Nov 06

Today’s News 6th November 2024

  • Watch Live: Republicans Take Senate As Trump Leads Across All Swing States
    Watch Live: Republicans Take Senate As Trump Leads Across All Swing States

    Here we go…

    Results from the 2024 election have begun pouring in from around the country. Of course we won’t have a final count from several counties, until, well they’re ‘done’ so to speak…

    Coverage:

    Color:

    What we’ve got so far:

    Presidential: Trump Leads

    Harris:

    • *HARRIS WINS VERMONT: AP

    • *HARRIS WINS MASSACHUSETTS: AP

    • *HARRIS WINS DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA: NETWORKS

    • *HARRIS WINS RHODE ISLAND: AP

    • *HARRIS WINS CONNECTICUT: AP

    • *HARRIS WINS MARYLAND: AP

    • *HARRIS WINS MAINE’S FIRST DISTRICT: FOX

    • *HARRIS WINS NEW JERSEY: AP

    • *HARRIS WINS DELAWARE: NBC

    • *HARRIS WINS ILLINOIS: AP

    • *DECISION DESK HQ PROJECTS HARRIS WINS NEW HAMPSHIRE

    • *HARRIS WINS NEW YORK: AP

    • *HARRIS WINS COLORADO: FOX

    • *HARRIS WINS WASHINGTON STATE: AP

    • *HARRIS WINS CALIFORNIA: AP

    • *HARRIS WINS OREGON: AP

    • *HARRIS WINS VIRGINIA: AP

    • *HARRIS WINS NEBRASKA’S 2ND DISTRICT: FOX

    Trump:

    • *TRUMP WINS KENTUCKY: AP

    • *TRUMP WINS INDIANA: AP

    • *TRUMP WINS WEST VIRGINIA: AP

    • *TRUMP WINS MISSISSIPPI: AP

    • *TRUMP WINS ALABAMA: AP

    • *TRUMP WINS OKLAHOMA: AP

    • *TRUMP WINS FLORIDA: NETWORKS

    • *TRUMP WINS SOUTH CAROLINA: AP

    • *TRUMP WINS TENNESSEE: AP

    • *TRUMP WINS ARKANSAS: AP

    • *TRUMP WINS NEBRASKA: AP

    • *TRUMP WINS NORTH DAKOTA: AP

    • *TRUMP WINS SOUTH DAKOTA: CNN

    • *TRUMP WINS TEXAS: NETWORKS

    • *TRUMP WINS WYOMING: AP

    • *TRUMP WINS LOUISIANA: AP

    • *TRUMP WINS KANSAS: FOX

    • *TRUMP WINS OHIO: AP

    • *TRUMP WINS UTAH: AP

    • *TRUMP WINS MONTANA: AP

    • *DECISION DESK HQ PROJECTS TRUMP WINS IOWA

    • *DECISION DESK HQ PROJECTS TRUMP WINS GEORGIA

    • *TRUMP WINS IDAHO: AP

    • *TRUMP WINS KEY MAINE DISTRICT FOR 1 ELECTORAL VOTE: FOX

    • *TRUMP WINS NORTH CAROLINA, KEY BATTLEGROUND STATE: AP

    • *TRUMP WINS BATTLEGROUND STATE OF GEORGIA: NETWORKS

    States called:

    The shift to Trump from 2020 is very broad…

    The market is shifting significantly pro-Trump:

    The Dollar, Bitcoin (record high), and 10Y Yields are spiking…

    Prediction markets shifting strongly pro-Trump:

    Swing States:

    Georgia and North Carolina have been called for Trump:

    Trump leads across all swing states…

    Trump just took the lead in PA…

    Senate: Republicans Take Control

    Republicans flip Ohio and West Virginia to take control of the Senate:

    House:  Republicans Lead

    What to watch for:

    It’s all about the swing states – most notably Pennsylvania, where Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are virtually tied according to polls – so who actually knows.

    1/ Pennsylvania is key for Harris to win.

    2/ The best early indications for the presidential race might come from North Carolina and Georgia (key for Trump to win).

    3/ Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are likely to be the most important results to the presidential outcome but will take longer.

    4/ Arizona and Nevada are likely to take the longest of the swing states.

    The earliest results in most states will likely be dominated by early votes and mail-in ballots, with some states reporting these separately at the start of election night reporting, while others will report with partial election-day results, according to Goldman.

    • For Harris, most obvious path is to win Michigan (15), Pennsylvania (19), and Wisconsin (10), netting the bare majority 270 electoral votes.

    • For Trump, the most obvious path is to win the Sunbelt states of Arizona (11), Georgia (16), and North Carolina (16) and one of the Rust Belt states (any would be worth enough to reach 270).

    In 2020 and 2022, early voting resulted in a shift to Democrats, however this year may be different – and might even slightly lean Republican, as early voting trends appear much more even based on party than in the past.

    In larger counties, reporting is expected to take days vs. smaller counties.

    Here’s Goldman Sachs’ expectations of how the night goes:

    7pm ET  
    •    28 electoral votes lean toward Trump: Indiana, Kentucky and South Carolina
    •    16 electoral votes lean toward Harris: Virginia and Vermont
    •    16 toss-up votes: Georgia (16). In 2020, the AP first reported Georgia results at 7:20 p.m. ET
     
    7.30pm ET
    •    21 electoral votes lean toward Trump: Ohio and West Virginia
    •    16 toss-up votes: North Carolina (16). In 2020, the AP first reported results at 7:42 p.m. ET  
     
    8.00pm ET
    •    74 electoral votes lean toward Trump: Oklahoma, Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida and Maine’s 2nd Congressional District
    •    78 electoral votes lean toward Harris: Illinois, Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Washington, DC
    •    19 toss-up votes: Pennsylvania (19). In 2020, the AP first reported results at 8:09 p.m. ET
     
    8.30pm ET
    •    Polls close in Arkansas, which has 6 electoral votes and is likely to support Trump. Polls will now be closed in half the states.
     
    9.00pm ET
    •    73 electoral votes lean toward Trump, including Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Texas and Louisiana
    •    54 electoral votes lean toward Harris, including New Mexico, Colorado, Minnesota, New York and Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District
    •    36 toss-up votes: Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan (11, 10, 15, respectively)
    In 2020, the AP first reported Michigan results at 8:08 p.m. ET (note Michigan runs two time zones; most of the state close at 8pmET, with rest at 9pm ET)
    In 2020, the AP first reported Wisconsin results at 9:07 p.m. ET  
    In 2020, the AP first reported Arizona results at 10:02 p.m. ET
     
    10.00pm ET
    •    10 electoral votes lean toward Trump, including Utah and Montana
    •    6 toss-up votes: Nevada (6)
    In 2020, the AP first reported Nevada results at 11:41 p.m. ET
     
    11.00pm ET
    •    4 electoral votes lean toward Trump: Idaho
    •    74 electoral votes lean toward Harris, including California, Oregon and Washington
     
    Midnight to 1am ET
    •    3 electoral votes lean toward Trump in Alaska
    •    4 electoral votes lean toward Harris votes in Hawaii

    Here’s when previous presidential election results were called:

    According to prediction markets, a Republican sweep is the most likely outcome, followed by a divided Democrat win.

    In the House, the generic ballot shows a much tighter race than we had a few weeks ago – an is in line with the notion that the party that wins the White House usually carries the House as well.

    Earliest indications will come from Florida (13th District), Virginia (2nd and 7th Districts) and North Carolina (1st District), where according to Goldman, trends could become clear by 9-10pm ET. It may take until 11pm – midnight ET before further House races come into focus.

    In the Senate, Republicans continue to maintain an advantage in both polling and prediction markets implying that two Democratic seats will likely flip, and a third (Ohio) has a slight chance of flipping to the Republicans, giving them either 51 or 52 seats.

    That Ohio senate tossup should be decided tonight – as the state typically reports fairly quickly. The first vote counts should roll in around 8pm ET, and around half of the vote reported before 9:30pm, according to Goldman. If R’s win the seat, it would take the possibility of a Democratic sweep off the table.

    Montana Senate results will likely take longer, as polls close around 10pm ET, and the state usually takes longer to count, reporting only 1/4 of its vote by midnight, and 1/2 by 2am ET.

    Stay tuned for updates…

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 11/05/2024 – 23:55

  • Antifa Returns On Election Night, Causing Chaos In Downtown Seattle
    Antifa Returns On Election Night, Causing Chaos In Downtown Seattle

    The potential return of former President Trump to the White House appears to have sparked rage among far-left activists on Tuesday night. With Trump currently leading the electoral count at 214 votes to Harris’s 179, reports are surfacing from Seattle that show Antifa activists have mobilized. 

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    Ahead of the elections, National Guard troops were activated in Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Illinois, North Carolina, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin, and West Virginia. Guardsmen in Colorado, Florida, Nevada, and Washington, D.C., are on standby.

    Earlier this week…

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    *Developing…

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 11/05/2024 – 23:45

  • Sachs: The BRICS Summit Should Mark The End Of Neocon Delusions
    Sachs: The BRICS Summit Should Mark The End Of Neocon Delusions

    Authored by Jeffrey Sachs via Scheerpost.com,

    The recent BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia should mark the end of the Neocon delusions encapsulated in the subtitle of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 book, The Global Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. Since the 1990s, the goal of American foreign policy has been “primacy,” aka global hegemony. The U.S. methods of choice have been wars, regime change operations, and unilateral coercive measures (economic sanctions). Kazan brought together 35 countries with more than half the world population that reject the U.S. bullying and that are not cowed by U.S. claims of hegemony.

    In the Kazan Declaration, the countries underscored “the emergence of new centres of power, policy decision-making and economic growth, which can pave the way for a more equitable, just, democratic and balanced multipolar world order.”

    They emphasized “the need to adapt the current architecture of international relations to better reflect the contemporary realities,” while declaring their “commitment to multilateralism and upholding the international law, including the Purposes and Principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations (UN) as its indispensable cornerstone.” They took particular aim at the sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies, holding that “Such measures undermine the UN Charter, the multilateral trading system, the sustainable development and environmental agreements.”

    Time has run out on the neocon delusions, and the U.S. wars of choice.

    The neocon quest for global hegemony has deep historical roots in America’s belief in its exceptionalism. In 1630, John Winthrop invoked the Gospels in describing the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a “City on the Hill,” declaring grandiosely that “The eyes of all people are upon us.” In the 19th century, America was guided by Manifest Destiny, to conquer North America by displacing or exterminating the native peoples. In the course of World War II, Americans embraced the idea of the “American Century,” that after the war the U.S. would lead the world.

    The U.S. delusions of grandeur were supercharged with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. With America’s Cold War nemesis gone, the ascendant American neoconservatives conceived of a new world order in which the U.S. was the sole superpower and the policeman of the world. Their foreign policy instruments of choice were wars and regime-change operations to overthrow governments they disliked.

    Following 9/11, the neocons planned to overthrow seven governments in the Islamic world, starting with Iraq, and then moving on to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. According to Wesley Clark, former Supreme Commander of NATO, the neocons expected the U.S. to prevail in these wars in 5 years. Yet now, more than 20 years on, the neocon-instigated wars continue while the U.S. has achieved absolutely none of its hegemonic objectives.

    The neocons reasoned back in the 1990s that no country or group of countries would ever dare to stand up to U.S. power. Brzezinski, for example, argued in The Grand Chessboard that Russia would have no choice but to submit to the U.S.-led expansion of NATO and the geopolitical dictates of the U.S. and Europe, since there was no realistic prospect of Russia successfully forming an anti-hegemonic coalition with China, Iran and others. As Brzezinski put it:

    “Russia’s only real geostrategic option—the option that could give Russia a realistic international role and also maximize the opportunity of transforming and socially modernizing itself—is Europe. And not just any Europe, but the transatlantic Europe of the enlarging EU and NATO.”

    (emphasis added, Kindle edition, p. 118)

    Brzezinski was decisively wrong, and his misjudgment helped to lead to the disaster of the war in Ukraine. Russia did not simply succumb to the U.S. plan to expand NATO to Ukraine, as Brzezinski assumed it would. Russia said a firm no, and was prepared to wage war to stop the U.S. plans. As a result of the neocon miscalculations vis-à-vis Ukraine, Russia is now prevailing on the battlefield, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are dead.

    Nor—and this is the plain message from Kazan—did U.S. sanctions and diplomatic pressures isolate Russian in the least. In response to pervasive U.S. bullying, an anti-hegemonic counterweight has emerged. Simply put, the majority of the world does not want or accept U.S. hegemony, and is prepared to face it down rather than submit to its dictates. Nor does the U.S. anymore possess the economic, financial, or military power to enforce its will, if it ever did.

    The countries that assembled in Kazan represent a clear majority of the world’s population. The nine BRICS members (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa as the original five, plus Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates), in addition to the delegations of 27 aspiring members, constitute 57 percent of the world’s population and 47 percent of the world’s output (measured at purchasing-power adjusted prices). The U.S., by contrast, constitutes 4.1 percent of the world population and 15 percent of world output. Add in the U.S. allies, and the population share of the U.S.-led alliance is around 15 percent of the global population.

    The BRICS will gain in relative economic weight, technological prowess, and military strength in the years ahead. The combined GDP of the BRICS countries is growing at around 5 percent per annum, while the combined GDP of the U.S. and its allies in Europe and the Asia-Pacific is growing at around 2 percent per annum.

    Even with their growing clout, however, the BRICS can’t replace the U.S. as a new global hegemon. They simply lack the military, financial, and technological power to defeat the U.S. or even to threaten its vital interests. The BRICS are in practice calling for a new and realistic multipolarity, not an alternative hegemony in which they are in charge.

    American strategists should heed the ultimately positive message coming from Kazan. Not only has the neocon quest for global hegemony failed, it has been a costly disaster for the US and the world, leading to bloody and pointless wars, economic shocks, mass displacements of populations, and rising threats of nuclear confrontation. A more inclusive and equitable multipolar world order offers a promising path out of the current morass, one that can benefit the U.S. and its allies as well as the nations that met in Kazan.

    The rise of the BRICS is therefore not merely a rebuke to the U.S., but also a potential opening for a far more peaceful and secure world order. The multipolar world order envisioned by the BRICS can be a boon for all countries, including the United States. Time has run out on the neocon delusions, and the U.S. wars of choice. The moment has arrived for a renewed diplomacy to end the conflicts raging around the world.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 11/05/2024 – 23:20

  • Rare Bees Nuke Mark Zuckerberg's Plan For Atomic-Powered AI Data Center
    Rare Bees Nuke Mark Zuckerberg’s Plan For Atomic-Powered AI Data Center

    At an all-hands meeting last week, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly told Meta workers that plans to build an AI data center powered by nuclear energy were scrapped after rare bees were discovered on the proposed site.

    Meta’s proposed AI data center project with an existing nuclear power plant operator fell apart over environmental and regulatory challenges, according to a Financial Times report, citing two people familiar with the meeting.

    The people gave no details about which nuclear power plant Meta planned to build an AI data center in an adjacent lot. They noted that Meta continues to search for locations to tap into carbon-free energy. 

    Here’s more from the report…

    Zuckerberg told staffers at the all-hands that, had the deal gone ahead, Meta would have been the first Big Tech group to wield nuclear-powered AI, and would have had the largest nuclear plant available to power data centres, two people said.

    One person familiar with the matter said that Zuckerberg has been frustrated with the lack of nuclear options in the US, while China has been embracing nuclear power. China appears to be building nuclear reactors at a fast clip, whereas only a handful of reactors have been brought online over the past two decades in the US.

    Incredible power demand growth from AI data centers has sparked a nuclear power revival in the US (but no fast enough when compared with China): 

    While we may not always see eye to eye with Zuckerberg, we share his concerns about China outpacing the US in nuclear power development. It’s alarming that Western lawmakers, wearing climate crisis blinders, have pushed de-growth global warming and climate policies that only stifle industrial output and fuel inflation, while providing China a clear runway to eclipse the West’s economy due to its total disregard for such policies.

    It’s safe to say that when the Communist Party in China builds coal power plants, concerns about bees are likely the last thing on their minds. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 11/05/2024 – 22:50

  • Homes In SoCal's Planned 'City Of Kindness' To Start In The Very Friendly $400,000s
    Homes In SoCal’s Planned ‘City Of Kindness’ To Start In The Very Friendly $400,000s

    Authored by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Imagine living in a city built on kindness, where residents are encouraged to respect one another and not judge their neighbors.

    John Ohanian, general manager of DMB Development, hopes to build just that—a “City of Kindness” called Silverwood in San Bernardino County.

    The Silverwood community center will be one of many places residents can mingle. DMB Development

    “It’s really important to us,” Ohanian told The Epoch Times. “The idea is to create some expectations of how we’re all going to live together.”

    The nearly 15-square-mile development is in Hesperia, California, on State Route 138 near the Cajon Pass in the San Bernardino Mountains, about 75 miles east of Los Angeles.

    The project will offer homes built around active outdoor lifestyles and priced from the mid-$400,000s up to the $700,000s. The community will also have five elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school, according to plans.

    “We’re trying to create a special place for folks to live that embraces an outdoor lifestyle and is community oriented,” Ohanian said.

    With home prices far below those closer to the coast, Ohanian said the housing will be more attainable for Californians who can’t afford Los Angeles and Orange County.

    “We’re trying very hard to articulate a lifestyle that is family oriented, allowing young families to be able to stay in California and afford to live here,” Ohanian said.

    Living in Silverwood will also include paying $158 a month in homeowner association fees, but that will include connections to full-gig speed internet, which is 10 times faster than older cable connections, according to the developer.

    Ohanian was inspired to build a community of kindness after hearing about former Anaheim Mayor Tom Tait’s “Kindness Initiative,” developed after he took office in 2010. The city officially made “kindness” its motto in 2017.

    Silverwood might be just the kind of city the former mayor was hoping to inspire.

    Developers plan to offer nearly 15,700 homes in eight villages within the Silverwood development in San Bernardino County. DMB Development

    “Kindness is very simple. It’s doing something for someone else with no expectation in return,” he explained in 2017 on City Talk. “Imagine an entire city where people are just a little kinder. Where they know it’s who we are. When that happens, literally everything gets better.”

    Tait did not return a request for comment about Silverwood on Friday.

    In this spirit, though, Silverwood’s homeowner association would offer residents who buy one of their nearly 15,700 homes a chance to sign a pledge promising to be kind.

    “We’re trying to make it feel like people have a voice, and have an opportunity to also be respected, not judged, and treated kindly,” Ohanian said. “It sets an expectation and we hope everybody who becomes a homeowner signs a pledge.”

    Kindness won’t be enforced, but Ohanian said he hoped peer pressure and conscience would drive residents to enforce the idea themselves.

    The project has been in the works since 2012, when the developer purchased the land out of a bankruptcy. The southern edge of the property was a working cattle ranch and will remain open space.

    The lower cost of the land is part of what will allow the developer to offer more affordable houses. The homes will range from 1,400 square feet for a one-story condo close to the town’s center, up to 4,000-square-foot executive homes at the higher end.

    Home prices in the Silverwood development in San Bernardino County will range from the mid-$400,000s to the $700,000s. DMB Development

    “Silverwood will create the opportunity for thousands of families to live in a gorgeous natural setting with endless opportunities for outdoor recreation, all within a reasonable commute to San Bernardino, Riverside, Ontario, and other existing employment hubs,” according to the project’s website.

    Each house will also come with solar panels, which are now required by California law. 

    The development will also build a wastewater treatment facility that will allow the association to use recycled water for all parks and schools. Half of the houses will also be built to offer homeowners the ability to use recycled water for irrigation and landscaping, according to the developer.

    The project is planned to include eight villages, each with its own theme and anchored by a green space. One might be built around pickleball courts, while another might have a swimming complex, according to the developer.

    “Each village will have their own neighborhood identity and each of them will have their own character,” Ohanian said.

    The community will also have its own medical services, grocery stores, and other services, he added.

    People will be able to gather at the pools, recreational facilities, bandstands, and other areas, according to the developer. Nearly half of the land in the development has been set aside for natural open space, conservation easement, parks, and the Serrano Preserve.

    The project is expected to include 59 miles of off-street trails, 107 miles of paths and paseos, and 387 acres of parks. Every house will be within a five-minute walk of a park, according to plans.

    Silverwood Lake is on the southern boundary of the property, and Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear are about an hour away.

    A room with a view at Lake Arrowhead Resort and Spa. Silverwood will be about an hour from Lake Arrowhead. Benjamin Myers/TNS

    Model homes at the development should be open in the spring of next year, Ohanian said. He expects to have people living in the community between April and June.

    Home builders include Lennar, Richmond American Homes, Watt Capital Developers, and Woodside Homes.

    The developer expects to take up to 20 years to completely build out the community.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 11/05/2024 – 22:20

  • Game Of Chess: US Prepares Next Move With More B-52s, Warships To Middle East 
    Game Of Chess: US Prepares Next Move With More B-52s, Warships To Middle East 

    It’s been a week since Israeli fighter jets pounded high-value Iranian military sites and assets with missiles and bombs. Iran has since delayed a retaliatory strike on Israel as the US presidential election is just days away, and now the US appears to be bolstering defense capabilities in the Middle East as regional war risks remain elevated. 

    Pentagon officials confirmed to Fox News on Friday that US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered several B-52 Stratofortress bomber aircraft, refueling aircraft, and Navy destroyers to the Middle East. 

    In a statement to Reuters, Pentagon spokesperson Air Force Major General Patrick Ryder said additional military assets will begin arriving in the region in the coming months. 

    “Should Iran, its partners, or its proxies use this moment to target American personnel or interests in the region, the United States will take every measure necessary to defend our people,” Ryder said. 

    The strategic positioning—think of it as a game of chess—of additional US military assets in the region in the very near term may only suggest broadening war risks after the US election cycle ends. In other words, the Pentagon may finally get serious about Iranian-backed Houthis, other Iranian proxies, and even Tehran, which have sparked chaos in critical maritime chokepoints.

    Ryder said Austin’s latest order shows the “US capability to deploy worldwide on short notice to meet evolving national security threats.” 

    One week ago, the US signaled defense guarantees to the Saudis – in the event Tehran or its proxies attempt to weaponize crude oil by targeting the Kingdom’s Abqaiq refinery (the largest crude oil stabilization plant in the world) with drone swarms or hypersonic missiles. 

    Austin revealed last month that B-2 stealth bombers targeted underground Houthi weapons storage facilities – indeed, a message to Tehran.

    “This was a unique demonstration of the United States’ ability to target facilities that our adversaries seek to keep out of reach, no matter how deeply buried underground, hardened, or fortified,” Austin said at the time, adding, “The employment of US Air Force B-2 Spirit long-range stealth bombers demonstrates US global strike capabilities to take action against these targets when necessary, anytime, anywhere.”

    On Saturday morning, Iran’s supreme leader threatened Israel and the US with “a crushing response” … 

    Meanwhile, the geopolitical risk premium in Brent crude oil has all but evaporated. 

    But will that all change after the US presidential election?

    Here are the latest geopolitical bets that can be taken on Polymarkets: 

    Reuters noted that the additional US bombers and warships being shifted to the region came as the Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group prepared to exit the region. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 11/05/2024 – 21:50

  • See The Human Brain Like Never Before
    See The Human Brain Like Never Before

    Authored by Makai Allbert via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    A decade ago, a small and unassuming brain sample arrived at Dr. Jeff Lichtman’s lab at Harvard University. Measuring less than a grain of rice, the 1 cubic millimeter of tissue contained 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses, each one a vital part of the brain’s intricate communication network.

    Neurons from the anterior temporal lobe, color-coded by size and type, reveal the six distinct layers of the cortex.

    Now, after a decade of collaboration with Google scientists, a monumental dataset—with 1,400 terabytes—has turned into the most detailed map of the human brain ever created.

    “A terabyte is, for most people, gigantic, yet a fragment of a human brain—just a minscule, teeny-weeny little bit of human brain—is still thousands of terabytes,” Lichtman said in a National Institutes of Health report.

    The detailed 3-D reconstruction reveals beautiful structures in the brain. Neurons forming dozens of connections, mirror-image neural pairs, and networks far more complex than expected, are just some of the groundbreaking discoveries.

    “I remember this moment, going into the map and looking at one individual synapse from this woman’s brain, and then zooming out into these other millions of pixels,” said Viren Jain, a senior scientist at Google in Nature Magazine. “It felt sort of spiritual.”

    The map, now part of an open-access dataset online, opens the door to new understandings of human cognition, psychiatric disorders, and the architecture of our minds.

    “There is the saying that ‘A map of synaptic connections is necessary but insufficient to understand the brain.’ In its current form it is still missing a lot of important information, but it is a step in the right direction,” Daniel Berger, a scientist in the Lichtman lab, told The Epoch Times.

    All images below are by Google Research and Lichtman Lab (Harvard University). Renderings by D. Berger (Harvard University)

    Excitatory neurons, color-coded by size, with red being the largest and blue the smallest. Cell cores range from 15 to 30 micrometers.

    A single white neuron receives signals from more than 5,000 blue axons, with green synapses marking the points where the signals transfer.

    Neurons with long dendrites and dendrite spine. In very rare cases, a single axon (blue) made repeated synaptic connections (yellow) with a target neuron (green).

    One unexpected discovery in the study was the presence of “axon whorls”—tangled loops of blue axons—which typically transmit signals away from nerve cells. These structures were rare in the sample and sometimes appeared to be resting on yellow cells. Their purpose remains unclear.

    Read the rest here…

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 11/05/2024 – 21:20

  • Israeli Airstrikes Pummel Syria For A Second Day In A Row
    Israeli Airstrikes Pummel Syria For A Second Day In A Row

    The last two days have witnessed more Israeli airstrikes carried out on Syria, with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on Tuesday issuing rare direct confirmation that it targeted Hezbollah weapons depots in the al-Qusayr area in western Syria, close to the border with Lebanon.

    “The IDF says Hezbollah’s armament unit is responsible for storing weapons in Lebanon, and it recently expanded its activities to Syria, storing weapons in al-Qusayr,” Israeli media reports.

    Illustrative prior attack on Damascus, Xinhua News Agency/Getty Images

    And the NY Times writes of the expanding and more frequent nature of the raids, “The Israeli military on Tuesday said its Air Force had struck targets in Syria for the second day in a row, attacks it said were aimed at cutting off the flow of weapons and intelligence between Hezbollah, the armed Lebanese group, and its sponsor, Iran.”

    The day prior, on Monday, Syrian state media confirmed Israeli airstrikes south of Damascus. The attack again targeted an area known to attract many Shia religious pilgrims.

    SANA indicated that it involved Israeli warplanes hitting “a number of civilian sites south of Damascus, resulting in material losses.” There are regional reports that at least two were left dead and five injured in the Monday attack on the Syrian capital’s suburbs.

    This could in part be Israel’s signaling Washington that whichever administration takes the White House, efforts to break up the ‘resistance axis’ of Tehran-Damascus-Hezbollah will continue.

    On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear in remarks that regardless of whether a cease-fire deal could be reached related to Lebanon, Israel’s military would remain committed to “cutting Hezbollah’s oxygen line from Iran via Syria.”

    We reported previously that just last week Israeli government minister and war cabinet member Gideon Saar threatened Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, warning that he will be “in danger” if his country continues to act as a “conduit” for Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah.

    Saar – who rejoined Benjamin Netanyahu’s government late last month – said during a conference that Tel Aviv “missed an opportunity” to “collapse” Assad’s government, which was “saved” by Iran and Hezbollah. 

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    Syria must not be permitted “under any circumstances to be a conduit for weapons supply from Iran to Hezbollah,” the minister went on to say, adding that “Israel must make clear to Assad that if he chooses to harm Israeli security in this manner, he places his regime in danger.”

    Israel “will not agree to Hezbollah’s renewed buildup of power through Syria, and will not agree to the opening of a front against it from Syrian territory,” he said. “Removing Assad from the Iranian axis will have far-reaching consequences for Israel’s security.” Thus even if somehow ceasefire is reached in Lebanon, these regular Israeli attacks on Syria will likely continue.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 11/05/2024 – 20:50

  • 77 Days Of Transition: New Law Aims To Streamline Presidential Power Transfer Process
    77 Days Of Transition: New Law Aims To Streamline Presidential Power Transfer Process

    Authored by Savannah Hulsey Pointer via The Epoch Times,

    The 2024 presidential election will see the first application of a 2022 amendment to the laws governing the transfer of power between administrations.

    There are 77 days between the Nov. 5 election and the Jan. 20, 2025, inauguration of the next president, during which time the president-elect will ready his or her administration to take over from President Joe Biden.

    The handoffs between an outgoing administration and a government-in-waiting have been largely drama-free for decades, and they have been governed by the rules enumerated in the Presidential Transition Act of 1963.

    The Electoral Count Reform Act will take effect this year, ensuring that five days after the election, the team of the winning candidate (or both candidates if the winner is not yet identified), will begin readying for the White House.

    Unless another authority is designated by state law, the act appoints governors as the principal officials responsible for filing certificates of state presidential electors. By providing expedited court review of matters pertaining to electors, it guarantees that Congress can establish a final slate of electors.

    The vice president’s involvement in the electoral vote count is defined by the new act as purely ceremonial, and he or she is not given any power to affect the count in any way. It also reduces the possibility of challenges by raising the threshold for congressional objections to one-fifth of each house. Previously, a single member of both chambers was needed to enter an objection to an elector or slate of electors.

    Additionally, the General Services Administration (GSA) is now required to provide money to both candidates in the event that a candidate does not withdraw their candidacy within five days following the election. This change affects the presidential transition process. The GSA will cut off financing to the unsuccessful campaign once the results are finalized.

    The initial responsibility of the successful candidate is to acquire knowledge of the current agency missions, policies, and ongoing projects, as well as to commence the process of filling political positions in the executive branch, ranging from Cabinet secretaries to press assistants.

    The new team is provided guidance by career leaders and appointees from the outgoing administration to assist in the launch of its government. They also provide briefings on significant issues and facilitate inquiries. An orderly transition has long been dependent on the flow of resources.

    Delays occurred following the 2020 presidential election as President Donald Trump questioned the validity of the election results as they were being reported. Because Trump was contesting the results in court, there was a delay in the start of the transition from Election Day on Nov. 3, 2020, to Nov. 23.

    Emily Murphy, then head of the GSA, reviewed the transition law from 1963 and concluded that she lacked the legal authority to determine a winner and commence funding and collaboration with the transition to a Biden administration.

    Weeks after the election, Murphy sent a Letter of Ascertainment to Biden and commenced the transition process after Trump’s efforts to contest the results had collapsed across key states.

    According to the GSA’s guidelines on the new rules, the amendment eliminates lengthy delays and states “an affirmative ‘ascertainment’ by GSA is no longer a prerequisite for obtaining transition support services.”

    However, the new law also effectively mandates federal support and cooperation for both candidates to initiate a transition. It is stated that such support should persist until “significant legal challenges” that could affect electoral outcomes have been “substantially resolved” or until electors from each state convene in December to formally select an Electoral College winner.

    Under this mandate, Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris may find themselves forming rival administrations for weeks.

    The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement amendment to the Presidential Transition Act was passed in December 2022.

    During a committee hearing on the Electoral Count Act on Aug. 3 that year, Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) said, “We were all there on Jan. 6 … We have a duty [and] responsibility to make sure it never happens again.” Manchin was referring to the events on Jan. 6, 2021, when protesters breached the U.S. Capitol while Congress was counting electoral votes.

    Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said in her testimony: “In four out of the past six presidential elections, the Electoral Count Act’s process for counting electoral votes has been abused with frivolous objections being raised by members of both parties. But it took the violent breach of the Capitol on Jan. 6 to really shine a spotlight on how urgent the need for reform was.”

    Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) opposed the bill, stating in a press release: “This bill is a bad bill. … It’s bad policy and it’s bad for democracy. There are serious constitutional questions in the bill. The text of the Constitution, Article Two says, ‘Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors.’ This bill is Congress trying to intrude on the authority of the state legislatures to do that.”

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 11/05/2024 – 20:20

  • Space Force Will Test Launch ICBM Minuteman III Shortly After Election 
    Space Force Will Test Launch ICBM Minuteman III Shortly After Election 

    While everyone is hyper-focused on the US presidential election, America is testing its nuclear deterrent capabilities. With war raging in Eastern Europe and the risk of broadening conflict between Iran and Israel in the Middle East, the US Space Force will launch an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile from Vandenberg Space Force Base later this evening.

    “These launches are scheduled years in advance on a quarterly basis, and there is often one in early November. The election had nothing to do with its scheduling,” an Air Force Global Strike Command Public Affairs representative told the local newspaper Lompoc Record, located in the town of Lompoc, California, down the street from Vandenberg. 

    Vandenberg’s Test Range will launch the LGM-30G Minuteman ICBM shortly after 2300 local time, with a launch window open through Wednesday. 

    The re-entry vehicle with a dummy warhead will travel across the Pacific Ocean and, 22 minutes later, plunge into the ocean near the Marshall Islands. 

    Here’s from from Lompoc Record about the launch:

    In accordance with standard procedures, the United States has transmitted a prelaunch notification pursuant to the Hague Code of Conduct, notifying the Russian government in advance, as outlined in existing bi-lateral agreements, officials reported.

    Test re-entry vehicles related to such missions travel approximately 4,200 miles southwest of California to the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

    Data collected from the missions are used by the wider ICBM community, consisting of the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and US Strategic Command.

    Anti-war group CodePink noted, “This Tuesday, while everyone’s attention will be on who our next president will be, the U.S. Air Force will test-launch an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile with a dummy hydrogen bomb on the tip from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.” 

    The ICBM test comes one week after Russia test-fired missiles that simulated a “massive” nuclear response to an enemy’s first strike. And Iran has threatened Israel with severe retaliation amid further risks of broadening conflict.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 11/05/2024 – 19:50

  • California Takes Controversial Approach To Fentanyl Crisis
    California Takes Controversial Approach To Fentanyl Crisis

    Authored by Beige Luciano-Adams via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    By now the statistics are familiar: Fentanyl is killing Americans at an unprecedented rate—around 73,000 annually.

    Illustration by The Epoch Times, Freepik

    For those aged 18 to 45, it is the leading cause of death.

    And it’s everywhere—tainting counterfeit pills, poisoning children and adults, addicts and first-time users, overwhelming any potential response. As a deluge of pills and powder flows across the southern border, authorities regularly seize enough fentanyl to kill everyone on earth, several times over.

    Into this carnage, a windfall.

    Nationwide, more than $50 billion is expected to flow from legal settlements with opioid manufacturers and distributors over the next two decades—with California in line to receive about $4 billion, divvied up among the state and local governments.

    This money will now largely go to abating illicit fentanyl—the third wave in an opioid crisis that began with prescription pain medication in the 1990s.

    In the first two years, California state programs have primarily used their share for “harm reduction” efforts—including opioid overdose reversal medication, needle exchange, and public education campaigns aimed at destigmatizing drug use.

    Nationally, experts and progressive advocates are keeping a close eye on settlement spending, in an effort to avoid mistakes of Big Tobacco settlements and ensure funds go to actual abatement, rather than plugging municipal budgets.

    But some wonder if another obvious lesson from the fight against Big Tobacco—in which stigmatization, graphic warnings about the dangers of cigarettes, and enforcement led to a radical decrease in smoking—is missing from the state’s approach to the fentanyl crisis.

    California’s Department of Public Health recently gave a San Francisco-based advertising agency $40 million in opioid settlement funds to produce a youth awareness campaign that aims to “meet people where they are” by reducing stigma around using fentanyl and other drugs and encouraging the use of naloxone.

    According to state records, the department has also paid that same advertising company nearly $900 million to produce campaigns that expressly stigmatize tobacco use and encourage abstinence from it.

    “In general, there is a strange contradiction between [California] Public Health trying hard to stigmatize tobacco smoking while destigmatizing fentanyl use,” Keith Humphreys, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, told The Epoch Times.

    By now, Humphreys said, the lessons from Big Tobacco are clear.

    “Disapproving of smoking has been a life-saving thing. And we should not be afraid to say to people that using fentanyl is incredibly dangerous and you shouldn’t do it.”

    An anti-smoking poster issued by the California Department of Health Services adorns the back of a Los Angeles Metropolitan bus. Hector Mata/AFP via Getty Images

    Harm Reduction Movement

    Harm reduction is a social justice movement that seeks to reduce drug harms without judging, punishing, or even interfering in drug use. It is an explicit pendulum swing away from the War on Drugs of past decades, which state leaders continue to criticize as a “failed” approach.

    Many who are critical of the harm reduction movement in California, where it is orthodoxy—baked into the law—support harm reduction measures like naloxone distribution, medication-assisted treatment, and needle exchange.

    Where people tend to disagree is whether hard drugs should be decriminalized and destigmatized, whether those using and selling them should be penalized when they break the law—and especially, whether treatment can be coerced or, as many harm reduction advocates insist, can only happen when and if the person who uses drugs decides they are ready.

    Humphreys supports harm reduction measures as part of a comprehensive, multi-pronged approach to the addiction crisis, and champions naloxone. As chair of the Stanford-Lancet Commission, he helped develop a national model for opioid response that recommends overdose rescue medications as “broadly the most lifesaving action policymakers can take.”

    But he recognizes the limitations and has criticized the trend, prominent in blue cities, toward de-stigmatization of hard drugs.

    “No one stops using drugs because of Narcan,” Humphreys said, citing recent research showing those successfully treated with naloxone—the overdose reversal medicine sold under the brand Narcan—have a 13-fold increase in mortality compared to the general population.

    “Twelve percent of people are likely to be dead from their addiction within 12 months of getting the Narcan,” he said.

    Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, poses for a photo in Stanford, Calif., on Aug. 29, 2016. Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Photo

    Further complicating the equation is the fact that non-opioids such as the “zombie drug” xylazine—which does not respond to naloxone—is showing up in nearly 30 percent of all fentanyl powder seizures, and there is no long term research indicating how effective naloxone is after repeated use, or the impact of increasingly higher doses needed to reverse synthetic opioid overdoses.

    Meanwhile, naloxone has a shorter half-life than many powerful synthetic opioids—including nitazenes, an “emerging threat” in the U.S. drug supply—meaning people can re-overdose after revival.

    California’s current fentanyl awareness campaigns elide the ugly realities of using fentanyl—or meth, which in Los Angeles County last year killed nearly as many people—in favor of a message that works “in alliance with people who use drugs for safer and managed drug use.”

    There are no photos of children who died from a single dose, no acknowledgement of the people suffering what amounts to a living death on the streets, no testimony from people who have recovered from their addiction.

    “I don’t see one ad in here that says anything about treatment,” noted Gina McDonald, co-founder of Mothers against Drug Addiction and Deaths (MADAAD), a San Francisco-based nonprofit critical of California’s permissive approach to fentanyl.

    “I eradicated my risk of overdose by stopping doing drugs—it’s the only foolproof way to prevent overdose. You would think that would be in at least one ad,” said McDonald, a former addict.

    According to 2024 statistics published by Mental Health America, a national nonprofit, nearly 83 percent of Californians with a substance use disorder, around five million people, did not receive needed treatment.

    Narcan nasal spray sits in a vending machine by the DuPage County Health Department at the Kurzawa Community Center in Wheaton, Ill., on Sept. 1, 2022. Scott Olson/Getty Images

    Nationally, only Illinois has a higher rate of untreated substance use disorder than California.

    McDonald co-founded MADAAD with other mothers who have lost children to the streets—mothers with children currently addicted to fentanyl in places like the Tenderloin and Skid Row.

    Their children are the intended targets of the state’s advertising campaigns—and the presumed beneficiaries of funds from a prescription opioid crisis that seeded subsequent heroin and fentanyl epidemics.

    McDonald, like most everyone, wants to see Narcan everywhere—in every school and workplace and store—and knows what the shame of addiction feels like.

    “I’m not saying we need to stigmatize drug users,” she said.

    “But how many times are people going to be Narcan-ed and go back to die another day? It’s usually what happens,” she said. “I don’t know too many people who’ve been Narcan-ed on the street and went into treatment after being resurrected. … Narcan isn’t dealing with any root cause of why people are using drugs.”

    Representatives from influential policy organizations that advocate harm reduction and opiate decriminalization—including the National Harm Reduction Coalition and OpioidSettlementTracker.com—did not respond to inquiries.

    Gina McDonald holds a poster of herself and her daughter at a protest in front of the Tenderloin Linkage Center in San Francisco on Feb. 5, 2022. Cynthia Cai/The Epoch Times

    An Empathetic Conversation

    Robert Marbut, the former executive director of the U.S. Interagency on Homelessness and producer of the forthcoming documentary, “Fentanyl: Death Incorporated,” says the government is under reacting to an existential and continually evolving threat.

    “We absolutely have to get into drug education and prevention at a level that we did with cigarettes,” he told The Epoch Times, pointing to the nearly 75-percent reduction in smoking since 1965, when nearly half of Americans smoked; now around 12 percent do.

    “[Those campaigns] said cigarette smoking is not cool—it’s dirty, it’s ugly, it’s awful. If you go look at the PSAs, they didn’t go into a sort of kinder, gentler thing. It was hard. It was direct—it was: ‘This is nasty. It’s horrible.’ And governments backed it up with real fines,” Marbut said.

    Generally, harm reduction advocates say a softer, empathetic approach is needed to avoid the stigmatization and punitive tones of the War on Drugs. They argue shaming or scaring people who use drugs will prevent them from seeking help.

    Representatives of Duncan Channon, the ad agency behind California’s “Facts Fight Fentanyl” campaign, say they avoided the “fear and tragedy” of traditional PSAs in favor of an “approachable and empowering” way to talk about the fentanyl crisis and get people comfortable using naloxone.

    “The last thing we are going to do is wag a finger at anybody or follow the failed tactics of ‘Just Say No,’ which has never really worked,” Duncan Channon’s CEO Andy Berkenfield told AdAge last year.

    “The state strongly believes—and we are very much in line with them—that our job is to engage in empathetic conversation and ultimately reduce harm,” he told the industry publication.

    Fentanyl de-stigmatization campaigns are common across the United States, and California’s opioid-settlement-funded “Unshame CA” campaign reports “measurable changes” in moving the needle on public perception of substance use disorder as a medical condition and naloxone as an everyday resource.

    Read the rest here…

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 11/05/2024 – 19:20

  • Censorship & The Criminalization Of Election Integrity
    Censorship & The Criminalization Of Election Integrity

    Via The Brownstone Institute,

    Throughout this election cycle, we have witnessed an incessant assault on our First Amendment.

    The regime sent dissidents to prison, destroyed opposition news sites, colluded to control the free flow of information, bankrupted its critics, and boasted that it would criminalize “misinformation.”

    The election threatens the death knell for free expression in the United States as Kamala Harris and her lead attorney, Marc Elias, vow to punish anyone who questions their pursuit of power. 

    No political actor has been more influential in overturning election integrity efforts than Marc Elias. Recently, he led the crusade to overturn the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Teigen v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, which banned the use of “drop boxes” in the state. 

    In deciding whether to hear the case, Republican Justice Rebecca Bradley called the Elias-led litigation a “shameless effort to readjust the balance of political power in Wisconsin.” Elias was successful, and dropboxes are now taking votes in Wisconsin, a state that may be the tipping point in the election.

    In 2020, President Biden won Wisconsin by just 20,000 votes. The rejection rate for absentee ballots plummeted from 1.4% to 0.2% as 1.9 million of the state’s 3.3 million voters cast absentee ballots. 

    Similarly, Elias led lawsuits to defend dropboxes in Pennsylvania. In 2020, President Biden received 75% of the 2.5 million mail-in ballots and won the state by under 100,000 votes. 

    But temporary political victories are insufficient for Elias. Along with Project 65, Elias has called for the disbarment of attorneys who challenge him in court. “I don’t think any lawyer should have a bar license for the privilege of destroying our country’s democratic traditions,” Elias insists, though “democratic traditions” apparently means months of absentee voting without signature verification or photo identification. He demanded an “accountability structure” for those who challenge the Democrats’ mandated standards for a “free and fair election.” 

    Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, evidently share this intolerance for dissent. Walz has insisted that the First Amendment does not protect “misinformation or hate speech…especially around our democracy.” The Biden-Harris administration has fiercely championed censorship and the regulation of social media content.

    Now, they threaten to jail anyone who criticizes their pursuit of power. Their judges – likely to be in the mold of Ketanji Brown Jackson – will not let the First Amendment “hamstring” their efforts to reshape the American government. And perhaps most tellingly, they’ll censor the critiques that are most obviously true. 

    “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”

    –Jimmy Carter, 2005

    We have long known the threat that absentee ballots pose to our elections. Following the controversy of the 2000 Presidential election, the United States formed a bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform. President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and former Secretary of State James Baker, a Republican, chaired the group.

    After almost five years of research, the group published its final report – “Building Confidence in U.S. Elections.” It offered a series of recommendations to reduce voter fraud, including enacting voter-ID laws and limiting absentee voting. The commission was unequivocal: “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” Yet, Elias and Harris would gladly disbar any attorney who uttered such a sentence in court. 

    The report continued: “Citizens who vote at home, at nursing homes, at the workplace, or in church are more susceptible to pressure, overt and subtle, or to intimidation. Vote buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.”

    Recent history supports this thesis. Just last week, a Chinese national illegally voted in Michigan. He was only caught because he brought it to the attention of authorities, who later revealed that his vote (though admittedly invalid) will still count. 

    The 1997 Miami mayoral election resulted in 36 arrests for absentee ballot fraud. A judge voided the results and ordered the city to hold a new election due to “a pattern of fraudulent, intentional, and criminal conduct.” The results were reversed in the subsequent election.

    Following Dallas’s 2017 City Council race, authorities sequestered 700 mail-in ballots signed “Jose Rodriguez.” Elderly voters alleged that party activists had forged their signatures on their mail-in ballots. Miguel Hernandez later pled guilty to the crime of forging their signatures after collecting unfilled ballots and using them to support his candidate of choice.

    The following year, it appeared that Republican Mark Harris defeated Democrat Dan McCready in a North Carolina Congressional race. Election officials noticed irregularities in the mail-in votes and refused to certify the election, citing evidence and “claims of…concerted fraudulent activities.” The state ordered a special election the following year.

    In 2018, the Democratic National Commission challenged an Arizona law that set safeguards around absentee voting, including limiting who could handle mail-in ballots. US District Judge Douglas L. Rayes, an Obama appointee, upheld the law.

    “Indeed, mail-in ballots by their very nature are less secure than ballots cast in person at polling locations,” he wrote.

    He found that “the prevention of voter fraud and preservation of public confidence in election integrity” were important state interests and cited the Carter-Baker Commission’s finding that “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”

    In May 2020, New Jersey held municipal elections and required all voting take place via mail due to Covid. The State’s third largest city, Paterson, held its election for City Council. Election officials rejected 19% of the ballots from Paterson, a city with over 150,000 residents. While Paterson’s election was particularly troublesome, mail-in ballots were problematic across the state. Thirty other New Jersey municipalities held vote-by-mail elections that day, and the average disqualification rate was 9.6%.

    New Jersey brought voting fraud charges against City Councilman Michael Jackson, Councilman-Elect Alex Mendez, and two other men for their “criminal conduct involving mail-in ballots during the election.” All four were charged with illegally collecting, procuring, and submitting mail-in ballots.

    A state judge later ordered a new vote, finding that the May election “was not the fair, free and full expression of the intent of the voters. It was rife with mail in vote procedural violations constituting nonfeasance and malfeasance.”

    In Wisconsin, the April 2020 primary election offered further evidence of the challenges and corruption surrounding mail-in voting. Following the primary, a postal center outside Milwaukee discovered three tubs of absentee ballots that never reached their intended recipients. Fox Point, a village outside Milwaukee, has a population of under 7,000 people. 

    Beginning in March, Fox Point received between 20 and 50 undelivered absentee ballots per day. In the weeks leading up to the election, the village manager said that increased to between 100 and 150 ballots per day. On Election Day, the town received a plastic mail bin with 175 unmailed ballots. “We’re not sure why this happened,” said the village manager. “Nobody seems to be able to tell me why.”

    Democrats admitted the system threatened election integrity. “This has all the makings of a Florida 2000 if we have a close race,” said Gordon Hintz, the Democratic minority leader in the Wisconsin State Assembly. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo went further. “It’s a harder system to administer, and obviously it’s a harder system to police writ large,” he said. Cuomo continued, “People showing up, people actually showing ID, is still the easiest system to assure total integrity.”

    The Wisconsin primary also featured special elections for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. A liberal judge upset the incumbent conservative justice, and partisans embraced their overhaul of the electoral system. The New York Times reported: “Wisconsin Democrats are working to export their template for success – intense digital outreach and a well-coordinated vote-by-mail operation – to other states in the hope that it will improve the party’s chances in local and statewide elections and in the quest to unseat President Trump in November.” 

    Scores of other reports of election fraud came forward as the Democratic Party used the pretext of Covid to reshape American elections. Despite the corruption, lost ballots, and admitted threats to electoral integrity, the process had been a success in political terms; their candidate had won. The ends had justified the means. Citizens lost faith in their election process, and political leaders readily admitted that their concerns were justified; but the professional politicos and their mouthpiece, the New York Times, characterized the disaster as a “template for success.”

    The stakes of the election could not be more stark. We either remain free to criticize those who reign over us, or we surrender this nation to a cabal of censorious thugs who will remain insatiable in their pursuit of ever-more power. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 11/05/2024 – 18:25

  • Elon Musk's 1950s-Style Drive-In Supercharger Installs Giant 45-Foot LED TV Screen
    Elon Musk’s 1950s-Style Drive-In Supercharger Installs Giant 45-Foot LED TV Screen

    Tesla’s 1950s-inspired drive-in Supercharging station, currently under construction at 7001 Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, recently installed a giant 45-foot LED television in the parking lot. 

    The West Hollywood Supercharger station is the next generation of Tesla charging stations, featuring a restaurant, drive-in movie theater, and dozens of charging bays. Tesla seems eager to spice up the currently dull charging experience by blending the 1950/60s Americana style with cutting-edge new technology. 

    Teslarati’s Zachary Visconti first reported on the new construction development: 

    Tesla has been hard at work on its Southern California diner, Supercharger, and drive-in movie theater location over the past year or so, and a recent update shows that the site has finally gotten its first full movie screen.

    …

    The screens, one of which still needs the final LED display, will run from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., while the diner and charging stations will be open 24 hours a day, according 247Tesla. The screens will also reportedly be visible from both the diner building and the Supercharging stations.

    Here’s the full video:

    From EVs to catching giant rockets with ‘chopsticks’ …

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

    … to space age vehicles …

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

    And robots. 

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

    Musk appears to have a deep love for ‘Americana’ and wants to inspire the next generation to look toward the stars to spark a new wave of innovation and power the nation forward. It all begins with freedom and healthy youngsters.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 11/05/2024 – 18:00

  • After The Ball Is Over…
    After The Ball Is Over…

    Authored by Thomas Neuburger via “God’s Spies’ Substack,

    What does the country look like, four years down the road, after a Trump or Harris victory?

    Many people have made election predictions (some in abundance), but few have looked at the post-electoral state.

    What happens if Harris wins? What does a Trump II world look like?

    I offer below what Ryan Grim sees post-November. I think in the main he’s right. His virtue is that he avoids conventional thinking and looks at what’s real.

    The whole piece went out to his Drop Site News subscribers and is also available there. But I’d like to offer it here; I know our readers are thoughtful and decidedly unconstrained by conventional ways. No one wants to fall prey to “what everyone knows to be true” without close examination.

    Grim’s analysis, with his permission, is printed in full below. Some comments first.

    A Pyrrhic victory

    Grim holds that if Harris wins, it will work like a loss. First, she’d likely rule without House and/or Senate support.

    Without the Senate, Harris will have a hard time confirming a dog catcher, let along [sic] a judge or a cabinet nominee. With the Senate but without the House, she won’t be able to get any of her agenda through. Worse, the debt ceiling will be hit in January, before she’s even inaugurated. 

    Would Democrats, especially decidedly unpopulist ones, be willing to take advantage of the advantages that populism-by-executive order confers? They haven’t yet. Grim is doubtful they will — to do so, Harris would have to find “populist Jesus” — and I would agree. Democrats are self-defined as the party of status quo Jesus. “Nothing will fundamentally change,” we’re regularly told, a contrast to the change their electoral opponents would bring.

    For that plan to work, people have to like what they see. Playing it safe in a land this dissatisfied won’t produce lasting wins.

    Grim also thinks a Harris win now tees up a Republican win in 2028.

    A status quo powerless Democrat with no personal base of support (“support for Kamala is more accurately described as opposition to Trump and support for Democratic policies generally”), ruling a party reduced to “an upper-middle-class center,” is not a winning combination, especially if it follows a term where little gets done.

    What kind of dictatorship?

    After a Trump win, many predict a dictatorship. Grim disagrees:

    Even with two new justices, the Supreme Court is not willing to turn power over to him. Trump is their tool to wield power, and they will be content to see him retire from the field. Trump also lacks the support of the military leadership. Without the court or the military, he has no path to hold on to power illegally.

    “Without the court or the military” — sounds pretty third-world to me. That’s how Egypt is ruled. Just wanted to point that out.

    The Realignment

    This will take much more thought, but the start point is here:

    [T]he class realignment already underway … leaves a coalition of the working class and the super rich in the Republican party. That’s an extremely dangerous coalition, and while it will be hampered by Trump’s defeat, it would be structurally strengthened longterm by a Harris victory[.]

    What it looks like when all the ripe apples have dropped is anyone’s guess. Grim thinks its possible that Republicans, if Democrats keep shedding their base, could “lock in generational power” in 2028.

    We’ll see if that’s true: it’s a “dangerous coalition” indeed. What happens with working class Sanders populists — yes, there are many; Sanders might have wiped the floor with 2016 Trump — is clearly up in the air. Rich material for a novelist.

    The NatSec state

    Here Grim is silent, but we don’t have to be. At this point, no president can oppose the cemented-in apparatus, our heroes who “maintain security.” (Trump on Joe Rogan talked about how he was convinced not to release the JFK files as he first intended. Listen between the lines and you hear, “Sir, you don’t want to do that.”)

    To the extent there’s real rebellion in the U.S., there will be real repression, more than what’s already here. What elites do abroad, they will do at home, given a sufficiently media-marginalized target. (The military calls this “preparing the battlefield.”)

    There are only two end points historically for this kind of collision — a state in chaos (think ‘60s and ‘70s rebellion) or a locked-down, Stasi society, surveilled and policed. Ask yourself, how would today’s guardians of security handle the 1960s? Gloves on or gloves off?

    Now for Grim’s analysis. If you want just his bottom line, skip down to “What It Means”. Enjoy.

    *  *  *

    Ryan Grim’s election predictions

    What will realistically happen if Harris or Trump wins

    Just like Jeff Bezos, I would never tell you who to vote for. You don’t need that from me anyway. What I can do though is offer a few thoughts on what might happen if either candidate is elected, which I haven’t seen anybody try to do with any seriousness.

    According to Elon Musk, if Kamala Harris wins, there’ll never be another election, and according to lots of Democrats, if Trump wins, he’ll turn into a dictator. Both are wrong. The truth is more complicated but not necessarily less frightening. In tonight’s newsletter, I’ll game out what that might look like…

    If Kamala wins:

    Congress goes

    If Harris wins, the chance she also takes Congress relies on a number of miraculous upsets. Joe Manchin is leaving the Senate, and his Senate seat is leaving the Democratic caucus for the rest of all of our lives. That takes Dems from 51 down to 50 seats. Jon Tester won extremely narrow races in Montana in 2006, 2012, and 2018, and he’s about as good a rural politician as you’re going to find, but Montana’s rightward drift might be too much for him to overcome. Polls have him down. If they’re right, he’s toast, and that brings Democrats down to 49 seats. 

    To get back to 50 – which would let Tim Walz break ties – they’d need to hold on to Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin (all doable, even likely) but also win in either Florida or Texas – or Nebraska. 

    If you’ve been following our coverage of the Nebraska Senate race, you know independent populist Dan Osborn has a genuine shot at upsetting the incumbent Republican. Internal polls I’ve heard about from both sides, however, suggest Trump’s ads tagging him as a “Democrat in disguise” may have done enough damage to blunt his momentum. If he wins though, I’m confident he’d caucus with Democrats, and that would make a majority. But he’s still a longshot.

    Colin Allred, the former NFL linebacker and member of Congress, has a credible chance of beating Ted Cruz. The question will be whether pollsters missed an influx of Democratic donors to the Lone Star state. If they did and the polls are slightly off, he could win. But he’s also a longshot.

    Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell could theoretically pull off an upset in Florida, but man is that hard to see. So Democrats would need one of those four longshots—Montana, Nebraska, Texas, or Florida—to come through.

    And then they’d have to win the House, too. 

    Without the Senate, Harris will have a hard time confirming a dog catcher, let along a judge or a cabinet nominee. With the Senate but without the House, she won’t be able to get any of her agenda through. Worse, the debt ceiling will be hit in January, before she’s even inaugurated. 

    Bankruptcy?

    With control of Congress, Republicans will play economic-armageddon brinksmanship, take a chunk out of the global economy, get our credit-ratings downgraded, and probably extract a chunk of fiscal flesh in exchange for simply agreeing to pay the bills that are due. The other possibility, that we actually go over the cliff and get a mini or major financial crisis can’t be ruled out. 

    Antitrust

    Harris will then be left to govern strictly from the executive branch. She’d probably have to keep Lina Khan, whether she wants her as chair of the FTC or not, since Republicans wouldn’t confirm a replacement anyway. Her victory would be meaningful for climate action, as she’d continue to disperse and execute the clean energy policy and subsidies from the Inflation Reduction Act, while Trump would smother it (or send it all to Elon Musk?).

    Taxes

    Trump’s tax cuts also expire during Harris’s first two years in office, meaning she’ll negotiate their extension. There, she has the advantage, because if she does nothing, the old tax policy snaps back into place. Her ability to do anything at all her first two years would be limited to this tax realm and, potentially, immigration. She’s likely to sign a tough border and immigration bill into law. 

    It’s hard to see how she emerges from this two years with anything higher than an approval rating in the low-30s. Given she has no organic base of support—support for Kamala is more accurately described as opposition to Trump and support for Democratic policies generally—it’s impossible to say how low her floor is. We might find out. 

    Ukraine

    Russia is making major advances in Ukraine and the U.S. public is no longer interested in the war. Harris will probably have to end it with some sort of ceasefire/non-deal that leaves Ukraine in a wildly worse off position than they’d have been in if they’d made a deal in early 2022—a deal the U.S. scuttled at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. Or she could prove she’s a tough commander-in-chief—leader of the “most lethal military” ever, as she puts it—by escalating the conflict and striking deeper inside Russia, risking nuclear war. Let’s hope it’s not that. The same dynamic could be at play with China, with much of her party leadership egging on confrontation.

    The Mideast

    I interviewed Israeli journalist Amir Tibon recently, who said that Netanyahu made a bet sometime around December that Trump would be elected president and therefore he was willing to take whatever minor grief he suffered from Biden for ignoring all the U.S. entreaties to protect civilians, allow in humanitarian aid, and negotiate in good faith toward a ceasefire. There was little grief. But, said Tibon, if Harris wins, Netanyahu will be exposed politically, and he predicted his government would collapse “within months.” A Harris win would signal to Netanyahu’s coalition partners that two of their big dreams will be at least put on hold for four years. Those two major ambitions, Tibon said, are reform of the Israeli courts in order to subsume them to the judiciary, and the Israeli settlement of Gaza. With those ambitions stymied, Netanyahu’s coalition becomes untenable.

    Foiling Netanyahu’s bet on Trump is the most persuasive case I’ve heard for a vote for Harris. The problem, though, is what comes next. Tibon is confident a candidate from a coalition that does not includes the ultra-orthodox or settler movements would triumph and that any new government that replaced Netanyahu would be similarly supportive of the various Israeli war efforts, but more willing to cut a ceasefire-for-hostages deal. But I checked Tibon’s theory with people in Israel to the right of Tibon, and they agreed that the Netanyahu government would indeed fall and new elections would be called—but that Netanyahu would win those new elections. 

    Abortion Rights

    Harris wouldn’t be able to get anything through Congress, but having Democrats control the Justice Department and Health and Human Services would put some of the brakes on right-wing states pushing ahead with increasingly aggressive abortion restrictions, including laws that make it a crime to “traffick” a minor across state lines to get an abortion. Such laws are plainly unconstitutional, but Trump’s DoJ would do nothing to stop them, whereas a Harris administration would.

    Midterms

    Every president faces brutal headwinds in their first midterm, and Republican gains are the most likely result of the 2026 midterms. The only pickup opportunities in the Senate would be in Maine and North Carolina, and both would be unwinnable in a Republican reaction year. The good news for Dems is they don’t have to defend many seats – Georgia and Michigan – but they’d still fall that much further behind in the House. 

    2028

    Republicans would be the heavy favorites in 2028. Democrats seem to hate primaries, so maybe Harris doesn’t face one even if she’s in the low 30s, with Democratic rivals holding their fire for 2032. The most likely outcome, then, of a Harris victory in 2024 is a Republican sweep in 2029, giving them a trifecta and the opportunity to lock in Supreme Court control for several generations. That court could issue abortion-related rulings that would make Dobbs look downright liberal.

    If Trump wins:

    Let’s take seriously what Trump will actually do, versus what his opponents claim he’ll do. Some of the more lurid warnings, I think, are wildly overblown. But not all of them. It’s extremely likely he will assign significant resources toward a roundup of immigrants, and will do so in a flamboyant fashion, deploying the military if he can get away with it. If he’s extra lucky, there’ll be mass resignations of military brass as a result, allowing him to elevate loyalists. 

    Stephen Miller, a deeply dangerous and strategic man, will have immense power. Trans rights will be in the crosshairs and so will abortion rights. 

    I’m less worried about his promise to add a 20 percent tariff to everything. He continues to speak highly of Robert Lighthizer as his top trade adviser, and Lighthizer is very good at what he does. Lighthizer was Trump’s United States Trade Representative and lefty trade hands and unions were generally supportive of his approach, even as they had some disagreements. If Lighthizer guides trade policy, it won’t be reckless. 

    Trump’s tax cuts from his first term will also come up for renewal, and I’d expect he’ll successfully extend and deepen them, particularly for the rich and corporations. 

    He will fire an enormous number of federal employees. Whether he can hire enough to replace them is a different question, but at minimum he’ll be able to break a lot of federal agencies. 

    He’ll go after the American university system with a vengeance. Look at what Chris Rufo has managed to do in Florida under Ron DeSantis for a flavor of what Trump could do nationally. 

    He will rescind or simply not deploy much of the climate spending included in the Inflation Reduction Act. He hates eclectic vehicles, though his alliance with Elon Musk may protect some of that. 

    Supreme Court

    Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas will retire, allowing Trump to appoint at least two more justices. 

    Trump, however, will not have the capacity to become a dictator. Even with two new justices, the Supreme Court is not willing to turn power over to him. Trump is their tool to wield power, and they will be content to see him retire from the field. Trump also lacks the support of the military leadership. Without the court or the military, he has no path to hold on to power illegally. 

    Voters will reject his displays of extremism at the polls in the 2026 midterms, likely delivering the House and Senate both to Democrats. They’ll impeach him immediately, just as Republicans will impeach Harris, but neither effort will have enough support in the Senate to go anywhere. In 2028, Republican voters will choose between J.D. Vance and opponents like Ted Cruz (unless he loses his Senate race, of course). 

    The economy will probably take a cyclical downturn toward the end of Trump’s term, and he’ll be deeply unpopular. Democrats would be favored to win in 2028 and likely hold Congress, too. 

    Mideast

    It’s impossible to predict what Trump will do here. On the one hand, he calls himself “the candidate of peace”—on the other, he has said Biden’s biggest problem has been that he’s been too tough on Netanyahu and he should let him take the gloves off. Trump has been mad at Netanyahu for congratulating Biden on his win, but he knows Bibi has been rooting for him and doing what he can to help him win, and in Trump’s world alone, that means a lot to him. You know Trump as well as I do, I’ll let you guess on this one.

    Ukraine

    The conventional wisdom is that Putin will strike a deal to end the war if Trump wins, on favorable terms to Russia, given how much ground they’ve gained. On Ukraine, the CW is probably right.

    China

    Trump will do way more jawboning of China than Harris would, but he seems to have no appetite for a war. Let’s hope that prevails.

    What It Means

    So far, we’ve talked about the near-term future relying on historical precedent. That only gets us so far. We also have to look at the coalitional trends underway and ask how a victory by each candidate influences each. If Harris wins, Democrats will be rewarded for having skipped the nominating process and overseeing a genocide in Gaza. They will have done so while embracing the Cheneys and other neocons expelled from the MAGA coalition. They will now have to be understood as a faction of the Democratic coalition. With Democrats already becoming increasingly militaristic, that only pushes the party further toward a confrontational imperial foreign policy. 

    Harris also ran detectably to Biden’s right when it came to labor, antitrust, and the economy. Winning on that message could convince Democrats that their dalliance with economic populism was unnecessary, which would speed up the class realignment already underway, with more working class voters of all races and genders feeling unrepresented by Democrats, who come to fully stand in for coastal elites. With Democrats representing an upper-middle-class center, that leaves a coalition of the working class and the super rich in the Republican party. That’s an extremely dangerous coalition, and while it will be hampered by Trump’s defeat, it would be structurally strengthened longterm by a Harris victory – unless Harris somehow finds populist Jesus like Biden did. There is still a strong faction of populist-progressives in the Democratic coalition, and Harris’s victory would not be the final word. But a Democrat who comes after Harris could be facing nearly insurmountable odds if Republicans are able to lock in generational power in 2028. 

    The short version is that there’s reason to be optimistic that Harris may win. There’s reason to be scared if she does. Or doesn’t. Hope that helps.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 11/05/2024 – 17:40

  • WTI Holds Gains Despite Bigger Than Expected Crude Build
    WTI Holds Gains Despite Bigger Than Expected Crude Build

    Oil prices closed higher for a fifth straight day as traders were sensitive to geopolitical headlines (from Israel) and the domestic election situation.

    The tension in the oil market is “palpable” as headlines around the U.S. election, turmoil in the Middle East, economic woes in China and a potential hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico “swirl,” Rebecca Babin, senior energy trader and managing director at CIBC Private Wealth US, told MarketWatch.

    “The reality of very short-term volatility has traders cutting risk and taking the shoot first, ask questions later approach the moment trades stop working.”

    Additionally, a tropical storm threatens production from the Gulf of Mexico.

    API

    • Crude +3.13mm (0.00mm exp)

    • Cushing +1.72mm

    • Gasoline -928k (-900k exp)

    • Distillates -852k (-300k exp)

    US crude inventories continued their noisy run of the last few weeks with a bigger than expected crude build. Products saw inventory draws and stocks at the Cushing hub rose by the most since May…

    Source: Bloomberg

    WTI dipped very modestly on the API-reported crude draw, but is holding above $72 for now…

    Oil prices maintained an upward trend Tuesday as “risk taking remains limited with many headlines expected in the next few days, coming from the Federal Reserve’s Policy meeting, China’s congressional meeting that will determine governmental stimulus, and the U.S. election,” Alex Hodes, director of energy market strategy at StoneX, wrote in Tuesday’s energy newsletter.

    Finally, pump prices remain very low relative to crude and wholesale gasoline prices…

    …with the election now behind us, how long before prices snap up higher?

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 11/05/2024 – 17:20

  • With JD Vance And Elon Musk, Suddenly Ideas Are Back In This Campaign
    With JD Vance And Elon Musk, Suddenly Ideas Are Back In This Campaign

    Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute,

    This presidential campaign season may be one of those turning points in history for reasons good and bad. Anyone watching the one debate between the Republican and Democratic Party candidates would not have come away with the view that this was a great battle of competing principles and visions for the future. It was a campaign of name-calling and bullets, where one candidate avoided discussing ideas at all costs – and even avoided the media at all costs. Where the other candidate dodged two attempted assassinations while throwing red meat rhetoric to an understandably angry population.

    It was a campaign where, more than ever, the mainstream media completely abandoned any idea of being a neutral source of information and instead jumped into the ring on the side of one candidate. In the one debate between presidential candidates, the mainstream media went so far as to “fact check” one candidate while giving the other a “pass.” The “fact check” turned out to be misinformation – something the mainstream media excels in – but they have long figured out that by the time the actual facts are in, people have already absorbed the falsehood.

    According to the conservative Media Research Center, mainstream media coverage of the Trump campaign was 85 percent negative while its coverage of the Harris campaign was 78 percent positive. If accurate, it explains why the public holds the media in such contempt.

    What felt missing in the campaign was a discussion of the real issues we are facing.

    The destruction caused by interventionism in our economy, in our lives, and in the rest of the world.

    There was no talk about the Federal Reserve and how it hurts the middle class, helps the wealthy, and greases the war machine.

    Then, at the tail end, things got interesting.

    Republican candidate for Vice President, JD Vance, mentioned last week that he had come to the view that the Federal Reserve was not the benevolent force for good that its supporters claim.

    He didn’t say it in those exact words, but that was his point.

    Then Trump surrogate campaigner Elon Musk made an announcement that no-doubt terrified the DC swamp: were he to get the government efficiency job Trump suggested, he’d start with a bang, cutting two trillion dollars from the Federal budget!

    We even had a little fun with it.

    After I posted some encouragement on Musk’s Twitter/X, he responded that he would be happy to have me join him looking for places to cut!

    While the last thing I am looking for is another job, I am encouraged by the outpouring of support and happy to help any effort to correct the wrong path we have been going down – a path toward total bankruptcy.

    Perhaps the most encouraging development this election cycle is the well-earned decline in the influence of the corrupt mainstream media.

    When Elon posted a funny meme of the two of us cutting government on his Twitter/X platform, it garnered some 50 million views! Compare that to the steady decline of mainstream media viewership.

    An alternative way of reporting and analyzing the events of our time is emerging on the ruins of the legacy media and it’s driving them insane.

    Good.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 11/05/2024 – 17:00

  • MSM's Matrix Cracked This Election Cycle As Americans Woke Up In Droves
    MSM’s Matrix Cracked This Election Cycle As Americans Woke Up In Droves

    The censorship and manipulation of political information by Big Tech companies led by “woke” white-collar activists, corporate media, fact-checkers funded by far-left billionaires, a web of leftist-controlled non-profits, and the censorship blob in Washington, DC – all working in unison to combat free speech and control public narratives is at its worst: election interference. 

    One of the best examples is Facebook and Twitter’s suppression of Hunter Biden’s laptop story ahead of the 2020 presidential election… 

    The censorship blob has been at it again, waging an all-out blitzkrieg against the American people. Democrats have been obsessed with uploading far-left propaganda into the minds of not just children but adults, telling them how to vote, think, and, in some cases, what gender they should be.

    Anyone challenging the Deep State-approved narratives, like Biden’s mental acuity, was labeled as “misinformation” and “disinformation” in this election cycle, despite Democrats pushing the president aside for Harris-Walz. 

    Data from media bias rating company AllSides shows how Google tweaked search results on voters, with a majority of the search results leaning hardcore to the left this election cycle. 

    Where’s the outrage? 

    AllSides analyzed the search engines Microsoft Bing, Yahoo!, and Google and found that Google displayed the most far-left-leaning news stories in search results for voters. 

    Search engine bias on Google was obvious for “election news,” with 80% of the content leaning towards leftist organizations while only 5% leaning towards right-leaning organizations.

    Even searching for “Trump News,” Google pushed out content that leaned mostly toward leftist organizations:

    Google Search displayed 64% outlets rated Lean Left, 4% rated Left, 16% rated Center, 11% rated Lean Right, and just 9% rated Right.

    The 2024 Google Search bias analysis examined 545 articles over a two-week period in August. It looked at the featured articles based on 10 search terms: Election News, Abortion News, Economy News, Harris News, Climate Change News, Trump News, Crime News, Voter Fraud News, Immigration News, Gun Control News. The results were similar to what AllSides found in separate analyses of Google News (Lean Left).

    For nearly every subject searched on Google, the big tech firm directed left-leaning sources to populate for users.

    “Out of the 545 articles analyzed, outlets that were featured the most in Google Search results for selected search terms were The New York Times (Lean Left), Fox News (Right), CNN (Lean Left), The Guardian (Lean Left), ABC News (Lean Left), NBC News (Lean Left), Washington Post (Lean Left), Politico (Lean Left), Associated Press (Lean Left), and NPR (Lean Left). All of the top 10 featured outlets were rated Lean Left, except for Fox News,” AllSides said. 

    Separately, the non-profit Media Research Center showed that election coverage this cycle was the worst in history for a Republican candidate, with only 15% positive stories, while the Democratic candidate received 78% positive stories. This means Democrats had a huge vantage point on spewing misinformation and disinformation on legacy media outlets, such as ABC, CBS, and NBC. 

    Meanwhile, polling data has been distorted statistically three weeks before the election, usually towards Democrats. 

    But for the first time in any election cycle, the Democratic machine’s matrix glitched and Deep State-approved narratives were instantly shattered by Elon Musk’s X and citizen journalist who waged a ‘meme-war’ against the censorship blob.

    The biggest takeaway from this election cycle is that an increasing number of Americans have broken free from the MSM’s matrix. 

    Jeff Bezos penned an op-ed in his Washington Post paper, in which he explained last week the reason why he did not endorse Harris-Walz: 

    “Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.”

    In other words, Musk glitched the Deep State’s matrix over the American people. The Overton Window shifted back towards the center after being artificially held to the far left for years.

    Also, the Davos elites are livid with Musk and the US Constitution. They said the quiet part out loud during this election cycle. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 11/05/2024 – 16:40

  • Post-Election Truths: The Things That Won't Change (No Matter Who Wins)
    Post-Election Truths: The Things That Won’t Change (No Matter Who Wins)

    Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “If voting could ever really change anything, it’d be illegal.”

    – Thorne, Land of the Blind (2006)

    After months of handwringing and mud-slinging and fear-mongering, the votes have finally been cast and the outcome has been decided: the Deep State has won.

    Despite the billions spent to create the illusion of choice culminating in the reassurance ritual of voting for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, when it comes to most of the big issues that keep us in bondage to authoritarian overlords, not much will change.

    Despite all of the work that has been done to persuade us to buy into the fantasy that things will change if we just elect the “right” political savior, the day after a new president is sworn in, it will be business as usual for the unelected bureaucracy that actually runs the government.

    War will continue. Drone killings will continue. Surveillance will continue. Censorship of anyone who criticizes the government will continue. The government’s efforts to label dissidents as extremists and terrorists will continue. Police shootings will continue. SWAT team raids will continue. Highway robbery meted out by government officials will continue. Corrupt government will continue. Profit-driven prisons will continue. And the militarization of the police will continue.

    These problems have persisted – and in many cases flourished – under both Republican and Democratic administrations in recent years.

    The outcome of this year’s election changes none of that.

    Indeed, take a look at the programs and policies that will not be affected by the 2024 presidential election, and you’ll get a clearer sense of the government’s priorities, which have little to do with representing the taxpayers and everything to do with amassing money, power and control.

    • The undermining of the Constitution will continue unabated. America’s so-called war on terror, which it has relentlessly pursued since 9/11, has chipped away at our freedoms, unraveled our Constitution and transformed our nation into a battlefield, thanks in large part to such subversive legislation as the USA Patriot Act and National Defense Authorization Act. These laws—which completely circumvent the rule of law and the constitutional rights of American citizens, re-orienting our legal landscape in such a way as to ensure that martial law, rather than the rule of law, our U.S. Constitution, becomes the map by which we navigate life in the United States—will continue to be enforced.

    • The government’s war on the American people will continue unabated.  “We the people” are no longer shielded by the rule of law. While the First Amendment—which gives us a voice—is being muzzled, the Fourth Amendment—which protects us from being bullied, badgered, beaten, broken and spied on by government agents—is being disemboweled. Consequently, you no longer have to be poor, black or guilty to be treated like a criminal in America. All that is required is that you belong to the suspect class—that is, the citizenry—of the American police state. As a de facto member of this so-called criminal class, every U.S. citizen is now guilty until proven innocent. The oppression and injustice—be it in the form of shootings, surveillance, fines, asset forfeiture, prison terms, roadside searches, and so on—will come to all of us eventually unless we do something to stop it now.

    • The shadow government— a.k.a. the Deep State, a.k.a. the police state, a.k.a. the military industrial complex, a.k.a. the surveillance state complex—will continue unabated. The corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials will continue to call the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House or controls Congress. By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

    • The government’s manipulation of national crises in order to expand its powers will continue unabated. “We the people” have been subjected to an “emergency state” that justifies all manner of government tyranny and power grabs in the so-called name of national security. Whatever the so-called threat to the nation, the government has a tendency to capitalize on the nation’s heightened emotions, confusion and fear as a means of extending the reach of the police state. Indeed, the government’s answer to every problem continues to be more government—at taxpayer expense—and less individual liberty.

    • Endless wars that enrich the military industrial complex will continue unabated. America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $93 million an hour (that adds up to $920 billion annually). Incredibly, although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 40% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 9 biggest spending nations combined.

    • Government corruption will continue unabated.  The government is not our friend. Nor does it work for “we the people.” Americans instinctively understand this. When asked to name the greatest problem facing the nation, Americans of all political stripes ranked the government as the number one concern. In fact, almost three-quarters of Americans surveyed believe the government is corrupt. Our so-called government representatives do not actually represent us, the citizenry. We are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests whose main interest is in perpetuating power and control.

    • Government tyranny under the reign of an Imperial President will continue unabated. The Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers. In recent years, however, American presidents have anointed themselves with the power to wage war, unilaterally kill Americans, torture prisoners, strip citizens of their rights, arrest and detain citizens indefinitely, carry out warrantless spying on Americans, and erect their own secretive, shadow government. The powers amassed by each past president and inherited by each successive president—powers which add up to a toolbox of terror for an imperial ruler—empower whoever occupies the Oval Office to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability.

    The grim reality we must come to terms with is the fact that the U.S. government has become a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this state of affairs has become the status quo, no matter which party is in power.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 11/05/2024 – 16:20

  • Election Day Exuberance Sparks 'Buy All The Things' Theme
    Election Day Exuberance Sparks ‘Buy All The Things’ Theme

    Stocks up, Bonds (prices) up, Gold up, Bitcoin up, Crude up… VIX & Dollar down… as ISM Services soars on Election Day.

    All the majors were green on the day with a squeeze in Small Caps leading the way…

    Traders should not be surprised – we haven’t had a down-day on election day for the S&P 500 since 2000:

    11/3/2020 +1.78% ELECTION DAY
    11/4/2020 +2.20%

    11/8/2016 +0.37% ELECTION DAY
    11/9/2016 +1.11%

    11/6/2012 +0.79% ELECTION DAY
    11/7/2012 -2.37%

    11/4/2008 +4.08% ELECTION DAY
    11/5/2008 -5.27%

    11/2/2004 +0.01% ELECTION DAY
    11/3/2004 +1.12%

    11/7/2000 -0.02% ELECTION DAY
    11/8/2000 -1.58%

    11/5/1996 +1.05% ELECTION DAY
    11/6/1996 +1.46%

    11/3/1992 -0.67% ELECTION DAY
    11/4/1992 -0.67%

    The Trump Trade saw another very small profit-taking day today as PolyMarket odds increased…

    Source: Bloomberg

    NVDA overtook AAPL once again to become the world’s largest market cap company…

    Source: Bloomberg

    VIX was slammed lower as the inverted curve starts to unwind into ‘less uncertainty’ (don’t forget FOMC Thursday)…

    But the vol term structure has a long way to fall from its extreme inversion as we await Thursday…

    Source: Bloomberg

    “Most Shorted” stocks were a one-way street of squeeze today…

    Source: Bloomberg

    BUT there was one stock that was wild today: DJT

    Treasury yields were all over the place, hurt early on by knock-on effects from a terrible auction in Gilts, then strong ISM Services pushed yields higher still only to see a strong 10Y auction slam yields back lower (and when DJT started to crack, so did bond yields)…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Only the 2Y yield remains higher post-payrolls…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Bitcoin, bond yields, and DJT all dumped at the same time (around 1430ET)…

    Source: Bloomberg

    The dollar dived once again, back to three-week lows…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Despite the intraday volatility elsewhere, gold continued to tread water around $2740…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Bitcoin was a bit chaotic today, ripping back above $70,000 only to get slammed lower as DJT and bond yields slipped…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Crude traded wild today. Strong open was hit by Israeli HLs (Gallant fired), but then the machines realized that Gallant was the less war-hawky one…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Finally, with the election almost over, traders wil turn to Thursday’s shenanigans with The Fed…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Today saw rate cut expectations slump again (50-50 chance of 1 or 2 cuts in 2024 and 50-50 chance of 2 or 3 cuts more in 2025).

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 11/05/2024 – 16:00

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Nov 05

Today’s News 5th November 2024

  • Netanyahu Aide Arrested Over Intel Leak Which Damaged Ceasefire Talks
    Netanyahu Aide Arrested Over Intel Leak Which Damaged Ceasefire Talks

    Via The Cradle

    Israeli police have arrested a top aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and four others for allegedly leaking classified information to foreign media, court documents released on Sunday revealed. The intelligence allegedly claimed Hamas was planning to smuggle Israeli captives from Gaza to Egypt.

    Opposition leaders say the intelligence was leaked to take pressure off Netanyahu to reach a ceasefire deal with Hamas that would bring home the roughly 100 Israeli captives still held by the Palestinian resistance movement. It is estimated that roughly 70 remain alive.

    Source: Flash90

    Netanyahu has repeatedly sabotaged ceasefire talks with Hamas since the start of the war on October 7 last year, despite heavy pressure from the families of the captives to reach a deal.

    Court documents released on Sunday identified Eliezer Feldstein, an aide to Netanyahu, as one of several people being detained and interrogated over the leak of “classified and sensitive intelligence information.” The names of the other four detained persons have not been cleared for publication by Israel’s military censors.

    The intelligence was leaked to two foreign media outlets, the Jewish Chronicle in the UK and Bild in Germany, both of which published stories about the leaked intelligence. The Jewish Chronicle later retracted its story.

    The court documents said that information taken from the Israeli military’s systems and “illegally issued” may have damaged Israel’s ability to free the captives held by Hamas in Gaza.

    Opposition leader Yair Lapid on Sunday accused the prime minister’s office of leaking “faked secret documents to torpedo the possibility of a hostage deal – to shape a public opinion influence operation against the hostages’ families.”

    By claiming that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was planning to flee to Egypt with the captives, the leaked documents appeared to promote Netanyahu’s claim in the minds of the Israeli public that any ceasefire deal must allow Israel to keep its forces on the Philadelphia Corridor, which runs along the Gaza-Egypt border. 

    Otherwise, the captives could end up in Egypt’s Sinai or “pop up in Iran or Yemen,” Netanyahu claimed.

    Netanyahu added the demand that Israel be allowed to continue occupying the Philadelphia Corridor in the 11th hour of negotiations for a ceasefire this summer. The demand torpedoed the talks, as Hamas has long insisted on a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza as part of any ceasefire deal.

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    Members of the Likud, Religious Zionism, and Jewish Power parties, which comprise Netanyahu’s governing coalition, have stated it is their priority to continue the war. They hope to ethnically cleanse Gaza and annex it, ideally to build Jewish settlements atop destroyed Palestinian cities. 

    Israeli soldiers have stated the army is currently carrying out the so-called “Generals’ Plan” to forcibly expel the remaining 300,000 residents in northern Gaza and move them to the south of the strip. The plan calls for starving or killing any militants or Palestinian civilians who refuse or are unable to leave. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 23:00

  • Election 2024: The Day Before
    Election 2024: The Day Before

    Authored by Techno Fog via The Reactionary,

    We’re just a day away from the 2024 Presidential election and if you’re feeling a little on edge, let us offer a little consolation: the Democrats are wracked with worry.

    We have documented the polling trends for the last couple of months. The movement from September 10, 2024 to the present day, November 1, has Republicans feeling confident. Victory isn’t guaranteed, but it’s safe to say that leadership is cautiously optimistic.

    Back in September, based on the aggregate polls, Vice President Kamala Harris enjoyed slim leads in the majority of swing states – Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania – and was essentially tied with Trump in Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona.

    September 2024 Aggregates:

    But things have changed. Momentum shifted. In a race with a number of close states, the last ~60 days have been very good for Donald Trump. Per the New York Times aggregates, Trump has secured slim leads in Nevada, North Carolina, and Georgia. He has gained 3 points in Arizona. Kamala’s lead in Wisconsin has shrunk and she is now fighting to not lose Michigan.

    November 2024 Aggregates:

    Nate Silver was kind enough to post this chart showing shifts for the last week and month. While there are some changes from last week benefiting Democrats, they have been insufficient to cut into Republican gains this past month. If polling can be believed.

    Contrary to much of the polling relied upon by The New York Times, AtlasIntel, which had some of the most accurate polls of the 2020 election, has Trump ahead in every swing state. (Their November 1-2 poll is available here.)

    Theoretically, Trump could have a clean sweep of all the swing states. But don’t get too confident just yet – the race for independents is tight. According to the latest Atlas polls, Trump is winning independents in Arizona (45.4 to 44.9); Nevada (51 to 41.6); and North Carolina (49.4 to 44.7). He’s lagging behind Kamala in the independent vote in Georgia (38.2 to 50); Michigan (45.7 to 47.9); Pennsylvania (41.9 to 45.6); and Wisconsin (45.6 to 47.9). Georgia seems like the outlier – but even with that large margin, Atlas has Kamala behind Trump in Georgia by 2.5%.

    For what it’s worth, here’s Karoline Leavitt (Trump’s Press Secretary) discussing their internal polling: “Our internal polls have President Trump leading in every single key battleground state.”

    You expect a campaign to say that – but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong. In fact, early voting results indicate motivated Republicans and suggest potential problems with Democrat turnout. There’s an enthusiasm gap.

    Early Results – Nevada

    In Nevada, as of yesterday, Republicans have a lead of approximately 43,000 votes – equaling 4 percent – over Democrats (not counting independents, which may skew Trump). Jon Ralston – who abhors Trump – at The Nevada Independent observed that Republicans “have a substantial turnout advantage of a whopping 8 percent statewide (57-49) and approaching 10 percent (57-47) in Clark County [Las Vegas]”.

    Nevada is trending in the right direction for Trump and other Republicans – it seems Nevada Republicans and rural counties are highly motivated this year – but it’s too early to celebrate, as Clark County continues to cut into the Republican lead and the Nevada Democrat machine is strong. Ralston believes Harris edges Trump by 0.3 percent based on a “feeling”, but concedes the election is “really a coin flip” and that “It’s going to be very, very close.” The winner may not be clear on election night. We’ll see.

    Early Results – Pennsylvania

    In 2020, Pennsylvania Democrats had a firewall of nearly 1.1 million early votes.

    The latest numbers show a dramatic decrease. The Democrat early voting lead is approximately 400,000. That’s 700,000 less than the 2020 lead, the result of 700,000 fewer Democrat mail-in voters. (Republicans stayed fairly even.) Again, indications of a Democrat enthusiasm problem.

    Spelling more trouble for Democrats in Pennsylvania is the fact that “there are now more registered Republican voters in Pennsylvania than ever before.” Democrats still hold the registration lead with 286,291 more registered Democrats than Republicans, but this is a dramatic decrease from 2020, where the Democrat margin was 685,818.

    Early Results – Arizona

    Republicans currently lead the Arizona mail-in ballots by 182,681 votes.

    By comparison, in 2020, Democrats had a slight lead of nearly 10,000 votes. As of November 1, 2024, there have been approximately 200,000 fewer Democrats voting by mail.

    More Numbers and More Democrat Issues

    The Trump campaign has gone into more detail on lagging Democrat turnout – something Democrats have voiced concern about – particularly in the swing states. Here are the numbers:

    Arizona:

    • Urban turnout is down -385,285 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    • Female turnout is down -170,011 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    • Rural turnout is UP +14,124 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    Georgia:

    • Urban turnout is down -153,846 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    • Female turnout is down -46,732 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    • Rural turnout is UP +171,837 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    Michigan:

    • Urban turnout is down -321,523 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    • Female turnout is down -204,856 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    • Rural turnout is UP +55,951 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    North Carolina:

    • Urban turnout is down -175,470 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    • Female turnout is down -154,459 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    • Rural turnout is UP +26,911 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    Nevada:

    • Urban turnout is down -191,199 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    • Female turnout is down -126,112 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    Pennsylvania:

    • Urban turnout is down -381,519 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    • Female turnout is down -450,802 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    Wisconsin:

    • Urban turnout is down -100,733 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    • Female turnout is down -238,452 votes compared to this point in 2020.

    Will we see an urban/female turnaround, and has the GOP vote been frontloaded? It’s possible, but it may not be likely. We’ll find out soon enough.

    But if it’s any indication, the Democrats are admitting that “the early vote numbers are a little scary.” And that’s probably an understatement.

    Zero Hedge
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 22:35

  • Rogan Endorses Trump After Wild Musk Interview
    Rogan Endorses Trump After Wild Musk Interview

    Following an awesome 2.5 hour podcast with Elon Musk, Joe Rogan announced his endorsement of Donald Trump.

    In a post on X dropping the podcast, Rogan said of Musk “He makes what I think is the most compelling case for Trump you’ll hear, and I agree with him every step of the way. For the record, yes, that’s an endorsement of Trump.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsTrump thanked Rogan:

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

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    Nuggets from the interview:

    Musk and Rogan discussed how an influx of illegal migrants to swing states followed by some sort of amnesty program would turn the country into a one-party state.

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

    They slammed Democrats for constantly spreading hoaxes:

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

    They discussed the killing of Peanut the squirrel:

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

    Musk was at the White House correspondents dinner where the elites shit-talked Trump over Obama-birther comments and he got so pissed he ran for president.

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

    John McAfee was discussed:

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

    Musk and Rogan talked video games – noting a study in which surgeons who also game are more effective at their jobs.

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

    So there you have it – at the 11th hour, Rogan goes for Trump after yet another interesting interview with Elon Musk.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 22:05

  • Read The Opponent, Not The Polls
    Read The Opponent, Not The Polls

    Authored by Thaddeus McCotter via American Greatness,

    For recovering politicians, this is the most dangerous time for a relapse, especially those living in a swing state. Their televisions, radios, and social media are chock with political news and ads. This can spark a recrudescence of old vices, such as arguing at the top of one’s lungs at an offending ad or slanted news story, and, worse, then conjuring a way to counter it and win the election for their side. It may even spur them to contact old friends still in the political arena and urge them to incorporate their “unexpectedly” inspired idea into their campaign. Such a loss of realistic expectations and understanding of what others are going through constitutes sure signs the poor creature is reverting to a politician’s solipsistic mindset.

    Further exacerbating the risk of their relapsing, interested friends from across the country send recovering politicians’ links to ads, news, or tweets to get their reaction. This can further trigger bouts of the ex-pol shouting to the heavens—or elsewhere—and reengaging the sordid political world they had renounced.

    Yet, by far the most frequent temptation occurs when friends from across the country contact the recovering politician to see if he or she has any insight into how their swing state and/or the nation will ultimately choose for president (and often who will control both chambers of Congress). These contacts are usually precipitated by the inquirer seeing a poll and asking if the recovering politician believes it is “accurate.” Tragically, the recovering politician may immediately commence addressing the merits of the poll’s methodology; the voting history of various constituencies vis-à-vis the poll results; and sundry other micro- and macro-critiques and speculations regarding the election—including their view of “what they need to do to win!”

    When the relapsed pol hits rock bottom, it “ain’t that pretty at all….”

    Of course, the friends of an ex-pol do not want to be the reason he or she goes cannonballing back into the political cesspool. So, for their sake and that of my fellow recovering politicians, I offer this bit of advice to avoid the temptation to relapse posed by “the polls say” query: Watch the opponent, not the polls.

    The virtue of this approach is to allow the inquirer to refrain from dragging the recovering politician back into the electoral fray for a simple reason: the inquirer can figure it out on their own. Granted, it isn’t foolproof, since fools will be too benighted to interpret an opponent’s political machinations. Still, it can help reduce the number of “the polls say” questions and, ergo, the near occasion of temptation for the ex-pol to reengage.

    Presently, the Democrat nominee’s presidential bid exemplifies why understanding what a campaign is doing is the best barometer of how a candidate is performing with the electorate—not a poll.

    On the micro-level, one can view the Harris campaign’s targeting of individual constituencies, which have traditionally comprised integral parts of the Democrat coalition. From young African-American men to Hispanics to Arab-Americans to Jewish-Americans, the Harris campaign’s assumed, almost unanimous, and necessary support has been lacking. As a result, we see not only an increase in her campaign’s messaging to these constituencies, we see the surreal hectoring of young black males—and males, in general—by surrogates, such as the Obamas. Asking voters to support your candidate indicates your campaign is okay; urging voters to support your candidate indicates your campaign is troubled; criticizing voters as not being “man” enough to vote for your candidate indicates your campaign is cooked. Other targeted messages abound within the Harris campaigns, including the emphasis on increased federal spending within the African-American community (in one of the most patronizingly racist appeals imaginable); abortion (though it is hard to imagine those who believe abortion is the overriding issue not already voting for the vice president); and the big lie about “Project 2025” being Donald Trump’s post-election agenda—all of which are designed to unite and rally a presently eroding and unenthusiastic Democrat voter base.

    On the macro-level, be one a political junkie or a well-adjusted person, the Harris campaign’s desperation is patent for all to see, notably by those Democrat candidates’ running from the radical leftist Ms. Harris and racing toward the middle:

    August’s “politics of joy” has devolved into October’s “Trump is Hitler.”

    Now, do you really need to risk a recovering politician’s relapse to recognize the Harris campaign is circling the drain?

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 21:45

  • This Pennsylvania County Built America, And May Decide The Next President
    This Pennsylvania County Built America, And May Decide The Next President

    Authored by Jacob Burg via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    BETHLEHEM, Pa.—Nestled in the heart of eastern Pennsylvania is one of two state counties that has been a bellwether in the last four presidential elections, and may decide who controls the White House next year.

    View from the Bethlehem Steel Plant in Bethlehem, Pa., on Oct. 25, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

    Northampton County, home of the former Bethlehem Steel plant—once the world’s largest producer of steel—is one of two once-blue counties in the Keystone State, along with Erie County, that then-candidate Donald Trump flipped in 2016 before moving back to the Democrats in 2020.

    Now considered a swing county in the largest battleground state, Northampton is seeing significant attention this year. Democrats visited the county in September, Trump stopped repeatedly in the larger Lehigh Valley area, and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has been to Bethlehem twice recently.

    The attention underscores how important the county will be in determining the winning presidential candidate in Pennsylvania and, by extension, the White House.

    “These fluctuations between Donald Trump and Joe Biden and Barack Obama, I think, are indicative of the fact that we truly are a true bellwether,” Northampton County GOP Chair Glenn Geissinger told The Epoch Times.

    “We reflect the national feel as well as that of the Commonwealth pretty well, because our demographics accurately reflect the cross-section of everybody. We [also] have a good, solid portion of independents.”

    Part of that political diversity comes from the region’s decades-long evolution.

    Industrialization “was a sort of a slam dunk for the Democrats,” Tony Iannelli, president and CEO of the Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce, told The Epoch Times. “There’s still a fair amount of labor here.”

    When manufacturing went offshore in the mid-1990s, Iannelli says the area “hit a wall “ but has since bounced back.

    “The bad times literally set us up for the good times,” he said. Health care, life sciences, sports, and other industries are flooding into the area, building a bustling tourism industry.

    Residents in neighboring New York City and Philadelphia—both a 90-minute drive away—are moving into Northampton County, leading to a 5.1 percent population growth from 2010 to 2020, according to U.S. census data.

    Now “softer R” or moderate Republicans are moving into the area from neighboring New York and New Jersey, Geissinger said, adding to the area’s political diversity.

    That growth has also allowed the GOP to shave off the Democrats’ voter registration advantage in Northampton County. In 2008, there were over 30,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in the county, but by September, that margin was roughly 12,000.

    “We’ve cut the margin significantly over time … and we’ve also seen an increase in the number of independent voters,” Geissinger said.

    “What Donald Trump did is he brought a populist message to the Republican Party, and that populist message has paid off for him,” he added, especially in appealing to working-class voters.

    President Joe Biden, in Geissinger’s view, won over older blue-collar voters in 2020 because of his connections to Scranton, where he was born and raised.

    “We’re not going to experience that this time around with Kamala Harris. It’s just not going to happen,” he said.

    The chairman acknowledged that Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, has advantages with younger, college-educated groups, but is confident of Trump’s chances this year.

    People walk on the Lehigh University campus in Bethlehem, Pa., on Oct. 25, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

    “[Trump has] made inroads with blue-collar … Democrats, and that’s going to pull him over significantly in Northampton County,” Geissinger said.

    The Epoch Times contacted the Northampton County Democratic Party but did not receive a response by press time.

    “This race is a toss-up. So it tells me that we’re still kind of a purple state in the sense the urban areas … tend to be more Democratic, and then our outlying regions tend to be Republican,” Iannelli said.

    County Demographics

    The cities of Bethlehem and Easton toward the south near Bucks County have been traditionally blue but Pennsylvania’s rural, agricultural areas to the north are largely Republican, Geissinger said.

    “Certainly, we would have the traditional Democrat base that will still be there in the cities, just as we have the traditional Republican base that will be in the rural areas,” he added.

    Some of the locals are drawn to the county’s diversity.

    “There’s a lot of diversity out here, and not even just in terms of culture or ethnicity, but just in terms of like different groups,” Francisco Santana, 25, told The Epoch Times.

    “You have seniors, you have middle-aged people, and there’s a lot of colleges here.”

    While the county is 85.1 percent white, according to the U.S. census, 8.3 percent of residents are black, and 15.9 percent are Hispanic or Latino.

    Trump’s support among Hispanic voters has increased in 8 years, but Harris has leaned into the controversial remarks said at his Madison Square Garden rally last month about Puerto Rico, where a comedian called the territory a “floating island of garbage.” Those with Puerto Rican heritage make up 56.4 percent of Northampton County’s Hispanic population.

    Bethlehem Voter Vibes

    Modern-day Bethlehem sits like a crown jewel beneath the hills of the Appalachian Highlands, and is a central hub of Northampton County.

    Like much of industrial Pennsylvania, Bethlehem was a victim of the offshoring of U.S. manufacturing, which led to the demise of its once-mighty Bethlehem Steel plant—formerly the world’s largest producer of steel, fabricating structures like the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge.

    Nestled along the Lehigh River, the sprawling site’s towering buildings are now weathered, rusted, and decayed from decades of neglect. Windows are cracked or shattered, with crumbling bricks exposing the entrails of what used to be a mighty industrial giant.

    Bethlehem Steel Plant in Bethlehem, Pa., on Oct. 25, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

    “When so much went overseas [in] steel making, they just weren’t ready for it. And that was the end of their demise,” Iannelli said.

    Some in the area still have connections to the plant.

    “For some families, it took a huge toll,” Amanda Holi, 36, whose father, uncle, and grandfather once worked at Bethlehem Steel, told The Epoch Times. When part of the site became the Sands Casino, she worked there as well.

    However, she sees a resurgence in the area,with new developments and businesses feeding the local economy.

    “There’s tons of traditions that I feel make it cute and quaint,” she said, describing the local sports rivalries and the new restaurants opening locally.

    Downtown Bethlehem, Pa., on Oct. 26, 2024. Jacob Burg/ The Epoch Times

    Along the winding streets of Bethlehem’s residential borrows, rows of houses sport Harris-Walz yard signs. But for every four homes backing the Democratic nominee, one will see a Trump-Vance sign—a reminder of the support for Republicans in a county that was once solidly blue, and now has only a tiny majority of registered Democrats.

    Voters of all ages, including students at Lehigh University, spoke about their desire for political unity, access to healthcare, reproductive rights, the economy, and their fears about the 2024 election.

    Some were aware of the significance of their vote as residents of a bellwether county in the largest U.S. battleground state.

    “It makes me feel a little responsible to try to convince people to vote the way I think is important, because I think we’re in a crucial time here,” Norah Hooper, a retiree who moved to the area two years ago, told The Epoch Times.

    “It’s made me try to talk to people about it, and to work towards Harris to make sure that she wins,” she said. Hooper feels “scared to death” about the election and wants a president who empathizes with all Americans.

    Northampton’s diversity gives many different voter groups a chance to make their mark on the nation, Santana said.

    “Even if it is a battleground state, I think it’s nice to see that a lot of demographics are here and are having their voice heard,” he said.

    Ben Cohen, 43, said he would vote regardless. His support for Harris this year is a “very simple, binary choice” as he does not think Trump is a good leader for the country, calling him a wild card. Cohen says he supports an economic agenda that focuses on the middle class.

    Others downplayed the state and county’s significance in the election, pointing out that every ballot nationwide contains many local and statewide races.

    “I think every vote counts regardless of where you are,” a man who declined to give his name told The Epoch Times. “Every vote counts in some way.”

    Concerns About Election Results

    Some expressed deep concerns about what could play out on election day.

    “I already voted by mail, and I’m kind of scared that [Trump] might win,” Mary Jean Langman, a retired teacher who moved to Northampton County from Scranton, told The Epoch Times.

    Mary Jean Langman in Bethlehem, Pa., on Oct. 26, 2024. Jacob Burg/The Epoch Times

    She’s worried about the former president cutting Social Security, which, along with Langman’s teacher’s pension, is her lifeline. While Trump has said this year he would not make any changes to Social Security, he has discussed making cuts to it in the past, including in 2020, during the last year of his administration.

    The economy is often named as one of the top issues on voters’ minds in most polls, although some expressed optimism about the country’s trajectory.

    “All these years that I’ve been here, it was always the economy; that was the issue” that mattered in most elections, Babak Kamyab told The Epoch Times. He owns a gift shop in downtown Bethlehem and immigrated to the United States from Iran in 1977.

    Despite economic woes since COVID, Kamyab says his business is thriving.

    “The economy is like an ocean, if it’s turning whether up or down, it’s going to make a huge circle, very slowly, to come back up or go down. That’s the way [the] economy works,” he said.

    Kamyab’s shop is one of the only along Main Street with a Harris-Walz sign at its entrance. Given how close the race seems in recent polling, he expressed concerns about Trump’s chances but said he thinks Harris will prevail if she stays the course.

    Babak Kamyab in Bethlehem, Pa., on Oct. 26, 2024. Jacob Burg/The Epoch Times

    “I mean, the international situation is a terrible situation,” Kamyab said, referring to the escalating military conflicts in Europe and the Middle East. “But at least I know with [Trump], the Ukraine situation is going to get worse.”

    Frankie Lozada, 37, and Timear Haley, 30, both moved to the Lehigh Valley to join Hogar Crea, an international drug rehabilitation program that has a location in nearby Allentown. While Lozada doesn’t pay much attention to politics, Haley is inspired by Harris’s messaging.

    “[Her slogan] ‘When we fight, we win,’ it kind of caught me, because I was at a stage in my life where I wanted to give up, and I just didn’t want to live life anymore,” Haley said.

    “When she said that, it kind of took to me, and I was just like, I would keep going with her with that slogan, so fight and win. So far, so good, I’ve been a month clean,” he said. Haley hopes to start a business when he gets back on his feet.

    Timear Haley (L) and Frankie Lozada (R) in Bethlehem, Pa., on Oct. 26, 2024. Jacob Burg/The Epoch Times

    The College Vote

    Many of the students at Bethlehem’s Lehigh University are deeply engaged in the 2024 election. For some, it is the first time they’re old enough to cast a ballot.

    “I just want younger candidates” and smaller generational gaps between them, Raquel Romero, 19, told The Epoch Times.

    “Our financial state right now is absolutely horrible with the fact that living expenses are almost that height of this generation, at least mine,” she said. Bodily autonomy as a woman is also a central issue on her mind this election.

    “It’s definitely difficult because it’s almost choosing between two evils. I definitely understand how difficult it could be for the candidates themselves,” Romero said. She sees no quick and easy solutions for inflation, as raising salaries could also increase the prices of goods.

    Raquel Romero after an interview with The Epoch Times at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., on Oct. 25, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

    “At the end of the day, we’ve had so many experiences where one candidate says one thing, and then they just never do it,” she added. Romero knows who she’s voting for, but declined to say.

    Even though Haksheel Alleck, 23, an international student from Mauritius Island, can’t vote in this election, he’s concerned about illegal immigration and the nation’s geopolitical tension with other countries.

    Haksheel Alleck after an interview with The Epoch Times at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., on Oct. 25, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

    He’s also worried about how both candidates could affect visas for international students like himself.

    “It’s always on my mind, would my visa still be relevant in the next few years? Would my status change [as] the political landscape changes here?” Alleck added.

    Other students, acknowledging the voting enthusiasm among their social circles, expressed frustration with the choices of candidates.

    “It’s really sad,” Max Denbow, 20, told The Epoch Times. “It’s also tough because … each candidate has aspects that appeal to me, but I can’t get myself to vote for either of them.”

    Max Denbow after an interview with The Epoch Times at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., on Oct. 25, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

    Denbow is writing in his own name on his ballot this year.

    When asked what kind of message or agenda he’d like to hear from a future presidential candidate—either Republican or Democrat—to win his vote, Denbow was quick to respond.

    “Someone that prioritizes unity. We need to be unified.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 20:55

  • NBC Airs Trump Message After Harris Saturday Night Live Appearance
    NBC Airs Trump Message After Harris Saturday Night Live Appearance

    Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    NBC aired a message from former President Donald Trump one day after Vice President Kamala Harris appeared on Saturday Night Live (SNL).

    Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump greets supporters during a campaign event in Rocky Mount, N.C., on Oct. 30, 2024. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

    Trump spoke for about one minute during the message, which was prerecorded and broadcast during a NASCAR race on Nov. 3. It was aired again during an NFL game.

    Trump, after greeting fans of sports, noted that the presidential election is slated for Nov. 5.

    “We’re two days away from the most important election in the history of our country. We’ve got to save our country, and it needs saving. It’s in very bad shape,” Trump said.

    “We’re going to end up in a depression based on what’s been happening,” he added later.

    “We have to straighten out our country, we have to close our borders, we have to lower our taxes, we have to get rid of inflation. I’ll fix it.“

    NBC declined to provide a comment on the development.

    Harris appeared live during Saturday’s SNL. She participated in a skit that portrayed her speaking to another version of herself ahead of the election.

    “It is nice to see you, Kamala, and I’m just here to remind you, you got this. You can do something your opponent cannot do. You can open doors,“ Harris told Maya Rudolph, who was playing the vice president and had said she wished she could talk to someone ”who’s been in my shoes; a black, South Asian woman running for president, preferably from the Bay Area.”

    Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Brandon Carr wrote in a Nov.3 post on social media platform X that the Democratic presidential nominee’s appearance may have violated an FCC rule against licensed broadcasters using public airwaves to influence an election in favor of a candidate unless the other candidate is offered equal time by the same broadcasters.

    The rule in question “generally means providing comparable time and placement to opposing candidates,” according to an FCC fact sheet.

    The regulator gives an example of a qualified candidate appearing on a station. In that scenario, the station “will be required to entertain requests for Equal Opportunities by opposing legally qualified candidates for the same office,” the FCC states. “However, the station is not required to seek out opposing legally qualified candidates and offer them Equal Opportunities.”

    The FCC grants licenses to some broadcasters. The agency can revoke licenses, although its chairwoman said in October that revocation would not happen “for political reasons.”

    Over the weekend, NBC lodged a notice with the FCC that said Harris appeared on its network for one minute and 30 seconds. The broadcaster said the appearance came “without charge.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 20:20

  • Losing Power? The Elites And The Leftist Mob Would Rather Burn It All To The Ground
    Losing Power? The Elites And The Leftist Mob Would Rather Burn It All To The Ground

    Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

    It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a significant positive evolution within American society. In the early days of the Ron Paul movement I remember the hopeful groundswell of support for a new conservative epoch that adopted a little Libertarianism and a recognition that most “conspiracy theories” are actually conspiracy realities. It was the kind of catalyst that was needed to break the long running false paradigm of Neo-Cons vs Democrats; it was the beginning of the conservative rebellion we see happening today.

    How do I know things have changed? For one, Neo-Cons are almost universally hated by real conservatives. So much so that it has forced those politicians to show their true colors and come out in favor of Democrat/globalist candidates like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The mask is truly off and the act is over. You’re not going to see people like Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney or Lindsay Graham taken very seriously by anyone anymore.

    The return to a true conservative philosophy has been initiated and this time it doesn’t look like it will be snuffed out like the Barry Goldwater era of the early 1960s. The concept of limited government, an end to debt spending, sound money, the removal of elitist NGOs from political influence, a hard-line stance against globalism, legit border security, meritocracy, a rejection of progressive deconstruction and moral relativism, all of these things are prime conservative principles.

    Such ideas have been treated as “archaic” and “barbaric” for decades because they threaten the structures that keep the establishment elites in power. Today, they are making a comeback.

    Some will say that it’s all because of Donald Trump, but this is not the case. This movement was growing into a Juggernaut long before Trump, though he is certainly riding the wave as it comes to fruition. The question is, will Trump do it justice if he gets the gold this week?    I predicted a Trump win in 2016 for months leading up to the election despite the army of naysayers (I also predict he will win in 2024).  But, for me, his first term left a lot to be desired; the biggest problem being the elitist creepers filling his cabinet.

    But hey, at least he wasn’t promoting transsexual procedures for children or trying to start World War III with Russia like the Democrats have been doing.  I’ll also admit that Trump’s coalition of allies is looking FAR better this time around. Talk of Ron Paul joining the team is surprising and gives me some hope.

    During the Ron Paul movement in 2012 I was once invited to a conservative dinner with some liberty bigwigs at the time (most of them are long out of the picture now, either retired or dead) and some were arguing about the presidential election. The position was presented that voting for Romney over Ron Paul would at least get Obama out of the White House. Others suggested that this was simply choosing the lesser of two evils.

    I and others argued that there was no lesser evil. They were both equally demonic. One man in the group said “Well Jesus isn’t running for office.”

    I doubt that man would defend Mitt Romney today. That said, I don’t view the election of 2024 the same way I did in 2012. Jesus isn’t running, that’s for certain, but the Devil definitely is in the form of the extreme political left. They are evil incarnate. Maybe Trump turns out to be a disappointment, but he’s no devil.  And if he doesn’t follow through on his campaign promises then conservative can hold him accountable and it won’t be treated as an insurrection, just a correction.

    There’s already millions of conservatives putting the candidate under a microscope and we don’t function the way Democrats do. The party is meaningless to us, it’s the policies and the follow through that matter. You can’t mention Trump around a group of conservatives without half of them noting his shortcomings. His mistakes are tallied regularly by the very people who originally voted for him.

    Leftists don’t dare do that within their own circles. They don’t care about policy, they only care about power.

    No conservative is going to change his or her mind about securing the border, deporting the illegals, shrinking government, ending American participation in the Ukraine War and ending the transing of kids on a federal level (to start with). These things are going to happen eventually with or without Trump.

    And I can’t help but notice how much the establishment seems to be breaking down in a panic over the idea of a new conservative renaissance. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the new world order elites look as worried and despondent as they do right now.  (I’m thinking specifically of Lynn de Rothchild at the beginning of this year pouting over the public exposure of ESG and talking about how the globalists would have to abandon it in favor of a more discreet program. Or, John Kerry this month at the climate talks in New York bitterly admonishing free speech on the web and how it was sabotaging the globalist agenda).

    When was the last time you saw WEF globalists taking center stage in the media? What happened to the Council For Inclusive Capitalism? ESG controls and lending have been crushed. DEI is quickly dying, as it should. Gen Z men are reportedly the most conservative group of young men in generations. There is a sea change happening right now, and if you’ve been paying attention from within the alternative sphere for a decade or more then you have probably noticed it.

    This is not a momentary flash of cultural awareness. This is a permanent societal shift. Unfortunately, when this sort of thing happens engineered calamity usually follows.

    Globalists and their leftist puppets can’t conceive of losing. They can’t fathom the idea that their ideology is failing and that the public isn’t buying what they’re selling. They will council themselves and suggest that the populace is simply “too stupid” to understand the necessity of the globalist vision. They’ll say that the rise of the conservative right is a “great step backwards” and a “dark age”. They’ll claim that this will lead to an epic disaster on a planetary scale.

    Then…those same people take action to CREATE that disaster.

    My original prediction for 2024 was that another presidential election would not happen; that there would be an event that disrupts the election and sends the country into chaos. We almost had that happen with two separate assassination attempts on Donald Trump. However, by sheer luck it appears that I was wrong and the election is moving forward.  What does this mean for the future?

    I think most of us in the alternative economic field understand well that if Trump reenters the White House the complex manipulation of financial data and jobs data by the Biden/Harris Administration will suddenly end. Meaning, the real data will come out, it will look very bad, and the media will immediately accuse Trump and conservatives of destroying the economy.

    On top of that, conservatives will be inheriting two separate proxy wars from Democrats – The war with Russia through Ukraine and the war with Iran through Israel. Both of these scenarios have the potential to escalate into a world war. I would argue that at this point a world war is inevitable (the first stage has already begun) and Trump will not be able to keep America out of it even if he wants to. Too many dominoes have been set in motion.

    Then you have the potential domestic fallout from a Trump win with leftists rioting across the country (as soon as the weather warms up enough enough for their dainty little hands to throw bricks and Molotovs). The goal of the leftist mob is to force conservatives to act like the very “fascists” the activists accuse us of being. Of course, if that happened they would be dead, but they will have destroyed the conservative moral ideal in the process.

    These are the kinds of people we’re dealing with. They aren’t going to sit back and let us prove the country can function far better without progressive influence and woke social engineering. They would rather burn the whole thing to the ground first.

    My point is, always be on guard in the moments when you think you’re winning. That’s when the people that mean you harm will be most angry, when they will be most unhinged, and when they will be most inclined to strike.

    *  *  *

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

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 20:05

  • Philly Judge Allows Musk's Million-Dollar Giveaway To Continue
    Philly Judge Allows Musk’s Million-Dollar Giveaway To Continue

    Authored by Sam Dorman via The Epoch Times,

    A judge has denied Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s request to block the $1 million giveaway program that billionaire Elon Musk and America PAC have been operating in the lead-up to the Nov. 5 election.

    Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas Judge Angelo Foglietta issued the denial after a Nov. 4 hearing that was prompted by Krasner’s civil lawsuit against Musk and America PAC.

    Krasner had accused Musk and America PAC of running an illegal lottery, which he said created a public nuisance, and violating a state consumer protection law.

    The program is set to conclude on Election Day, Nov. 5.

    The two sides had a brief hearing on Oct. 31, but Foglietta decided that he had been divested of jurisdiction after Musk filed to move the case to federal court. A federal judge sent the case back to state court the following day, and Foglietta quickly responded by scheduling a hearing for Nov. 4.

    Foglietta said at the beginning of the hearing that because another day remained for the program, he didn’t think the case was moot.

    Musk was not in the courtroom, located within Philadelphia City Hall.

    America PAC attorney Chris Gober argued that despite Musk’s description of the giveaway as random, the program was not random.

    Gober said the program involved a contractual relationship in which participants served as spokespeople for the political action committee after being selected by a predetermined pool of people.

    So far, several individuals from Pennsylvania have won as part of the giveaway. Krasner’s complaint cited a post on X in which America PAC said more than 280,000 registered voters in Pennsylvania had signed the petition, which makes them eligible for the giveaway.

    Gober said that 6,661 of 18,000 payments—of differing amounts—owed to the residents of Philadelphia County had already been mailed. Around 3,000 were in process and slated to be mailed on Nov. 4 while the remaining—around 7,000—were slated to be mailed on Nov. 5.

    John Summers, an attorney representing Krasner’s office, said the PAC is relatively opaque about details surrounding the giveaways and terms for the PAC’s relationship with participants.

    Summers pointed to Musk’s giveaway statement and argued that the fact that the giveaway wasn’t actually random was not a valid defense. He also noted the testimony from America PAC Director Chris Young stating that he was surprised to hear Musk call the giveaway random.

    During his closing argument, Summers alleged the defendants’ lack of transparency cheated thousands of Philadelphians.

    Andy Taylor, another attorney for the defense, basing his closing argument on the First Amendment, said Krasner was asking for a violation of core political speech by stopping people from signing the PAC’s petition.

    Taylor said that the giveaway was by design rather than by chance. The winner selection process, he said, should be likened to a job application rather than a lottery.

    Summers responded to Taylor in part by stating that the case had nothing to do with freedom of speech and should instead be viewed as fraud.

    “No one’s First Amendment rights are being smothered,” Summers said.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 19:15

  • How To… Rig Your Rigged Elections
    How To… Rig Your Rigged Elections

    Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,

    Are you an aspiring oligarch, dictator or autocrat? Do you want to wield power whilst maintaining a façade of popular support and democratic mandate? Do you want to make your proles believe they have a choice?

    Well then, welcome to the first of our “How to…” series.

    A selection of articles dedicated to teaching aspiring authoritarians how to hide tyranny behind a reassuring mask of  freedom.

    Here we’ll go into the finer points of how it’s possible to have “elections” that mean almost nothing.

    What we talk about when we talk about rigging an election

    First things first, we need to establish what we mean when we talk about “election rigging”.

    Controlling the outcome of an election is a comparatively simple, even vulgar, process. All you need to do is manipulate the count and/or simply lie about the result.

    However doing this efficiently  – rigging an election with as little effort as possible and disguising that fact is more difficult.

    In short, if your rigged election is entirely reliant on simply forging ballots you have done something wrong. If you want to reliably and consistently control the results of your “elections” you need to be more creative than that.

    The vast majority of your work pre-election will be dedicated to laying the groundwork, building infrastructure, and lubricating the public.

    The vote itself is the final destination in a long journey that starts with…

    1. The System

    The CIA is a perfect example of the kind of institution which is not answerable to the electorate. You’ll need to create your own version of this.

    “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”

    Your first priority when constructing your system should be establishing an infrastructure that is not significantly impacted by elections.

    Unelected civil servants,  intelligence agencies, military officers, judges, NGOs, corporate interests and lobby groups should form the permanent foundations of the power structure, while “elected officials” should ideally be mere window dressing and wall-paper, with zero opportunity to act independently.

    Having by this means established a covert power structure that effectively guarantees an election will never be able to change anything meaningful – what we can call your “Deep State” – you need to set about creating a “democracy” that camouflages this fact.

    The design of your “democracy” can make or break an efficiently controlled election. Following our advice on the voting system you employ can make controlling the outcome of your “elections” relatively hassle-free.

    For starters, you should be aiming to make as little work for your Deep State as possible. A country is a big and complex entity,  and effectively micro-managing millions upon millions of individual votes is demanding of man-hours and man-power.

    That’s where your “voting system” comes into play, and it should work, not by falsifying and manipulating every single vote, but by making the vast majority of those votes mutually-canceling.

    Using your fully controlled “two-party system” (point 2), you should try to achieve a status quo in which the voting intentions of the majority will always split fairly evenly between two meaningless “choices”.

    You can do this with class or race or gender messaging, it doesn’t matter, just so long as their minds are made up at an early stage and tend to stay that way.

    Essentially you need a situation in which roughly 49% of your populace will vote for Team Red and 49% will vote for Team Blue.

    This then creates your mythical “election deciders” – the remaining 2% of the electorate whose votes you will need to care about. You can call them “swing states” or “floating voters” or some terminology of your own.

    What you’re aiming for by this means is an “election” that is decided by as few votes as possible.

    Once you have the system in place you need to start thinking about your political parties.

    2. The Parties

    “There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties.”

    An essential part of your control mechanism is, as referenced above, the  “Two-Party System”. Ideally this would be a perfect but meaningless binary, but this method can absorb  a few token “third party” options provided they remain purely minority choices.

    In fact permitting a few “independents” or “wild cards” to proliferate can even be beneficial  for a few reasons –

    a) it reinforces your appearance of genuine democracy, while remaining largely meaningless since the aforementioned entrenchment means they will never gain any serious traction.

    b) because sandwiching your Big Two parties between the “kill the rich and eat their babies” party on the Left and the “set fire to everyone darker than taupe on the Dulux paint scale” party on the Right only makes your two “REAL” parties look more sensible and “safe”.

    c) Hopeless minority third parties can act as good anger-sponges  and safety-valves for people who may be beginning to see through your rigged system.

    Of course, if you are doing this thoroughly you will probably be controlling the third parties as well. But that isn’t essential and in the main, you’ll want to focus on The Big Two.

    Establishing your Big Two is relatively easy, after all, you have money and power and (thanks to your candidate filtering processes, point 3) you have an entire political class dedicated to the pursuit of those things.

    Bringing both Big Two parties under your banner is easy.  The hard part is refining the skill of taking two near-identical things and somehow making them appear not just different but diametrically opposed.

    Your press will play an important role here. They must report only on the minor points of difference, and completely ignore or elide the obvious fact that the two parties agree on every single major issue.

    IMPORTANT – The unquestioned assumptions holding your system in place only work if they remain unquestioned, and they only remain unquestioned if people don’t realise they are there.

    This is the primary purpose of the Big Two parties, limit choice and control public discourse – while appearing to do the exact opposite.

    When the press discuss the Big Two parties they should talk about ill-defined concepts instead of facts. Use words like “progressive”, “liberal”, “traditional” and “common sense”. Words with relative qualitative meaning as opposed to objective quantitative value.

    Focus on aesthetic, surface-level differences. Contrast colours and iconography. Make sure they aim at different bases and demographics to encourage that 50/50 entrenchment we discussed in point 1.

    Sidenote: One of the additional benefits of these two near-identical parties that constantly pretend to be polar opposites is that when you really need to sell something to everyone you can unite the parties in “bi-partisan support”, and the press can sell the issue as “so important that even Red and Blue agree”.

    3. The Candidates

    “If you own everyone on the ballot, you don’t have to rig anything.”

    So, you have a power structure in place that works independently of any and all “elected” officials, you have a voting system that is easy to sway in either direction, and you have two parties as near-identical as makes no difference.

    But you still need actual – for want of a better word – “people”, to fill the role of “leader”. These are your candidates, the pool of potential puppets from which you pick.

    The good news here is that this process is partly automated via self-selection. The kind of shallow narcissists who seek positions of power are exactly the kinds of people you want on your roster.

    It is essential for the maintenance of the status quo that ANY candidates for high political office must be passed through levels of filtration before any ordinary person has the opportunity to put a check next to their name on a ballot paper. 

    a) Money. Your system needs to ensure no one can run for high office without a LOT of money behind them. Since you and your class allies control all the money worth controlling, this essentially means no one can run for office without your approval.

    b) Education and training.  As part of your power structure you should have invested resources in your education system. You should be selecting potential “leaders” at an early stage and directing their development through internships and “excellence programs” etc.

    As people progress through this system, you need to offer them opportunities to compromise themselves – morally and financially. Anyone who does not avail themselves of those opportunities must be rejected immediately and their career stalled or curtailed.

    Only those candidates willing to compromise themselves will progress to the next level.

    This both de-selects inappropriate applicants and provides important kompromat for future utility. Your intelligence agencies should maintain up to date dossiers on prospective candidates. Records used for what might be vulgarly described as “bribery” and/or “blackmail”.

    We prefer the term “carrot and stick”.

    4. The Press

    It’s nearly election day. The longterm planning is done. You have a political system immune to change, a voting system where most votes are irrelevant, near identical political parties advocating your selected agenda in slightly different words, and a shortlist of candidates who you handpicked and can easily control with carrots or sticks.

    But, when the actual voting is about to happen, all of that is of secondary importance to the press.

    A cooperative press is one of the fundamental pillars of your political system (point 1), and we won’t be going into creating that here, that’s another lesson for another time.

    For the sake of this lesson, we’ll be assuming your “Deep State” assets own and operate the vast majority of mainstream social media, print media, and audio-visual media outlets.

    At that point, The Press is your first and best tool for effectively disguising the nature of your “democracy”.

    Your press will tell the story of the election, and an efficiently controlled election is nothing but a story. A candidate only says what the press say he says. A candidate only does what the press say she does. Intrigues, scandals, highs-and-lows are the meat and lifeblood that make this show feel “relevant” –  a wave of “incident” painting a picture of a dynamic fluid situation with an uncertain outcome, even as it steadily steers the result in your chosen direction.

    Remember this isn’t about convincing people how to vote – the locked-in two-party system already renders that self-canceling and meaningless in all but those vital  “swing states” (or whatever your chosen terminology).  This is simply about making people pay attention, care about the outcome, feel as if vital life-changing choices are at stake, and that you are invested in those choices.

    Further, this is a type of propaganda that needs to exist on the meta-level to maintain the facade of choice. The very act of attempted persuasion reinforces the idea that people need to be persuaded and, as such, that their votes matter.

    This is the most vital task of your captive press –  not controlling the result, but making your chosen result believable.

    If you want a landslide polls can predict a landslide, if you want it to be close polls can predict it will be close. By making your carefully curated future what people expect to happen they will be more accepting of it when it happens.

    Sidenote: Control of the press was simpler for the generations that came before. Unfortunately, while some aspects of your job have been made easier by technology, some others have been made far more difficult. The modern tyrant must concern themselves with the independent media, but that’s another article in this series.

    5. The Votes

    “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”

    You might be wondering, if you control both sides of the election, handpick the candidates, puppeteer the press and have a system in place which means your interests are on both tickets and can literally never lose, do you need to actually rig the votes?

    Well, of course you do.

    While all your candidates are under your control and promoting the same basic agenda, you will still have a preferred story you want to tell at any given time and a puppet best suited to promoting that story.

    For example, you might have a future psy-op planned which only works if Team Red is at the helm.

    Or it might be that there is a lot of ill-feeling in the populace that you want to either a) focus on a new hate figure or b) dissipate with an apparent regime change.

    It might be you owe some favours to a powerful ally and getting their relative/spouse/son into office is a pay-off.

    It might be that you’ve realised, too late,  your chosen puppet is so mentally unbalanced he/she might become essentially uncontrollable through your usual methods, and a last minute switch is needed.

    These are circumstances where actual vote rigging becomes essential.

    Thankfully, as we discussed in point one, you’ve designed a system where an election with millions of votes can be decided by a few thousand,  and you have a press that will always obediently lay the groundwork by “predicting” your planned result, however improbable it might seem and even if it requires a last minute change of direction that defies all reason and sense.

    You also have “tame” political parties you can unite in bi-partisan acceptance of the result and you have candidates who will always do what they are told, which makes concealing the rigging relatively easy.

    So – how do we do the actual rigging?

    Surprisingly, in our experience, the traditional in-person hand-written ballots are actually the hardest to manipulate, especially when there is infrastructure in place to confirm IDs and count quickly and efficiently.

    This method should therefore be discouraged.

    Have your captive Press refer to it as “old-fashioned” and “outdated”. Claim it benefits one side or is “racist”. The specifics don’t matter.

    At the same time, you need to be promoting more “modern”, “efficient” and “fairer” methods of voting – postal voting, drop boxes, electronic voting machines and online voting.

    All these methods allow for extra votes to be added quite easily via mail fraud or algorithm, or taken away via “lost ballots” or “technical glitches”. They put space – real or metaphorical – between the voter and the people who count the votes.

    You can slide into that space and get to work.

    And since your system means only a few thousand votes in a relatively small area will likely decide the election you don’t need to go too crazy.

    Just a thumb on the scales and you get the result you want.

    No one will notice  – unless you happen to encounter a situation where your chosen puppet proves to be vastly more unpopular than you anticipated.

    This may require last-minute “adjustments” overt enough to raise some comment.  However, just make sure your tame press dismiss all such comment as “conspiracy theory”  and there will be no significant long-term damage.

    Sidenote: To finesse this even further, have the press report on some “glitches” and “lost ballots”. Create a background white noise of chaos but ensure BOTH SIDES are seen to both suffer and benefit, and underline that this is just the way huge modern elections work, and the margin wasn’t impacted. Then, after the fact, issue apologies, censure those  “responsible” and promise to improve.

    We call this “incompetence camouflage”.

    Conclusion

    Congratulations, with the completion of this guide you are now one step closer to a perfectly controlled dictatorship in the guise of  a democracy.

    You should have in place:

    1. A system where your elected officials have very little power, and most votes don’t count.

    2. Political parties that agree on everything of importance whilst constantly squabbling over matters of very little import.

    3. A roster of candidates that are either morally or financially compromised and have been trained to do as they are told.

    4. A captive press which will report only what you tell it to report.

    5. Measures which make actually rigging the vote simple.

    Remember, with all these safeguards and plans in place, it is easy to control the outcome of the election without anyone ever revealing the level of corruption.

    …unless, for some reason, you want to make it obvious, perhaps to discredit democracy or start a civil war.

    But that’s advanced-level narrative management, which we will cover in a future lesson.

    You need to remember – Public belief is the reason we’re doing all of this. The illusion of choice is the lifeblood of your system. Once you reveal it’s fixed and voting doesn’t matter, they will stop voting and lose all investment.

    From there your power base can quickly crumble.

    Only aim for this if you have a better system already set up to replace it.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 18:25

  • RFK Jr Says Trump Plans To Remove Fluoride From American Drinking Water
    RFK Jr Says Trump Plans To Remove Fluoride From American Drinking Water

    The debate over the forced medication of the American population by the government is a long standing conflict.  Today it is more important than ever after the draconian efforts of Democrats to create a path to forced covid vaccinations using economic coercion.  The fight over experimental mRNA vaccines and vaccine passports has had an interesting side effect – The public is now motivated to question many other medical mandates and FDA standards with suspicious origins. 

    Water fluoridation is one of those standards.

    Robert F. Kennedy Jr, now part of Donald Trump’s campaign dream team, is to be put in charge of US health initiatives should Trump win the election this week.  Kennedy’s secondary career focus (beyond politics) has been exposing faulty medical establishment practices and food industry corruption.  He was a stalwart opponent of covid mandates and forced vaccination attempts and it’s fair to say he is widely hated by the government funded medical elite and the media.     

    Kennedy announced this week that he has turned his sights on water fluoridation, and says Donald Trump plans to set policies in motion to end fluoridation if he returns to office. 

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

    Fluoridation of the US water supply has been a key battleground since it began in 1945.  The practice was not widely accepted by the scientific community or the dental community back then, but that was before government manipulation of medical and scientific research through subsidies became a standard.

    After a few decades of indoctrination in universities and the growing habit of the medical community to police its own when it comes to investigating certain subjects, very few researchers had the courage to publish evidence contrary to the narrative that fluoride in the water supply was anything other safe.

    To question fluoride treatment is almost as taboo as questioning climate change if you are a scientist.  It’s just not done, but that attitude is completely contrary to the scientific method.  Try to study the subject online and most search engines will bury you in hundreds of “Fact Check” articles claiming that questioning fluoridation is pure conspiracy theory.

    The early days of mass fluoride medication are as shady as any conspiracy could possibly be.  Rumors of fluoride testing on unwilling subjects by the Third Reich and the Soviets abound, but there is little concrete evidence to confirm the claims that this was done to “control the population.”  The Soviets did in fact pass a directive in the 1960s for mass fluoridation of the water supply, and this ended in the 1990s.  The reason why is not officially admitted.

    The theory was that the chemical caused docile behavior and reduced IQ, making the population easier for the elites to manage. 

    Here are the facts:

    1)  Fluoride (or sodium fluoride) is a toxic chemical byproduct of the aluminum and fertilizer industry often used in rat poison.  It is also a cumulative agent, which means it continues to collect in the human body over time when ingested. 

    2)  Initially, these industries pumped fluoride gases into the air, causing health concerns and lawsuits.  This forced the manufacturers to capture the gases and reduce them down to a chemical sludge.  This is then distilled into a powder which makes it easier to contain and transport.  The problem was, the chemical was expensive to dispose of safely under environmental protocols.

    3)  Trace elements of natural fluoride already exist in many water supplies.  In some places with higher fluoride content in ground water in the early 1900s, residents were found to suffer from a condition called “brown teeth”.  Scientists found that people with brown teeth also had lower instances of cavities.  Eventually a correlation to fluoride was established by a man named Trendley H. Dean. 

    4)  Dean, a dentist and scientist, ultimately led the charge for mass fluoridation in US cities.  Another entity also lobbied the government for mass fluoridation:  Aluminum giant Alcoa.

    5)  And here’s where it gets shady – Trendley Dean worked for the NIH and the Public Health Service, which was run by Andrew Mellon.

    6)  Wealthy elitist Andrew Mellon, a founder of ALCOA and one of its major stockholders, was the U.S. Treasury Secretary from 1921-1932, when the PHS was still a division of the Treasury Department.  It was therefore Mellon’s PHS that ordered Dean to study fluoride in the first place.  In other words, Mellon and Alcoa had Dean conjure up the very studies that would change fluoride from a toxic waste into a public health miracle. 

    7) This is yet another example of the revolving door between corporations and government health agencies. 

    8)  Not only did industry magnates no longer have to pay for expensive chemical disposal for fluoride, they stood to make millions selling the poison to the government for water treatment.  After that, the medical community (under Mellon) hyped up fluoridation as a magical cure for bad teeth.  

    9)  Dozens of recent studies now confirm what many people suspected decades ago:  Fluoride does in fact decrease IQ.  Children are especially vulnerable.  It is also proven to cause weaker bones, thyroid problems and a host of neurological issues.  Several published articles have postulated that fluoride could be producing alterations in mitochondrial DNA; mitochondrial DNA has many implications in various mental disorders.

    10)  Federal Courts have ruled against the EPA in the forced fluoridation of water.  They have ordered officials to take action over concerns about potential health risks from currently recommended levels of fluoride in the American drinking water supply.

    11)  Trendley Dean claimed that tooth decay was reduced by 60% in his studies on fluoride.  More recent studies claim a more modest 15% to 25% reduction. 

    12)  Around 70% of US communities fluoridate.  Communities that have stopped fluoridation have not experienced a significant increase in dental decay.

    Even if fluoride does have legitimate value as a treatment for tooth decay, this is ultimately irrelevant.  The dangers involved in using the toxic chemical in public water far outweigh the potential benefits.  The suspicious history of the practice also needs to be investigated.  It is better to err on the side of caution and not lace our water supply with an industrial waste product.

    Plenty of alternatives exist in our modern era for healthy teeth.  Beyond that, the government should not be given authority to mass medicate the population.  Politicians are not qualified enough or trustworthy enough to make such decisions.  Ask yourself, is the government really that concerned about your teeth, or is something else going on?

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 18:00

  • Philly Shipyard's Transformation: How Hanwha's Investment Is Driving U.S. Navy Readiness
    Philly Shipyard’s Transformation: How Hanwha’s Investment Is Driving U.S. Navy Readiness

    By Wilson Beaver of Heritage.org

    Earlier this year, Hanwha Ocean Company bought Philly Shipyard for $100 million. Though it was met with little fanfare from the public at the time, the investment was a big deal in the Navy.

    The Independence-class littoral combat ship USS Mobile (LCS 26) comes alongside the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) for a fueling-at-sea, Oct. 1, 2024

    It came after requests from American defense experts and government officials for shipbuilders from allied countries to invest into the worn down, depleted, and inefficient mess that is the US shipbuilding industry. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro even called the deal, “a game-changing milestone” for America’s “Maritime Statecraft.”

    Now, the new partnership is paying dividends, for Hanwha, Philadelphia, and the United States. In late August, Hanwha secured an annual Navy maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) contract. That contract and the new work at Philly Shipyard will go a long ways towards fixing the Navy’s current maintenance backlog, which is currently contributing to both shipbuilding delays and cost overruns.

    According to a 2022 Government Accountability Office report, the Navy’s current maintenance backlog amounted to $1.8 billion. This inefficiency has a major impact on America’s combat readiness has contributed to the Navy’s decision to decommission 9 ships before their expected service life.

    Unfortunately, things have only gotten worse under the Biden-Harris administration. Misguided spending priorities and a lack of urgency have set back America’s ability to keep up with and deter China, which is the world’s largest Navy numerically and whose fleet is still growing fast.

    Hanwha could help turn the tide in that fight, though. With the purchase of the Philly Shipyard, it is now positioned to compete for contracts for building new ships, which could be an enormous windfall not only for Philadelphia workers, but also our naval power.

    Specifically, the Philly Shipyard is well positioned to compete for contracts to construct Constellation-class frigates. Currently, these ships are only being built at Marinette Marine in Wisconsin, with the first ship set to set sail in 2029 following production delay. But Navy leadership has already called for an increase in the construction of new missile-guided frigates, and the Philly Shipyard is now well-positioned to compete for building these additional frigates.

    The new investment in the Philly Shipyard is a refreshing step in the right direction. It is also a reminder that our efforts to reshore industry and rebuild our defense industrial base will benefit American workers first and foremost, like the new workers who will need to be hired as Philly Shipyards expands.

    If we want to win, however, we need to build on this positive momentum. Policymakers should work to create maritime prosperity zones, implement programs to solve labor shortages, and cut down on overregulation in order continue to promote further investments in and expansion of our naval infrastructure, especially at Philly Shipyards.

    As our Navy works to meet the challenges of tomorrow, Hanwha’s new investment means Philadelphia will be playing a leading role in the fight. By fixing the maintenance glut and building new ships, Philly Shipyard will be vital to preserving the security of the American people.

    Why? Because the first battle of the next great power competition will not take place in the far-off seas of the Pacific; it will be fought in places like Philly Shipyard on the Delaware as we set out to defeat our own deficiencies. And this is a battle we can’t afford to lose.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 17:40

  • The Closest Election In History?
    The Closest Election In History?

    According to RealClearPolitics, the current US Presidential polling averages have Trump at 48.5% and Harris at 48.5%, literally a tie.

    On this measure the two candidates have been within two percentage points of each other since mid-August. So in terms of the popular vote, this is officially the closest election on record.

    Today’s Chart of the Day from DB’s Henry Allen (available to pro subscribers in the usual place), looks at the gap between the candidate declared President and the runner up in percentage terms in every election since 1868 after the US Civil War.

    Those in red mark the times where the eventual President didn’t win the popular vote. Allen has also annotated all those with less than a 3 percentage point differential.

    There have been six elections with less than a percentage point between the candidates.

    1. 1880 Garfield beat Hancock by 0.1pp
    2. 1884 Cleveland beat Blaine by 0.5pp
    3. 1888 Harrison was elected although he lost the popular vote to Cleveland by -0.8pp
    4. 1960 Kennedy beat Nixon by 0.2pp
    5. 1968 Nixon beat Humphrey by 0.7pp
    6. 2000 Bush won even though he lost the popular vote to Gore by -0.5pp. See Henry Allen’s piece here this morning that looked at the market reaction after each election since and including this contested one.

    So if current polls are correct then this could be the closest of any US election in popular vote terms. Of course in reality, polls are subject to a margin of error, so you’d expect some variation, but one thing is certain: in just a few days, the avalanche of lawsuits will begin.

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

    Shortly we will publish a comprehensive Election Day guide, providing a comprehensive overview of the “swing states” that will decide the election, a list of bellwether counties to pay attention to within those states, as well as a precise recap of the time line for vote reporting and media projections of the winner in 2020.

    It will also cover the rules for challenging the voting results in the swing states as well as rule changes at the federal level adopted in the wake of the last election.

    Finally, we caution that while a winner is likely to be declared in MI, AZ, WI and NV within the first 24 hours of the polls closing on Tuesday, PA and GA are likely to take longer to assess – potentially 3-4 days or longer if there are recounts.

    So if it is close, stand by for a long few days/weeks/months.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 17:20

  • From 'Clingers' To 'Garbage' – Why The 16 Years Of Vilification?
    From ‘Clingers’ To ‘Garbage’ – Why The 16 Years Of Vilification?

    Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

    Who actually are the “garbage” people?

    Are they one and the same with Joe Biden’s “semi-fascists,” “chumps,” and “dregs of society?”

    Or Barack Obama’s “clingers?”

    Do they include Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables?”

    Are they FBI grandee Peter Strzok’s Walmart shoppers who “smell?”

    Over the last decade-and-a-half, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Harris-Walz, and a host of other self-described elites have variously invented a wide range of smears and slurs—but about whom exactly?

    Who are these people that leftwing politicians have so vehemently derided—and why?

    They include Trump supporters, of course, or what Biden also dubbed “ultra-MAGAs” and Tim Walz called “fascists,” now without the prior qualifying prefix “semi.”

    In general, these adjectives of disdain denote about half the country according to the results of what will soon be the last three presidential elections.

    This half is more rural than urban, characterized by larger than smaller families, more high-schooled diplomaed than college degreed, and more conventional and traditional than vanguard and trend-setting.

    Statisticians tell us that the new non-clinging Democratic Party finds its greatest support from those who earn less than $50,000 and those who make considerably more than $100,000. These are the rich/poor bookends that surround the reformed Republican party in between.

    So, in terms of generalized income and earnings, the left is now the party of the well-to-do professional and credential class and the rich, along with the subsidized poor. The Republicans, by contrast, are increasingly represented by the middle classes.

    The Democratic top dogs are most likely to embrace agendas that never garner 51 percent of public support—vast reductions in gas and oil to lessen “climate change,” open borders to welcome in the world’s needy, the government promotion of a third, transgendered sex, abortion on demand without restrictions, the reifications of various critical (race/legal/penal/modern monetary) “theories,” and radical changes in the current system (ending the Senate filibuster, the Electoral College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, the 50-state union, etc.).

    Two truisms stand out about the elite boutique agenda: one, when these theories are implemented – often by the courts, and the permanent and unelected administrative and bureaucratic state – the architects of such experimentation do not really feel the inevitable deleterious consequences.

    Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the Silicon Valley masters of the universe, the professors of law, the corporate CEOs, and the Bill Gates of the world really don’t care much whether gas is at $3 a gallon or $6, or Romex wire is $39 a spool or $150.

    Illegal aliens do not go to their children’s schools or crowd the offices of their concierge cardiologists and oncologists, much less dump trash on their streets and curbs.

    They are strong supporters of teachers’ unions, despising the very idea of charter schools and homeschooling. And yet they send their children more often to private schools where students are not the lab rats of the public school system.

    Their ideology is the fruit of their privilege and so is often more utopian and abstract. Given that if it results in economic, social, and cultural damage to millions, they will certainly avoid the ensuing flotsam and jetsam.

    The fallout from defunding the police falls upon the inner city, not the privately patrolled Presidio Heights or the secluded sorts in Martha’s Vineyard.

    Given their income and status, the new Democratic credentialed and moneyed classes do not care about the struggle of others to live one more day, clinging to the middle-class vestiges of their parents’ era. Instead, for the anointed who have transcended the fear of not filling up their tank or coming up short on monthly rent and power bills, it is not hard to mandate job-killing EVs or to chuckle over biological boys in girls’ locker rooms and pride flags flying from the abandoned American embassy in Kabul.

    By the same token, the poor count on the left’s largesse to cushion themselves from the damage of their own party’s dreams turned into nightmares. Various food, housing, medical, legal, and educational subsidies to the poor are testaments that the left’s own agendas stagnant upward mobility and confine the poor to permanent poverty.

    In a cynical sense, left-wing elites square the circle of the guilt over their privilege through government subsidies for those whom they’d rather not necessarily live next to or have their children attend school with. In other words, they find them useful rather than empathetic. They welcome in millions of illegal aliens—as long as they don’t camp out at Yale, the Hamptons, or Malibu Beach.

    Not so the struggling middle classes. Modern theories can result in hyperinflation that can ruin them or easily send them into the ranks of the government-subsidized poor. They are conservative in wanting a secure border, legal-only immigration, affordable food and energy, safe streets, and equality of opportunity rather than of result, because they have no margin of error, lacking the wherewithal of secure home zip codes, or the perks of gargantuan grocery bills at Whole Foods, or a new foreign car every two years.

    Such conservatism is reflected in the worldview of the clingers and irredeemables. They accept not cosmopolitism but 2,500 years of nationhood that remind them there can be no nation without borders.

    There can be no modern comforts and security without access to affordable food and energy. There can be no public society without safe streets—and indeed, not even public places without sanitation and common decency.

    So, the great middle class is wary about falling at the hands of others into government dependency and even more fearful of destroying what has worked over the ages. They resist experimenting with the unknown, especially when thought up and designed by those who will easily ride out the ensuing disasters when such harebrained schemes inevitably fail.

    These chumps, fascists, and garbage people know that their advantages in numbers are outweighed by the Eloi’s absorption of institutional and government power. So, in depression, they often shrug and drop out. They assume wisely that the network news, the New York Times and Washington Post, Hollywood, and the corporate boardroom are mere extensions of the utopian and cultural left, who despise them for ignoring their supposed betters.

    They pass on watching the Emmys, Oscars, Tonys, and Grammys. They are deaf to the top-down sermons from an Al Gore, John Kerry, the Clintons, the Obamas, or Joe Biden, which assume the grubby majority is either too ignorant or amoral or both to know what is good for them and so must be shamed, smeared, and slurred rather than won over by argumentations and persuasion. Is not the 2024 election about just that—the haughty who sermonize and those weary of being lectured?

    The dregs could care less who is president of Harvard or how many letters and titles follow a professional’s name—except to confirm to themselves when watching or hearing such people that our elites increasingly have neither common sense nor integrity. A high school history teacher could have answered congressional questioning on race, anti-Semitism, and bias far more effectively and adroitly than a deer-in-the-headlights, clueless Harvard president Claudine Gay.

    Yes, the semi-fascists are lectured that they are racist, sexist, and xenophobic. They are damned by the credentialed as “white privileged” who “rage,” as they dutifully go off to Iraq and Afghanistan to die in combat at double their numbers in our demographics.

    They are advised of their toxic illiberality and bigotry, even as their children lack the race, gender, and ethnicity advantage accorded to the so-called Other and the inside edge that money, influence, and status provide for the elite.

    What has recently brought this great divide to a head and exposed the fury of the elite is resurgent anger at the newfound impudence of the deplorable class, or the notion that they would dare call the dishonest media the “fake news” or suggest that “fit-as-fiddle,” “smart-as-a-tack,” cognitively challenged Joe Biden is the proverbial emperor with no clothes.

    Who are these arrogant who pack the 20,000 seats of Madison Square Garden even after the good people have warned that they were mindlessly reenacting Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will?

    The left believes that either racial victimization or money should guarantee privilege and so despises those qualifying for neither. In the elite’s view, the working class so often lacks the romance of the poor and non-white, but worse still, the culture and pretensions of the progressive Übermenschen.

    Finally, the unspoken irony of this divide is that the self-professed elite know that they are not the elite by any definable standard or meritocracy. Yale gives a higher percentage of A’s on spec to its students than do trade schools and junior colleges.

    Today’s supposedly brilliant Columbia student would likely struggle to earn an objectively graded C on a state college’s standardized, multi-choice history exam.

    Those who run the Washington Post or NPR are less competent, worldly, and knowledgeable than the chumpy and dregsy sexagenarian who publishes a small town’s weekly newspaper.

    The average salesman and electrician can far better spot fraud and deceit than an Anthony Fauci or Peter Daszak. And the tractor driver is more likely not to lie under oath than a John Brennan, James Clapper, or Andrew McCabe. The lineman working with high voltage is far more likely to err on the side of safety with the lives of others than the executives of Pfizer or Moderna.

    In a wider sense, the deplorable class believes it can still build reliable pipelines, frack, truck our nation’s goods, and clean up after a hurricane. But it has utterly lost confidence that the best and the brightest at the Pentagon can win a war, at Boeing can craft a safe jet, or at NASA can send astronauts safely into space and back in the fashion of their grandfathers more than half a century ago.

    This election is about many things—left/right issues, of course, and the peculiar personalities of Trump and Harris perhaps.

    But it will likely be defined by those who are not just tired of being smeared as the underbelly of America but, far more unforgivably, are beginning to enjoy and mock the disparagement from those who have never earned the right to smear anyone but themselves.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 17:00

  • "Coma In A Bottle": Miami Doc Charged With Trafficking Date Rape Drug
    “Coma In A Bottle”: Miami Doc Charged With Trafficking Date Rape Drug

    As if there weren’t enough problems in academia right now, an assistant professor at the University of Miami’s medical school has just been charged with trafficking a date rape drug, according to the NY Post.

    On Friday, Dr. Dairon Garcia was charged with trafficking the drug. Authorities say they connected him to a package intercepted at Miami International Airport containing 15 pounds of gamma-hydroxybutyric acid.

    Miami-Dade Judge Mindy Glazer said at the arraignment: “He should be so embarrassed being here. He’s a medical doctor, going through all those years of education and committing his life to helping people and to get arrested for this.

    She added: “That’s between you, your lawyer and the criminal justice system. Good luck to you, sir.”

    Photo: Miami-Dade Corrections

    The NY Post article says that Garcia, an assistant professor of clinical radiology at the UM Miller School of Medicine, is facing charges linked to a package from Paris addressed to his rental property, intercepted by customs at Miami Airport on Aug. 29.

    Miami police, alerted by Homeland Security, monitored the address as the package was delivered on Sept. 12 and collected by a woman. After a search, her daughter reported Garcia had informed them of the delivery, asking them to accept it.

    Another tenant reported receiving a separate package for Garcia on Sept. 7, and customs intercepted yet another on Sept. 25, addressed to his registered company, DG Diagnostics MD LLC, the report says. 

    He pleaded not guilty at Friday’s arraignment, was held on $15,000 bail, and posted it that evening.

    The DEA says gamma-hydroxybutyric acid (GHB), often called “grievous bodily harm” or “coma in a bottle,” is colorless and can be slipped into drinks, causing sedation without the victim’s knowledge.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 16:40

  • Escape From Psychopathocracy
    Escape From Psychopathocracy

    Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

    “Most people do not get a clear opportunity to vote against Communism and prevent a historical evil from taking hold. We have that opportunity. Vote Trump.”

    – James Lindsay

    You thought Halloween was over, but somehow the horror show won’t stop, and it’s not so much fun anymore.

    Those oversized ghouls, werewolves, and dead souls you erected in the front yard, like shrines to wickedness, represent something truly roiling and moiling around the zeitgeist of this troubled land: the ruling Party of Chaos.

    Look at what they have done to you and what they are still doing. Hoaxing you, sucking the life-blood out of you, and lying about everything. Wrecking the country.

    Why does it seem that the Democratic Party is in it solely to remain in power?

    I will tell you: because it controls the money-flows to the vast cadres of a vicious parasitical bureaucracy and its support system of outside orgs that commit crimes and make war on the rest of us.

    It’s called “the blob” for a reason. It’s exactly like that monster out of the 1950s horror movies, a shape-shifting leviathan that devours everything in its path with only one purpose, to grow ever larger until it consumes. . . everything.

    In my state of New York last week, the DEC authorities sent a swat team to seize a man and woman’s pet squirrel and raccoon and then killed the animals. Why? Because they could. How is that different from the DOJ swatting and seizing a grandmother for walking through the US capitol building and then stuffing her in prison for the rest of her natural life on misdemeanor charges? It’s not different. They are both demonstrations of deliberate cruelty — and that’s why the squirrel story resonated so widely around the country. You know exactly what it says: we can take whatever is dear to you. . . your pets. . . your livelihood. . . your freedom. . . your life.

    Who failed to notice that candidate Kamala Harris was unable to articulate any coherent notion about how her government might manage its business beyond some empty nostrums about “joy,” and “turning the page?” Because the party’s actual purpose, which it hides and lies about, is just to push you around, tell you what to do and what to think, and to punish you if you don’t comply — in other words, to exercise despotic power. It can’t do anything else with that power.

    It lacks the competence to manage an economy from the top down, and it certainly won’t allow the countless volitional transactions of people at liberty to produce and sell things of value on their own. It will go to war against anything to steal more money: some pitiful foreign kleptocracy of country. . . the liberty-minded people of our own country. . . against sound ideas, proven principles, standards of decency, and, not unusually, against reality itself.

    And now you and I face the ordeal of an election that, by design, will be nearly impossible to audit, will remain inconclusive for weeks, and subject to endless dispute. Why, because it serves the purpose of the Party of Chaos, which is. . . chaos! The scheme was to introduce so many devices of uncertainty as to guarantee political paralysis. Why else would you use batteries of hugely expensive computerized vote-counting machines that can be easily hacked, untraceable mail-in ballots with no chains of custody, the automatic registration of non-citizens, and laws (as in California) to literally forbid the requirement of voter-ID?

    This was the work of lawfare terrorist Marc Elias — with hundreds of millions of dollars at his disposal, some from the government itself, a bunch from the party, and some from rogue billionaires such as George Soros, Bill Gates, and Reid Hoffman, and then disbursed surreptitiously through hundreds of NGOs — to elect officials such as Secretaries of State and district attorneys who will ignore or bend the law, to pay off state legislators around the country to change voting rules, to hire brigades of ballot “harvesters,” and to file ruinous lawsuits against anyone who objects to these pranks. It is an enormous, dastardly machine designed to deprive you of your consent to be governed. It is the work of political psychopaths.

    You’ve no doubt heard about one of the blob’s instrumental players, Rep. Jamie Raskin’s audacious plan to un-do the election, should Donald Trump happen to generate a landslide vote that overwhelms Marc Elias’s ballot-box-stuffing operation. The Raskin scheme is to disqualify Mr. Trump as an “insurrectionist” by an act of Congress before the January 6 certification ceremony. Of course, that would suppose a Democratic majority in Congress, which is unlikely to be the case.

    But Mr. Raskin put his foot in his mouth so deeply that he nearly choked to death last week when, discussing election matters with entertainer Bill Maher on TV, Mr. Raskin stated that he would accept the results only of a free and fair election – with himself left to determine whether it was free and fair.

    This, you understand, is exactly what he accuses Donald Trump of doing in 2020: thinking-and-saying that the election might not have been free and fair.

    The problem for Mr. Raskin is that this sort of “election denial” he exhibits is exactly the basis for accusing Mr. Trump of “insurrection” in the first place.

    Thus: Mr. Raskin has just made a potential “insurrectionist” of himself. What’s more, as if the Jack Smith Case in Judge Chutkan’s DC court was not already compromised enough by the SCOTUS decision on presidential immunity, Mr. Trump’s lawyers can now call Jamie Raskin as a witness in the case, play the video of his remarks to Bill Maher, and ask him how expressing doubt about the freeness or fairness of an election amounts to “insurrection.”

    One way or another, looks like we’re in for a hard, anxious winter.

    Threats galore loom concerning possible blob / Party of Chaos mischief ahead, designed to disorder our national life: false flags prompting the imposition of martial law. . . aggressive censorship and cancellation of free-speaking regime opponents. . . deployment of Antifa mobs against civil order, with violence, looting, arson.

    This symbiotic enemy of the people is desperate to evade accountability for the crimes they’ve already committed as officials running institutions: abuse of power, conspiracy to deprive many citizens of their civil rights, perhaps even treason. They’re capable of anything. They must be defeated.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 16:20

  • Bonds Bid, Bitcoin Skids As Traders Take Profits On 'Trump' Bets
    Bonds Bid, Bitcoin Skids As Traders Take Profits On ‘Trump’ Bets

    The equity market was mixed today with The Dow lagging and Small Caps leading (S&P/Nasdaq modestly lower) ahead of tomorrow’s big day. NOTE the drop in the morning was reportedly triggered by WSJ HLs that Russia is suspected of a plot to send incendiary devices on US-bound planes, citing Western security officials, but that was quickly BTFD back…

    The bigger theme of the day was profit-taking on the so-called “Trump Trade” after extreme outpereformance of the Kamala basket in recent weeks…

    Source: Bloomberg

    VIX ended the day notably elevated with the vol term structure extremely inverted ahead of this week’s extreme event risks…

    Source: Bloomberg

    …in fact this is the VIX’s longest stretch above its 200dma since 2019…

    Source: Bloomberg

    For the first time since early 2019, VIX Specs are net long futures…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Maybe this is more than an election-uncertainty trade… maybe it’s structural…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Mega-Cap Tech fell once again today but has found support for now…

    Source: Bloomberg

    After Friday’s utter chaos in bond land, reality set in that piss poor payrolls means lower yields and Treasury yields tumbled across the board with the long-end outperforming (2Y -3bps, 30Y -8bps). Yields are still marginally higher from Thursday’s close…

    Source: Bloomberg

    The 10Y yield ended back at pre-payrolls levels…

    Source: Bloomberg

    The dollar continued to drift lower (ignoring the manic buying after payrolls)…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Arguably another “Trump Trade” continues to build as the Mexican Peso plunges to its weakest since Sept 2022

    Source: Bloomberg

    Despite the dollar weakness, gold trod water today, holding just above support around $2730…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Bitcoin fell again after tagging record highs last week. BTC is finding support in the $67-68k region for now

    Source: Bloomberg

    Oil prices rallied (with WTI back up near $72), erasing last week’s plunge on Israel-Iran optics…

    Source: Bloomberg

    With oil prices rising again, we wouldn’t question you for being surprised that pump-prices are testing multi-year lows (right ahead of the election)… probably nothing, right?

    Source: Bloomberg

    Finally, what happens to USA Sovereign Risk tomorrow?

    Source: Bloomberg

    From 12-month highs – will a divided govt soothe the pain?

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 16:00

  • Leaked NBC Election Night Rehearsal Shows Trump Winning Swing States
    Leaked NBC Election Night Rehearsal Shows Trump Winning Swing States

    Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

    Footage has leaked online of an NBC News dry run of election night, and interestingly it shows president Trump winning the swing states.

    The mock election night scenario is accompanied by a chyron stating “THIS IS A TEST,” and has NBC anchors covering wins for Trump in key states like Michigan and Wisconsin.

    “Right now, it looks like there’s a big crack in Michigan,” one of the anchors is heard saying.

    “Saginaw, Michigan, this is really big for Donald Trump. Joe Biden won it in 2020, but this time it’s going to Trump. If he does that in Michigan, it’s a good sign for him,” one of them says in the clip.

    Pointing to a map showing Trump heading to victory, an anchor comments, “Kamala Harris only has a couple of ways to get there,” pointing particularly to Pennsylvania.

    The footage shows that even with Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Minnesota and Virginia voting blue, Kamala falls short with 247 electoral votes.

    The leaked footage also suggests Republican gains in both the Senate and House.

    Watch:

    As we highlighted last week, a news station in Pennsylvania was forced to apologize for flashing up the US presidential election results in the state as part of a “test” that wasn’t supposed to be seen by viewers.

    The ‘results’ showed Kamala beating Trump by 52 per cent to 47 per cent of the vote.

    Most final polls are calling it for Trump. A fresh AtlasIntel swing state poll shows Trump leading in all seven states.

    In 2020 they were the most accurate pollster, and now they also have Trump leading nationally by 2 points.

    *  *  *

    Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 15:45

  • The Biden-Harris' Economic Time-Bomb: A Warning To Trump & Musk
    The Biden-Harris’ Economic Time-Bomb: A Warning To Trump & Musk

    Authored by Daniel Lacalle,

    The insane neo-Keynesian policies implemented by the Biden-Harris administration have created persistent inflation and record levels of debt with two objectives: to bloat Gross Domestic Product and jobs with public spending and government jobs.

    The United States’ insane inflation is solely due to out-of-control spending and currency printing. Corporations, wars, or supply chains cannot cause aggregate prices to rise, nor can they consolidate the increase even at a slower pace. Although this can have an impact on individual prices, the only factor that causes aggregate prices to rise year after year is the decline in the value of the US dollar that the government issues.

    Over 20.5% accumulated inflation over the past four years, government deficit spending has reached nearly $2 trillion annually despite record tax receipts and a growing economy, public debt has reached almost $36 trillion, and the monthly job figure includes an astonishing 43,000 new government jobs each month. In 2023, nearly 25% of all job gains were government ones, and the entirety of the growth of the labor force in the past four years came from foreign workers. The latest jobs figure is so poor it seems disingenuous to blame it on hurricanes and strikes, as if economists and forecasters had not considered those two factors in their estimates. Furthermore, the only factor that continued to increase uncontrollably was the number of government jobs, adding 40,000 new positions to an overall total of just 12,000 jobs. No wonder the labor participation rate and employment-to-population ratios remain below 2019 levels. Furthermore, in the latest GDP figure, government spending accounted for 30% of the annualized growth, while investment was basically stagnant. In the past nine quarters, government spending has been one of the top drivers of GDP growth, and its contribution to GDP in the third quarter of 2024 was the largest in a year.

    This is upside-down economics in full swing. Private sector investment weakness, higher taxes for the productive economy and government spending and debt driving the economy. Of course, this never ends well.

    The Harris-Biden administration arrived in January 2021, when the economy was bouncing back strongly. Instead of allowing the private sector to thrive, it embarked on a strategy of out-of-control spending and tax increases with two objectives: increase the size of government in the economy so much that the next administration would be unable to reduce it enough in four years. The second objective was to bloat growth and job figures so aggressively that the next administration will see a recession if it reduces public sector growth. You may ask yourself why they would do it if Harris intended to win the elections. If Kamala Harris wins, she will continue to expand the size of government, inflate prices through spending and printing, and blame companies and stores for these actions.

    The Biden-Harris administration has left a massive time bomb for Trump and Elon Musk’s government efficiency office if they win. It will be almost impossible to avoid a recession if they cut discretionary spending and eliminate duplicate jobs. It is the same strategy that the socialists followed in Greece, Spain, and France, by the way.

    However, the socialist strategy may backfire. The evidence is that citizens do not value Biden’s policies and the state of the economy. The approval rate regarding the economy is atrociously low, 39.8%, according to RCP. United States citizens do not believe that they are better off than in January 2021. Inflation, immigration, and rising taxes have crippled small businesses and families. Furthermore, a strong pro-growth strategy and lower taxes will likely boost the dormant investment figure, create jobs in the private sector, and help small businesses achieve critical mass and grow. In Argentina, Milei recognized the necessary actions and cautioned the citizens about the inevitable reduction of the bloated state. The Kirchner socialists left a more significant time bomb legacy than what Trump might inherit. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. Lower inflation led to lower taxation, an eight-month budget surplus, and rapidly improving public finances.

    The biggest risk for the United States economy and the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency is out-of-control public spending and constant currency printing added to tax hikes. Healing public finances and reducing government jobs may have a temporary negative impact on GDP, but higher exports, investment, and private sector jobs will likely compensate for it, and the result will be better for the US dollar and American citizens.

    More government is always poorer citizens. The potential of the United States economy’s private sector is much greater than the short-term negative impact of efficiency and budget control on headline GDP.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 15:05

  • Gold – Best Asset In 2000s, But You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet!
    Gold – Best Asset In 2000s, But You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet!

    Authored by Egon von Greyerz via VonGreyerz.gold,

    There is a fine line between happiness and misery, as Dickens describes in David Copperfield. Copperfield’s landlord, Mr Micawber, was just on the wrong side of happiness by six pence. 

    In a recent article called THE END OF THE US ECONOMIC AND MILITARY EMPIRE AND THE RISE OF GOLD, I stated: “Unsustainable deficits and galloping debt levels, combined with a crumbling military, are the perfect recipe for the end of an Empire.”

    So, we are obviously not talking about a six-pence deficit in the case of the virtually bankrupt US empire but instead about a debt that is growing exponentially, now by several trillions of dollars annually.

    History doesn’t just rhyme, but it repeats itself over and over and over again. 

    Let’s just look at the final stages of a debt crisis. 

    The table below shows the disastrous result of irresponsible governments during the last 54 years.

    Governments never tell their people that they consistently destroy the value of the people’s money. 

    In 1971, when Nixon took away the dollar’s gold backing, he said: “YOUR DOLLAR WILL BE WORTH AS MUCH TOMORROW”.

    If Tricky Dick was still alive today, he can, of course, argue that he didn’t lie.

    Because a dollar today is still worth a dollar, he would argue. But he wouldn’t tell anyone that the dollar 53 years later has lost 99% of its purchasing power.

    Gold is up 78X since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971. The next phase will be acceleration.

    As I explain in this article, gold will rise by multiples in the coming years (obviously with corrections).

    The Roman emperors who ruled the Roman Empire from 190 to 290 AD could argue the same, although the Denarius silver coin went from almost 100% silver content to zero. 

    The same was true for Friedrich Ebert, the president of the Weimar Republic in the early 1920s. He would have argued that a Mark is always a Mark, even when it has lost 100% of its purchasing power. 

    But gold doesn’t lie. Measured in real money, an ounce of gold in 1923, was worth 87 trillion Marks.

    Until a currency totally dies in a hyperinflationary collapse, the deceit of the leaders is never revealed to public.

    But we must never forget what Voltaire said in 1729 – “Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value – ZERO.”

    When have we ever heard of a leader telling us that we must protect ourselves against the fraudulent destruction of our wealth by constantly debasing the value of money?

    As Alan Greenspan said in 1967:

    “In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value…The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.”

    Have a look at the tables above again.

    These are but a few examples of thousands of currencies having been destroyed throughout history.

    Governments create inflation by printing money and by allowing the financial system to create unlimited amounts of credit in the fractional reserve banking system. 

    In short, it means that banks and other financial institutions receive a deposit of, say, $100 and can lend 10 to 50X or $1,000 to $5,000 against that. Add derivatives, which allows the system to create trillions of dollars out of thin air. 

    This immoral and totally undisciplined financial model doesn’t just create unlimited leverage for financial players, whether they do it in banks, hedge funds, private equity, or any part of the shadow banking system. 

    This is how the total global debt of $350 trillion probably is in the quadrillions of dollars if we include all these creative “financial weapons of mass destruction”, as Warren Buffett called them. See the debt pyramid below.

    Until now, conventional investment assets like stocks and property have been excellent \protection as they have gone up substantially as a result of the constant growth of credit and money supply.

    So, this massive liquidity injection has created colossal paper fortunes for most investors.

    WHEN WILL IT END

    That party is now coming to an end. Valuations of these bubble assets are now at perilous levels. History tells us that manias always end badly. 

    But history doesn’t tell us when they will end. Will it be tomorrow, in six months or several years? 

    So, can we forecast the end?

    Well, the most exact of all sciences is hindsight. With the benefit of this very accurate method, many people will tell us afterwards that the crash was bound to happen. 

    Sadly, no one realises that this time, dip buying will fail. Still, investors will buy dip after dip until they are exhausted. So when the market has fallen further than anyone expects most investors will sit tight based on greed and FOMO (fear of missing out). And just at that point, the biggest wealth destruction in history will take place. 

    Very few will think of alternative investments like gold to preserve wealth until it is too late.

    And at that point, gold will have gone up so much in value with very few participating. Everyone will find gold too expensive. Very few will realise that gold isn’t going up, but paper money is down.

    A FASCINATING JOURNEY LEADING TO A POT OF GOLD

    I was born in Sweden and have dual Swedish / Swiss citizenship. I started my career in banking in Switzerland and then in corporate life in the UK. 

    In 1972, I was offered a job by a bank client, a small listed retail company called Dixons. I became Finance Director in 1974 at the age of 29. I was thereafter appointed Vice-Chairman. 

    We made the company to be the biggest electric and consumer electronic retailer in the UK and a FTSE 100 company. 

    It was an incredibly stimulating time building a dynamic business both organically and by acquisition. As business leaders we experienced adversity as a positive challenge. We sold electrical goods including televisions by candle light in 1974 when there was only electricity for 3 days per week due to a major coal miners’ strike. And we grew by contested takeovers of companies much bigger than ourselves.

    Corporate life in a dynamic business is extremely exciting. But since I started that career in my late 20s, I felt it was time to do my own thing in my early 40s. 

    So, in the 1990s, I started investing my own funds as well as the capital of some wealthy friends. 

    I have always been interested in understanding risk and protecting the downside, both in banking and in corporate life. 

    In the 90s I started to be concerned about the growth of debt and derivatives. So I was looking at the best ways of preserving wealth. 

    Having experienced Nixon closing the gold window and the subsequent 24X growth of the gold price from $35 in 1971 to $850 in 1980, I had always been fascinated by gold. 

    Seeing debt and especially derivatives growing with no shackles and especially tech stocks becoming a massive bubble in the late 1990s, I was convinced that gold par excellence was the best asset to preserve wealth.

    Having experienced gold go from $35 in 1971 and then correct from $850 in 1980 to $250 in 1999, I was closely watching the gold price for confirmation of a bottom. So in early 2002 we invested heavily into physical gold at $300 for ourselves and a group of co-investors that we were advising. 

    We haven’t looked back since and only increased our investment in gold over the years. Since we had created a superb system for buying and storing physical gold based on our stringent wealth preservation principles, people around the world started to ask for help.  That led to the creation of Matterhorn Asset Management / GoldSwitzerland. The name was changed at the beginning of this year to VON GREYERZ AG. 

    Today we have clients in over 90 countries and are probably the biggest company in the world outside the banking system for HNWIs acquiring and storing gold. 

    We have been actively involved in gold for soon a quarter of a century and experienced almost 10X growth in the gold price since we started the business. 

    Still, we believe that the gold journey is only starting now.

    Why, you may ask. 

    Well, gold is the best-performing asset class in this century, better than the S&P including reinvested dividends and still NOBODY OWNS GOLD.

    Only 0.5% of global financial assets are invested in gold. 

    It is totally incomprehensible that gold has gone up 9.5X. This century, investors are not even looking at it. 

    So why is gold still so unloved?

    Gold held in the investor’s name in safe vaults and jurisdictions outside the financial system is the ultimate form of wealth preservation.

    But asset managers and banks dislike gold since they can’t churn commission with an asset that can’t be turned over at regular intervals. So no commission and no performance fees. Also, very few people understand gold. 

    In my view, gold is now ready to explode, measured in paper money. 

    I have explained the reason for gold’s coming explosion in many articles, including this recent one.

    But remember that gold never goes up. All it does is to reflect governments’ and central banks’ destruction of fiat money.

    Gold is just stable purchasing power in a world where goods and services go up exponentially in price because the money you buy it with always goes to ZERO. 

    Having said that, I do expect gold to do better than just keeping pace with purchasing power in the next few years.

    Again let me make it clear – no paper money has ever, ever, ever survived in history (in its original form). 

    With such a perfect record of destroying money, why should we believe that the FED, ECB, BoE (Bank of England) or BoJ (Bank of Japan) or any other central bank will stand a chance to save the global financial system with $2-3 quadrillion of toxic exposure?

    Well, I can personally guarantee that they won’t. 

    Remember that destroying the value of money by printing quadrillions is a technical default, although no central bank will call it that. 

    And creating digital money for the central bank is just a technical diversion. 

    Debt can never be written off without totally destroying the value of the assets it supports. That is how a balance sheet or double-entry accounting works. 

    So, this global financial system will collapse, as they all have. But this is the first time it has been global. 

    BRICS countries will also suffer, but not as much as the West. 

    The coming era will be commodity-based. Take Russia, for example, with $85 trillion of natural reserves. They will be one of the major winners in the coming commodity era. They also have low debts. 

    So, let’s look at the risks.

    WAR RISK 

    There are today two major wars that could lead to global conflicts and potentially nuclear war. 

    The US is directly involved in both conflicts with weapons and money, although US territory is not threatened. The best chance for the world to avoid a global conflict is for Trump to be elected. He has both proven and stated that he will stop the war, especially in Ukraine. Harris will not change the direction of Biden and the neocons, which means a much higher risk of global conflict.

    COLLAPSE OF GLOBAL FINANCIAL SYSTEM

    As outlined above, this collapse is inevitable. The only question is when and to what extent. I strongly believe that most of the BRICS countries will suffer less from the collapse and emerge from it much faster. 

    The West, with its massive debt bubble and moral decadence, has already started a major secular decline that could last for centuries.

    WEALTH PRESERVATION 

    Gold is not the panacea for the problems outlined above. However, history proves that in any period of crisis, gold has always stood as a protector, both financially and for personal safety.

    But what is more important than anything else is protecting and helping family and friends. 

    Strong family ties and a group of close friends are more important than all gold in the world. 

    As Dickens said:

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 11/04/2024 – 14:25

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Nov 04

Today’s News 4th November 2024

  • "An Existential Race Amongst The Great Powers Accelerates, At The Dawn Of The AI Age"
    “An Existential Race Amongst The Great Powers Accelerates, At The Dawn Of The AI Age”

    By Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management

    “In the global competition on AI, the alleged role of a single, and outdated, version of an American open-source model is irrelevant when we know China is already investing more than one-trillion dollars to surpass the US on AI,” said a Meta spokesperson, defending itself against an allegation.

    The Jamestown Foundation had released an academic paper [here] with the following claim: “The military and security sectors within the People’s Republic of China are increasingly focused on integrating advanced AI technologies into operational capabilities. Meta’s open-source model Llama (Large Language Model Meta AI) has emerged as a preferred model on which to build out features tailored for military and security applications. In this way, US and US-derived technology is being deployed as a tool to enhance the PRC’s military modernization and domestic innovation efforts, with direct consequences for the United States and its allies and partners.”

    The report also stated: “In September, the former deputy director of the Academy of Military Sciences (AMS), Lieutenant General He Lei, called for the United Nations to establish restrictions on the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in warfare. This would suggest that Beijing has an interest in mitigating the risks associated with military AI. Instead, the opposite is true. The People’s Republic of China is currently leveraging AI to enhance its own military capabilities and strategic advantages and is using Western technology to do so.”

    As the world waited for America to choose its next commander-in-chief, I spent the week thinking about security matters.

    “The number of different categories of space weapons that China has created and the speed with which they’re doing it is very threatening,” warned General Chance Saltzman, head of space operations for the US Space Force, as an existential race amongst the great powers accelerates, at the dawn of the AI Age. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 11/03/2024 – 23:20

  • The Future Of Debanking
    The Future Of Debanking

    Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

    Among many worrying trends is the problem of debanking. It is underreported. The victims do not like to talk about it, even among family and friends.

    It is rarely discussed at all in public forums. Only specialists write about it. But it is a threat to everyone in the most intensely effective way. The practice denies people access to the basics of life and yet there is no appeal, no process, no methods of challenge, and no remediation.

    We did not know until Melania Trump’s latest biography that she and her son Barron were victims of debanking, the practice of shutting down a person’s bank account based on an unsigned and unexplained decision in which the account holder is merely notified that all services are hereby denied.

    Good on her for admitting this. People rarely do.

    This apparently happened in 2021, after her husband had left the office of the presidency. There were concerted efforts at the time to wipe out the memory of his time in office.

    Back in those days, I used the home assistant app called Google Home. I asked who the 45th president was and the product responded that it had no information on that. Indeed, it was like a scene from Orwell.

    Apparently Melania and Barron were also being deleted by their own bank.

    “I was shocked and dismayed to learn that my long-time bank decided to terminate my account and deny my son the opportunity to open a new one,” she wrote.

    She did not say the name of the bank. Nor do most victims of this practice. The bank simply sends a letter and encloses the balance. The victim then has to hunt around for an alternative, now with the black mark of having been canceled by another bank, which raises real questions. The problem is compounded by the absence of any real reason for the actions.

    We do not know how widespread this practice is but, anecdotally, it has clearly escalated in recent years. The same has happened to the former president, and many of his supporters.

    The Free Press comments: “Also debanked have been a number of Christian charities, including Indigenous Advance Ministries, a Memphis-based charity that does philanthropic work for orphans in Uganda, and Family Council, a pro-life charity based in Arkansas. According to Democratic lawmakers, many Arab and South-Asian Americans—who are considered ‘high risk’ because of being Muslim—have been debanked, too.”

    There is no human right to have a bank account, and banks have every legal right to decide with whom they would like to do business. They can end client services for anyone at any time and have no legal obligation to explain or allow appeal.

    Confusing matters is that banks may not necessarily want to kick out account holders but are pressured to do so by their own compliance standards. If they see a business account engaged in activity that seems even slightly sketchy—dealing with crypto or moving cash around in strange ways or taking too many deposits from a strange source—the system itself could flag the account and the process is then set in motion with no human decision-maker.

    Indeed, the letter could be sent and the account removed without any knowledge of someone at the bank. The algorithms are ruling the people in this case, a problem that has become extremely serious in a range of areas.

    At the same time, there is real danger presented when the practice is deployed for purely political reasons. It is a digital application of the principle of Sun Tzu: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” Debanking allows exactly this.

    Banking services exert an incredible power over our lives. Our automatic payments keep the lights on, the mortgage paid up, and the cellphone going. The debit cards and credit cards hooked into them are the lifeblood of our living standards. Try to function even a day or two without them and you’d see what I mean.

    Having them suddenly cut off is like falling into the abyss. You can march down to bank headquarters and demand answers, but this much I promise you: You will get none. Probably no one there, not even the branch manager, has any answer. For whatever reason, the powers that be have decided that your account is not one they want and that is the end of it. There is no one to sue because no one did anything wrong. Granting banking services is at the discretion of the bank, period.

    The problem is that the banking system is integral to power itself, regulated by agencies and holding vast amounts of government debt in a system that is ultimately overseen by the legislative and executive branches. That makes banking political, not just in the United States but all over the world. The discovery by political elites that they can weaponize the banking system should alarm anyone and everyone simply because it allows the punishment of political enemies through surreptitious means.

    The Free Press points to “an emerging, bipartisan, anti-debanking bloc on Capitol Hill.” They quote Ro Khanna, a Democratic representative from California. “Every American should have the ability to take out a loan or save for their future without fear of discrimination or having their accounts closed without explanation,” Khanna said, according to the publication.

    Indeed, that seems entirely reasonable. There needs to be some action taken before this gets out of hand, which it will very quickly in today’s contentious political environment.

    Experts on this topic all agree: The debanked need to speak out about this now, posting letters and recording communications. It’s the only way we draw public attention to this.

    There is a broader problem relating to the creation of social-credit systems around the world, most especially in China. Political compliance becomes a standard of inclusion in financial and social life generally. It’s a highly effective way that regimes can carefully and quietly control their citizens. It has no place in a free society, and it seems like our laws ought to be clear about that.

    Even if the technology allows it, even if the algorithms dictate it, we need systems in which banks and other financial institutions cannot end services for people without some explicitly cited reason and an opportunity for appeal, in addition to some legal recourse in the case of arbitrary action. Taking those steps would help underscore the point that this society aspires to be free and grants its citizens dignity and rights.

    Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 11/03/2024 – 22:10

  • Medvedev: US Election Doesn't Matter, Ukraine War Won't Stop, And Trump May Get JFK'd If He Intervenes
    Medvedev: US Election Doesn’t Matter, Ukraine War Won’t Stop, And Trump May Get JFK’d If He Intervenes

    Days after Russia launched a massive readyness drill of their nuclear forces, former Russian President and current deputy chairman of the country’s Security Counsel Dmitry Medvedev says that the outcome of the US election doesn’t matter, as both candidates believe “Russia must be defeated,” and that if Donald Trump is elected and tries to intervene, he may be assassinated.

    Dmitry Medvedev, 2016.

    Medvedev made the comments to his nearly 1.4 million followers on Telegram.

    The entire post, translated (emphasis ours);

    The whole world stands frozen in uneasy anticipation, waiting for the results of the presidential election in the distant land of ‘Us.

    There is no reason why we should have high expectations about it.

    1. The outcome of the election will not change anything for Russia, as both candidates share the same bipartisan consensus that ‘Russia must be defeated’.

    2. Kamala is dumb, inexperienced, and easy to control, as she will be terrified of everyone around her. All the real decision-making will be done by a coterie of top ministers and advisors plus (indirectly) the Obamas.

    3. A low-energy Trump, spewing clichés like “I’ll offer them a deal” and “I have a very good relationship with…”, will be forced to comply with the system and its rules. He won’t stop the war. Not in one day, not in three days, not in three months. And if he actually attempts to do it, he could end up becoming the new JFK.

    4. The only thing that matters is how much cash the new POTUS can squeeze out of Congress to finance someone else’s war, fought in a far-off land. Cash to feed the American military-industrial complex and to line the pockets of the Banderite scum in Ukraine.

    5. That is why, if we want to please both candidates for the highest American office, the best thing to do on November 5 is keep pummeling the Nazi regime in Kiev!

    Meanwhile, Medvedev reiterated to Russian state-controlled news agency RT that adding Ukraine to NATO could lead to World War III.

    “Shortly before his death, already at a very mature age, he (Kissinger) as if with some regret suggested that now we have no choice but to accept Ukraine into NATO,” he told the outlet. “I think that he was still mistaken in this. There is no such predetermination. Because, choosing between some promises and the possibility of starting a third world war—the choice is still quite obvious.”

    Ukraine’s long-held goal of NATO membership was among the objectives in the Victory Plan that Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky unveiled during a visit to the U.S. in September.

    Kyiv’s ambassador to the alliance Nataliia Galibarenko said in October that the Ukrainian government would like a formal invitation to join the alliance before President Joe Biden leaves office in January.

    Along with claims of alliance encroachment on Russia, Moscow often refers to the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO to justify its actions. Kyiv says it needs to join NATO to resist any future Russian aggression. -Newsweek

    He also told RT that Moscow believes the current US and European political establishments lack the “foresight and subtlety of mind” of Kissinger, and should take the Kremlin’s nuclear warnings seriously.

    “If we are talking about the existence of our state, as the president of our country has repeatedly said, your humble servant has said, others have said, of course, we simply will not have any choice,” he said, per Sky News and The Sun, adding that the US and the West are “wrong” if they think Putin won’t turn to nuclear weapons if NATO sought to inflict a defeat on Russia in the Ukraine war.

    “If the new [US] leader is going to be fiercely dedicated to adding fuel to the fire of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, it will be a very bad choice,” adding “Because this is the road to hell.”

    “It’s really a road to World War Three,” he continued. “Whoever decides to continue the war will be making a very dangerous mistake.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 11/03/2024 – 21:35

  • What's Wrong In Our Nation?
    What’s Wrong In Our Nation?

    Authored by Star Parker via The Epoch Times,

    As we move to the conclusion of this election cycle, there seems to be only one thing about which all Americans agree.

    That is, that something is very wrong in our nation.

    In the latest Gallup polling, only 22 percent say they are satisfied with the direction of the country. The highest this has been over the last 16 years was 45 percent back in February of 2020.

    So, despite change in party control over these years, the sense that something is wrong in the country has persisted.

    More in the framework of this election, only 39 percent say they are better off than they were four years ago, and 52 percent say they are not better off.

    Most Americans do not even have confidence in the sources where they get their news. Only 31 percent say they have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in mass media. The first time Gallup asked this question, back in 1972, 68 percent expressed confidence in mass media.

    A record high percent of Americans, 80 percent, say the country is “greatly divided” on the most important values.

    In a New York Times/Siena College poll, only 49 percent say “American democracy does a good job representing the people.” And 76 percent say “American democracy is currently under threat.”

    All agree that something is wrong, but no consensus emerges about what exactly is the problem.

    Is it possible to put a finger on what is causing the cynicism and disillusionment that grips the psyche of our nation?

    My view is the problem is the drift of the nation from its founding principles.

    To put it another way, we have no choice about whether we have faith or belief. But we do have choice about what it is we believe.

    The dramatic change that has taken place in America is the uprooting of the Bible as our starting point for right and wrong.

    We have exchanged our faith in God for a faith in government.

    In 1950, Gallup reports 0 percent of Americans said they have no religion. By 1970, this was up to 3 percent. And by 2023, this was up to 22 percent.

    Over this same time, in 1950, the federal government consumed 14.2 percent of our GDP. The estimate from the Congressional Budget Office is that in 2024, that percent will be 23.9 percent.

    The preamble to our Constitution explains its purpose is “to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and posterity.”

    Our Constitution was not presumed to be the source of our freedom. We are already free by virtue, as noted in the Declaration of Independence, of being created thus by our God.

    Our Constitution was designed to limit interference by government in the ability of free, God-fearing men and women to live their lives as they see fit.

    The guideline for behavior, for right and wrong, is that which is transmitted to us from our Creator through the Bible.

    Under this reality, America grew and became great.

    However, success brings the sin of pride, and we begin to attribute our success to our cleverness rather than our faith and personal responsibility. As increasing numbers of Americans have turned away from God, they have turned more to government.

    The sad paradox is that as Americans turn to government, they abrogate the very freedom that the founders envisioned government’s role to secure.

    The result is less economic growth, breakdown of the American family and disappearance of children.

    Growth of government, growth of federal debt, and no children is no formula for a country with a future.

    I believe this is what Americans are sensing and what is producing all the negative feelings and pessimism.

    We must return to the vision of our founders.

    A free nation, under God. And a Constitution that secures “the blessings of liberty.”

    Short of this, although we may experience ups and downs, the nation will not realize its great potential.

    *  *  *

    Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 11/03/2024 – 21:00

  • America's Out Of Control Debt "Is A National Security Threat" – Judy Shelton On Gold & Global Peace
    America’s Out Of Control Debt “Is A National Security Threat” – Judy Shelton On Gold & Global Peace

    “I want the United States to be the leader if there’s any kind of gold backing to a currency.”

    – Judy Shelton

    Economic advisor to former President Donald Trump, Judy Shelton, joins GoldTelegraph’s Alex Deluce for a captivating conversation spanning a wide range of subjects.

    Judy Shelton is a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute and author of the book Good as Gold: How to Unleash the Power of Sound Money.

    She is the former Chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy and former U.S. Director of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. She has testified before the U.S. Senate Banking, Senate Foreign Relations, House Banking, House Foreign Affairs, and Joint Economic Committee.

    In their conversation, Deluce and Shelton explore a series of compelling topics, highlighted by Judy’s riveting career stories, including her interactions with figures like Alan Greenspan, Paul Volcker, and other influential central bankers.

    One of the most powerful revelations she shared was Paul Volcker’s frank admission: he had always believed the United States would eventually return to the Bretton Woods system.

    For those unfamiliar, Volcker was referencing the pivotal moment known as the Nixon Shock in 1971, when President Nixon abruptly suspended the U.S. dollar’s convertibility into gold, shattering the foundation of the Bretton Woods system.

    At that historic moment in history, Volcker served as the Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Monetary Affairs.

    This marked the transition to a pure fiat monetary system.

    Deluce and Shelton get into a wide-ranging conversation that covers many topics, which include:

    • The US Dollar

    • The U.S. National Debt as a Security Threat

    • Federal Reserve’s Role in America’s debt and Financial Instability

    • Historical Perspectives on Monetary Policy

    • Potential Return to a Gold-Backed System

    • Comparisons Between Soviet Central Planning and Current Economic Policies

    • BRICS Countries and Global Financial Shifts

    • Treasury Bond Backed by Gold and the Potential for Gold Backed Stablecoins

    TIMESTAMPS:

    0:49 – How much does the US dollar’s global dominance depend on the upcoming election?

    2:08 – Is debt a threat to U.S. national security?

    3:20 – How responsible is the Federal Reserve for America’s current debt level?

    7:54 – How has the Federal Reserve contributed to the financial instability we face today?

    13:22 – How do you see today’s shifting global landscape, given your deep background in historical analysis?

    19:46 – Are we on the verge of another major global monetary shift, and what might it look like?

    29:13 – Was there a specific moment or event early in your career that sparked your interest in the study of gold?

    34:09 – Memorable stories from your conversations with Alan Greenspan, Paul Volcker and Robert Mandel

    39:22 – How do you define sound money?

    46: 14 – How interconnected are sound money, economic opportunity, stability, and global peace, especially in today’s polarized world?

    49:51 – Why do you think so many policymakers dismiss and mock gold, even as global demand is at records and central banks are stockpiling?

    54:13 – How does the Fed’s dual mandate open it to political vulnerabilities, and could a rules-based system address these issues?

    59:37 – How does the Fed’s centralized control over interest rates affect what is supposed to be a market-based economy?

    1:02:48 – Are central banks aggressive policies eroding or undermining capitalism and the concept of free markets?

    1:06:23 – Are BRICS nations positioning gold to become a unit of account and medium of exchange, potentially bypassing the traditional financial system?

    1:09:38 – Could imposing tariffs on countries that move away from the dollar actually help America maintain its financial muscle?

    1:14:47 – What gives you hope for potential reforms that could create a monetary system supporting economic freedom and stability for everyone?

    1:16:58 – Could we potentially see you in the next administration advocating for these policies?

    Watch the full interview below:

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    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 11/03/2024 – 20:25

  • What Drives US Voters
    What Drives US Voters

    By Philip Marey, Senior US Strategist at Rabobank (also available in pdf format)

    Summary

    • We analyze a 2022 survey from AP VoteCast to understand what drives US voters. We find that voters who judged economic conditions as “poor”, were more likely to vote for a Republican candidate in the Senate or the House of Representatives, punishing the Biden-Harris administration. In contrast, those who considered economic conditions to be “good” were more likely to vote Democrat. However, voters who judged economic conditions as “not so good” were also more likely to favor a Democrat, suggesting that Biden did not get all of the blame for the disappointing economy or that voters made a trade-off between the economy and other issues.

    • On social policy issues, voters are more likely to vote for a Republican if they think that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, if they think that the racism issue is not too or not at all serious, if they were not too or not at all concerned about COVID and if they strongly favor increased border security.

    • We also found that demographic characteristics determined US voter behavior. Men are more likely to vote Republican. In contrast, women and non-binary people are more likely to vote Democrat. The same is true for Black, Latino and Asian people. White people are more likely to vote Republican. People with a higher income are more likely to vote Republican, but – at a given income level – college graduates and people with a postgraduate degree are more likely to vote Democrat.

    • While this confirms several stereotypes, we also find some more nuanced results. For example, the probability of voting Republican increases with age until it peaks at the 50-64 segment, then it falls back a little. Moreover, if we take a closer look at the Hispanic vote, we find that Cuban Americans are more likely to vote Republican. Finally, it should be noted that the regression results imply that Black men are less likely to vote Democrat than Black women.

    • We also find that pop culture affects voter behavior, with people having a favorable view of Taylor Swift more likely to vote Democrat – even within their age cohort– and those with an unfavorable view of her more likely to vote Republican.

    • For the 2024 elections, our results suggest that the economy is a drag on the Harris campaign, but there are opportunities to offset this through social policy issues such as abortion. What’s more, our results show that in demographic terms Kamala Harris more closely resembles the typical Democratic voter than Joe Biden, which could help explain the increase in enthusiasm among Democratic voters after she replaced him at the top of the ticket. However, our results also explain why Harris has difficulty convincing Black men to vote for her: they are less likely to vote Democrat than Black women more generally, even if she is not on the ticket.

    Introduction

    The 2022 US midterm elections presented a complex political landscape. This report uses data from the AP VoteCast survey to delve into the various factors that shaped voter behavior and electoral outcomes, focusing on three key areas: the impact of economic anxieties on voting behavior, the changes in policies on abortion and immigration, and the demographics of American voters. The 2022 midterms occurred against a backdrop of significant economic uncertainty, with inflation emerging as a dominant concern among voters. As inflation hit a 40-year high of 9.1% in June 2022, Americans expressed growing anxiety about their financial wellbeing, despite a low unemployment rate of 3.6%. By November 2022, inflation had started to fall, but was still very high at 7.1%.

    The 2022 midterms also demonstrated the rapid evolution of voter priorities. Just two years earlier, during the height of the pandemic, healthcare and public health concerns dominated the political discourse. By 2022, these issues had taken a backseat to inflation. However, despite the changes in priorities compared to the 2020 elections, voters were still concerned with  non-economic issues. Figure 2 and 3 show the responses of voters to “Which one of the following would you say is the single most important issue for you?”

    The economy was the main concern among both Democrats and Republicans, with 33.2% and 63.2% of respondents choosing it respectively. However, for Democrats climate change, abortion and healthcare followed closely. For Republicans, at some distance, immigration and crime were mentioned most often.

    Regarding abortion, The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization had a significant impact on the 2022 midterm elections. For about a quarter of voters, the Court’s decision was the single most important factor in their midterm vote. This figure increased to more than 3 in 10 among groups traditionally aligned with prochoice positions: Democratic voters, younger women, and first-time voters. These voters predominantly supported Democratic candidates. The impact was particularly pronounced among women of color. Majorities of Black and Hispanic women reported that the Supreme Court decision influenced their voting behavior. Finally, a key issue for Republican voters in 2022 was immigration, because of a surge in the number of migrant apprehensions at the southern border. Democrats, however, ranked immigration as their last concern.

    The data set from the 2022 midterms offers valuable insights into US voter behavior. It reveals that while economic concerns were at the forefront of voter priorities, these were not the only factors driving electoral decisions. The economic anxieties that dominated the political discourse led to a Republican majority in the House. However, the data also underscores the continued significance of non-economic issues, such as abortion and immigration, in shaping voter behavior. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade emerged as a pivotal factor, underscoring the powerful role of social issues in mobilizing the electorate.

    Data and model

    Our analysis is grounded in a comprehensive dataset primarily sourced from AP VoteCast, a nationwide survey conducted after midterm and general elections in the US comprising more than 100 thousand respondents. This data provides direct insights into the demographics, sentiments, and perceptions on various economic and non-economic topics of individual voters. AP VoteCast, initiated in 2018, combines interviews with randomly sampled registered voters from state voter files and self-identified registered voters from NORC’s AmeriSpeak® panel and nonprobability online panels.

    To examine the relationships between voters’ attitudes and their candidate preferences, we employ a logistic regression model. The regression analysis of the data at the individual level helps us understand how these various factors interact and influence voting behavior. We can analyze the impact of economic factors and social policy issues, given the demographic characteristics and vice versa. This means that we can isolate the pure effects of economic factors, social policy issues and demographic characteristics on voter behavior at the micro level, rather than effects at the macro level that are distorted by the composition of the sample.

    Empirical results

    Our regression results can be described as follows. In 2022, voters who judged economic conditions as “poor”, were more likely to vote for a Republican candidate in the Senate or the House of Representatives. This is a plausible result since the Democrats (the Biden-Harris administration) were in charge of economic policy. In contrast, those who considered economic conditions to be “good” were more likely to vote Democrat. Interestingly, also voters who judged economic conditions as “not so good” favored a Democrat. So some voters were willing to forgive Biden or thought that he was not (fully) to blame for the economic conditions. We should not forget that high inflation in 2021 and 2022 was not restricted to the US, although the empirical evidence suggests that excessive fiscal policy has made it worse. Also, some voters could be making a trade-off between the economy and other issues. For example, if you oppose making abortion illegal, you may be willing to tolerate some economic adversity from the party that is pro-choice.

    Now let’s turn to these social policy issues. Voters who thought that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases were more likely to vote Republican. In contrast, voters who though that abortion should be legal in most cases were more likely to support a Democratic candidate. Voters who were not too or not at all concerned about COVID were more likely to vote Republican, while voters who were somewhat or very concerned favored the Democrats. Compared to voters who strongly favored increased border security, those who only somewhat favored this or opposed this were more likely to vote Democrat. Those who thought the racism issue was not too or not at all serious were more likely to vote Republican compared to those who thought it was somewhat or very serious.

    These questions were all about political issues, but we also found that demographic characteristics – even after correcting for economic and social policy issues – determined voter behavior. In particular, women and non-binary people were more likely to vote Democrat. The same is true of Black, Latino and Asian people. Age also matters, as people above 30 are more likely to vote Republican. This probability increases with age until it peaks at the 50-64 segment. People of 65 and older are also more likely to vote Republican, but not as much as the cohort below. If we look at education, we find that college graduates and people with a postgraduate degree are more likely to vote Democrat. In contrast, people with a higher income are more likely to vote Republican. This may seem contradictory because people with a higher education tend to have a higher income. However, our regression allows us to identify the effects of education given a certain level of income and vice versa. So if two persons with the same education differ only in their income level, then the one with the higher income is more likely to vote Republican. And if two people with the same income level differ only in their level of education, then the higher educated person is more likely to vote Democrat.

    To summarize, the Republican voter in 2022 could be characterized as an older white male with a higher income but no college degree who judged economic conditions as poor, who thought that abortion should be illegal, strongly favored increased border security, was not too or not at all concerned by COVID and thought that the racism issue was not too or not at all serious. In contrast, a Democratic voter was typically a younger college-educated woman of color with a lower income who judged economic conditions as good or not so good, who thought that abortion should be legal, did not strongly favor increased border security and was concerned about COVID and racism.

    While table 1 may confirm several stereotypes, the regression results show some nuances. Take age for example: the tendency to vote Republican rises with age, but falls back a little for people of 65 and older. We have also taken a closer look at ethnicity and found that not all Hispanic groups exhibit the same voting behavior. In particular, Cuban Americans are more likely to vote Republican than Democrat. This can likely be attributed to the tougher foreign policy stance of the GOP regarding Cuba. Hispanics from all other countries of origin are more likely to vote Democrat. Finally, since the regression isolates the effect of being Black from being a man, the results explain why Kamala Harris is currently having trouble getting support from Black men. Note that these regression results are based on the 2022 midterms, so well before Kamala Harris rose to the top of the Democratic ticket. It shows that Black men being less likely to vote Democrat than Black women is not specific to presidential elections. While former president Obama recently suggested that Black men “just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president”, Democrats should probably better ask themselves why one of their key demographics has been drifting toward the GOP for some time now. The Democrats’ “Opportunity agenda for Black men” that they are now suddenly rolling out may be too little too late for this year’s election.

    The Taylor Swift effect

    The 2022 midterms also highlight an intriguing connection between pop culture and political preferences. In 2020 Taylor Swift released the song “Only the young” – a political anthem aimed to encourage young adults to “speak up and stand for what is right.” It made references to the surprise victory of Donald Trump in 2016 and how the young voters were outnumbered. Swift’s influence reflects broader trends in youth political engagement. Her public support for Democratic candidates, particularly her advocacy for LGBTQ+ rights, gender equality, and opposition to systemic racism, aligns with issues that resonate strongly with younger voters. This alignment is significant given that Swift’s fan base largely consists of Millennials and Gen Z, demographics that statistically lean more liberal and are generally more receptive to social justice movements. The “Taylor Swift effect” thus serves as a microcosm of larger cultural shifts influencing political engagement among younger voters.

    This raises two interesting questions: are Taylor Swift fans more likely to vote Democrat, and if so, is this simply a reflection of their age cohort being more liberal, or are “Swifties” (Taylor Swift fans) actually more likely to vote Democrat than other people with the same demographic characteristics? We find that people with a “very favorable” or “somewhat favorable” view of Taylor Swift are more likely to vote Democrat. In contrast, those with a “somewhat unfavorable” or “very unfavorable” view of her are more likely to vote Republican. Note that the regression takes into account age, so even within the subset of Millennials and Gen Z those with a favorable view of Taylor Swift are more likely to vote Democrat. In this sense, the “Taylor Swift effect” is real. After the debate between Trump and Harris on September 10, Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris “because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them.” Swift’s endorsement could help raise the voter turnout among a demographic that is culturally close to the values of the Democrats.

    Conclusion

    Our findings reveal that while economic anxieties drove many voters towards Republican candidates in 2022, social issues and demographics provided countervailing forces, contributing to the Democrats’ stronger-than-expected performance. In our midterm preview in 2022, we explained that based on economic performance, Biden’s approval rating and the usual midterm loss for the party occupying the White House, the Republicans should be heading for a landslide victory in the midterms, but that the more modest polling results suggested that other factors, such as abortion, could be leading to Republican underperformance, as it did on Election Day.

    For the 2024 elections, our results suggest that the economy is likely a drag on the Harris campaign, but there are opportunities to offset this through social policy issues such as abortion. What’s more, while Kamala Harris may have been picked as Vice-President to balance the 2020 Democratic ticket, our regression results show that she is not just another demographic of the Democratic Party, but she actually gets close to representing the typical Democratic voter. This could help explain the recent enthusiasm among Democratic voters that was absent when Biden was on top of the presidential ticket. This also meant that picking Tim Walz as VP candidate was necessary to balance the ticket and attract swing voters. However, our results also show that Black men have been less likely to vote Democrat than Black women well before Kamala Harris rose to the top of the Democratic ticket. Taking a key demographic for granted could hurt the Democratic Party well beyond the 2024 presidential election.

    Also available in pdf format.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 11/03/2024 – 19:50

  • How Chinese Traders Will Help Drive Gold to $3,000+
    How Chinese Traders Will Help Drive Gold to $3,000+

    By Jesse Colombo of the Bubble Bubble Substack

    In my debut Substack article on September 6th, I theorized that Chinese futures traders would return from their summer hiatus with renewed vigor, to drive gold prices sharply higher once again in an encore of their spring performance, when they pushed prices up by $400, or 23%, in just six weeks. When I wrote that article, gold was trading at $2,497 an ounce; today, it stands at $2,738 an ounce. I’m now providing an update because the trend I anticipated is unfolding as expected, and I believe the most thrilling, explosive phase is still to come.

    The Shanghai Futures Exchange (SHFE) gold futures were the primary vehicle behind the gold frenzy in March and April, a surge that subsequently spilled over into international gold prices:

    A fascinating Financial Times article from that time titled “Chinese Speculators Super-Charge Gold Rally” highlighted how trading volume in SHFE gold futures had surged by 400%, propelling gold prices to record highs:

    The spring Chinese gold trading frenzy can also be seen in the chart of long open interest in SHFE gold futures:

    Following the Chinese-driven gold frenzy in the spring, it was as if a switch flipped off on April 15th, leading SHFE gold futures to trade sideways for five months. In my original September 6th article, I explained that SHFE gold futures were merely taking a pause, likely setting the stage for another surge similar to the one seen in the spring. I also noted that a decisive close above the 585 resistance level would trigger a new rally in gold prices—not only in China but globally. As the chart below shows, that’s precisely what’s happening:

    As shown in the chart below, the international spot price of gold in U.S. dollars traded in a choppy manner from April until mid-September, when it hit an inflection point and began climbing vigorously once again. This timing is no coincidence; it aligns with SHFE gold futures breaking out of their trading range, drawing Chinese traders—known for their strong affinity for gold—back into the market.

    Technical analysis of SHFE gold futures implies that the international gold price in U.S. dollars should reach approximately $3,000 per ounce during the current rally. This projection relies on the concept of a “measured move,” where the price following a consolidation pattern or trading range is expected to rise by the same number of points as the rally preceding the consolidation. The diagram below illustrates how measured moves work:

    The chart of SHFE gold futures below shows a 105 yuan/gram rally in the spring, followed by a five-month trading range. This suggests that the current rally should also reach 105 yuan/gram, projecting a target of 690 yuan/gram, or roughly $3,000 per ounce. This target is also logical because $3,000 is a significant psychological level, and major levels like that typically act like a magnet for prices. And, in case $3,000 seems ambitious, it’s only a 9.3% increase from current levels. I’m confident that gold will climb even higher in the course of this bull market, though it may pause or consolidate around the $3,000 level for a time to catch its breath.

    Gold analysts and investors who closely follow developments in China often monitor whether the domestic Chinese gold price trades at a premium or discount compared to the international price. In recent months, China’s domestic gold price experienced an unusual discount of up to $40.60 per ounce against the international price. However, this discount has quickly reversed following the breakout in SHFE gold futures, with Chinese gold now trading at a $1.10 per ounce premium over the international price. This transition from a discount to a premium is an indication that gold trading activity in China is starting to heat up once again.

    Another sign that gold trading activity in China is heating up is the recent increase in SHFE gold futures trading volume over the past two months. As seen in the chart, volume surged dramatically during the spring rally. While trading activity is currently rising in a measured and orderly way, I expect it to ramp up significantly as the rally progresses toward $3,000. That’s when the real frenzy in Chinese gold trading will likely begin in earnest.

    Despite rising gold prices and increased trading activity, the high cost of gold has actually dampened physical consumer demand in China. According to Bloomberg, overall demand fell by 22% to 218 tons in the three months leading to September, with jewelry consumption dropping 29% to 130 tons and bar and coin purchases declining 9% to 69 tons. This suggests that the rapid price surge has created sticker shock for many Chinese consumers, who are likely waiting for a price dip to buy at more favorable levels.

    The reality is that high gold prices are here to stay, however, with even further increases ahead as global debt, money supply, and inflation continue to rise. Soon—possibly during the intense “frenzy phase” I mentioned—physical gold buyers may recognize that prices aren’t dropping and, driven by the fear of missing out (FOMO), start buying aggressively before prices climb even higher. This shift in behavior will only add further fuel to the fire.

    Another factor supporting the bullish outlook for gold in China is the country’s struggling economy, weighed down by the collapse of massive bubbles in real estate and the stock market. In response, the Chinese government recently announced a plan to issue special sovereign bonds totaling approximately 2 trillion yuan ($284.43 billion) this year as part of a new fiscal stimulus. Fiscal and monetary stimulus programs are typically bullish for gold because they add to national debt, debase the currency, and drive inflation higher. Burdened by a substantial overhang of bad debt, inflated asset prices, “zombie” companies, and a rapidly aging population, China is now on a path toward an addiction to stimulus to keep its economy afloat—much like the United States, Europe, and Japan.

    Source: Financial Times

    In conclusion, the stage is set for Chinese traders and investors to continue fueling a powerful rally in gold prices, pushing it to $3,000 and then beyond. Now that SHFE gold futures have broken out of their consolidation and trading activity is heating up once again, all indicators point toward a renewed surge that could mirror or even surpass the intensity of the spring rally. Meanwhile, China’s economic struggles and increasing reliance on stimulus add further support to the bullish outlook for gold. As global debt and inflationary pressures rise, and with Chinese physical gold investors and consumers likely to return in droves once they recognize that high gold prices are here to stay, the conditions are primed for an explosive phase in the gold market. This momentum, driven by both domestic factors in China and international dynamics, is likely just the beginning of an even greater upward trend.

    Also watch the video presentation of this report:

    The Bubble Bubble Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support Jesse’s work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 11/03/2024 – 18:40

  • 'A Coordinated Effort' To Rig States – Rogan Exposes Democrats' Plan To Destroy American Democracy…
    ‘A Coordinated Effort’ To Rig States – Rogan Exposes Democrats’ Plan To Destroy American Democracy…

    “Undeniably,” admits Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman to podcaster Joe Rogan, “immigration is changing our nation.”

     The two men spoke about a wide variety of political topics ranging from how Donald Trump won in 2016 to how immigration stands as a key issue in the election today.

    Specifically, Fetterman played the Democratic Party card, claiming that Republicans in 2024 “had an opportunity to do a comprehensive border-bipartisan-and that went down because Trump, he declared that that’s a bad deal after it was negotiated with the other side.”

    Rogan then brutally ‘fact-checked’ the stammering senator, pointing out the reality that that the deal made many concessions that Republicans concerned about the border found to be unacceptable.

    “But, didn’t that deal also involved amnesty,” responded Rogan,“and didn’t that deal also involve a significant number of illegal aliens being allowed into the country every year?” 

    Silence from Fetterman.

    Rogan continued:

    “I think it was 2 million people. So still the same sort of situation. And their fear is exactly what I talked about, that these people will be moved to swing states and that that will be used to essentially rig those states and turn them blue forever.“

    Finally, the PA Senator responded

    “I’ve never witnessed those kinds [illegals voting] of a thing… I don’t think there’s that level kinds of organization.“

    But Rogan once again would not allow the politician to ‘lie’ pointing out that “there is an organization that’s moving these people [illegals] to swing states.”

    “There’s a significant number of these people that are illegal immigrants that have made their way to swing states.

    And then there’s been calls for amnesty. There’s been calls for allowing these people to have a pathway to citizenship and allow them to vote.

    The fear that a lot of people have is that this is a coordinated effort to take these people that you’re allowing to come into the country, then you’re providing them with all sorts of services like food stamps and housing and setting them up and then providing a pathway to amnesty.

    And then you would have voters that would be significantly voting towards the Democrats because they’re the people that enabled them to come into the country in the first place, first place and provided them with those services.

    This is a big fear that people have and that you’re rigging this system and that this will turn all these states into essentially locked blue like California is.”

    Fetterman’s responds:

    “undeniably,” adding that “immigration is changing our nation.”

    “I haven’t spent a lot of time in Texas but it’s very clear that immigration has remade Texas and I think it’s generally, it’s a good thing.”

    Watch the discussion on immigration below:

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    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 11/03/2024 – 18:05

  • In Addition To Not Being Funny, SNL May Have Violated Election Law With Kamala Cameo
    In Addition To Not Being Funny, SNL May Have Violated Election Law With Kamala Cameo

    Vice President Kamala Harris made a surprise appearance on “Saturday Night Live” last night – playing herself across from Maya Rudolph’s version of her in the show’s cold open.

    It was essentially an exact copy of Trump’s appearance in 2015, except not funny.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jshttps://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsWhat’s more, it may have violated election laws.

    As Michael Shellenberger points out, “The producer of Saturday Night Live said neither Harris nor Trump would appear on the show “because of election laws.” Last night, about 60 hours before polls open, he put Harris on the show in a warm & humanizing sketch. He and NBC violated the equal time provision of the law.”

    Continued:

    That article linked to a September 19 interview between Michaels and SNL cast members, Colin Jost and Michael Che. Weirdly, however, the September 19 does not contain the Lorne Michaels quote referred to in the October 1 Hollywood Reporter article. Even more weirdly, neither does the WayBack Machine’s first capture of the article on September 19.

    The reason that’s weird is that many media outlets reported on Michaels’ statement in early October.

    NBC clearly violated the law. In a 2022 fact sheet, FCC writes, “FCC rules seek to ensure that no legally qualified candidate for office is unfairly given less access to the airwaves – outside of bona fide news exemptions – than their opponent.”

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    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 11/03/2024 – 17:45

  • 'Fourth Turning' Election Igniting A Firestorm
    ‘Fourth Turning’ Election Igniting A Firestorm

    Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

    “Imagine some national (and probably global) volcanic eruption, initially flowing along channels of distress that were created during the Unraveling era and further widened by the catalyst. Trying to foresee where the eruption will go once it bursts free of the channels is like trying to predict the exact fault line of an earthquake. All you know in advance is something about the molten ingredients of the climax, which could include the following:

    Economic distress, with public debt in default, entitlement trust funds in bankruptcy, mounting poverty and unemployment, trade wars, collapsing financial markets, and hyperinflation (or deflation)

    Social distress, with violence fueled by class, race, nativism, or religion and abetted by armed gangs, underground militias, and mercenaries hired by walled communities

    Political distress, with institutional collapse, open tax revolts, one-party hegemony, major constitutional change, secessionism, authoritarianism, and altered national borders

    Military distress, with war against terrorists or foreign regimes equipped with weapons of mass destruction”

    The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe

    How many times have you heard this is the most important election of our lifetimes in the last few weeks? When Strauss & Howe published The Fourth Turning in 1997, the national debt was $5.4 trillion, and the country was running an annual deficit of $22 billion. We now add $22 billion of debt every 4 days, amounting to $2 trillion per year. They postulated the major catalysts for the next Fourth Turning would be debt, civic decay, and global disorder.

    As we enter the 17th year of this Crisis, no one can question their prescience in predicting the facilitators which have propelled this ongoing Crisis thus far. The volcanic debt eruption created by the Federal Reserve and their Wall Street cabal owners in 2008 initiated all the chaos, debt creation, crushing inflation, authoritarian measures, social decay, celebration of delusion, delegitimization of the regime media and their corrupt government co-conspirators, and the rise of Trump. This country, and most of the western world, is experiencing extreme economic, social, political and military distress, as this upcoming election is guaranteed to ignite a civil and global conflagration.

    No matter the result of this election, the losing side will not accept the outcome. It has been unequivocally evident for several weeks Trump would win this election in a landslide, on par with Reagan’s destruction of Mondale in 1984, if the Democrat cheat machine of fraudulent mail-in ballots, illegal hordes voting, and ever trusty Dominion vote switching algorithms cannot overcome his overwhelming margin.

    Those pulling the levers are willing to do anything to retain power, not excluding assassination of Trump, initiating WW3 or some other manufactured crisis to cancel the election, illegal lawfare schemes to convict Trump of fake crimes or prevent his inauguration in January, or releasing their BLM, Antifa, and Illegal terrorist hordes into the streets to wreak havoc and initiate civil war. The treasonous bastards who stole the 2020 election and have committed crimes against the American people fear the retribution and prison sentences which could be inflicted upon them if Trump wins. They will not go silently into the night.

    The Deep State skullduggery implemented through election fraud shenanigans, using their captured Soros judges and district attorneys to commit illegal lawfare, will rile the normies (aka deplorables, aka garbage) if they feel another election has been stolen by these treasonous totalitarians. Normal Americans have reached their breaking point. They have seen their bank accounts defunded by the Biden/Harris inflationary tsunami, unleashed by their covid debacle and ironically named Inflation Reduction Act, and their enablers at the Federal Reserve who printed trillions of new fiat, while keeping interest rates at 0% for years.

    Anyone living in the real world knows inflation is at least twice as high as the reported government manipulated figures. They gaslight us about GDP growth, number of jobs added (850,000 overestimation last year), unemployment rate (% in labor market hugely underestimated), and every government statistic, in order to portray a false narrative of an economy doing well and raising all boats. The only boats being raised are the yachts of the .1%.

    In reality, economic distress is creating psychological trauma on young and old alike. Seniors on fixed incomes and the poor dependent upon welfare, sink further into poverty, as the cost of food, energy, rent, medicine, and most necessities reach all-time highs. No one earning the average income in this country can afford a home. Credit card debt and auto loan debt have reached unpayable levels, and an avalanche of defaults and re-possessions has commenced. Meanwhile, with stock markets and housing markets at all-time highs, the wealthy have gotten wealthier, so the plight of the bottom 90% is of no concern to their day-to-day luxurious existence.

    This bifurcation of economic circumstances is evidenced by the populist rage propelling Trump’s campaign. Normal Americans are tired of being screwed over by the system and fed up with politicians, left wing billionaires (Soros, Gates, Bezos, et al), and regime media talking heads demanding they acquiesce to their totalitarian mandates, while being propagandized to believe their provably false narratives about the “great” economy. Biden is president in name only, as proved by his dementia ridden rants and those pulling the strings casting him aside like a piece of trash when he no longer met their needs.

    I don’t think Strauss & Howe envisioned the types of social distress which would be ushered in by the ruling oligarchy in a desperate attempt to divide, destroy, and degrade the social fabric of our society, obliterating the common values which helped build this nation. The organized, funded, and promoted invasion of our country by third world bottom feeders with the intent to take the lower paying jobs of native Americans, overwhelm the country’s social welfare system, funnel illegal voters into swing states, and create civil chaos in formerly homogeneous communities, is designed to contribute to the economic collapse of the country, allowing the Great Reseters to implement their new world order machinations.

    The race riots, funded by Soros and encouraged by his bought off district attorneys in every shithole Democrat run sanctuary city in America, conducted by his BLM and ANTIFA hired terrorists, were designed to bring down Trump and demoralize the white middle class families who are the backbone of the country. We were supposed to bow down to these race baiters and pretend a drug addict black criminal thug was a saint, while honoring fictitious made-up ridiculous black holidays like Juneteenth and Kwanzaa. The entire narrative has been to make white people take the knee and accept this woke drivel. The goal has been to destroy the community standards we grew up with and replace them with an anything goes mentality of degeneracy and delusion.

    The other socially explosive issues designed to divide and conquer have involved pretending mentally ill men are women and vice versa, while mentally ill women encourage the mutilation of their children as a sacrifice to the woke gods. Allowing mentally ill perverted men into women’s restrooms is pure insanity, but corrupt politicians, bought-off government bureaucrats, and woke judges have mandated this dangerously absurd behavior.

    Men dominating women’s sports is perfectly fine to these seekers of societal implosion. Allowing and encouraging young girls to cut off their breasts because their batshit crazy mothers suffer from a woke form of Munchausen syndrome by proxy is a despicable surrender to degeneracy. We are failing our children, resulting in massive levels of depression, drug use, self-mutilation, and suicide among the young.

    The most socially distressful act in the history of mankind was our authoritarian government politicians and bureaucrats forcing over 270 million guinea pigs (over 5 billion worldwide), under threat of losing their livelihood and being ostracized from society, to be injected by an experimental gene therapy marketed as a vaccine, that did not prevent people from catching, spreading or dying from the most overhyped flu in history.

    The ruling overlords, who planned this fake pandemic (Event 201), successfully created the largest mass formation psychosis among the fearful masses than has ever been achieved through a propaganda of fear campaign. They proved they could force the sheep to willingly lock themselves down and beg to be injected with a toxic concoction designed to kill them suddenly or over time, while reducing fertility and disabling millions, accomplishing a major goal of the Gates depopulation agenda. The pure bloods will never forget or ever forgive those who treated them like trash. The coming civil war will see the dividing lines very much aligned between the jabbed versus the unjabbed.

    Political distress has been building in this country since the day Trump descended that Trump Tower escalator in June of 2015, announcing he was running for president. He was able to corral the populist rage of the economically and socially distressed deplorables and achieve the upset of the century against the Deep State chosen one, initiating the Deep State coup against him, which continues to this day. The political system is wrought with fraud, corruption, malfeasance, and a disregard for the proper legal functioning of elections.

    The 2020 election was stolen, mainly through fake mail-in ballots supposedly instituted as a one-time covid measure. Now it is a permanent fixture, and systematic fraud is purposely built into the system, as no ID or proof of citizenship is required to vote, illegals are being enabled to vote illegally by the Democrat party, and the judicial system is filled with left-wing activist judges whose sole purpose is to promote criminality and deviancy.

    The desperation of the Deep State oligarchs and their hired henchmen within the CIA, FBI, DOJ, and State Department is palpable and exceedingly dangerous, as they are willing to burn down the system to prevent their criminal conspiracy from being revealed. They have tried to imprison and kill Trump already and will continue to do so before his January inauguration. It is probably too late to stop the election from taking place, but nothing they do is too diabolical to exclude at this point. When Trump’s margin of victory exceeds their ability to cheat, they will proceed with plan B and unleash their paid hordes of violent felons in every major city in America, to try and stop Trump from assuming power.

    Biden and Harris’ handlers will use every lawfare means at their disposal to prevent the smooth transition of power. The fake January 6 insurrection will seem quaint compared to what these traitors will attempt to pull off. We know they consider us deplorable, garbage, racist Nazis, so that belief allows them to consider us as non-humans and use lethal means to suppress our voices. The Biden-Harris administration updated DOD Directive 5240.01 on Sept. 27 to include provisions authorizing lethal force in certain circumstances when assisting civilian law enforcement. The timing of this change sure seems suspicious, as this volatile election enters the home stretch.

    This is where military distress will rear its ugly head. We know the woke military cooperated and conspired with the other Deep State bad actors in the coup against Trump. Milley acted in a treasonous manner behind Trump’s back by communicating with adversaries and planning to override any direct order from the Commander–in-Chief. The military leadership under Biden has proven to be incompetent, committed to diversity & equity, and willing to do the bidding of the forces aligned against Trump.

    The possibility of the military participating in violent coup against Trump before he takes office, or shortly thereafter, is not out of the question. When men who know they have committed illegal, treasonous acts feel threatened with exposure and prosecution, they are capable of anything to avoid their fate. Militarily, this is an extremely dangerous period for our nation.

    With neocons dominating in Congress, and their regime media partners regurgitating their propaganda talking points about Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, these psychopaths are pushing as hard as possible for WW3. Whether it launches in the Ukraine, Gaza, the Taiwan Straits, or on the border of the two Koreas, their goal is global conflict and obscene profits for the military industrial complex who dole out the bribes. They know Trump is not a war monger and will attempt to broker peace deals in the Ukraine and in the Middle East. Therefore, they are recklessly flailing about trying to initiate a global firestorm before Trump assumes the presidency.

    Beware of our “Gulf of Tonkin” false flag incident, which will be used as the basis to go to war with whichever “evil dictator” suits our purposes at that moment. No matter the outcome of this election, there will be blood – whether it be American blood on American soil or American blood on foreign soil, or both simultaneously. Fourth Turnings always accelerate towards a violent denouement, with an unanticipated number of deaths. Over 5% of the male population was killed in the American Civil War Fourth Turning, while 65 million people were killed during the WWII Fourth Turning. With the current level of killing technology, the potential number of casualties in a global conflict would be astronomical and inconceivable to average Americans.

    I do not have any misconceptions that the election of Trump can undo the fiscal disaster heading our way. At best, he could delay the timeline for financial catastrophe and possibly keep WW3 from launching during his term.  I even wonder whether the selection of Kackling Kamala and Tampon Tim, the single worst presidential ticket in American history, has been purposely engineered by the Deep State in order to insure the economic and financial implosion happen during Trump’s reign.

    Discrediting Trump, as they did by blaming Herbert Hoover for the Great Depression, when it was FDR’s policies that exacerbated the problem, might provide the Democrat Deep State Party with the narrative that Trump’s policies caused the collapse. There is absolute certainty the losers in this election will declare it stolen and refuse to acknowledge the winner. With over 75% of the population expecting post-election violence, there will be violence. Where it leads and what unintended consequences befall the nation are unknown but guaranteed to further split a divided nation.

    The core elements of this Fourth Turning Crisis (debt, civic decay, global disorder) were the driving factors at the outset and continue to be the driving factors as we approach the climax of this winter of our discontent in the early 2030s. Between now and then will be the most perilous years of our lifetimes. Panic, chaos, financial disaster, authoritarian measures, civil war, global war, and a myriad of other epic challenges await. They will attempt to abscond with your wealth through their Great Taking plans.

    They will attempt to implement their Great Reset though CBDCs, mass surveillance, and totalitarian enforcement of their new world order mandates. They will continue their depopulation efforts through war, vaccines, and starvation of the poor. They will attempt to put a final nail in the coffin of the U.S. Constitution, ushering in their one world government, controlled by billionaire oligarchs, and enforced by their military/police thugs. They are attempting to demoralize the masses, propagandizing them into believing only the government can save them, and forcing them to march into an electronic gulag with no escape routes.

    All my ruminations about this Fourth Turning always come down to the potential outcomes laid out by Strauss and Howe twenty-seven years ago, before the turn of the century, and eleven years before the triggering of this Crisis. No matter which channels of distress the volcanic molten lava breaks free from, the next several years will be disconcerting, difficult, destructive, and deathly. There is no escape from the grim reality of what is coming. You cannot be prepped enough to withstand the bitter winter winds which will begin to blow with the outcome of this election.

    Nothing will be the same after November 5. Will there ever be another election? Will our country still exist in its current form ten years from now? Strauss and Howe did not predict a specific outcome but provided four realistic possible outcomes. Three out of four are dire, including the end of humanity as a distinct possibility. After reading the recent best-selling book Nuclear War – A Scenario, you realize the world could end in a matter of hours if the weak-minded psychopaths leaders initiate an unstoppable progression of responses.

    I know the linear thinking noobs who believe the world always progresses in a straight line will dismiss these warnings as just conspiracy theory doom porn. They have no interest in the cyclical nature of history and will continue to trust the government narrative, enforced by the regime media propaganda mouthpieces, and repeated by the NPCs who make up a major percentage of the population. That’s fine. They can keep their heads in the sand and believe the delusional drivel doled out by those in power, but Fourth Turnings are going to deluge them under a tsunami of reality, pain, death and destruction. That’s just the way it is.

    People need to get their heads straight and understand the challenges that lie ahead. I don’t see any easy solutions, and I’m not selling a newsletter with the secret to surviving this Fourth Turning. I’ve been issuing warnings for over a decade, and I’ve seen nothing that has happened or is happening, to make me change my mind.

    1. This Fourth Turning could mark the end of man. It could be an omnicidal Armageddon, destroying everything, leaving nothing. If mankind ever extinguishes itself, this will probably happen when its dominant civilization triggers a Fourth Turning that ends horribly. For this Fourth Turning to put an end to all this would require an extremely unlikely blend of social disaster, human malevolence, technological perfection and bad luck.

    2. The Fourth Turning could mark the end of modernity. The Western saecular rhythm – which began in the mid-fifteenth century with the Renaissance – could come to an abrupt terminus. The seventh modern saeculum would be the last. This too could come from total war, terrible but not final. There could be a complete collapse of science, culture, politics, and society. Such a dire result would probably happen only when a dominant nation (like today’s America) lets a Fourth Turning ekpyrosis engulf the planet. But this outcome is well within the reach of foreseeable technology and malevolence.

    3. The Fourth Turning could spare modernity but mark the end of our nation. It could close the book on the political constitution, popular culture, and moral standing that the word America has come to signify. The nation has endured for three saecula; Rome lasted twelve, the Soviet Union only one. Fourth Turnings are critical thresholds for national survival. Each of the last three American Crises produced moments of extreme danger: In the Revolution, the very birth of the republic hung by a thread in more than one battle. In the Civil War, the union barely survived a four-year slaughter that in its own time was regarded as the most lethal war in history. In World War II, the nation destroyed an enemy of democracy that for a time was winning; had the enemy won, America might have itself been destroyed. In all likelihood, the next Crisis will present the nation with a threat and a consequence on a similar scale.

    4. Or the Fourth Turning could simply mark the end of the Millennial Saeculum. Mankind, modernity, and America would all persevere. Afterward, there would be a new mood, a new High, and a new saeculum. America would be reborn. But, reborn, it would not be the same.

    I’ve been issuing warnings for over a decade, and I’ve seen nothing that has happened or is happening, to make me change my mind. Befriending like-minded people and summoning all the courage and fortitude you can muster is the best advice I can give.

    The best analogy for the next several years is: get prepared to slog many miles through a raging blizzard in sub-zero temperatures with less than 50% chance of survival.

    Good luck and Godspeed.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 11/03/2024 – 17:30

  • US Warns Tehran It Will Not Restrain Israel If Iran Retaliates
    US Warns Tehran It Will Not Restrain Israel If Iran Retaliates

    Iran has kept up its saber-rattling in the wake of last week’s Israeli aerial attack, which itself was the much anticipated response to the Iranian ballistic missile attack of October 1st. Washington is now warning Tehran that it “won’t be able to hold Israel back” if the Islamic Republic retaliates, US and Israeli officials told Axios Saturday.

    “We told the Iranians: We won’t be able to hold Israel back, and we won’t be able to make sure that the next attack will be calibrated and targeted as the previous one,” the US official said.

    Via Reuters

    The message was reportedly passed to Iranian officials via Swiss intermediaries, the Axios report details, which is a rare public disclosure.

    Ayatollah Ali Khamenei the same day warned of “tooth-breaking” response for Israel’s actions. Recent international reports have also suggested Iran-linked paramilitaries in Iraq could be preparing a new attack on Israel.

    The Iranian Supreme Leader has also said, “We will do whatever is necessary in confronting arrogance, whether in terms of military and armament or politically. The Iranian people and officials will never hesitate in facing global arrogance and the criminal apparatus ruling the world order.”

    “The issue is not just about revenge, but rather acting with logic and confrontation consistent with religion, ethics, Sharia, and international laws. The issue is confronting international injustice, and for the Iranian people, confronting oppression and arrogance is a mandatory duty,” he added. 

    The Iranians are signaling that an attack is “definitely” coming, per Axios:

    • Esmail Kowsari, a member of the national security committee in Iran’s parliament, said Saturday that Iran’s security council had agreed on a response but not yet on the exact date and scope.
    • Kowsari said the attack will be executed in coordination with other “resistance” groups in the region and will be stronger than Iran’s Oct. 1 attack, which involved 180 ballistic missiles.

    But the reality is that Iran also is signaling its own domestic population with all this tough talk, as well as enemies across the region, even if it doesn’t actually intend to hit back against Israel.

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    With the Oct.1st attack, and Israel’s retaliation, Tehran is still able to claim ‘victory’ of sorts for its strikes involving over 180 ballistic missiles. It sent a strong message, and now that status quo has been restored to some extent.

    The US days ago began moving extra B-2 bombers and other major military assets in the region, as a precaution in the scenario of another Iranian strike on Israel.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 11/03/2024 – 16:55

  • "We're Not Going To Allow Them To Steal It": Raskin Repeats Trump-Like Reservation On Accepting Election Results
    “We’re Not Going To Allow Them To Steal It”: Raskin Repeats Trump-Like Reservation On Accepting Election Results

    Authored by Jonathan Turley,

    On Bill Maher’s HBO Show on Friday, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) appeared to repeat his reservation about accepting a Trump win in the presidential election. Raskin said that Democrats will only support a “free and fair election.” Trump was widely criticized for the same position when he said “If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results.”

    Raskin previously said that he would not guarantee certifying Trump and that, if he wins, he may be declared as disqualified by Congress:

    “It’s going to be up to us on January 6th, 2025 to tell the rampaging Trump mobs that he’s disqualified. And then we need bodyguards for everybody and civil war conditions.”

    Raskin went on HBO to repeat his reservation on accepting the results of any Trump victory:

    “When I say we will support a free and fair election, no, we we’re not going to allow them to steal it in the states, or steal it in the Department of Justice or steal it with any other election official in the country.

    If it’s a free and fair election, we will do what we’ve always done. We will honor it.”

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    Remarkably, as the audience applauded Raskin, Maher added “That is the Democrats’ history: They honor it. That’s the big difference between the parties.”

    However, that is not the history and Raskin knows it.

    The certification of President George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election was opposed by Democrats and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) praised the effort of then-Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) who organized the challenge.

    Jan. 6 committee head Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) voted to challenge it in the House.

    Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) sought to block certification of the 2016 election result.

    Raskin also insisted on CNN that the effort to prevent citizens from voting for Trump is the very embodiment of democracy:

    “If you think about it, of all of the forms of disqualification that we have, the one that disqualifies people for engaging in insurrection is the most democratic because it’s the one where people choose themselves to be disqualified.”

    Democrats not only sought to strip Trump from the ballot this election, but sought to cleanse ballots of 126 House members.

    We are already seeing an ominous uptick of challenges, which I discuss in my column this weekend. There are also new allegations of systemic fraudulent registrations in multiple districts.

    Raskin presumably expects any voters to protest “peacefully” if they are declared the losers.

    I am leaving for New York today to join in the coverage. This could prove a long night, if not a long week.

    *  *  *

    Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 11/03/2024 – 15:45

  • Some Clarity This Week
    Some Clarity This Week

    By Peter Tchir of Academy Securities

    Some Clarity This Week?

    We get the election and the Fed this week, both of which should provide us with some clarity.

    The Fed

    Let’s start with the Fed because I think the Fed is easy:

    • Cut 25 bps. That’s what they were planning to do, and Friday’s jobs report gives them the ammunition to do so.
    • Push back on the pace of rate cuts going forward. This will be relative to the last meeting since the market has already dialed back significantly on rate cuts in 2025. They will mention a more balanced concern between a potentially better job market (see NFP – An Ugly Report) and signs that inflation may be stabilizing above their target level. The jobs data was definitively impacted by hurricanes and strikes, but the JOLTS Quit Rate really caught my eye, as it dipped to levels that we haven’t seen since mid-2008.
    • Higher neutral/terminal rate. We discussed this in a Much Higher Neutral Rate at the beginning of October. Markets have moved to the lower end of our band (3.5% to 4%), but there is room for that to edge higher (though we might be getting greedy). We had a lot of reasons for expressing this view, but one that stands out is this simple chart. Look at where rates have been and what the economy has done, and it is difficult to argue that 5% and higher was very restrictive.

    The market has moved closer to our views, and we expect that it will continue to do so. Actually, the 10-year yield up at 4.38% is above the top end of our range, but we remain reluctant to fight it (at least not yet) as market positioning (amongst other things) makes us nervous – see Bond Vigilantes in last weekend’s report.

    Expectations

    This might be a good way to segue from bond markets and the Fed to election prognostications.

    • Who had a weak jobs report = 10 bps higher on the 10-year yield?

    We did think that the rally in bonds after the report would fade. But going from 4.22% all the way to 4.38% was a much bigger fade than I would have expected. I did think that stocks would fade, and they did close well off their highs, but they were above their opening levels, so I got this wrong. What is surprising is how resilient stocks were in the face of bond yields rising for the wrong reason (not due to economic strength), but it was the first day of the month and the first big “buy the dip” opportunity in the past month as well.

    But I digress. The main point of this section, ahead of the election section, is to point out that sometimes, even if you knew the data in advance, it would have been difficult to make money. A weak jobs report sending Treasury yields to a fairly large one-day loss doesn’t seem obvious – even in hindsight.

    We discussed some of our scenarios and views on the election in last weekend’s report (Who Wins and What Does it Mean?). Since then, the betting markets have reversed course to some degree, making even those markets closer than they were last weekend.

    I’m also hearing more people question whether the “Trump Bump” is real. This is the view that he tends to get more votes than the polls indicate. With a sample size of 2, where the 2nd time certainly wasn’t as strong as the first time, I’m pretty dubious about this view heading into Tuesday.

    I do remain convinced, despite being told I’m dead wrong, that a lot of “undecided people” will be flip- flopping their thoughts right until the moment they vote (kind of like how many market participants will second guess their well-thought-out Fed strategies between noon and 2pm ET on November 7th).

    The Election

    Frankly, I think that there are too many permutations to properly analyze this. There is virtually no scenario that would “surprise” me. I don’t think all scenarios are equally likely, but I could be convinced that a lot of them are possible.

    Also, with the cop-out in the previous section, I’m not sure it is easy to interpret how markets will react to what could be quite complex outcomes.

    Having said that, it would be irresponsible not to have some sort of a playbook coming into this week. That is particularly true as I will be on Bloomberg TV at 9pm ET on election night trying to digest the information real-time.

    Best Case for Markets:

    • A clear winner on the presidential side with gridlock established. If we can wake up Wednesday morning (better yet, go to bed on Tuesday night) knowing that there is a clear and obvious winner for president and that there will be gridlock, we can buy stocks and bonds. I don’t think there is a better case for the market than this, and we should get some indications if this is happening quite early in the evening.

    Worst Case(s) for Markets:

    • I think that there are two bad cases for markets, both of which are very different.
    • A clear sweep. Anything where it is clear that the presidential election has been decided and that the winning party will have both the House and the Senate firmly in control would likely be bad for markets. The “mandate” would (rightfully so) convince that party that they can implement even some of their more extreme policies. I don’t see that being good for the deficit. For stocks it might turn out to be good, but I think, at least initially, the response to this would be negative. It is ironic that we could get a situation where the country really supports one ideology and Wall Street doesn’t like it, but that’s my sense of how this would play out.
    • A prolonged and hotly contested election result. I’m thinking more at the presidential level. Even there, I think if the House and the Senate are split, even a hotly contested presidential result might not hurt markets, at least not for a few days. While the Geopolitical Intelligence Group staunchly believes that we will have a legal and normal transfer of power and that all the systems (and the checks and balances) will work, the longer any dispute lingers, the more likely it is to affect domestic behavior.
      • There is a risk that if this goes on for an extended period, our enemies (or competitors) will take advantage of what they might view as an opportunity. The media (and nation) will be fixated on internal issues and there may be a perceived power vacuum if the contested election reaches vitriolic levels (which cannot be discounted with the power of social media). If you missed Academy’s latest Around the World, this might be a good time to catch up on the issues we focused on this month.

    Beyond that, I just think there are too many possibilities. We might not know who will control the House or the Senate right away. Again, I think that any uncertainty will be digested by the market if gridlock looks likely.

    I think that a few days of contested results and recounts is pretty much built into markets. However, I’m not sure if contested results extending well into the following week, with rhetoric getting increasingly nasty, is priced in (I’d like to say that this possibility is extremely low, but I’m not sure that it’s that low).

    It would be great if election night gives us clarity, even if that clarity is bad for markets, but that is not a certain outcome. I do think that many people are being a bit cavalier about how easily we will absorb a “contested” election – since I think it very much depends on how hotly that election is contested (if we get to that point at all).

    Not sure this is much of a game plan for the election, but it is the best that I can come up with at the moment.

    Bottom Line

    We will get through this election. The system will work as intended and we will adjust and adapt our strategies appropriately.

    Yes, there is a lot of heated “debate” occurring in social media and it is easy to get disheartened. But I think that is really just at the extreme and gets far too much attention relative to the people working together to get the country, the economy, and even the globe on a good path forward!

    Due to some misspent youth, I am well aware of the Sex Pistols. They had songs like “Anarchy in the U.K.” (what would have been my walk up song if they had those when I played sports) and “God Save the Queen.” So, a lot of what we are hearing and seeing (as many of our Geopolitical Intelligence Group members remind our clients) is not new. It just receives a lot more attention than it should. And now, I cannot resist one message about “unintended consequences” because that is a favorite subject of mine. The Queen’s Jubilee had the Queen floating down the river Thames. Word leaked that the Pistols were going to perform “God Save the Queen” somewhere along the route and annoy the entourage and many of the spectators. So, as I recall, they implemented some rule about no performances within a certain distance from the Queen. Problem solved? No, the band, or their organizers, put them on a barge and they followed the Queen to play the song – making the entire experience for the Queen likely much worse. Unintended consequences are always worth thinking about!

    But in any case, decades later, England is still functioning and the “dire” warnings never materialized, so I think much of the concern is misplaced and will be largely forgotten (or at least tuned out) as we move forward!

    Good luck with this week and I cannot believe that we still make it dark extra early on purpose!

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 11/03/2024 – 15:10

  • OPEC+ Delays Production Hike (Again)
    OPEC+ Delays Production Hike (Again)

    OPEC+ agreed to push back its December production increase by one month, the second delay to its plans to revive supply as faltering demand in China and swelling supplies from the Americas pressure prices.

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    No reason was given for the delay.

    “Market conditions won out,” said Harry Tchilinguirian, head of oil research at Onyx Commodities Ltd.

    “OPEC+ showed it couldn’t ignore the current macroeconomic economic realities centered on China and Europe, which point to weaker oil demand growth.”

    OPEC Plus had first announced in June that it would gradually increase production by an estimated 2.2 million barrels a day, or around 2 percent of global supplies, in October.

    That had been a major source of concern for the markets.

    Then, in September, the group announced a delay until at least December.

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    The OPEC+ move is “modestly positive,” said Giovanni Staunovo, an analyst at UBS Group AG in Zurich. The market will focus instead on Iran’s response to Israel’s attacks and the outcome of US elections, he said. However, JP Morgan analysts wrote that “with geopolitical concerns temporarily set aside, attention is once again shifting back to market fundamentals.”

    We suspect the election will matter… a lot.

    “Given all the geopolitical tension in the Middle East and, perhaps more importantly, the upcoming US presidential elections, it makes perfect sense for OPEC+ to postpone the unwinding of the voluntary cuts for an extra month,” said Jorge Leon, senior vice president at consultant Rystad Energy AS.

    These eight OPEC+ countries reiterated their collective commitment to achieve full conformity with the Declaration of Cooperation, including the additional voluntary production adjustments.

    “For me, the impact is more important on sentiment than the numbers,” said Amrita Sen, director of research at consultant Energy Aspects Ltd.

    “The market has been incorrectly viewing OPEC+ as wanting to flood the market to regain market share,” but instead, their “primary focus remains keeping oil inventories under control.”

    Prices are headed into the $60s next year, and potentially lower if OPEC+ opens the taps, according to Citigroup and JPMorgan analysts.

    That poses a financial threat for Riyadh, which needs levels closer to $100 a barrel to cover the ambitious economic plans of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, according to the IMF.

    The market outlook the group faces ultimately hinges on the outcome of US presidential elections on Nov. 5, Currie added.  “The real geopolitical risk has yet to come, which is the shockwave from the US election,” he said. “Not only will it jar fragile flash points around the world, but it will also reveal the all-important path that Chinese stimulus takes in response.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 11/03/2024 – 14:35

  • Iranians Frustrated By China, Russia For Meager Response To Israeli Strikes
    Iranians Frustrated By China, Russia For Meager Response To Israeli Strikes

    Via Middle East Eye

    China and Russia’s response to Israel’s attacks on Iran has drawn widespread criticism, with many deeming the reactions insufficient and delayed.

    The Tehran-based Ham-Mihan daily newspaper emphasized that given the extensive promotion of strategic relations between Tehran, Moscow and Beijing in recent years, there was an expectation that Russia and China would officially condemn the attacks on Iran.

    The newspaper wrote: “Three days passed after the Israeli military attack on sites in three Iranian provinces before China’s foreign ministry responded. The Russian foreign ministry spokesperson also commented on the attack only hours afterwards. In the end, neither Beijing nor Moscow condemned Israel’s actions.”

    Via Reuters

    The daily continued to criticize the stances of these two countries, comparing them to some European nations that have tense relations with Iran.

    As western sanctions against Iran have increased in recent years, Tehran has strengthened economic ties with Moscow and Beijing, with one key outcome being the sale of cheap oil to China.

    However, the expansion of these political ties has consistently faced criticism within Iran and discontent has intensified following recent direct conflicts between Iran and Israel.

    Calls for direct military action against Israel

    A newspaper affiliated with Iran’s so-called “hardliners” has called for direct military action against Israel, arguing such attacks are essential for ensuring regional stability.

    In an article titled “Killing the Dog”, the Agaah daily emphasized the need to intensify military confrontations with Israel, saying: “Attacks on the interests of the Zionist regime worldwide guarantee the security of the region.” The report featured images of Israel’s political and military leaders alongside suggested targets, including military and economic centers.

    This is not the first instance Agaah has advocated direct action against Israel. Last month, the daily released a list of sites that could potentially be targeted by Hezbollah’s missiles and drones. The list included food factories, power facilities, technology plants and chemical production sites. 

    Moreover, the Dimona nuclear plant was identified as a target for Hezbollah, reportedly within range of Iran’s Fateh-110 missiles.

    Ex-legislator: Iran’s diplomacy hampered by internal conflicts

    The former head of the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission has criticized the government’s handling of “extremist” groups within the country, saying they are undermining diplomatic efforts.  

    In an op-ed, Hashmatullah Falahat Pishe argued that the failure to unify domestic political forces has led to setbacks in the nation’s foreign policy. “Diplomacy is accepted and trusted globally when it reflects a unified and strong voice within a country. Therefore, the key obstacles to diplomacy here are internal,” he wrote, adding: “Mr Pezeshkian’s government must address these issues first.”

    Falahat Pishe also mentioned Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s recent visits to nine Middle Eastern countries, stressing that the activities of extremist groups in Iran have undermined these diplomatic efforts.

    “This shows the government has not yet resolved its internal challenges with extremist factions. The government must first prove its ability to address foreign policy issues internally. Only then can diplomacy succeed,” he concluded.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 11/03/2024 – 14:00

  • Growing Risk In Private Credit And Shadow Banks
    Growing Risk In Private Credit And Shadow Banks

    Submitted by Brent Johnson of Macro Alchemist (read it here in pdf format)

    The transformation of banking and financial services away from traditional public markets and the banking system itself has been dramatic since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008.

    This shift has reshaped the financial landscape, as more activities that were once dominated by banks and public markets have moved into private and non-bank financial sectors.

    In 2008, when the GFC struck, the financial world experienced a severe breakdown. Banks, which had been the backbone of lending and liquidity, stopped trusting one another, ceasing to lend in overnight markets, which are crucial for short-term liquidity. Simultaneously, public markets suffered immense losses, with the S&P 500 plunging by roughly 50%.

    As a result, both the banking system and public markets effectively froze, becoming illiquid and dysfunctional almost overnight. What had once been highly liquid, smoothly functioning financial ecosystems ground to a halt.

    Fast forward to today, and we are witnessing a striking evolution: the non-bank financial sector, which includes institutions like hedge funds, private equity firms, and shadow banks, has grown larger than the traditional banking sector. Similarly, private markets, such as those for private equity, private debt, and direct lending, are expanding at a much faster rate than public markets.

    This rapid growth is fundamentally altering the structure of global finance.

    Such a shift of this magnitude raises critical questions about the potential impact on future financial crises. One key issue is that risk-taking is now concentrated in markets that are inherently less liquid. Even before a liquidity crisis occurs, the financial system is building up risk in markets that, by their nature, are harder to exit quickly. So, what happens when these already illiquid markets face a shock and become even less liquid, potentially triggering a crisis?

    Consider direct lending, private credit, and private equity investments, all of which are largely concentrated in the non-bank financial sector. If the global financial system could experience a crisis of the scale seen in 2008—when liquidity dried up in highly liquid public markets—what might happen when the starting point for risk-taking is in far less liquid, private markets?

    The consequences could be even more severe and far-reaching.

    This paper explores the rapid expansion of the non-bank financial sector and the liquidity constraints that characterize private markets.

    One of the key concerns with liquidity crises is the cascading, second- and third-order effects they can generate. These effects occur when markets that are perceived to be liquid—markets where investors believe they can easily buy and sell assets—suddenly become illiquid, trapping participants and causing widespread disruptions.

    Such second and third order effects often impact investors, institutions, and sectors that would ordinarily consider themselves insulated from high-risk financial activities.

    However, the interconnectedness of the global financial ecosystem means that shocks in one part of the system can quickly reverberate through others, catching seemingly unrelated players in the fallout. This is why understanding shadow banking, private markets, and the broader non-bank financial system is critical for assessing the risks posed to the overall financial system.

    The increasing prominence of non-bank and private financial markets presents new challenges for managing liquidity and systemic risk. As the financial system becomes more dependent on these less liquid sectors, the potential for liquidity crises and their ripple effects across the global economy grows, highlighting the importance of monitoring and addressing risks in the shadow banking and private market ecosystems.

    Backdrop – The Global Financial Crisis

    No two financial crises are exactly the same, though human behavior and emotions are always central to them. Each crisis has its own unique characteristics, and as long as human nature remains constant, cycles of boom and bust are inevitable.

    Given today’s historically high equity valuations, comparisons to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008 and the Dot-Com bubble of the late 1990s are natural, and the current enthusiasm for Artificial Intelligence is reminiscent of past periods of euphoria. However, it’s important to remember that valuations are symptoms of broader market conditions, not the underlying causes. For example, during the Dutch Tulip Mania in 1636, a single black tulip was valued at several years’ salary—an indicator that something was amiss, but not the root of the issue.

    Pinpointing the exact moment when a financial crisis begins is often only possible in hindsight. Did the GFC start with the collapse of two Bear Stearns hedge funds in 2007? Was it the fall of Bear Stearns itself? Or perhaps Lehman Brothers’ collapse? Some might even argue it began with Meredith Whitney’s 2008 analysis, revealing that Citigroup couldn’t maintain its dividend. The answer depends on perspective—those directly impacted by these events would likely give different timelines.

    What’s crucial today is understanding that comparing current credit conditions to 2008 is misleading.

    All credit crises share a common feature: relaxed lending standards. Before the GFC, subprime lending accounted for around 3% of mortgage lending; by 2007, it had surged to nearly 25%. Loan standards deteriorated so badly that defaults on the first mortgage payment were rising, yet this was just one part of the problem.

    Other key players in the crisis were institutions like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the mortgage insurer MBIA. As long as these entities retained their high credit ratings, they were able to keep issuing loans to borrowers who couldn’t repay. MBIA, for example, wrote billions in liabilities while holding only $30 million in shareholder funds.

    But the real breaking point came when large banks stopped lending to each other overnight, driven by concerns about both their counterparts’ liquidity and their own over-leveraged balance sheets. Bear Stearns, for instance, had $3 of equity for every $100 in assets, a precarious 33:1 leverage ratio.

    Once regulators stepped in after the crisis, they sought to prevent a repeat by imposing stricter rules on large banks through the Dodd-Frank Act. This curtailed trading and market-making activities, bringing these financial giants into line. But as with any financial system, where there is demand, supply will find a way. This time, the non-bank financial intermediaries (NBFIs) stepped in. In just over a decade, these NBFIs grew to become the largest lenders, overtaking traditional banks.

    The lesson here is simple: credit demand doesn’t disappear—it shifts. Understanding where that demand goes is crucial in predicting how future financial risks may unfold.

    The Rapid Growth of Non-Bank Financial Institutions (NBFI)

    In addition to the increased regulatory pressure on banks after the 2008 crisis, the prolonged low-interest-rate environment has been a major catalyst for the rapid growth of non-bank financial institutions (NBFIs).

    With traditional savings accounts and government bonds offering historically low yields, investors began seeking higher returns through alternative avenues. NBFIs responded by offering a range of financial products that provided more attractive returns, such as collateralized loan obligations (CLOs), private debt, real estate investment trusts (REITs), and other investment opportunities that banks, due to regulatory constraints, did not provide.

    This shift allowed NBFIs to fill a crucial gap in the market by catering to the increasing demand for yield-driven investment products.

    As banks became more restricted in their ability to engage in riskier, high-yield activities due to post-crisis regulations like the Dodd-Frank Act, NBFIs stepped in with offerings that were not only higher-yielding but also often more complex and less transparent. The flexibility of NBFIs to operate with fewer regulatory barriers became an attractive alternative for both institutional and retail investors hungry for returns in a low-rate world.

    At the same time, technological innovation has accelerated the growth of NBFIs, especially through the rise of fintech companies. These firms have revolutionized the financial services sector by utilizing data analytics, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and digital platforms to deliver more efficient and accessible financial solutions.

    Fintech innovations such as peer-to-peer lending platforms, robo-advisors, online wealth management services, and digital payment systems have disrupted the traditional banking model. These technologies offer faster, more cost-effective services tailored to the modern consumer, enabling individuals and businesses to access credit, make investments, and manage their finances without relying on traditional banks. Fintech’s rise has made NBFIs even more prominent by providing an infrastructure that is more agile and responsive to market demands.

    However, with this agility comes a trade-off in oversight.

    Because NBFIs are subject to fewer regulatory constraints than traditional banks, they can accumulate risks that may not be visible to regulators or market participants until it’s too late. Hedge funds, for example, often engage in highly leveraged strategies, which can magnify losses during periods of market volatility. The collapse of such funds can quickly spiral into broader financial instability, as these firms are tightly interconnected with traditional banks and financial institutions through various channels of lending, derivatives, and investment portfolios.

    An example of this occurred in 2020, during the market turbulence triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Money market funds, once considered stable and low-risk investments, experienced rapid outflows as investors fled to safety, highlighting the unpredictable fragility within certain corners of the NBFI sector.

    The spillover effects of these outflows flowed throughout the broader financial system, underscoring the interconnected nature of banks and NBFIs.

    Given the systemic importance of NBFIs, policymakers and regulatory bodies, including the Federal Reserve and the Financial Stability Board (FSB), have become increasingly concerned about the potential risks posed by the growing influence of these institutions. There is ongoing debate about whether NBFIs should be subject to the same level of scrutiny and oversight as traditional banks, particularly those that have grown large enough to pose a significant threat to financial stability.

    The challenge for regulators is to strike a balance between encouraging the innovation and growth that NBFIs bring to the financial system, while ensuring that these institutions do not become the next source of systemic risk.

    However, history suggests that regulators are often reactive rather than proactive when it comes to addressing potential crises. Despite growing awareness of the risks associated with NBFIs, regulatory intervention may lag until after significant financial disruptions have already occurred.

    The rise of NBFIs represents a profound shift in the U.S. financial system. Their ability to innovate rapidly, operate with less regulatory oversight, and meet investor demand for higher-yielding products has allowed them to outpace the traditional banking sector in many respects. Yet, their growth also requires a closer examination of their role in maintaining financial stability.

    The lack of visibility into NBFIs’ balance sheets and activities poses a risk, as it makes it harder to assess their vulnerabilities and potential for triggering broader financial distress. As NBFIs continue to expand, understanding their impact on the overall financial ecosystem will be crucial in preparing for and mitigating the risks of future financial crises.

    Private Equity and Credit Markets

    Private equity and private lending have not only expanded in size but also grown in complexity, becoming critical pillars of global finance.

    These sectors have evolved in response to regulatory changes, technological advancements, and shifting investor demand, reflecting broader trends across the financial landscape.

    Initially, private equity was a niche field focused on venture capital for early-stage companies and distressed assets. It played a limited role in mainstream corporate finance. Over time, however, private equity has matured into a sophisticated industry that now employs a wide range of investment strategies, including leveraged buyouts (LBOs), growth equity, special situations, distressed investing, and infrastructure investments.

    Leveraged buyouts (LBOs), in particular, have become a defining feature of private equity. These transactions allow firms to acquire companies using a mix of equity and significant amounts of borrowed capital, with the expectation that the target company’s cash flow will be used to pay off the debt.

    The rise of LBOs has transformed how private equity firms approach value creation, using financial leverage to amplify returns while taking control of large, established companies. This strategy has proven immensely profitable, but it also introduces higher levels of risk, particularly in uncertain economic environments.

    In recent years, private equity firms have shifted from purely financial strategies, like cost-cutting and restructuring, to a more hands-on operational approach. Known as the “operational value-add” strategy, private equity firms now leverage their industry expertise and resources to drive operational improvements, digital transformation, and leadership development within their portfolio companies.

    By engaging more actively in business operations, private equity firms are unlocking new growth opportunities and generating more sustainable returns, setting themselves apart from traditional investors.

    Furthermore, private equity firms are increasingly investing in technology-driven sectors, such as software, fintech, healthcare technology, and digital infrastructure.

    The rise of tech-focused private equity funds reflects the industry’s growing recognition that innovation and data analytics are key to staying competitive in the modern economy.

    By adopting data-driven decision-making and enhancing due diligence processes, private equity firms are now better positioned to identify high-potential investments and maximize long-term growth.

    At the same time, private lending has grown into a critical component of alternative finance, providing capital to companies that may not qualify for traditional bank loans. The sector’s rapid expansion is a direct response to the regulatory tightening following the 2008 financial crisis, which limited banks’ ability to engage in riskier lending activities.

    Direct lenders—including private credit funds, hedge funds, business development companies (BDCs), and institutional investors—offer a diverse array of debt instruments, such as senior secured loans, uni-tranche loans, mezzanine financing, bridge loans, and subordinated debt. Private lenders’ flexibility and speed in underwriting and approving loans have made them an appealing option for companies looking to finance leveraged buyouts, acquisitions, expansions, or debt refinancing. Their ability to offer more customized terms than traditional banks has enabled private lending to become a significant source of financing, particularly for middle-market companies.

    The rise of private lending has also been fueled by the global search for yield in a low-interest-rate environment.

    Institutional investors, including pension funds, insurance companies, and endowments, have increasingly allocated capital to private debt as it offers attractive risk-adjusted returns with low correlation to traditional equity and fixed-income markets.

    This influx of capital has allowed private lending firms to scale their operations, even competing with traditional banks on larger, more complex transactions.

    Technological innovation has also played a transformative role in both private equity and private lending.

    In private equity, advancements in data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning have revolutionized deal sourcing, due diligence, and portfolio management. Firms now use sophisticated tools to assess market trends, predict business performance, and identify high-potential investment opportunities.

    Similarly, in private lending, the rise of digital platforms and marketplace lending has democratized access to credit, allowing businesses to secure loans through online platforms that connect borrowers directly with investors.

    This innovation has streamlined the lending process, reduced costs, and increased transparency.

    Due to their significant growth, private equity and private lending are facing increased scrutiny from regulators due to concerns over high levels of leverage, lack of transparency, and the potential buildup of systemic risks.

    In private equity, the use of leveraged buyouts has raised questions about the impact of high debt levels on the financial stability of acquired companies, especially during economic downturns. Additionally, private equity’s impact on employment and wages has drawn criticism, with some arguing that short-term profit motives can undermine long-term business sustainability.

    In private lending, the rapid expansion of direct lending and private credit funds has triggered concerns about the buildup of credit risks outside the traditional banking system. Since private lenders operate with far fewer regulatory constraints, there is less visibility into their risk exposures.

    As these institutions continue to grow and become more interconnected with traditional banks and other financial institutions, distress in the private lending market could have far-reaching implications for the broader financial system.

    The broader Non-Bank Financial Intermediaries sector, of which private equity and private lending are key components, has seen explosive growth since the 2008 financial crisis.

    With the NBFI sector now being larger than the traditional banking system in the U.S., its growth trajectory still shows no signs of slowing down.

    This rapid expansion has caught the attention of regulators such as the Financial Stability Board, who are increasingly concerned about the systemic risks posed by the shadow banking sector. Historically, tighter regulatory frameworks—like the Dodd-Frank Act—have only been enacted in response to crises, such as the 2008 meltdown, when it became clear that greater oversight was needed.

    Their rapid growth and evolving complexity present both opportunities and challenges.

    While these sectors have provided new avenues for investment and credit, their lack of transparency and regulatory oversight makes them vulnerable to systemic risks.

    The FSB acknowledges the need for tighter regulatory frameworks to mitigate these risks, but historically, such regulations tend to be reactive, implemented only after a crisis occurs.

    Legislation such as Dodd-Frank would not have been necessary had the Clinton Administration not repealed the Glass-Steagall Act in the 1990s—a law originally enacted in the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash to regulate the banking industry. The repeal removed the separation between commercial and investment banking, a move that many argue contributed to the excesses leading up to the GFC.

    Today, the NBFI sector has become an increasingly important borrower, which carries two significant implications.

    First, the line between traditional banks and non-bank financial institutions has become increasingly blurred, even though they operate under different regulatory regimes. This blurring creates ambiguity around risk oversight.

    Second, NBFIs are borrowing at a much faster rate than the overall market, raising concerns that the sector could be headed for a crisis of its own.

    The question remains: will regulators act in time, or will they once again be left playing catch-up when growth rates like these become unsustainable?

    Moreover, private equity firms and direct lenders have become vital sources of credit for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and leveraged buyouts. These areas are often considered too risky or capital-intensive for traditional banks, further underscoring the growing role that NBFIs play in providing essential credit where banks have become more risk-averse.

    As NBFIs continue to expand in influence and borrowing magnitude, the urgency for regulatory bodies to address their systemic risks grows—before another financial crisis emerges from the shadows.

    Shadow Banks and Private Markets – Illiquidity

    Liquidity risk is one of the most significant challenges faced by private equity and private lending firms, largely shaped by the illiquid nature of their investments, market dynamics, and their funding structures.

    These firms invest primarily in assets without active secondary markets, making it difficult to quickly convert investments into cash. While taking on illiquidity risk allows them to pursue higher returns, it also exposes them to considerable vulnerabilities, especially during times of financial stress or economic downturns.

    In private equity, firms acquire stakes in privately held companies or engage in leveraged buyouts (LBOs) of public companies. These investments typically involve multi-year commitments, with the goal of enhancing operations, growing value, and eventually exiting via a sale or initial public offering (IPO).

    However, when markets enter downturns, the exit strategies of private equity firms often face severe constraints.

    In such situations, potential buyers may vanish, and IPO markets may close, leaving firms unable to sell their holdings at favorable prices—or in some cases, unable to sell at all. This lack of liquidity creates significant challenges, tying up capital much longer than expected and potentially derailing planned investment cycles. Without the ability to exit their investments, private equity firms can experience a liquidity crunch, where the inability to generate cash flow limits their ability to return capital to investors, pursue new investments, or meet other financial obligations.

    Similarly, private lending firms face their own liquidity risks.

    These firms provide loans to businesses that often fall outside traditional banking channels, including middle-market companies and those with lower credit ratings. While these loans typically offer higher yields to compensate for the greater risk, they come with a major trade-off: illiquidity. Unlike publicly traded bonds, which can be quickly bought and sold on secondary markets, private loans lack a ready market, making it difficult for lenders to raise cash in times of need.

    During periods of financial distress, these risks become even more pronounced. Companies facing economic challenges may struggle to meet their repayment schedules or refinance their debt, leading to a higher rate of defaults. As defaults rise, the value of these private loans can plummet, leaving lenders exposed to significant losses. The inability to sell or restructure these illiquid loans in a timely manner compounds the liquidity risk, as lenders face mounting pressure to meet their own financial commitments.

    Moreover, the increasing use of payment-in-kind (PIK) structures, where interest payments are capitalized rather than paid in cash, adds another layer of complexity.

    While PIK arrangements provide temporary relief to borrowers by postponing cash payments, they heighten liquidity risks for lenders. Capitalizing interest rather than receiving cash inflows delays revenue and pushes the lenders deeper into illiquid positions, further limiting their ability to generate liquidity when needed. In times of economic stress, this can leave lenders with growing obligations but limited options for raising cash, intensifying financial vulnerabilities across the system.

    Of course, a key factor that exacerbates liquidity risk in both private equity and private lending is the use of leverage.

    Private equity firms often rely heavily on debt to finance acquisitions, using the acquired company’s cash flow to service that debt. When cash flows falter or interest rates rise, debt servicing becomes more difficult, potentially forcing firms to inject more capital into struggling companies or sell assets at a steep discount.

    In private lending, leverage is present both in the loan structure and in borrowing companies. If economic conditions worsen, highly leveraged borrowers may struggle to repay their loans, leading to defaults and creating further liquidity pressure for lenders who depend on regular repayments to maintain their own financial commitments.

    Another dimension of liquidity risk comes from the fund structure itself.

    Private equity and credit funds are typically closed-end, meaning investors cannot access daily liquidity like in mutual funds or ETFs. Investors commit capital for a set period, usually 5 to 10 years, expecting distributions from asset sales over time.

    However, if too many investors demand early liquidity, these funds may be forced to liquidate assets under unfavorable conditions, creating what is known as a liquidity mismatch. This problem is often magnified during economic crises, when many investors seek to withdraw funds simultaneously, putting additional pressure on these funds to generate liquidity when they are least able to.

    The COVID-19 pandemic provided a recent example of this liquidity mismatch. During the market turmoil, many investors sought to reduce their exposure to riskier assets, prompting significant pressure on private equity and credit funds to meet these demands in a difficult market. If forced into fire sales, these funds can push asset prices lower, sparking a downward spiral that further erodes investor confidence and increases redemption requests.

    Private equity and lending firms also rely on external financing from banks or other financial institutions to manage liquidity needs and execute deals. This reliance further entangles these firms with traditional banks and non-bank financial intermediaries (NBFIs), despite operating under different regulatory frameworks. In times of economic stress, banks may tighten lending conditions or withdraw credit, adding more complexity to liquidity management for these firms.

    The interconnectedness of the financial markets means that liquidity issues within private equity and lending firms can have broader implications for the entire financial system. As these sectors have grown, they have become deeply intertwined with banks, institutional investors, and other market participants. A liquidity crisis in one area can trigger wider disruptions, affecting asset prices, credit availability, and investor sentiment across the financial ecosystem.

    For the broader NBFI sector, managing liquidity risk is critical, as it directly impacts their operational stability and ability to navigate financial stress. NBFIs, which include entities such as asset managers, hedge funds, insurance companies, private equity firms, and private credit funds, provide crucial financial services without the same access to central bank liquidity or deposit bases that traditional banks rely on.

    This lack of access makes liquidity management more challenging for NBFIs, particularly because they often hold or finance illiquid assets such as private debt, real estate, or equity stakes in private companies. During periods of volatility, these assets become even more difficult to liquidate, exposing NBFIs to significant liquidity risk if they need to meet sudden cash demands.

    Many NBFIs face an additional challenge from their reliance on short-term funding to finance longer-term investments. This funding mismatch, where liabilities are short-term and assets are long-term, leaves NBFIs vulnerable when short-term funding markets tighten or become more expensive.

    For instance, hedge funds and private credit funds often depend on short-term repurchase agreements (repos) or commercial paper to finance their positions. If these markets dry up during periods of stress, NBFIs can face severe liquidity pressures that threaten their solvency.

    Investor runs or mass redemption requests are another prominent liquidity risk for NBFIs. Investment funds, such as mutual funds, ETFs, and hedge funds, allow investors to redeem their investments on short notice. In times of uncertainty, a rush of investors trying to withdraw their money can force NBFIs to sell assets quickly at depressed prices, further exacerbating market stress and undermining investor confidence.

    Given the interconnectedness of NBFIs with the broader financial system, liquidity challenges can have far-reaching effects. Many NBFIs maintain relationships with banks and other institutions through credit lines, derivatives, and other financial instruments.

    If an NBFI experiences a liquidity crisis, the impact can quickly spread to other market participants, affecting asset prices and destabilizing the broader financial system.

    The growing systemic importance of NBFIs highlights the need to carefully manage liquidity risk within this sector. As these institutions continue to take on roles traditionally filled by banks, the potential for liquidity pressures to create broader market disruptions has increased.

    While NBFIs provide essential credit and financial services, their reliance on illiquid assets and short-term funding leaves them particularly vulnerable to market shocks, making liquidity risk a central concern for the stability of the financial system.

    Conclusion

    The transformation of the global financial landscape since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has been monumental.

    The shift from traditional banking systems and public markets toward non-bank financial intermediaries (NBFIs) and private markets has significantly altered the structure and functioning of finance. As a result, NBFIs—including hedge funds, private equity firms, private credit funds, and fintech companies—have grown to occupy a larger portion of the financial ecosystem, becoming major players in corporate lending, investment management, and liquidity provision.

    One of the most profound developments has been the rapid expansion of private equity and private lending markets. These sectors have evolved to meet investor demand for higher-yielding opportunities, offering a wide range of innovative financial products such as leveraged buyouts (LBOs), private credit, and alternative debt structures. The rise of these markets is a testament to the adaptability of finance and the relentless pursuit of returns. However, it is not without significant risk—particularly in the realm of liquidity.

    Liquidity risk remains a critical challenge for private equity and private lending firms. Both industries rely on illiquid assets, such as private debt and equity stakes, which are difficult to convert into cash when needed.

    This inherent illiquidity can become a major vulnerability during periods of financial stress, when market conditions deteriorate, exit strategies are delayed, and asset sales become constrained. The complex and often opaque nature of these investments further compounds the risk, making it difficult for market participants and regulators to accurately assess the extent of exposure.

    The use of leverage amplifies these risks.

    Private equity firms, in particular, utilize significant amounts of debt to finance acquisitions, while private lenders provide loans to highly leveraged borrowers. When economic conditions worsen, the strain on both the firms and their borrowers becomes acute, leading to increased defaults, liquidity shortages, and the potential for forced asset sales. This situation is exacerbated by the “payment-in-kind” (PIK) structures that delay cash flow, creating additional stress on firms’ liquidity positions.

    Another crucial aspect of liquidity risk lies in the fund structures used by private equity and private credit firms. Closed-end funds with limited liquidity options can face a liquidity mismatch during economic downturns, as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Investors, seeking to withdraw capital, may force these funds to sell assets at unfavorable prices, sparking further market disruption. Moreover, the reliance of private equity and lending firms on external financing from traditional banks ties them closely to the regulated financial system, despite operating under different regulatory frameworks.

    As private equity, private lending, and NBFIs continue to grow in influence, so too does their interconnectedness with the broader financial system.

    This interconnectedness poses systemic risks.

    A liquidity crisis within one sector could quickly cascade across the financial landscape, leading to broader disruptions in asset prices, credit availability, and investor sentiment. The ripple effects of a crisis in private markets or shadow banking could undermine the stability of the global economy, just as the collapse of major financial institutions did during the 2008 GFC  – but with less warning due to less visibility.

    The starting point for private markets is illiquidity, unlike public markets whose starting point is liquidity. When things get illiquid, and they always do, this will pose a much bigger problem for private markets.

    Despite the significant role NBFIs play in modern finance, the regulatory framework governing these institutions lags behind their growing importance. NBFIs operate with far less oversight than traditional banks, which heightens the risks associated with leverage and illiquidity.

    While the lessons from past crises, such as the GFC, have led to some regulatory improvements, history shows that regulations often follow crises rather than prevent them.

    The question remains whether policymakers can enact tighter oversight of the NBFI sector before a liquidity-driven crisis emerges.

    In conclusion, the rise of NBFIs and private markets presents both opportunities and challenges.

    While these sectors have provided new avenues for investment and credit, their inherent illiquidity and use of leverage make them vulnerable to market shocks. The growing systemic importance of NBFIs highlights the need for a proactive regulatory approach to managing liquidity risks.

    Only by addressing these vulnerabilities can the financial system hope to mitigate the impact of future crises, ensuring that the benefits of financial innovation do not come at the cost of systemic stability.

    About

    The Macro Alchemist is an amalgamation of ideas, experiences, and investing disciplines sourced over decades from the minds of Brent Johnson and Michael Peregrine.

    Explore this latest topic further, and additional market insights from the creators, at MacroAlchemist.com

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 11/03/2024 – 12:50

  • Visualizing 'Law and (Dis)Order' Around The World In 2024
    Visualizing ‘Law and (Dis)Order’ Around The World In 2024

    Many prosperous countries are among the safest globally, highlighting the link between economic stability and physical security.

    Despite global conflicts reaching their highest levels since World War II—currently at 56—the public’s sense of safety has improved over the past decade. This rise in perceived safety is largely attributed to greater trust in law enforcement, which remains a key factor in how secure people feel, regardless of a country’s economic standing.

    This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Dorothy Neufeld, shows Law and Order Index scores by country, based on data from Gallup’s Global Safety Report 2024.

    Methodology

    The Law and Order Index reflects public perceptions of safety, based on a survey of 146,000 people from 140 countries. Respondents were asked about their perceptions on three key areas:

    • Feelings of personal safety

    • Confidence in police

    • Experience of assault and theft

    Where Are the Safest Countries in the World?

    Below, we show how each country ranks according to their Law and Order Index scores in 2024:

    Country Law and Order Index Score 2024
    🇰🇼 Kuwait 98
    🇸🇬 Singapore 95
    🇹🇯 Tajikistan 95
    🇳🇴 Norway 93
    🇪🇪 Estonia 91
    🇫🇮 Finland 91
    🇮🇸 Iceland 91
    🇽🇰 Kosovo 91
    🇱🇺 Luxembourg 91
    🇨🇭 Switzerland 91
    🇩🇰 Denmark 90
    🇦🇪 UAE 90
    🇻🇳 Vietnam 90
    🇧🇭 Bahrain 89
    🇸🇻 El Salvador 89
    🇮🇩 Indonesia 89
    🇵🇹 Portugal 89
    🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia 89
    🇸🇮 Slovenia 89
    🇺🇿 Uzbekistan 89
    🇨🇳 China 88
    🇪🇬 Egypt 88
    🇲🇪 Montenegro 88
    🇳🇱 Netherlands 88
    🇸🇪 Sweden 88
    🇹🇼 Taiwan 88
    🇦🇹 Austria 87
    🇦🇿 Azerbaijan 87
    🇯🇴 Jordan 87
    🇲🇾 Malaysia 87
    🇪🇸 Spain 87
    🇬🇪 Georgia 86
    🇩🇪 Germany 86
    🇭🇰 Hong Kong, S.A.R. 86
    🇮🇪 Ireland 86
    🇯🇵 Japan 86
    🇱🇹 Lithuania 86
    🇦🇲 Armenia 85
    🇨🇿 Czech Republic 85
    🇰🇷 South Korea 85
    🇦🇱 Albania 84
    🇫🇷 France 84
    🇮🇶 Iraq 84
    🇮🇱 Israel 84
    🇲🇹 Malta 84
    🇵🇭 Philippines 84
    🇧🇪 Belgium 83
    🇨🇦 Canada 83
    🇭🇺 Hungary 83
    🇮🇳 India 83
    🇷🇸 Serbia 83
    🇧🇦 Bosnia and Herzegovina 82
    🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan 82
    🇱🇻 Latvia 82
    🇹🇷 Northern Cyprus 82
    🇸🇰 Slovakia 82
    🇸🇴 Somalia 82
    🇹🇷 Türkiye 82
    🇬🇧 United Kingdom 82
    🇦🇺 Australia 81
    🇧🇩 Bangladesh 81
    🇭🇷 Croatia 81
    🇮🇷 Iran 81
    🇮🇹 Italy 81
    🇵🇱 Poland 81
    🇷🇺 Russian Federation 81
    🇺🇸 United States 81
    🇰🇭 Cambodia 80
    🇰🇿 Kazakhstan 80
    🇲🇺 Mauritius 80
    🇲🇩 Moldova 80
    🇲🇰 North Macedonia 79
    🇹🇿 Tanzania 79
    🇹🇭 Thailand 79
    🇧🇬 Bulgaria 78
    🇧🇫 Burkina Faso 78
    🇲🇦 Morocco 78
    🇵🇰 Pakistan 78
    🇷🇴 Romania 78
    🇨🇾 Cyprus 77
    🇬🇷 Greece 77
    🇱🇦 Lao 77
    🇲🇱 Mali 77
    🇳🇵 Nepal 77
    🇵🇦 Panama 77
    🇱🇰 Sri Lanka 77
    🇱🇾 Libya 76
    🇳🇿 New Zealand 76
    🇹🇳 Tunisia 76
    🇵🇸 State of Palestine 75
    🇺🇾 Uruguay 75
    🇧🇷 Brazil 74
    🇨🇮 Côte d’Ivoire 74
    🇬🇹 Guatemala 74
    🇨🇷 Costa Rica 73
    🇭🇳 Honduras 73
    🇱🇧 Lebanon 73
    🇺🇦 Ukraine 73
    🇧🇯 Benin 72
    🇵🇾 Paraguay 72
    🇸🇳 Senegal 72
    🇬🇭 Ghana 71
    🇲🇳 Mongolia 71
    🇲🇿 Mozambique 71
    🇹🇬 Togo 71
    🇾🇪 Yemen 71
    🇪🇹 Ethiopia 70
    🇰🇲 Comoros 69
    🇩🇴 Dominican Republic 69
    🇿🇼 Zimbabwe 69
    🇨🇱 Chile 68
    🇲🇬 Madagascar 68
    🇳🇪 Niger 68
    🇲🇽 Mexico 66
    🇻🇪 Venezuela 66
    🇦🇷 Argentina 65
    🇨🇴 Colombia 65
    🇲🇷 Mauritania 65
    🇳🇬 Nigeria 65
    🇿🇲 Zambia 65
    🇨🇲 Cameroon 64
    🇲🇲 Myanmar 64
    🇳🇦 Namibia 64
    🇬🇳 Guinea 63
    🇰🇪 Kenya 63
    🇲🇼 Malawi 63
    🇵🇪 Peru 63
    🇨🇬 Republic of the Congo 63
    🇧🇴 Bolivia 62
    🇸🇿 Eswatini 62
    🇬🇦 Gabon 62
    🇺🇬 Uganda 62
    🇧🇼 Botswana 60
    🇹🇩 Chad 60
    🇬🇲 The Gambia 59
    🇨🇩 DRC 58
    🇿🇦 South Africa 58
    🇸🇱 Sierra Leone 57
    🇪🇨 Ecuador 55
    🇱🇷 Liberia 50

    Countries with high state control had the strongest public perceptions of safety, led by Kuwait, Singapore, and Tajikistan.

    Globally, Singapore ranks as one of the safest countries in the world. This is aided by low violent crime rates, at 9 per 100,000 people as of 2021. Strict law enforcement and banning the possession of weapons likely increase feelings of safety among the public. Additionally, the government enforces capital punishment for murder and illegally possessing firearms.

    Moreover, seven of the top 10 countries were in Europe, likely due to low crime rates and high trust in government institutions. In particular, Finland has one of the highest public trust in police systems, at 87% of the population, while 74% trust the judicial system.

    By contrast, Liberia fell at the bottom of the list for the second year in a row, driven by personal experience of crime, low trust in law enforcement, and economic hardship. Concerningly, 28% of respondents were the victim of assault in the last year, while 45% had experienced theft. As one of the poorest countries worldwide, Liberia has faced years of political corruption and low access to public services, exacerbating public perceptions of safety.

    To learn more about this topic from a homicide rate perspective, check out this graphic on the world’s most dangerous countries.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 11/03/2024 – 12:15

  • How The 7 Swing States Will Count Votes And Post Election Results
    How The 7 Swing States Will Count Votes And Post Election Results

    Authored by Lawrence Wilson, Allan Stein, John Haughey, Nathan Worcester, Jackson Richman, Arjun Singh, Jeff Louderback, Joseph Lord, Stacy Robinson via The Epoch Times,

    The 2024 presidential election on Nov. 5 likely hinges on the outcome in seven battleground states.

    Battlegrounds—also called swing or purple states—are where support for Democratic and Republican candidates has been split in recent presidential elections. Current swing states are Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia.

    Most other states consistently break for the same political party and aren’t considered competitive.

    The battleground states account for 93 of the nation’s 538 electoral votes. The winner needs at least 270 electoral votes—more than half—to win.

    Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris appear nearly tied in those seven states, according to current polling averages. And all of those states currently are considered tossups that could go either way, according to Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan elections rating group.

    How long it will take for Americans to know the results in the seven swing states depends on the individual states’ laws.

    State Election Laws Differ

    Under the U.S. Constitution, elections are conducted by each state.

    Unofficial results often are reported soon after polls close, sometimes within hours. News organizations often announce presumed winners of national races within hours or by the early morning of the next day.

    But the official result takes longer for several reasons.

    State laws vary regarding when to count ballots that are mailed in, dropped off, or cast during in-person early voting.

    Though they go by different names, all seven battleground states allow some kind of absentee or mail-in voting. And all offer early in-person voting, which is now underway throughout most states.

    Some state laws allow for early ballots to be tallied before Election Day. Others prohibit counting before polls close.

    Mailed ballots received after Election Day still will be counted in some states, as long as they were postmarked by Nov. 5. The deadline for receiving them varies by state.

    Poll workers demonstrate how ballots are are received, processed, scanned, and securely stored on Election Day during a press tour by the Philadelphia City Commissioners, at the Philadelphia Election Warehouse in Philadelphia on Oct. 25, 2024. Matthew Hatcher/Getty Images

    Verifying Voters

    Counting ballots not cast in person can take more time.

    Some states—Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan—require a voter’s signature on a mail-in ballot to be verified.

    In Georgia, officials must verify that the driver’s license number or state-issued identification number included on the returned ballot matches what’s on file for the voter.

    In Wisconsin, an adult witness must sign the ballot being returned, verifying the voter filled out his or her own ballot.

    In North Carolina, a voter using an absentee ballot must sign a certificate witnessed by a notary or two adults who also provide their addresses.

    Pennsylvania requires proof of identification to be submitted when requesting an absentee or mail-in ballot. But no challenges may be made to mail-in or absentee ballots at any time based on signature analysis, the commonwealth’s rules stipulate.

    Provisional ballots can complicate the process further.

    A provisional ballot usually is used when a voter shows up at a precinct to vote and his or her name doesn’t appear on the list of registered voters.

    After being marked, a provisional ballot is slipped into a secrecy envelope and kept separate from the regular ballot box. After the polls close, that ballot will be counted only if the voter is confirmed as eligible to vote.

    But even after all ballots have been tallied, the results still aren’t official.

    Each state has a canvass period and certification process in which officials formally certify their state’s results, which usually takes place around three weeks after Election Day.

    The U.S. Election Assistance Commission lists each state’s certification deadline online.

    Voters cast their ballots during Michigan’s early voting period in Dearborn, Mich., on Oct. 29, 2024. Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

    Arizona

    Arizona has 11 electoral votes and about 4.4 million registered voters.

    Candidate Joe Biden flipped Arizona in his favor in 2020, besting incumbent Trump by fewer than 10,500 votes or 0.3 percent.

    The deadline in Arizona to register to vote in this election cycle was Oct. 7. In-person early voting began two days later and continued through 7 p.m. on Nov. 1.

    Voters on the state’s Active Early Voting List automatically receive a ballot by mail. Those can be returned by mail or at drop boxes at the state’s polling places.

    Counties can begin tabulating those ballots after early voting begins. Early ballots that come in on Election Day will be tabulated in the days immediately following the election.

    But before any are counted, election officials must compare the signature on the ballot envelope to the voter’s signature on file.

    If the signatures match, the ballot is counted immediately. If the signature is in question, election officials are to try to contact the voter to confirm the ballot’s validity. 

    Military members and other overseas citizens can cast their ballots by fax or by uploading to a secure system maintained by the secretary of state. Ballots must be received by 7 p.m. on Election Day.

    Voting in person in Arizona requires valid identification.

    Anyone who attempts to vote on Election Day has “the right to cast a ballot,” according to the Arizona secretary of state. But provisional ballots only will be counted if the county recorder can verify the voter’s eligibility.

    On Election Day, polling locations in the 15 Arizona counties close at 7 p.m. Anyone in line at that time is allowed to vote.

    After polls close, ballots are either tabulated at the polls or at a county’s central counting location.

    Arizona provides livestream viewing of county vote-tabulation rooms and publishes details online about measures used to keep electronic voting equipment secure.

    Maricopa County is home to about 2.4 million registered voters—more than 60 percent of the state’s electorate.

    A glass-enclosed room, which is open to the public for observing the verification process, is located at the electoral center in Pinal County, Ariz., on Oct. 18, 2024. Olivier Touron/AFP via Getty Images

    Maricopa counts votes at its own centralized location, the Maricopa County Tabulation and Elections Center (MCTEC) in Phoenix. The facility provides livestream viewing of signature verification, early-ballot processing, and ballot tabulation.

    Officials there warned on Oct. 22 that it may take between 10 and 13 days to tabulate the results of the Nov. 5 election.

    In the aftermath of the 2020 contest, Trump and other Republicans alleged that Arizona’s election was rife with voter fraud. Ultimately, lawsuits against Arizona and Maricopa County officials were dismissed. In 2020, county officials certified the results 17 days after Election Day.

    Election Day voters in Maricopa County usually make up 10 to 15 percent of the vote in the county. To vote in person, Arizonans must present identification, get a new ballot printed, fill it out at the voting location, and feed it into a tabulator.

    After polls close, rules direct bipartisan employees of Maricopa County to put memory drives from tabulators into tamper-proof packages and take them to MCTEC. There, workers verify they’ve been kept secure and load election results into the election server, periodically releasing updated race results.

    On Election Night, Arizona’s election results will be available online after 8 p.m. and will be updated sporadically.

    State statute requires that bipartisan appointees validate the accuracy of the vote-tabulation system through a random hand-count audit of 1 percent of early ballots and 2 percent of votes cast at a voting center.

    Canvassing begins on Nov. 11. Canvassing is the process of accounting for every ballot cast. It ensures each valid vote is included in the official results.

    During the canvass, election officials resolve discrepancies and check for accuracy before certifying the results as final.

    If a county hand-count audit is held, each recognized party on the ballot appoints representatives to participate. County officials have until Nov. 21 to certify their results.

    A statewide canvass will be conducted on Nov. 25. The deadline for Arizona to certify election results is Dec. 2.

    Election workers open envelopes and sort ballots at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center in Phoenix on Oct. 23, 2024. Olivier Touron/AFP via Getty Images

    Nevada

    Nevada has six electoral votes and nearly 2.4 million registered voters.

    All active registered voters were sent ballots by mail, unless they opted out. And most Nevadans traditionally vote early or by absentee ballot.

    In 2020, a little more than 77 percent of the state’s voters cast ballots. Only about 11 percent voted on Election Day. The rest voted early in person or returned absentee ballots.

    To be counted in Nevada, mailed ballots must be postmarked by Election Day and received by the county no later than four days later, on Nov. 9.

    Early in-person voting in Nevada began on Oct. 19 and runs through Nov. 1. On Day 1 of early voting, 42,237 Nevadans cast ballots.

    Tallies of those early ballots can’t be released before polls close at 7 p.m. on Election Day.

    Under Nevada law, “compromising the secrecy of the ballot by releasing results early is a crime,” according to Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar.

    Even on Election Day, eligible citizens can register to vote and cast a ballot in the state.

    In the hopes of speeding up results, new guidance from Aguilar instructs election officials to start tabulating early voting returns and mail ballots at 8 a.m. on Election Day.

    By 6 p.m., county clerks and registrars are to provide their first election results to the secretary of state’s office for verification.

    “This year, the country will be looking to Nevada to determine the winner of the presidential election,” Aguilar stated in a news release.

    A banner marks a voting site on the first day of in-person early voting at the Thunderbird Family Sports Complex in Las Vegas on Oct. 19, 2024. Ethan Miller/Getty Images

    “Voters deserve available results on Election Night; releasing results sooner will increase transparency, help us combat misinformation, and alleviate pressure on election officials … [and] this change is a win for our entire state.”

    Clark County—home to Las Vegas and 71 percent of Nevada voters—has 132 polling and drop box locations.

    Once county clerks and registrars confirm all polls are closed and the last voter has voted, the secretary of state’s office plans to release unofficial results online. Results are expected to be updated routinely until the final update after the canvass of the vote by the counties.

    Ballots are tabulated on voting devices and saved on removable media that are taken by two election board members to a receiving center or counting place, according to Nevada law.

    “If practical,” the law stipulates, those election board “members must be of different political parties.”

    Members of the general public are allowed to observe the delivery of those voting components in sealed containers and watch vote-counting.

    Nevada’s electronic voting system isn’t connected to a network or the Internet, and it can’t connect wirelessly. All components go through a series of tests and audits before they can be used.

    And components have a chain of custody, with “tamper evident” security seals. Access to them is limited to authorized personnel.

    City or county clerks supervise the operation of the central counting places.

    As soon as the returns from all the precincts and districts have been received by the board of county commissioners, the board shall meet and canvass the returns.

    Counties have up to 10 days to certify elections.

    In 2020, the Nevada GOP sued, citing claims of fraud. So the election was not officially finalized until the state’s Supreme Court certified the results on Nov. 24.

    This year, Nevada’s deadline to certify its election results is Nov. 26, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

    Clark County Election Department poll workers check in voters at a table as people vote at the Meadows Mall in Las Vegas on Oct. 21, 2024. Ethan Miller/Getty Images

    Wisconsin

    Wisconsin has 10 electoral votes and more than 3.5 million active registered voters.

    As of Oct. 29, more than 1.1 million absentee ballots had been sent out, and a little more than 511,000 had been returned.

    The ballots must be returned by mail or in person at a ballot drop-off location by 8 p.m. on Nov. 5, when polls close.

    Absentee ballots are counted by being put through a tabulator at polling places on Election Day. To be counted, the envelope must include a signature from the voter along with one from a witness and the witness’s address.

    They also can be processed at what’s known as a “central count” location, common in larger municipalities, such as Milwaukee.

    To vote on Election Day, Wisconsin residents must show a photo ID that meets state standards when checking in at a polling place. State law does not authorize or require a voter’s signature to be verified.

    At each polling place, there normally are seven election inspectors led by a chief inspector who is coordinated by the municipal clerk. Municipal clerks also can appoint tabulators to help count votes.

    The group of inspectors normally includes Democrats and Republicans. Under state law, the party that garnered the most votes in the territory covered by the polling place during non-presidential election years “is entitled to one more inspector than the party receiving the next largest number of votes at each polling place.”

    Wisconsin has a three-step process for certifying elections.

    After polls close and ballots have been entered into the machines for voting, poll workers convene their “board of local canvassers.” Anyone, including the media, may observe and record the proceedings from a designated area.

    Municipal clerks transmit results to Wisconsin’s 72 county clerks, who are required to post unofficial results on their websites. Wisconsin doesn’t have a statewide system for reporting unofficial results on Election Night, and there isn’t a central official website where results will be reported.

    People vote early at a polling site at the Warner Park recreation center in Madison, Wis., on Oct. 30, 2024. Scott Olson/Getty Images

    “The municipality, or the county, on behalf of the municipality, is responsible for ballot retention post-Election Day,” a spokesperson for the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission told The Epoch Times. “The two entities would need to work together to determine which option is best.”

    Counties have 14 days to transmit their certified results to the state.

    This year, that’s Nov. 19.

    The state elections commission will canvass the election and report the state’s official results by Dec. 1.

    Michigan

    Michigan has 15 electoral votes and more than 8.4 million registered voters.

    The state uses all paper ballots, which are fed into a tabulator in each precinct to calculate the results, Macomb County Clerk Anthony Forlini told The Epoch Times.

    Michigan law allows so-called “poll watchers” to be present in a designated public viewing area where they can observe the process at a polling place, early voting site, or place where absentee voter ballots are being processed. 

    Early in-person voting is open at regional sites within each county for a minimum of nine days and for up to 28 days ending on Nov. 3.

    Counties were allowed to start the early-voting period as late as Oct. 26.

    Early votes are tabulated when cast, Forlini said.

    Absentee ballots are received and stored securely by township clerks, he said.

    Workers process absentee ballots for the 2024 general election at Huntington Place in Detroit on Oct. 29, 2024. Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images

    To be counted, mailed absentee ballots must be received by the voter’s local clerk by 8 p.m. on Election Day.

    Ballots returned by military and overseas voters must be postmarked by Nov. 5 and received within six days after Election Day.

    As of Nov. 2 at 7 a.m., nearly 2.8 million voters—about 38 percent of the electorate—had voted early or returned an absentee ballot. The numbers are updated online daily by the state.

    Cities and townships can provide written notice to the secretary of state and begin processing and tabulating absentee ballots early. But totaling the vote count and generating, printing or reporting election results isn’t allowed before 8 p.m. on Election Day.

    Some counties have a centralized absentee-vote-counting center, according to Oakland County Clerk Lisa Brown. 

    Polls close at 8 p.m. on Election Day.

    At that time, precinct officials—including at least two Republicans and two Democrats—will canvass the election to ensure that the number of ballots cast matches the number of voters who received a ballot, Forlini said.

    Precinct officials then print results from the tabulator, remove the computer memory stick that was locked into the tabulator, and seal both, along with their paperwork, in three tamper-proof envelopes. 

    One is directed to the county clerk. One goes to a probate judge. And one remains with the local clerk, according to Forlini.

    Ballots are placed in sealed containers, and the serial number of the seal is recorded in the ballot book. Ballots remain with the local clerk, Forlini said.

    Precinct results are then delivered to the county clerk.

    Some counties, such as Macomb, deliver them in person. Others, including Oakland, do so by modem, using an air-gap computer that has not been connected to the internet.

    In an October interview on CBS, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson estimated that unofficial election results for her state will be available by the end of the day on Nov. 6.

    Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson speaks during a House Administration Committee hearing at the U.S. Capitol on Sept. 11, 2024. Bonnie Cash/Getty Images

    But Michigan’s results remain unofficial until the Board of State Canvassers audits them and certifies the election.

    That county-level canvass process begins the day after Election Day and must be completed within two weeks. This year, the deadline is Nov. 19.

    The Board of State Canvassers meeting is scheduled for 10 a.m. on Nov. 22. The meeting will be livestreamed.

    Under Michigan law, the state must canvass and certify the election results no later than the 20th day after the election, which falls on Nov. 25 this year.

    Pennsylvania

    Pennsylvania has 19 electoral votes and a little more than 9 million registered voters.

    Oct. 21 was the last day to register to vote in Pennsylvania. In 2020, slightly more than 76 percent of registered voters cast a ballot in the presidential election.

    The period for “early on-demand voting” differs by county. The deadline to apply for a “no-excuse mail-in” or absentee ballot was Oct. 29 at 5 p.m. Some locations accepting those ballots in person had already closed before Oct. 29.

    The deadline to return a mail-in or absentee ballot is 8 p.m. on Nov. 5. Pennsylvania law requires voters to return their own ballots. A voter with a disability may use a form to designate someone else to deliver his or her ballot.

    Unlike many other states, Pennsylvania law prevents counties from opening any ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day, when voting starts at more than 9,100 polling places.

    On the morning of Election Day, Pennsylvania poll workers can begin counting mail-in ballots.

    They’ll begin counting in-person ballots when polls close at 8 p.m. Poll workers will continue counting into the next day, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State.

    Poll watchers from political parties with candidates on the ballot can observe the counting. The locations for vote tabulation vary by county.

    In Philadelphia County, home to more than 1.1 million voters, ballot tabulation will take place at the Philadelphia City Commissioners Office & Election Warehouse, a spokesman for the Philadelphia City Commission told The Epoch Times in an email. The Philadelphia County Board of Elections, led by three city commissioners, will count the ballots, he said.

    A person drops off a mail-in ballot in Doylestown, Pa., on Oct. 15, 2024. Registered voters in Pennsylvania can vote “on demand” by requesting a mail-in or absentee ballot, filling it out, and dropping it off all in one visit to their county election office or other designated location. Hannah Beier/Getty Images

    Each county must submit the initial results to Pennsylvania’s Department of State by 3 a.m. on Nov. 6.

    Unofficial results will be published online starting after 8 p.m. on Election Night and will be updated periodically.

    The county boards will meet to canvass the election results by 9 a.m. on Nov. 8. During that process, they’ll reconcile results to ensure the number of people who voted in each precinct matches the number of ballots.

    Election officials also will check provisional ballots and process those that are eligible to be counted. By 5 p.m. on Nov. 12, counties must submit their results to the Department of State. Military-overseas ballots must be delivered by that time.

    By Nov. 25, counties must certify their election results. After reviewing them, Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt will certify election results statewide.

    By Dec. 11, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro must sign a certificate of ascertainment, appointing electors. At noon on Dec. 17, those electors meet at the Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg to vote for the new president and vice president.

    North Carolina

    North Carolina has 16 electoral votes and almost 7.8 million registered voters.

    As of Nov. 1, more than 4.1 million ballots had been cast. That’s about 53 percent.

    In-person early voting started in all 100 counties on Oct. 17 and ended on Nov. 2 at 3 p.m.

    On the first day, a record 353,166 ballots were accepted at polling sites statewide, according to preliminary North Carolina State Board of Elections data.

    That surpassed the previous first-day record set in 2020 by 1.3 percent.

    A long line of potential voters wait outside an early voting site in Asheville, N.C., on Oct. 17, 2024. Several counties affected by Hurricane Helene had a large voter turnout on the first day of early voting. Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images

    By Election Day in 2020, when the state went for Trump, about 65 percent of North Carolinians had cast their ballots.

    That was up from 62 percent of voters casting early ballots in 2016. Trump won the state’s electoral college votes that year, too.

    This year, the state’s official voter registration deadline was Oct. 11. But any voters providing acceptable photo identification will be allowed to register and vote during early voting.

    North Carolinians were able to request absentee ballots online or in person through Oct. 29. The deadline was extended until 5 p.m. on the day before Election Day for active military families or U.S. citizens outside the United States.

    North Carolina absentee voting has been adjusted since Hurricane Helene ravaged the western part of the state on Sept. 28. Now, voters from the 25 counties hit hardest by Helene’s flooding and mudslides can return absentee ballots to any early voting site during early voting.

    Those counties are Alexander, Alleghany, Ashe, Avery, Buncombe, Burke, Caldwell, Catawba, Clay, Cleveland, Gaston, Haywood, Henderson, Jackson, Lincoln, Macon, Madison, McDowell, Mitchell, Polk, Rutherford, Transylvania, Watauga, Wilkes, and Yancey.

    The State Board of Elections website offers detailed information for voters affected by the disaster.

    North Carolina also provides detailed information online about the state’s voting procedures designed to protect election integrity, including the staffing of two “judges” from at least two different political parties at each site. Additionally, the chair of each political party in a county can appoint observers to monitor early voting and Election Day voting.

    On Election Day, voters without the required photo ID still can vote by filling out a form explaining why they don’t have identification, or by casting a provisional ballot and showing valid identification at their county board of elections office by 5 p.m. on Nov. 14.

    After the polls close in North Carolina on Election Night at 7:30 p.m., the counting of all received ballots begins. Results are updated every 5 to 10 minutes online as they are approved by county boards of elections.

    But results still will be unofficial.

    A voter checks her information while checking in for early voting in Hendersonville, N.C., on Oct. 17, 2024. Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images

    The day after the election, bipartisan teams at every county board of elections will conduct an open-to-the-public hand-count audit to ensure voting equipment recorded voters’ choices accurately, according to the state board of elections.

    The state board of elections chooses two groups of ballots to count from each county, either from individual precincts or early voting sites, or all the absentee ballots cast in a county. The state tells each county which groups to count. Examined in the audit is always the top contest on the ballot—this year, the presidential race.

    Also counted are absentee by-mail ballots postmarked on or before Nov. 5 and those received from military members serving overseas. They can arrive as late as 5 p.m. on Nov. 14.

    Each county board is scheduled to certify results in open-to-the-public meetings 10 days after the election on Nov. 15. The State Board of Elections is scheduled to meet on Nov. 26 at 11 a.m. to certify the election results.

    Georgia

    Georgia has 16 electoral votes and more than 8.2 million registered voters.

    The deadline to register to vote was Oct. 7.

    Early voting began on Oct. 15 and ended on Nov. 1. And Day 1 smashed records, according to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

    More than 310,000 cast ballots, he said, up from 136,739 on the first day of voting in the 2020 presidential election and up from 134,962 on Day 1 of voting in the 2022 midterms.

    As of Nov. 2, more than 4 million ballots had been cast either in person or by mail and numbers were being updated periodically online. That’s 55.3 percent turnout.

    On Election Day, polls will be open in the state from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m.

    Voters not able to show valid identification to poll workers can vote by provisional ballot and will have three days to resolve questions of eligibility. Any voters in line by 7 p.m. still will be allowed to vote.

    Georgia’s State Election Board voted 3–2 on Sept. 20 to establish a rule requiring ballots to be hand-counted on the evening of the election after the polls close. But Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney blocked that rule on Oct. 15, saying the change was “too much, too late.”

    Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger holds up a mobile device during a news conference at the State Capitol in Atlanta on Oct. 23, 2024. Alex Wong/Getty Images

    McBurney also repeated criticisms that others, including Raffensperger, had leveled at the change—that there were no procedures in place under the new hand-count rule, and that the counting process would result in delays that would undermine voter confidence in the results.

    Absentee ballots are verified in Georgia by elections workers as they are received. Information on each ballot is cross-checked with an official photo ID on file with the state, according to a spokesman for the Georgia Secretary of State’s office.

    On Election Day, elections workers will begin tabulating early and absentee ballots at 7 a.m., the spokesman said. Absentee ballots must be received by 7 p.m. on Nov. 5 to be counted, he said.

    When the polls close, each poll station manager, accompanied by two poll officers serving as witnesses, will record the number of ballots scanned and generate three paper “tapes,” receipts with election results from each scanner. 

    One tape is affixed to the polling station’s door for public view. Another is stored in an envelope, along with the memory card with scanning machine data to be sent to the county election superintendent. The third tape is stored in an envelope along with a polling recap form. 

    All the voting data—the scanner memory card, the paper ballots, the voting machine access cards voters use to operate voting machines, and electronic poll books with voter information—are placed in sealed containers.

    These are delivered to the county election superintendent by the poll manager and at least one other poll worker or law enforcement officer.

    Georgia state law requires that results from precincts are consolidated by the county election superintendent and counted in public view.

    The rules say that the counting “shall not cease” until the results are all tabulated, barring an emergency. The results are then reported to the secretary of state.

    Lee County poll workers look for watermarks on voting paper during poll worker training in Leesburg, Ga., on Oct. 2, 2024. Becca Milfeld/AFP via Getty Images

    In 2020 a water leak, originally reported as a burst pipe, led to a counting delay of several hours at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena polling station in Fulton County.

    After the election, paper ballots are stored by the clerk of the county superior court with other county records. If there is no contest to the election they may be destroyed after two years.

    State rules require each county election board to meet by 3 p.m. the Friday after the election, this year on Nov. 8, to conduct a review of precinct returns.

    The election must be certified by 5 p.m. on the Monday after Election Day. This year, that Monday is Veterans Day. So the deadline will be extended to the next day, Nov. 12.

    But even the certification deadline is the subject of a legal battle in Georgia.

    McBurney ruled on Oct. 15 that election officials cannot refuse to certify results by the required deadline, even if they suspect fraud.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 11/03/2024 – 11:40

  • Kamala Harris Bans Virtual Guns In Her Own "Freedom Town" Fortnite Game
    Kamala Harris Bans Virtual Guns In Her Own “Freedom Town” Fortnite Game

    In the digital era video games are the most consumed form of entertainment by far, and gamers who spent their formative years playing the first generation Nintendo, Sega and Playstation are all now adults with careers, businesses, families and voting status.  A lot of them still play. 

    While surveys suggest that this demographic is made up almost evenly of men and women, the reality is that most women who do play games do so casually, focusing predominantly on less intensive and non-competitive media.  Meanwhile, the vast majority of competitive gamers are men.  “Competitive” generally means combat games featuring combat mechanics and weapons.  In other words, they are the same demographic that Democrats have been demonizing as “toxic incels” for the past ten years.   

    The 2024 election is perhaps the first election in which both major political parties are vying for the attention of gamers for votes.  Trump has done live events with popular video game streamers and the group is increasingly leaning conservative.  Let’s not forget the “Gamer Gate” controversy in which gamers were attacked relentlessly by the mainstream media for pointing out that the gaming industry had been invaded by woke activists.  In 2024 this agenda is thoroughly exposed but in those days the culture war was just a tiny spark.

    At the time the political left denied that they were infiltrating and controlling pop media.  Gamers were one of the first groups outside of the alternative media to openly challenge the political left’s subversive dominance in the entertainment space.

    True to form, even when Democrats court gamers for their affections the party does so with nefarious intentions.  Kamala Harris in an odd campaign stunt has partnered with the company behind the popular Fortnite franchise; an online third person shooter which requires players to eliminate all their competition on a map and be the last person standing.

    Harris’ map, ironically labeled “Freedom Town”, set the players on a mission to “squad up, go vote and fight for freedom.”  However, the combat game lacks one important item in Freedom Town: Guns.

    That’s right, Harris banned guns in her own virtual video game world.  Players no longer fight competitively; rather, they scour a city covered in Kamala propaganda while they collect items like lost Harris campaign posters “scattered by the wind.”  Hopefully the game is a portent of the Harris campaign being scattered to the winds instead of a representation of the world to come.

    If Harris is banning virtual guns in her video game, what would she do with real guns in the real world as President…?

    Not surprisingly, the gaming gimmick was a complete failure.  The number of players participating?  A maximum of 383.  To put this embarrassment in perspective, Fortnite has over 400 million registered players worldwide and the average established map has over 300,000 participants in a 24 hour period.  Harris couldn’t even break 400 players in 24 hours.

    The amount of money put into the stunt must have been sizeable.  Securing a partnership with Fortnite, paying for the programmers that created the special map, renting the server space, and the background music is a track from Megan Thee Stallion.  All for nothing.  

    The woke movement’s relentless mission to inject progressive ideology and LGBT messaging into video games has not helped to endear gamers to Democrats – It’s done the opposite.  A majority of these video games are now imploding, with development studios shutting down after  losing hundreds of millions of dollars on AAA titles.  Get woke, go broke.

    Kamala Harris may end up being the ultimate get woke go broke allegory if she loses the election on November 5th.  It’s difficult to find a demographic (beyond childless cat ladies and Hollywood celebrities) that actually respects the candidate.  Gamers have shown she’s certainly not popular with them.            

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 11/03/2024 – 11:05

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Nov 03

Today’s News 3rd November 2024

  • Portents Of Chaos
    Portents Of Chaos

    Authored by Patrick Lawrence via Consortium News,

    At this moment it is hard to locate the limit of what either of the two main political parties in the U.S. will do to avoid losing…

    Uh-oh. The New York Times is picking up its familiar theme now that the Nov. 5 elections are but a few days out front: Those mal-intended foreigners are again “sowing discord and chaos in hopes of discrediting American democracy,” it reported in a piece published Tuesday. 

    The Beelzebubs haunting this political season, when everything would otherwise be orderly and altogether copacetic among Americans, are Russia, China and Iran.

    Why can’t this year’s version of the old, reliable “Axis of Evil” leave us alone with our “democratic process,” the one the rest of the world envies and resents? Troublemakers, with all their “sowing.” You could probably call them “garbage” and get away with it. 

    Uh-oh. We’re already reading of tampered voter-registration forms and forged applications to vote by mail in two districts in Pennsylvania, the populous state where the results in 2020 could not have been blurrier and whose 19 Electoral College votes were decisive in getting Joe Biden into the White House last time around.

    But not to worry. In a delightful reprise of one of the truly memorable phrases to come down to us from the 1960s, an election commissioner in one of the districts where officials uncovered the malfeasance tells us, “The system worked.” 

    I think I understand.  

    I tell you, whenever I read of people in other countries sowing anything, whether it is doubt or chaos or disinformation, and at this point even pumpkin seeds, it always turns out the same. This word “sowing” has been a favorite in the mainstream press since 2016, when we read daily — and of this we were to have no doubt — the Rrrrrussians were “interfering in our elections.”  

    Since then, everytime I read of someone sowing something it sows more doubt in my mind — more than I already harbored — that one can take our electoral system, as we have it in the 21st century, the slightest bit seriously.  

    This is to say nothing of putting one’s name on it behind a little green curtain in a voting booth.

    On the one hand you have the Times, which has diminished itself over the past eight years to little more than the Democrats’ house organ, already preparing to suggest that the malign enemies of American democracy corrupted the elections. Believe me, you will hear this if Kamala Harris loses but not if she wins.  

    On the other hand, you have early but clear cases of attempted vote-rigging and local election officials waving these cases off as nothing at all to fret about. It is interesting to consider why said officials profess so cavalier a view.  

    I have thought for months that the 2024 elections, discord already in plentiful supply, could easily tip over into a degree of civil chaos beyond anything so far recorded in the American story. Just such a day of reckoning now seems to beckon. 

    Neither of the main parties appears prepared to lose. At this moment it is hard to locate the limit of what either party will do to avoid losing. 

    Remnants of Democracy

    All by our lonesome selves, it seems to me, we Americans have made a mess of the remnants of our democracy these past eight years.

    This is not to suggest American politics has ever been other than, let’s say, in the way of a barnyard. In this, neither of the major parties, whose function since the mid–19th century has been to circumscribe acceptable politics and policy, is free of responsibility. 

    But in the matter of responsibility I assign more to the Democrats than to the G.O.P. It was Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump eight Novembers ago that confirmed America’s swift drift into post-democracy.

    The Democrats have never recovered from the disruption in 2016 of their dream that history was about to end and their idea of the liberal ethos would eternally prevail, all alternatives withering away the way Marx and Engels thought the communist state would.

    Anti-Trump protest in Washington, D.C., Nov. 12, 2016. (Ted Eytan/Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

    I have long detected that American liberalism has at its core a vein of illiberalism that is essential to its character.

    America is simply not, to put this point another way, a tolerant nation. It does not encourage its people to think: It requires them to conform. Alexis de Tocqueville saw this coming two centuries ago in the two volumes of Democracy in America. 

    We are now, post–Clinton, treated to the spectacle of full-dress liberal authoritarianism, and if you do not like the term there are others. De Tocqueville, prescient man, called it “soft despotism.” I’ve always favored “apple-pie authoritarianism.”

    Institutional Corruptions

    There is a feature of this awful manifestation among NPR–addicted, kale-eating liberals that distinguishes our time as especially discouraging as to the future.

    This is their wanton corruption of some of the institutions without which even a semblance of democratic government is impossible. I am thinking particularly of three that figure in the pre-election picture.

    One is the judiciary — federal, state, county, local. Beginning with the Mueller investigation, the in-plain-sight corruption of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the ridiculous court cases brought against Donald Trump, Attorney–General Merrick Garland’s subversion of the Justice Department to protect President Joe Biden as his son’s influence-mongering schemes came to light — all this in behalf of the Democrats:

    Well, as I learned during my days as a correspondent abroad, when the judicial system goes down, the path to failed-state status opens.  

    Two is the intelligence apparatus and the military. Intel, from the days of James Clapper and John Brennan, has lined up unequivocally behind the Democrats ever since the brash real-estate man from New York foolishly assumed he could “drain the swamp” — his declaration that he would take on the Deep State.

    U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, Feb. 18, 2017. (U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

    As to the military, the generals thought nothing of declaring eight years ago, at the Democrats’ convention in Philadelphia and in open letters published in the Times, that they would refuse the commander-in-chief’s orders were Trump to win and attempt a new détente with Russia and an end to “the forever wars.” 

    Yes, you’ve got John Kelly, who served in Trump’s cabinet and then as his chief of staff, suddenly calling Trump a fascist — the Democrats’ favorite epithet these past weeks. Doesn’t anyone want to know why Kelly worked closely with a man he considered a fascist? Doesn’t it occur to anyone — it must, surely — that Kelly, a retired Marine general, says these things to serve the party he trusts to keep the wars going and the tax dollars flowing?  

    A paradox here, more apparent than real: John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, James Mattis, Mark Esper, and various others like them did not wear uniforms when they served in the Trump administration, but they never took them off. 

    If this election is about anything — apart from the price of groceries, of course — it is about the national-security state’s place in American politics. In our post–2016 era, intel and the military are perfectly welcome to operate openly, unabashedly, in the American political process — this because the Democratic Party gives them a wide berth to do so. 

    Deep-State Democracy

    Now, do you think the Deep State gives a toot about democratic process? Ask the Italians and the Greeks, the Iranians and the Guatemalans, the Japanese, the South Koreans and the Indonesians, the Chileans and the Venezuelans, and… and damn, ask most of humanity at this point. As others have pointed out since the Russiagate days, what the spooks have long done abroad now visits itself upon the American polity. 

    The obvious follow-on: Should we be concerned as to whether the Democrats and these institutional allies would let this election go to Trump just by the vote count? 

    I am.

    As to the third of the institutions that have corrupted themselves in the Democratic Party cause, may I let mainstream media speak for themselves? Apart from independent publications such as the one you are reading, the intent of American media is no longer to inform the public but to protect the institutions they purport to report upon from the public gaze.   

    Trump’s “a threat to American democracy,” Harris its savior: It’s a bust at this point. The New York Times has made itself a re-enactment of The New York Times. The Washington Post under the ownership of Jeff Bezos and this ghastly new chief executive of his, Will Lewis, cannot manage, and doesn’t seem to attempt, even a re-enactment. 

    I do not seem to be the only one ill-at-ease at the prospect of mayhem to come after midnight Nov. 5. The Post published a survey Wednesday, conducted in the first half of October, indicating that among voters in the states where the election could go either way, 57 percent are nervous that Trump supporters won’t accept defeat and may resort to violence, while a third of those surveyed think Harris supporters will take it to the street, as they used to say, if the candidate of joy and vibes loses.

    Harris campaigning in Glendale, Ariz., on Aug. 9. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

    The numbers skewed even more dramatically when The Post asked Democrats about Trump’s people and Trump’s people about Democrats. In a survey The Associated Press published Thursday, you have 70 percent of those polled saying they are “anxious and frustrated.”

    Join the party. I cannot, myself, take either candidate seriously. I take seriously the thought that a lot of people will not take the result seriously and a mess will ensue. 

    And in this I worry more about Democrats resorting to corrupt conduct than I do the Republicans. Why this, you may ask.

    To begin with, I do not at all like the smell of that Times piece quoted at the top of this column. It reeks too strongly of the scene in 2016, when, on either side of the election, the Democrats and all manner of repellent “progressives” conjured of thin air a frenzy of Russophobia from which American has yet to recover. 

    Steven Lee Myers, previously of the Times’s Moscow bureau, is now some kind of “disinformation” reporter and led the work on the piece in question. And all is as it was for four years after Clinton’s defeat: no shred of independent reporting or sourcing in anything under his byline. Intel people and other unnamed officials feed this guy like a foie gras farmer feeds his geese. 

    This is all you get from our Stevie. And I don’t see anyone trying on this disgraceful stuff in behalf of the Trump campaign. I have suggested my conclusions.

    But Jan. 6, Jan. 6, Jan 6! First of all, what happened on Jan. 6 does not rise to “coup” or “insurrection.” It was a protest, with much to suggest the presence of agents provocateurs. And second, there seems to me there was plenty to protest by that point. 

    Straight off the top, there was the liberal authoritarians’ perfectly legible collusion to suppress the contents of Hunter Biden’s vastly incriminating laptop computer three weeks before the vote, to the point of blanket censorship of the New York Post, the oldest newspaper in America. If this was not open-and-shut election interference someone will have to tell me what constitutes it.

    On less certain ground, I have read of many election officials in many states, Pennsylvania high among them, certifying the 2020 results. But a truly convincing, here-are-the-numbers case for these results in states such as Pennsylvania is hard to come by. You never read of Trump’s claims that the Pennsylvania results were rigged. You read only and always of Trump’s “false claims” or “discredited claims” or “disproven claims” to the point you start thinking of Lady Macbeth and how she doth protest too much, methinks.   

    Trump addressing The Believers religious group, in July in West Palm Beach, Fla. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

    I recall, very imperfectly, seeing research purportedly done by a computer scientist at one of the universities in Philadelphia. Just after the election he or she put out a series of screenshots on social media, time-stamped to the second, that appeared to show the results in a significant number of districts changing all at once and by enough to give Biden a swift come-from-behind victory by a margin of slightly more than 1 percent.  

    Genuine or a put-up job, this research? Credible or not credible? I would not dream of judging it, but this is not my point. My point is that there should be no cause to doubt such results as these and, eight years on, as I read it there still is. 

    Doubt recreates itself, as you may have noticed, like some organism that regenerates. So we come to the Times’ report Tuesday of attempted voter fraud in Lancaster and York counties, two populous areas of, once again, Pennsylvania.

    Campbell Roberston’s piece has just about everything, starting with a headline that has Trump “sowing doubt.” He, Trump, is even “using reports about suspicious voter registrations to cast the election as already flawed.” 

    What a cad. What a scoundrel. What a… fascist tyrant. 

    It seems that some thousands of forged or otherwise fraudulent voter registration forms and requests to vote by mail arrived recently in the offices of the Lancaster and York election authorities.

    So far as one can make out, some official or officials in each county brought these “large batches” of falsified government documents to light. Whereupon other officials in each case smothered this discovery as if suffocating the matter with a pillow. 

    Alice Yoder, an election commissioner in Lancaster, put it best, or anyway most preposterously.

    “The system worked,” saith Ms. Yoder.

    “We caught this.”

    I honestly had to read this quotation several times to believe anyone would say this. 

    I would like to know a few things about this case that we are not told. 

    The batches of forgeries “were submitted by out-of-state canvassing groups,” Robertson reports, groups that remain unidentified.

    One, what are canvassing groups and what do they do in whose behalf?

    Two, what were such groups doing in Lancaster and York counties if they are not from Pennsylvania?

    Three, if they are not from Pennsylvania, what were they doing with Pennsylvania election forms that were purportedly genuine?

    Just two more questions.

    Four, why are the election officials in these two counties not naming the guilty canvassing organizations? This seems to me very troubling. 

    And five, what are the party affiliations or otherwise the voting preferences of officials who will not identify the offending organizations and say things such as “The system worked.”

    There are no grounds to draw any conclusions whatsoever on this point, given we know absolutely nothing about these people, but I went to the trouble of looking up Ms. Yoder’s c.v. 

    There is a bit of the sociologist in all of us, well– or underdeveloped as the case may be. Journalists often make use of their endowments in this line.

    Drawing on mine, I would speculate that Ms. Yoder’s c.v., after a careful peruse, is highly suggestive of a Kamala Harris voter, perhaps even of a liberal authoritarian. 

    Could be dead right, could be dead wrong. I cannot go beyond more or less idle speculation.

    And not more or less idle doubt as Nov. 5 draws close.

    *  *  *

     

    The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News or ZeroHedge.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 11/02/2024 – 23:20

  • Israeli Commandos Snatch 'Hezbollah Naval Official' In Daring Beach Raid
    Israeli Commandos Snatch ‘Hezbollah Naval Official’ In Daring Beach Raid

    Regional media reports and government statements have confirmed that Israeli naval forces have captured an alleged senior Hezbollah official in a daring raid launched from the Mediterranean sea on Friday.

    The man described as a high-ranking Hezbollah operative has been identified as Imad Amhaz. Commandos on speed boats reportedly landed on a Lebanese beach and snatched him from a cabin in the early morning hours. 

    “A sizable force, suspected to be Israeli, stealthily touched down on the shores of Batroun in northern Lebanon, roughly 87 miles from the Israeli border, with the intent of snatching a high-ranking terrorist operative from his hideaway in a cabin,” Israel’s YNet news details, adding that the raid involved 25 Israeli elite troops.

    Imad Amhaz, an alleged Hezbollah naval official, via social media

    Lebanese national broadcaster National News agency separately described that an “unidentified military force” carried out a “sea landing” at a beach at Batroun, south of Tripoli.

    The commando group “went with all its weapons and equipment to a chalet near the beach, kidnapping a Lebanese man… and sailing away into the open sea on a speedboat,” NNA added.

    Lebanese media is only saying that the man that was nabbed was a “student” of a maritime institute in Lebanon. According to more from eyewitnesses of the strange episode:

    He was taken from student housing near the Batroun institute, but was a resident of the Shia-majority town of Qmatiyeh further south, said the acquaintance who spoke on the condition of anonymity for security concerns.

    He was completing courses to become a sea captain, the source told AFP, adding that the man was in his thirties and was well known by the teaching staff at the center.

    But the IDF has called the man a “significant source of knowledge” for Hezbollah’s naval force. It’s expected that Amhaz will be detained and interrogated in a military prison.

    “He was taken to Israel to be questioned by the Military Intelligence Directorate’s Unit 504 — which specializes in HUMINT, or human intelligence — on Hezbollah’s naval operations,” Times of Israel subsequently reported.

    UN peacekeeping forces in South Lebanon have entered the controversy, amid conflicting reports they may have prevented the Lebanese armed forces from responding to the raid (which UNIFIL firmly denies) on Lebanon’s sovereign territory and its citizens:

    Lebanese journalist Hasan Illaik, who first reported on the raid, cited anonymous Lebanese military officials as saying the operation was apparently carried out in coordination with the German Navy operating within UNIFIL forces, to prevent the Lebanese Navy from interfering.

    Meanwhile, some Lebanese sources say that the kidnapped man is innocent, and not affiliated with Hezbollah, and that the IDF kidnapped a regular Lebanese citizen. Video also captured the raid:

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

    Israel’s military has further said that “The operative has been transferred to Israeli territory and is currently being investigated.”

    The Associated Press has acknowledged that the occupation of the kidnapped man is murky and uncertain, amid continuing speculation: “Three Lebanese judicial officials told AP the incident occurred at dawn Friday, adding that the captain might have links with Hezbollah.” The report added: “The officials said an investigation is looking into the man is linked to Hezbollah or working for an Israeli spy agency and an Israeli force came to rescue him.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 11/02/2024 – 22:45

  • If Trump Wins…
    If Trump Wins…

    Authored by Bret Swanson via The Brownstone Institute,

    Trump enjoys the momentum.

    Four of the most recent major national polls show him up 2 to 3%, while Democratic-friendly outlets like the New York Times and CNN both show a TIE race in their final surveys.

    The 2016 and 2020 elections were razor close even though Clinton (5%) and Biden (8%) had solid polling leads at this point.

    We need to contemplate a Trump win not only in the electoral college but also in the popular vote.

    Here are some thoughts:

    1. JD Vance ascendant, obviously. Big implications for the Republican trajectory. 

    2. Will Trump replace Fed chairman Jay Powell? Or merely jawbone for a change in policy? In a new CNBC interview, former Fed governor Kevin Warsh argues that the Fed has juiced both the stock market and inflation. Would reducing inflation, which Trump has promised, automatically therefore lead to a stock market correction and economic slowdown? Not necessarily. If Trump unleashes productive economic activity and Congress ends the fiscal blowout, the Fed could normalize monetary policy without causing a major economic slump.

    3. Will Trump impose the broad and deep tariffs he proposed? Or will he mostly threaten them as a bargaining tool with China? I’m betting on some of the former but more of the latter. We notice, however, Trump allies are floating a trial balloon to replace income taxes with tariffs. As impractical and improbable as that may be, we’re glad to see the mention of radical tax reform reemerge after too long an absence from the national discussion.

    4. How will he organize the “deportation” of illegal migrants? In the best case, it will be difficult. There will be scuffles and chases. Critics will charge the new Administration as cruel and worse. How much stomach will Republicans have for a messy process? One idea would be to offer a “reverse amnesty” – if you leave peacefully and agree not to return illegally, we will forgive your previous illegal entry(s) and minor violations. This would incentivize self-identification and quiet departure. Plus it would help authorities track those leaving. Would migrant departures truly hit the economy, as critics charge? We doubt large effects. Substantial native populations are still underemployed or absent from the workforce. 

    5. We should expect a major retrenchment of regulatory intrusions across the economy – from energy to crypto. Combined with recent Supreme Court action, such as the Chevron reversal, and assisted by the Elon Musk’s substance and narrative, it could be a regulatory renaissance. Extension of the 2017 tax cuts also becomes far more likely.

    6. Trump has never worried much about debt, deficits, or spending. But he’s tapped Elon Musk as government efficiency czar. It’s an orthogonal approach to spending reform instead of the traditional (and unsuccessful) Paul Ryan playbook. Can this good cop-bad cop duo at the very least return out-of-control outlays to a pre-Covid path? Can they at least cancel purely kleptocratic programs, such as the $370-billion Green Energy slush funds? Might they go even further – leveraging the unpopular spending explosion and resulting inflation to achieve more revolutionary effects on government spending and reach? Or will the powerful and perennial forces of government expansion win yet again, sustaining a one-way ratchet not even Elon can defeat? 

    7. What if the economy turns south? One catalyst might be the gigantic unrealized bond losses on bank balance sheets; another might be commercial real estate collapse. Although reported GDP growth has been okay, the inflation hangover is helping Trump win on the economy. But many believe the post-pandemic economic expansion is merely a sugar-high and has already lasted longer than expected. A downturn early in Trump’s term could complicate many of his plans. 

    8. How will NATO and its transatlantic network respond? Or more generally, what will the neocon and neoliberal hawks, concentrated in DC and the media, but little loved otherwise, do? Does this item from Anne Applebaum — arguing Trump resembles Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin all rolled into one — portend continued all-out war on prudent foreign policy? Or will they adopt a more sophisticated approach? If the neocons move wholesale and formally (back) into the Democratic fold, how long will the coalition of wokes and militarists hold? On the economic front, Europe, already underperforming vis-a-vis the US, will fall even further behind without big changes. Reformers should gain at the expense of the transatlantic WEF-style bureaucrats. 

    9. Can Trump avoid another internal sabotage of his Administration? Before then, if the election results are tight, will the Democrats seek to complicate or even block his inauguration? Can he win approval for his appointees in the Senate? Can he clean house across the vast public agencies? How long will it take to recruit, train, and reinvigorate talented military leadership, which we chased away in recent years? And how will Trump counter – and avoid overreacting to – taunts, riots, unrest, and lawfare, designed to bolster the case he’s an authoritarian? 

    10. Will the Democrats reorient toward the center, a la Bill Clinton? Or will the blinding hatred of Trump fuel yet more radicalism? Orthodox political thinking suggests a moderation. Especially if Trump wins the popular vote, or comes close, pragmatic Democrats will counsel a reformation. James Carville, for example, already complains that his party careened recklessly away from male voters. And Trump’s apparent pickups among Black and Latino voters complicate the Democrats’ longstanding identity-focused strategy. Other incentives might push toward continued belligerence and extreme wokeness, however, and thus an intra-party war. 

    11. Will the half of the country which inexplicably retains any confidence in the legacy media at least begin rethinking its information diet and filters? Or has the infowarp inflicted permanent damage?

    12. Will big business, which shifted hard toward Democrats over the last 15 years, recalibrate toward the GOP? Parts of Silicon Valley over the last year began a reorientation — e.g. Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and before them, Peter Thiel in 2016. But those are the entrepreneurs. In the receding past, businesses large and small generally lined up against government overreach. Then Big Business and Big Government merged. Now, a chief divide is between politically-enmeshed bureaucratic businesses and entrepreneurial ones. Does the GOP even want many of the big guys back? The GOP’s new alignment with “Little Tech” is an exciting development, especially after being shut out of Silicon Valley for the last two decades. 

    13. Industry winners: traditional energy, nuclear energy, Little Tech. Industry losers: Green Energy, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Food. Individual winners: X (nee Twitter), Elon Musk, RFK, Jr. 

    14. How will the Censorship Industrial Complex react? A Trump win will pose both a symbolic and operational blow to governmental, non-governmental, old media, and new media outlets determined to craft and control facts and narratives. It will complicate their mission, funding, and organizational web. Will they persist in their “mis/disinformation” framing and their badgering of old media and social media companies to moderate content aggressively? Or will they devise a new strategy? A.I. is pretty clearly the next frontier in the information wars. How will those who propagandize and rewire human minds attempt to program and prewire artificial ones?

    15. How will Trump integrate RFK, Jr. and his movement? Will RFK, Jr. achieve real influence, especially on health issues? Big Pharma and Big Public Health will wage a holy war to block reforms in general and accountability for Covid mistakes in particular. 

    16. Trump has promised to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. On one hand, it should be easy. Despite what you hear from DC media and think tanks, Ukraine is losing badly. Hundreds of thousands are dead, and its military is depleted and faltering. Ukraine should want a deal quickly, before it loses yet more people and territory. Russia, meanwhile, always said it wants a deal, even before the war started, focusing on Ukrainian neutrality. Why Ukrainian neutrality should bother the US was always a mystery. And yet even critics of the West’s support for Ukraine, who want an agreement, think it will be difficult to achieve. The Western foreign policy establishment has invested too much credibility and emotion. It will charge “appeasement” and “betrayal” and make any deal difficult for Trump. Russia, meanwhile, has secured so much territory and now has Odessa and Kharkiv in its sights. Putin will not be eager to accept a deal he would have taken in 2021 or before. The far better path for all involved was a pre-war agreement, or the one negotiated but scuttled in April 2022. 

    17. What if A.I. launches a new productivity boom, enabled by an agenda of energy abundance, including a nuclear power revival? The economic tailwinds could remake politics even more than we currently see.

    18. Can Trump, having run and won his last campaign, consolidate gains by reaching out and uniting the portions of the country willing to take an extended hand?

    Republished from the author’s Substack

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 11/02/2024 – 22:10

  • Witness In Diddy Case Claims To Have Sex Tapes With 'Intoxicated' Celebrities And Minors
    Witness In Diddy Case Claims To Have Sex Tapes With ‘Intoxicated’ Celebrities And Minors

    Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

    A witness in the ongoing Sean “Diddy” Combs case says that he has several sex tapes that allegedly feature “intoxicated” and “victimized” celebrities, including two who were underage.

    During an interview with NewsNation, Courtney Burgess, who testified against Combs before a grand jury in Manhattan, claimed that he has in his possession flash drives featuring videos of eight celebrities with Diddy.

    Burgess said the flash drives originally belonged to Kim Porter, an ex-girlfriend of Diddy.

    Explaining his relationship with Diddy, Burgess said “I’ve been knowing him for 35 years. I think we probably entered into the music business at the same time.”

    Burgess said he is willing to turn over eleven flash drives to the court, claiming that the videos on them feature six well known males and two celebrity females.

    Burgess said “I think all, to be honest — all,” those in the tapes seemed “victimized” and “intoxicated.”

    Burgess also claimed that the flash drives include a manuscript from Porter that outlines Combs’ alleged crimes.

    Burgess’s attorney, Ariel Mitchell, was also featured in the interview, and claimed that the federal government sent U.S. Marshals to serve Burgess a subpoena for the flash drives.

    As we have previously highlighted, a former bodyguard of Combs has claimed that the rapper has footage of not only celebrities, but elite politicians and state figures engaging in compromising activities.

    The bodyguard, Gene Deal, says the secret footage was captured at Diddy’s various so called “freak off” parties, which are claimed to have involved victims being forced to engage in sex acts while Combs masturbated and recorded the events.

    “I don’t think it’s only celebrities gonna be shook. He had politicians in there, he had princes in there. He also had a couple of preachers in there,” said Deal, adding that “he had every room bugged.”

    One alleged victim of Combs has filed a lawsuit claiming that the rapper raped her when she was 13 years old while a male and female celebrity pair watched and joined in.

    The suit claims that the male celebrity also raped her while the female and Diddy observed.

    Combs has been denied bail twice on charges of racketeering, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution.

    He remains in custody at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, and has repeatedly denied all allegations against him.

    * * *

    Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 11/02/2024 – 21:00

  • Leftists Predict Hysterical Dystopian Future Ruled By JD Vance And An Immortal Elon Musk
    Leftists Predict Hysterical Dystopian Future Ruled By JD Vance And An Immortal Elon Musk

    The secret to understanding the average progressive mind is to first realize that everything they do revolves around a deeply ingrained fantasy world in which they are rebels; righteous underdogs fighting against “the system” or “the patriarchy.”  Leftists cannot function within their collectivist ideology without first creating a fascist bogeyman to revolt against.  If they were to ever realize that they are, in fact, the establishment and the authoritarians, their entire world view would collapse.

    This is why you will continue to see content like the election propaganda video below, no matter how ridiculous the premise might be.  Leftist activists create these narratives, not because they are necessarily convincing to most people, but because they need to convince themselves that they are still the good guys. 

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

    JD Vance as dictator for life?  Conservatives banning contraception?  Elon Musk as an immortal techno god who spies on the masses using X and AI?  Global warming destroying the planet and creating a Mad Max future in which the homeless are forced into concentration camps?  The only thing missing is the forced birthing ceremonies from The Handmaid’s Tale.

    The video credits cite a handful of progressive NGOs as references for donations (including Vote.org) but little on who specifically made it.  The relevant issue is the insight this gives into the insanity of left activists.  They cling to so many assumptions they have been proven wrong about time after time (global warming), and they also imagine a world in which conservatives are the elites searching for immortality.  They seem to be projecting the habits and hobbies of the very globalists that fund leftist groups today.  

    One could argue that perhaps this is gaslighting – They’re accusing conservatives of scheming to rule the world when they are the people that actually want control.  That could be, but the conspiracy theories surrounding “Project 2025” suggest a Q-Anon level of delusion going on that feeds directly into bizarre narratives like those in the video.  Leftists have to believe they’re fighting the good fight, even though they’re actually useful idiots for the establishment. 

    This desperate need to take on the role of “freedom fighter” doesn’t mesh very well with reality.  Keep in mind, for nearly two decades progressives have enjoyed expanding political and social power, with nearly every western government, every major NGO, every corporation, every legacy media outlet and every Big Tech platform dominated by woke ideology.  From ESG to DEI to LGBTQ+ and beyond, Americans and much of the west have been endlessly bombarded from every angle by leftist propaganda.  

    Their war on conservative principles and individual freedom nearly came to a crescendo during the covid pandemic when they claimed the power to take away people’s access to the economy if they refused to accept an experimental vaccine and follow the mandates to the letter.  Surveys showed a disturbing number of Democrats supported the outright destruction of constitutional freedoms in the name of forcing people to adhere to medical mandates based entirely on lies.

    Leftists also supported the widespread censorship of conservative voices on everything from the covid vaccine, to the lockdowns, to climate change, to Hunter Biden’s laptop.  This censorship was spearheaded by the Biden Administration acting in violation of the constitution as they worked closely with Big Tech companies to shut down dissent.

    They aren’t fighting “the man”, they are the man.  Ridiculous AI generated political videos like the one above are not going to change that.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 11/02/2024 – 20:25

  • Halloween Is Over, But The Election Litigation Is Getting Really Scary
    Halloween Is Over, But The Election Litigation Is Getting Really Scary

    Authored by Jonathan Turley,

    “Something wicked this way comes.” Those words from William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” capture a certain dread that takes hold of some of us tasked with covering the legal elements of the presidential election. 

    Just as Halloween ended, things in the days leading into Election Day have begun to get…well, spooky. Call it election jitters, but some of us have been here before. 

    More than 200 cases have been filed around the country before the election this year. In the last week, worrisome elements have begun to pop up in various swing states.

    Over the last couple of decades, I have covered presidential elections for three networks (as I will do for Fox News in this election). The lead-up to elections always includes a flurry of lawsuits. As the voting margin shrinks between the parties, the number of lawyers increases.

    Some lawsuits are important efforts to make changes to remove barriers for voters or the counting of early balloting. For example, on Friday an emergency lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union secured an order for election officials in Cobb County, Ga., to overnight mail ballots to roughly 3,000 citizens and to guarantee that they be counted after a snafu by election officials. Other lawsuits are what I call “placeholders,” where campaigns establish areas of concern to be able to reference later in any specific challenges on or after Election Day.

    The Supreme Court has already intervened to stop an effort by the Biden-Harris administration to force Virginia to put people back on the voting rolls who had identified themselves as non-citizens. It is a crime for non-citizens to vote. Although Virginia allows any mistaken information to be corrected (and also allows for challenged voters to file provisional ballots), lower courts ordered Virginia to enable people to vote who had said they were not citizens.

    Critics charge that the case is the continuation of the administration’s unrelenting attacks on voter identification and proof of citizenship laws, even though 84 percent of Americans support such laws. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom and Democratic legislators actually made it a crime for any poll worker to ask voters for identification.

    Some of these early challenges are welcomed, in the sense that we still have time to work out problems. Courts are notoriously reluctant to intervene after an election with the limited time before the certification of votes. They often refuse challengers access to vital election board information or bar cases as speculative or litigants as lacking in standing. This fuels the public’s distrust of the integrity of the election.

    Some challenges potentially involve a high number of votes in swing states. For example, in North Carolina, the Republican National Committee is suing the North Carolina State Board of Elections over 225,000 people who may not have been appropriately registered because that state failed to require a driver’s license or partial Social Security number.

    In Arizona, a judge had to order Democratic Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes to release the names of roughly 218,000 voters who may have been allowed to register without the proof of citizenship required by state law.

    There is also a growing concern over possible systemic voting registration violations in multiple districts in Pennsylvania. Initially, 2,500 forms were marked as suspicious for possible false names, duplicative handwriting or unverifiable or incorrect identifying information. Lancaster County District Attorney Heather Adams and her team found that about 60 percent of the 2,500 forms were potentially illegitimate. Monroe County District Attorney Mike Mancuso linked the registrations to “Field and Media Corps,” a subsidiary of Fieldcorps, an Arizona-based organization.

    Field and Media Corps appears to have taken down its website, but it previously identified itself as a subsidiary of FieldCorps. It described itself as “connecting campaigns and projects with communities of color across the state. Our clients benefit from our social activism and coalition leadership experience gained through decades of leading campaigns, highlighting social inequalities, and developing BIPOC coalition building.”

    FieldCorps has reportedly been working for the Harris-Walz campaign, the Mark Kelly campaign in Arizona and other Democratic campaigns. Efforts to reach FieldCorps for comment have been unsuccessful.

    The concern is that companies like FieldCorps could be replicating errors across districts and states in the rush to register new voters.

    If these are knowing falsifications, it could constitute a federal crime.

    We also have the same controversies arising in this election about changes to voting laws just before the election. In 2020, many voters were opposed to courts in states like Pennsylvania issuing last-minute changes. Many assumed that these laws had been finally worked out to guarantee the criteria for consideration of mail-in ballots and other forms of voting. 

    However, with less than two weeks to go, a divided Pennsylvania Supreme Court voted 4-3 to order a significant change in election rules. The Election Code in the state is a model of clarity — it says that a provisional ballot “shall not be counted if the elector’s [mail] ballot is received in a timely manner by a county board of elections.” However, the court ruled that provisional ballots must be counted even if an individual has already sent in a mail ballot rejected for violating a mandatory rule, such as failure to place the ballot in a secrecy envelope or to date or sign the envelope. Late Friday night, the Supreme Court declined to block the counting of the provisional ballots.

    However, on Friday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court did hold the line on another major change of the state election laws ordered by a lower court. The court stayed a decision that it is unconstitutional to reject mail ballots without handwritten dates on the return envelopes. The stay means that the law will remain in effect for the election. Justice Kevin Doughtery (joined by Chief Justice Debra Todd) wrote a reassuring concurrence for many of us having to follow these cases: “’This Court will neither impose nor countenance substantial alterations to existing laws and procedures during the pendency of an ongoing election.’  We said those carefully chosen words only weeks ago. Yet they apparently were not heard in the Commonwealth Court, the very court where the bulk of election litigation unfolds.” 

    In what may be the closest election in history, late changes to election laws are inflammatory for an already suspicious electorate. According to the Gallup polling, only 63 percent are “very (34 percent) or somewhat confident (29 percent) that votes in the upcoming midterm elections will be accurately cast and counted.” That is near a record low, and there is a 45 percentage point gap separating Republicans (40 percent) and Democrats (85 percent) in their confidence in election integrity.

    To my astonishment, voting officials are still committing basic errors. In Bucks County, Pa., voters were turned away in their attempt to apply in person for mail-in ballots. Some were told that there were computer or staffing problems. A court then ordered additional days to request ballots, so that matter at least is resolved. Yet such glitches are concerning. This is not rocket science. Rocket science is Elon Musk catching a massive booster rocket on what looked like a giant barbeque fork. Getting the staff and computers in place in a historic election should not be a great challenge.

    Given the emotions and closeness of this election, any such irregularities will only confirm the worst expectations of some voters. They are often neither sinister nor particularly suspicious. With tens of millions voting, there are going to be problems. Election officials can help reduce the suspicions by being more forthcoming in sharing information. In past years, officials have acted reflectively to oppose any disclosures while seeking the dismissal of cases. That largely succeeded legally but proved costly politically. It left many allegations (including ill-supported theories) unresolved in the minds of many citizens. 

    It would be far better for the nation to resolve questions before the elections and strive for greater transparency in post-election challenges. That is why, if something wicked this way comes, we can more easily send it along its way.

    Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 11/02/2024 – 19:50

  • "If Trump Is A Dictator…"
    “If Trump Is A Dictator…”

    Throughout the 2024 election, Democrats have gone into overdrive to paint Trump as a dire threat to democracy – comparing him to the likes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.

    In one week, ‘Trump-Hitler’ stories topped 5,500 according to Bloomberg.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsAnd people wonder why trust in the media has plummeted. But let’s entertain the claim that Trump is a dictator…

    X user ‘Insurrection Barbie‘ posts the following 12-point rebuttal, where the Biden-Harris administration did exactly that:

    *  *  *

    If Trump is a dictator, name one time he usurped power from the other branches of government to enact his will in violation of the separation of powers.

    Here are all the times the Harris/Biden administration did exactly that:

    1. The Harris and Biden administration extended the eviction moratorium after COVID by abusing their emergency powers at the expense of private property rights.

    2. This administration issued vaccine mandates for workers because their “patience” had run thin. This was struck down by the courts as unconstitutional.

    3. Our constitution gives the legislative branch the power to pass laws. This administration was not able to cancel student loan debt by getting Congress to vote on a bill to do so. So, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris did this by executive of fiat. They did this after the Supreme Court said it was unconstitutional. Twice.

    4. In violation of our first amendment, they tried to enact a disinformation governing board to censor your free speech. Ultimately the public backlash was so great that they scrapped the project for now.

    5. Through executive fiat and death by regulation they have upended our energy policies making our emergency oil reserves drop to the lowest they have been since 1984. They killed the Keystone pipeline and they defied court rulings and continued to opt out against holding oil drilling sales.

    6. This administration threatened and coerced social media companies to silence the speech of American citizens because it did not agree with the position of the government in violation of the first amendment.

    7. This administration has absolutely zero respect for property rights and have publicly announced that they pledge to protect 30% of land and water by 2030. That is a land grab. Very dictatorial.

    8. This administration has purposefully, ignored our immigration laws and allow 13 million people into the country. They have willfully failed to uphold deportation orders letting them lapse.

    9. In violation of our laws they have failed to secure our border and have allowed 425,000 [known or suspected] criminals into the country.

    10. They have targeted parents for protesting at their children’s school board meetings in violation of their first amendment rights of free speech and have had the FBI place them on a watchlist.

    11. They have targeted pro-life demonstrators and thrown them in prison while letting pro-abortion activists burn down clinics. The executive branch has to faithfully execute the laws without bias, clearly, they have failed to do that.

    12. They were not able to pass any legislation in Congress to force their transgender agenda into the school system so they passed it by executive fiat and the courts struck down much of it at this point.

    *  *  *

    And there you have it…

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 11/02/2024 – 19:15

  • First, Second, & Fourth Amendments Endangered By Kamala Harris
    First, Second, & Fourth Amendments Endangered By Kamala Harris

    Authored by John R. Lott Jr. via RealClearPolitics.com,

    Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats claim they are the party of freedom. In Harris’ interview on Club Shay Shay on Monday, she argued that people need to vote for her to preserve the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments, that Trump “wants to terminate the Constitution.”

    Yet, on the First Amendment, Harris previously called for government “oversight or regulation” of social media to stop what she calls misinformation. In 2022, her vice-presidential nominee, Gov. Tim Walz, claimed: “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech.”

    On gun ownership, Harris went so far as claiming: “I am in favor of the Second Amendment, I don’t believe that we should be taking anyone’s guns away.”

    Reassuring, but Harris’ emphatic past support for gun control is consistent and legion. Let’s look at her record. She claimed during her 2020 presidential campaign, “I support a mandatory buyback program.” When pressed about Joe Biden’s claim at the time that she couldn’t ban assault weapons with an executive order, Harris enthusiastically responded, “Hey, Joe, rather than saying ‘No, we can’t,’ let’s say ‘Yes, we can.’”

    But this is nothing new. Harris has strongly advocated for gun control for years. As San Francisco’s District Attorney, she declared, “Just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn’t mean that we’re not going to walk into that home and check to see if you’re being responsible.”

    She even supports warrantless searches, raising concerns she also doesn’t want to be bothered by the Fourth Amendment.

    In a 2008 amicus brief, Harris argued that a complete ban on all handguns is constitutional. She even said there is no individual right to self-defense.

    The Biden-Harris administration has been the most anti-self defense administration to date, shutting down thousands of gun dealers by mid-2022 due to minor paperwork errors. They renewed Obama’s Operation Choke Point to cut off financial resources for gun manufacturers and dealers; the companies that remained had to grapple with increased costs. The Biden-Harris administration has also established a national gun registry.

    If Kamala Harris becomes president, she will push for even more restrictions. The new Office of Gun Violence Prevention is “overseen” by Harris, which coordinates the administration’s gun control initiatives. The office oversaw a recently released U.S. Surgeon General report that fails to mention a single benefit of gun ownership.

    The OGVP was instrumental in implementing the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, introducing complex rules that classify many gun owners as firearms dealers. If you sell a gun to a friend once and discuss selling a second one to anyone, you must first become a licensed dealer. If you sell one gun and keep a record of the transaction, you are also required to first become licensed.

    Many BCSA rules are vague, giving the government discretion to arbitrarily label individuals as dealers.

    Under Harris’ leadership, the OGVP pushed for lawsuits against gun makers and sellers whenever criminals use their guns. She also pushed to ban semi-automatic “assault” weapons, and require background checks on all private gun transfers.

    By early 2022, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives had developed a digital database containing nearly a billion firearms transactions.

    U.S. Reps. Jim Jordan and Thomas Massie found that Bank of America provided the FBI with credit card data for firearms purchases without even requiring a warrant or probable cause.

    With a national gun registry in place, officials can now easily identify legal gun owners. Harris’ past threats to confiscate guns become much more likely to succeed.

    Gun control has already taken center stage in Harris’ campaign. Harris made gun control a key topic in her first event in Wisconsin and again at a gathering of the American Federation of Teachers.

    It isn’t just that Democrats want to regulate every part of our lives, but the real threat to the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments to the Bill of Rights are at risk from Harris. Those freedoms are endangered if she wins.

    *  *  *

    John R. Lott Jr. is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. He served as senior adviser for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs and the Office of Legal Policy at the Justice Department.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 11/02/2024 – 18:40

  • "There Are NO WATCHERS": RNC Sues Georgia Counties Over "Last Minute" Decision To Accept Weekend Ballots, Block GOP Observers
    “There Are NO WATCHERS”: RNC Sues Georgia Counties Over “Last Minute” Decision To Accept Weekend Ballots, Block GOP Observers

    The Republican National Committee (RNC) is suing several counties in Georgia, citing a simultaneous decision to accept ballots over the weekend – then block Republican poll watchers in defiance of guidance issued by the Secretary of State.

    “Fulton, Cobb, DeKalb, and Gwinnett counties decided at the last minute to accept ballots over the weekend — which disregards the law,” wrote RNC Chairman Michael Whatley on X.

    Democrat officials in Georgia are playing fast and loose with election law.

    Fulton, Cobb, DeKalb, and Gwinnett counties decided at the last minute to accept ballots over the weekend — which disregards the law. They have also failed to let our poll observers in to watch the process. The Secretary of State has issued guidance to allow Republican poll watchers in but local officials REFUSE.

    Our election integrity operation has filed a lawsuit.

    Georgia voters demand that the state and courts ensure that these reckless counties administer fair, transparent, and secure elections. Anything less undermines public trust. -Michael Whatley

    Georgia GOP Chairman Josh McKoon condemned the decision, writing on X:

    “Emboldened by the failure of our judicial branch to stop their changing election rules days before Election Day, Georgia Democrats and their allies in Fulton County are banning poll watchers from observing their “special” weekend operations to try to bank more Democrat absentee ballots.”

    We all know what is going on — Democrats are panicked by the incredible Republican turnout in early voting and will do anything to try to catch up even if it means doing it under the cover of darkness and stiff arming any independent observation of whatever the hell is going on in their four “special voting locations” open today with no notice or approval by anyone authorized to oversee elections administration.

    Georgia Republicans are calling on our elected officials and elections administrators to stop this madness which is doing incalculable and irreversible damage to confidence in this election.”

    McKoon posted what appears to be an internal, yet unverified (by ZeroHedge) email which reads: “Good Morning Team! FYI – There are NO WATCHERS approved for the ballot drop off! Do not let them in the building. If they want to observe from the parking lot, you can’t stop that but they are not allowed to sit in the building.”

    In response, Georgia state Senator Greg Dolezal said “I am in communication with the Secretary of State’s office and my Senate colleagues about this. The Secretary has sent investigators to all four locations and the outside monitoring teams (which were assigned specifically to observe Fulton for prior issues) are also deploying people to each location.”

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

    Stay tuned for updates…

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 11/02/2024 – 18:05

  • Flip The F*cking Table Over And Scream
    Flip The F*cking Table Over And Scream

    Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance

    I had an old friend who used to be a bouncer at one of the bars where I worked in Philadelphia many years ago. We got along decently outside of work because we both had the same mutual interests in our twenties: beer, sports, gambling, and women.

    The big differences between us were that he had a much shorter temper than I did, a much tougher time controlling his emotions and a much larger appetite for alcohol. As would happen given those differences, as the years went by, we eventually lost touch, only to bump into each other randomly at the airport one day after we hadn’t seen each other for about ten years.

    I was returning from a trip I had taken for my job, and he was on his way outbound to some tropical destination I can’t remember. After the perfunctory catch-up, I asked him why he was taking what seemed like a random vacation during the middle of the week.

    He told me that days prior, he had been at the local casino in Philadelphia playing poker and had won $30,000 from the bad beat jackpot, so he was celebrating.

    I asked him how it happened and what he did when he found out he’d won.

    He told me: “Chris, that place has taken so much money from me that when I finally won, I flipped the f*cking poker table over in the middle of the room, while all eight people were sitting at it, and screamed at the top of my lungs.”

    Then, he told me, they paid him out and asked him to leave and never come back.

    Anybody else might easily write this story off as someone with a flair for the dramatic, but having seen my friend flip a table once or twice under far less exciting circumstances (or for no reason at all after multiple shots of Jameson), I knew he wasn’t making it up.

    Heading into the weekend, I kept thinking about metaphors to make some type of big statement about how important I think Tuesday’s election is for our nation. No matter how many ways I tried to word it, all I could think about as an analogy to a potential Trump victory was my friend, sitting inside a casino he’s probably lost a zillion dollars in, finally scoring a big win against the house—the machine that always has the odds in its favor—flipping that table, with the chips, drinks and cards on it, and then getting kicked out carrying a massive Publisher’s Clearing House-style novelty check.

    I don’t like that this is how I think of the government, the Democratic party and the media, conjoined as one unbeatable, dystopian chimera with the odds always in its favor—but I can’t help it. What else could you possibly call a ruling party of elites, using one hand to rig their primary process while using the other to write diatribes about the importance of democracy? What else could you call the party that blankets its deeply flawed policy prescriptions under the cloak of the moral high ground? What do you call the party that used to preach freedom of choice, speech and liberty that now takes its cues from giant pharmaceutical corporations and the military industrial complex? How about the party that outright lied in 2020 to the public about the president’s involvement in a Chinese influence-peddling scam days before the last election?

    And then, what can be said about almost all of the major media networks that have enabled, and run cover for, these actions, all while making concerned looking faces like they actually give a shit about the truth and can’t believe how stupid we are?

    ABC News' David Muir And Linsey Davis To Moderate September Presidential Debate

    Just last week, I watched the media arm of the Democratic Party, consisting of all the major news networks with the exception of Fox News, accuse Jewish people at President Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally of being Nazis. This week, I’m watching them tell the public that Trump said Liz Cheney should be executed when he said nothing of the sort.

    Over the last four years, there have been countless instances like these — the “very fine people” hoax, the never-ending live coverage of the Russia collusion hoax, and CNN putting a yellow filter over Joe Rogan’s face and telling the world he was taking horse medicine when they knew he was not. I wrote it days ago: the media has sacrificed what’s left of its credibility at the altar of an un-elected woman who thinks the PCE deflator is something you sit on at a party that makes a farting noise and that “Strategic Petroleum, Reserve” is a brand of top shelf vodka.

    National Review said it pretty well last month:

    The media has gotten so much wrong over the last four years that not only is it bleeding viewers to alternative media, but major networks like CNN have been forced to lay off staff and completely rethink their programming. It’s a phenomenon that we saw continue last week, with Jeff Bezos making a point not to endorse a political candidate at the Washington Post because, in his words “Americans don’t trust the news media”.

    Among the dead weight purged from CNN some years ago was anchor Brian Stelter. This week, probably without even knowing it, he made a very cogent point when he quoted an anonymous TV executive who said:

    “If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they’re not reading any of this media, and we’ve lost this audience completely. A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form.”

    Stelter doesn’t know it, but he’s onto something much bigger than he thinks. He’s presenting that statement out of protest because he believes that mainstream media really is the authority for objective truth and the moral high ground.

    Of course, what the last decade has proven to us is that he’s wrong — deadass wrong. He may not know why he’s wrong, but the point he makes still stands: as I wrote days ago, at some point, the bias and outright lying are going to hit such a fever pitch that even independent and center-left viewers and voters are going to take notice.

    People are simply not going to stand for one-sided fact-checking at debates, “60 Minutes” deceptively editing interviews, and political anchors injecting their politics into the “news.” In fact, longtime Washington Post contributor Hugh Hewitt walked off the set of one of his live streams and quit the Washington Post just hours ago because of exactly this: Democrats are not even hiding their bias anymore and completely lack finesse in their attempts to sway public opinion, as I have noted in a previous article.

    For a glance at how left-wing mainstream media is imploding, watch the entirety of this four minute clip.

    Now that we have the miracle of the internet and alternative media, when that moment comes, mainstream media will have officially crossed to the other side of the adoption bell curve and will begin its slow descent into irrelevance. Before that descent can begin, tolerance for the media must hit a zenith where viewer interest peaks, then ever so slightly starts to fade toward alternative media. This election could very well mark that apex officially moving behind us. Here’s how I see it:

    A GOP victory on Tuesday not only flips the media’s figurative table over, it flips over the table of government in favor of empowering people. It flips over the table that is addicted to spending and racking up trillions of dollars in debt every year. It flips over the table that spends those trillions of dollars on other countries while increasing taxation on American citizens. It flips over the table that cleans up San Francisco for when China’s president arrives but can’t do so for American citizens. It flips over the table of every lie you’ve been told about Joe Biden’s mental health when you could clearly sit at home and watch with your own two eyes how poor of a state he was in. It flips over the table of identity politics and looking at everybody by their race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality under the guise of fighting discrimination. And most importantly, a victory for the GOP on Tuesday flips over the table of trying to stifle the most important God-given right of them all: our right to free speech.

    I’m not going to make some sensationalist claim like if the Democrats win, it’s going to be the end of the world. It won’t. That’s why we have three branches of government and, frankly, there are far too many lazy and incompetent people in government to effectively make too many negative changes quick enough for our nation to deteriorate much quicker over the next four years than it already is. But I bet even the Democrats who are going to vote for Kamala Harris know in the back of their mind that the nation isn’t on the right path right now, and that’s the way we will continue under a Harris administration. Only faster.

    🔥 50% OFF FOR LIFE: Using this coupon entitles you to 50% off an annual subscription to Fringe Finance for as long as you wish: Get 50% off forever

    If the GOP wins this election, I believe it will be far more consequential to the nation. It feels as though a dam is about to break in the United States and the magnetic poles of the two parties are about to shift. Joe Rogan alluded to this while interviewing Trump when he said:

    “The rebels are Republicans now. You want to be punk rock? You want to buck the system? You are conservative now. The liberals are now pro-silencing criticism. They are pro-censorship. They talk about regulating free speech. It’s bananas to watch.”

    There’s no question the left is pulling us further and further left and, at some point, the nation will snap back in the other direction, regardless of whether it is this election cycle or not. But I’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel like we are right on the doorstep of making a statement that’s bigger than politics by reelecting Donald Trump.

    Sure, it’ll be a statement that we want lower taxes, our freedom of speech, less regulation and small government. But most importantly, it would be a rebuke of all of the names that Democrats have called Republicans, all of the blatant lies they’ve told us and then scolded us like children for not believing, and the party and media machine’s assumption it could serve up whatever candidate it wanted, without a primary, and because they have the moral high ground and the media machine backing them, the country will just shut the fuck up and swallow it.

    When my friend lost money consistently at the casino for years and years, he just “shut the fuck up and swallowed it” and kept coming back for more. The games were rigged, but hell—he was in there taking his shot. And when he finally had the chance to take the house, big, not only did he take some of that money back, but he made a statement in doing so. And while I don’t usually condone destructive behavior, deep down, I know how good it felt for him, and I’m glad he did it. Now, I wonder if the nation can do the same.

    Note from QTR: This will be my last post about politics at least until after Election Day. If you haven’t yet, I urge you desperately to get to the polls on Tuesday and make your voice heard. Just like in 2020, this election may come down to single-digit numbers of votes in many places.

    QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts have been hand selected by me, have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author, reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.

    This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. I may or may not own names I write about and are watching. Sometimes I’m bullish without owning things, sometimes I’m bearish and do own things. Just assume my positions could be exactly the opposite of what you think they are just in case. All positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour. Also, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it twice because it’s that important.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 11/02/2024 – 17:30

  • Buffett Calls The Top: Berkshire Dumps 100 Million Apple Shares As Unprecedented Selling Spree Boosts Cash To Record $325 Billion Dollars
    Buffett Calls The Top: Berkshire Dumps 100 Million Apple Shares As Unprecedented Selling Spree Boosts Cash To Record $325 Billion Dollars

    Back in August, when discussing Buffett’s ongoing liquidation of his Bank of America stake, we said that “Berkshire’s rising cash stockpiles merely reflect the firm’s inability to find deals in today’s overvalued and weak economic environment”, little did we know just how accurate that would be, because just one day later we and the rest of the market were stunned to learn that far from only dumping Bank of America, the 94-year-old Omaha billionaire had been busy quietly liquidating his most iconic holding in an unprecedented selling spree that sent Berkshire’s cash pile soaring by a record $88 billion to an all time high $277 billion at the end of Q2.

    That was just the beginning, however, and this morning we subsequently learned that through the end of Q3, Berkshire’s unprecedented cash build continued, and the world’s largest conglomerate added another $48 billion to its cash – through both “harvesting” (i.e., selling of existing holdings) and cash from operations, taking it to a record $325.2 billion, or nearly a quarter trillion in cash. As shown for context in the chart below, Berkshire has nearly doubled its cash holdings from $168 billion at the start of the year to a staggering $325 billion 9 months later, up 94%!

    The bulk of the new cash came from sales: in the third quarter, Berkshire sold a net $34.6 billion worth of stock, following the record $75.5 billion in Q2 liquidations, the bulk of which we now know came from Buffett’s sale of half his Apple shares. In other words, the third quarter was the 8th consecutive quarter in which Berkshire has been a net seller of stocks.

    And the selling continued: while there was no 13F filed yet to go with the Berkshire’s 10Q, the company provided a snapshot of its top holdings, revealing that as of Sept 30 it held only $69.9 billion in Apple stock, down a quarter from the $84.2 billion as of June 30, down 62% from $135.4 billion as of March 31 and down 70% from the $174.3 billion as of Dec 31, 2023. This translates into just 300 million shares of AAPL held as of Sept 30, less than a third of what Berkshire owned at the end of 2023, and 30% of Buffett’s peak AAPL holdings of 1 billion shares as of 2018. 

    Buffett said in May that Apple would likely remain Berkshire’s top holding, indicating that tax issues had motivated the sale. “I don’t mind at all, under current conditions, building the cash position,” he said at the annual shareholder meeting. It was unclear if BRK shareholders understood that to mean a sale of 70% (and rising) of the AAPL holdings.

    Going down the list, with the exception of Bank of America (where Buffett is the single largest shareholder) which we already knew was also being aggressively sold – and in Q3 Buffett confirmed that he took down his BAC holdings by 23%, from 1033 million shares to 799 million which in turn made the BAC stake his 3rd largest after American Express –  the rest of Berkshire’s top 5 holdings (American Express, Coca Cola and Chevron) was largely untouched in Q3, meaning that Buffett clearly decided that it was time for Apple and Bank of America to go (we have since learned that subsequent to the end of Q2, Buffett also started to dump a large portion of his Bank of America shares where he is the single largest shareholder).

    While Berkshire’s cash balance rose by a record $35 billion – where proceeds from the sale of Apple and Bank of America were the bulk of the new cash – the company also generated substantial cash from its own operations, and in Q3 Berkshire reported operating earnings of $10.09 billion, down from the $11.6 billion in Q2 and down 6% from a year ago, as insurance underwriting earnings slumped. The company also recorded a $1.1 billion foreign-currency-exchange loss during the quarter.

    Berkshire has for years struggled to find ways to deploy its mountain of cash in a sluggish deal environment, lamenting the lack of cheap opportunities. At the firm’s annual shareholder meeting in May, Buffett said he wasn’t in a rush to spend “unless we think we’re doing something that has very little risk and can make us a lot of money.” It now appears that not only was Buffett not in a rush to spend, but taking advantage of the AI bubble, he has been aggressively liquidating his biggest holding.

    Finally, it’s not just AAPL that Buffett believes is overvalued and is aggressively dumping: the billionaire clearly believes the entire market is way expensive, and in the third quarter, Berkshire refused to repurchase any of its own shares, the first time it has done that since the company changed its buyback policy in 2018.

    It’s hardly a surprise why:  as we noted in “Berkshire’s Growing Cash Pile Has A Hidden Message On Stocks” the Buffett Indicator has rarely signaled a more expensive market.

    Bottom line: unlike October 2008, when Buffett led the clarion call to “Buy American“, this time he is selling American at a never before seen pace.

    Are you?

    One thing we know, Buffett is fearful.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 11/02/2024 – 16:55

  • Latest Trump Hoax Drops: No He Wasn't Simulating Oral Sex
    Latest Trump Hoax Drops: No He Wasn’t Simulating Oral Sex

    Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

    Another hoax has dropped today in an attempt to stop Americans voting for Trump. They’re now claiming he simulated performing oral sex on a microphone stand.

    What?

    Of course, it’s complete nonsense again.

    He was again having technical difficulties with the microphone and explained that the stand was useless because it was too low.

    There are two days to go until the election and nothing is working for the desperate Democrats.

    Yesterday they attempted to say Trump called for executing Liz Cheney. It fell flat on its face because anyone can watch the clip in full context.

    The day before they attempted to claim he wanted to force women to adhere to a federal abortion ban when he wasn’t even talking about abortion.

    This idiocy only serves to highlight how the Harris campaign is happy to outright lie and distort reality.

    They’ve built their campaign on out of context 10 second clips of Trump coupled with lies anyone can see through from a mile away.

    The Harris campaign’s Kamala HQ X account also posted several other edited clips of Trump Friday and suggested he was “confused” and “unhinged.”

    Meanwhile, they’re claiming that this unintelligible person reading something off a phone is “fire”:

    And they had yet another person relating something about the state/size of her vagina:

    Lets balance it out with some clips of what actually went on at Trump’s rallies Friday where he related his closing arguments.

    *  *  *

    Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 11/02/2024 – 16:20

  • Polymarket's Trump-Bullish Whale Speaks Out: "Absolutely No Political Agenda"
    Polymarket’s Trump-Bullish Whale Speaks Out: “Absolutely No Political Agenda”

    While still guarding his anonymity, the mysterious man who’s bet more than $30 million on a Trump election victory via the Polymarket prediction marketplace has come forward to assert that his wagers aren’t intended to sway the election, but simply to profit from an outcome he’s highly confident in.    

    “My intent is just making money,” said the man who describes himself as a Frenchman and former US resident who was a trader for American banks. In an exclusive interview with the Wall Street Journal via Zoom, he used the pseudonym “Théo,” saying he wanted to remain anonymous out of a desire to conceal the extent of his assets from his children and friends. The Journal said he was “sport[ing] a short, neatly trimmed beard” and spoke English with a small accent. 

    Here’s how the Journal described the precipitation of the interview, and the paper’s process to ensure it wasn’t talking to an imposter: 

    Théo emailed the Journal after the publication of an Oct. 18 article about his wagers. To prove that he was behind the Polymarket wagers, the Journal asked him to place a bet on whether Taylor Swift would announce that she is pregnant in 2024—one of the many small, nonpolitical wagers available on the platform. Minutes later, Polymarket’s website showed that one of the four accounts, Theo4, had placed a small bet on Swift’s pregnancy. 

    With $30 million on the line, the whale says he’s certain pollsters are again failing to fully capture Trump’s support (AP/Alex Brandon)

    In that original Oct. 18 article, the Journal gave some credit to the idea that the concentrated bets may represent some form of intentional narrative-control scheme meant to benefit Trump. Théo emailed the Journal to refute that theory, writing, “I have absolutely no political agenda.” 

    In his subsequent interview, Théo told the Journal he’s a veteran trader with a history of risking tens of millions of dollars when he discovers a high-confidence trade — and said that’s what he sees in the chance to wager on a Trump victory.  

    When news broke of the whale’s huge wagers on Trump, Polymarket engaged outside experts to scrutinize transactions in presidential election betting, an unnamed source told the Journal at the time. Last week, Polymarket said it had contacted the whale and confirmed it was a French citizen with an extensive financial services and trading background. “Based on the investigation, we understand that this individual is taking a directional position based on personal views of the election,” the firm said. 

    Théo said his conviction on a Trump victory rests on pollsters’ failure to capture the full extent of Trump’s support in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, and his belief that the “shy Trump voter effect” still endures in 2024. “I know a lot of Americans who would vote for Trump without telling you that,” he said, while also scoffing at the possibility that pollsters have improved their methodologies this time around.  

    Having been previously accused of trying to shape the election, Théo dished out an accusation of his own, saying leftist major media outlets are setting America up for post-election social unrest by perpetuating a fiction that the race is a close one. Théo thinks Trump is poised to rout Harris, which is why he has more than $30 million on Trump reaching 270 electoral votes, with the potential to receive $80 million if he’s right. He says his $30 million on Trump represents most of his liquid assets.

    Théo also has bets on a Trump popular-vote victory, along with bets on various swing-state wins. He also gave some insights into how he’s been trading:  

    He started quietly in August by betting several million dollars on Trump, using an account with the username Fredi9999. At the time, Trump and Harris had roughly even chances on Polymarket.

    Théo spread out his wagers over multiple days and weeks to avoid causing a price spike. Still, as his bets grew, Théo noticed other traders were backing away from quoting prices when Fredi9999 was buying. That made it harder for Théo to get attractive prices. He created the other three accounts in September and October to obscure his purchasing, Théo said.   

    Single-handedly accounting for 25% of the contracts on a Trump electoral college win and 40% of the bids on a popular vote victory, Théo would have a hard time pulling money off the table without pushing the value of his contracts down. Speaking of which, the electoral college version of a Trump win peaked on Wednesday at 76 cents (with a dollar payoff if Trump wins). However they’ve taken a big dive since — plunging to 57.5 cents as this is written in the wee hours of Saturday morning. You can check the current price here.    

    If you’re itching to buy the dip, note that Americans are officially barred from Polymarket. You can thank your all-powerful, all-knowing, Constitution-violating federal government for protecting you from yourself: The Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined the platform in 2022 for allegedly providing illegal trading services, prompting Polymarket to bar Americans going forward.  

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 11/02/2024 – 15:45

  • YouTube Pushes Back Against NY Times' Attempts To Censor Conservatives
    YouTube Pushes Back Against NY Times’ Attempts To Censor Conservatives

    Authored by Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov via Headline USA,

    Despite its reputation as one of the most well-known Big Tech censors, YouTube surprised conservative Americans by pushing back against the New York Times’ claim that some right-wing political commentators were spreading “misinformation” right before the election.

    The Times pressured YouTube to censor or outright deplatform political commentators like Tim Pool, Michael Knowles, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Steve Deace and Rudy Giuliani, but the Big Tech platform refused.

    “The ability to openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial, is an important value — especially in the midst of election season,” she said in a statement to the newspaper.

    After realizing that YouTube won’t censor those people, the Times made the Big Tech platform one of the villains in the story.

    “Within months [after June 2023], the largest video platform became a home for election conspiracy theories, half-truths and lies. They, in turn, became a source of revenue for YouTube, which announced growing quarterly ad sales on Tuesday,” the newspaper wrote.

    The Times also claimed that YouTube has “acted as a megaphone for conspiracy theories.”

    “The commentators used false narratives about [2020 election] as a foundation for elaborate claims that the 2024 presidential contest was also rigged — all while YouTube made money from them,” the newspaper wrote.

    Conservatives on Twitter criticized the Times for its attempts to silence those who oppose the mainstream media narrative.

    “This article is effectively trying to strongarm YouTube into censoring voices that the New York Times disapproves of. Shameful behavior from a newspaper,” @TheRabbitHole84 wrote.

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    Conservative commentator Ian Miles Cheong also responded to the recent news.

    “You really don’t hate the New York Times enough,” he wrote.

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    People from the free-speech platforms also used their chance to criticize the Times and promote their companies.

    Notice how the New York Times is targeting @TuckerCarlson [and] @benshapiro on YouTube, even though those same creators are also on Rumble. Reason why? They know Rumble will them to [f***] off,” CEO of Rumble Chris Pavlovski wrote.

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    Twitter’s CEO Linda Yaccarino also responded to the recent article.

    “We are not afraid of Media Matters. We are not afraid of The NY Times. And they shouldn’t be afraid of an informed group of citizens who are dedicated to preserving freedom of speech. Yet THEY seem to be?” she wrote.

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    Conservatives mentioned in the article also responded after discovering that the Times was working on the hit piece.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 11/02/2024 – 15:10

  • "The Guy's A Retard. He's Retarded": The Atlantic Accidentally Makes Trump Look Hilarious Over Biden Nickname
    “The Guy’s A Retard. He’s Retarded”: The Atlantic Accidentally Makes Trump Look Hilarious Over Biden Nickname

    For pearl-clutching, politically correct liberals, casually calling someone ‘retarded’ is a grave sin, as it may offend actual retards (but how would they know?)

    To normal people it’s just what you call a stupid person – which brings us to today’s unintentionally hilarious article from The Atlantic – owned by the woman on the left…

    Donald Trump. Called Joe Biden. A RETARD!

    Just read:

    At the end of June, in the afterglow of a debate performance that would ultimately prompt President Joe Biden to end his campaign for reelection, Donald Trump startled his aides by announcing that he’d come up with a new nickname for his opponent.

    “The guy’s a retard. He’s retarded. I think that’s what I’ll start calling him,” Trump declared aboard his campaign plane, en route to a rally that evening, according to three people who heard him make the remarks: “Retarded Joe Biden.”

    Who exactly is going to read this and not vote for Trump because of it?

    It was even a ‘HARD R!’

    When DRUMPLER fails, go full retard…

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    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 11/02/2024 – 14:35

  • Disputes In South China Sea Could Disrupt Trade Lanes, Lead To War, Experts Say
    Disputes In South China Sea Could Disrupt Trade Lanes, Lead To War, Experts Say

    By Noi Mahoney of FreightWaves

    A Chinese Coast Guard ship was involved in a skirmish with a ship from the Philippine Coast Guard in August 2023.

    Territorial confrontations in the South China Sea pitting several Asian nations against China have entered a perilous phase that could possibly lead to a war involving the U.S., experts say.

    China has claimed virtually all of the South China Sea for decades, but the country’s assertiveness in the region has steadily increased the past several years, resulting in heightened tensions with nations including the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan and Brunei.

    Krista Wiegand, a professor at the University of Tennessee, said the U.S. has no direct claims of sovereignty or unique maritime rights in the South China Sea, but the waterway nevertheless is a place where war could break out between the U.S. and China.

    Wiegand is the director of the Center for National Security and Foreign Affairs at the Howard J. Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs at the university. She is a specialist in territorial and maritime disputes, maritime law, and East Asian security.

    “If the U.S. were to get involved in any kind of war with China, it would most likely be over Taiwan,” Wiegand told FreightWaves in an interview. “But at the same time, there is a possibility of an accident or some kind of crisis happening in the South China Sea. For example, if a U.S. vessel has a collision with a Chinese naval vessel or there’s a missile shot at a U.S. destroyer ship or frigate, that would certainly lead to some kind of crisis that might escalate. Nobody wants a war, obviously, including China, but they definitely want the South China Sea, and there’s a possibility that the war might happen.”

    The 1.3 million-square-mile sea in the Western Pacific Ocean contains some of the busiest trade routes in the world.

    The South China Sea stretches from Singapore and the Strait of Malacca in the southwest to the Strait of Taiwan in the northeast and sits between China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Brunei, Cambodia and Malaysia.

    Researchers at Duke University calculated that total trade through both the South China Sea and the East China Sea — which lies between China, North and South Korea, and Japan, is worth $7.4 trillion per year. 

    About 24% of global maritime trade passed through the South China sea in 2023, according to the United Nations’ 2024 review of maritime transport.

    The South China Sea’s share of global seaborne trade volume per commodity in 2023 included crude oil (45%), propane (42%), cars (26%) and dry bulk (23%).

    Exports from China to both the U.S. and Mexico have shown strong growth the past five years. The trade route for goods from China to North America passes either through the South China or the East China Sea.

    As of Thursday, twenty-foot equivalent units moving from China to the U.S. are about 10% lower year over year compared to 2023, but are more than 40% higher y/y compared to 2022, according to the SONAR Inbound Ocean TEUs Volume Index.

    SONAR’s Inbound Ocean TEUs Volume index (IOTI.CHNUSA shows container movements from China to North America have been rising steadily over the last several years.

    The South China Sea may also hold valuable undiscovered resources, such as oil and natural gas, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). 

    In 2023, the U.S. Geological Survey reported the South China Sea may contain up to 9.2 billion barrels of untapped petroleum and other liquids, and up to 216 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, according to a recent EIA report.

    China’s disputes in the South China Sea include territories that fall within a country’s economic exclusion zones (EEZ), such as the Philippines. An EEZ is a maritime area where a coastal state has the right to explore, exploit, conserve and manage natural resources, according to the United Nations.

    In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague ruled in favor of the Philippines in a case opened in 2013 against China. The court of arbitration said China’s claims in the South China Sea had no legal basis.

    Wiegand said the Permanent Court of Arbitration and other international organizations made it clear that China did not have any solid claims to owning all of the South China Sea.

    “There are some historic claims that may have legitimacy, but at the same time, the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea, which China signed and ratified, along with most other countries in the world, with the exception of the U.S. and a few others, is very clear about the maritime boundaries of countries,” Wiegand said. “China’s claims or maritime features about islands in the waters of countries like Vietnam and the Philippines that fall under their control … those are completely illegitimate.”

    Hasim Turker, an international security expert based in Istanbul, said if the U.S. gets drawn into the South China Sea conflict, it will most likely be through its treaty with the Philippines or to help Taiwan or other nations.

    “The U.S. has substantial strategic interests in the South China Sea, centered around maintaining freedom of navigation and enforcing international maritime norms,” Turker told FreightWaves in an email. “This is not just about economic stakes, but also about reinforcing the rules-based international order. Regular Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPs) are a clear expression of Washington’s intention to challenge China’s expansive claims. These operations are designed to assert that the waters in question remain open to all nations, according to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) — even though the U.S. itself has not formally ratified the treaty.”

    In August 2023, ships belonging to China and the Philippines accused each other of causing collisions in a disputed area of the South China Sea.

    Philippine authorities said a Chinese Coast Guard ship carried out “dangerous blocking maneuvers” that caused it to collide with a Philippine vessel carrying supplies to troops, according to a statement on CNN.

    In June, China and the Philippines blamed each other for causing a collision in the South China Sea near the contested Second Thomas Shoal, with the Philippines saying its armed forces would resist Beijing’s actions in the disputed waters, according to Reuters.

    U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines MaryKay Carlson condemned China’s “aggressive, dangerous” maneuvers near the Second Thomas Shoal in a post on X in June.

    In September, authorities in China and the Philippines agreed to a temporary deal after the countries had repeated collisions near the shoal. However, the Philippines said the deal might not be permanent.

    About 24% of global maritime trade passed through the South China sea in 2023, including exports of crude oil, propane, cars and dry bulk.

    The U.S. and the Philippines have a long history of cooperation, officially starting in 1951 with the U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty. The treaty requires both nations to support each other if another party attacks either country.

    “The likelihood of armed conflict in the South China Sea remains significant due to ongoing tensions, frequent confrontations, and increased militarization,” Turker said. “Incidents like the August 2023 underscore the persistent risk of military escalation. These confrontations reflect a broader pattern of assertive behavior by China, involving the deployment of coast guard vessels, maritime militia, and military assets to enforce its claims over disputed waters.”

    Turker, a former commander in the Turkish navy, is the author “European Security and Defense Policy” (2007) and “Towards the New Cold War: Rising China, the U.S., and NATO,” (2019). He was also the academic coordinator and senior researcher at the Bosphorus Center for Asian Studies, an independent think tank based in Ankara, Turkey.

    “Frequent incidents … demonstrate how easily low-intensity confrontations can occur, especially given the dense presence of military, coast guard, and civilian vessels in contested waters, which increases the likelihood of accidental or deliberate escalation,” Turker said. “This risk is compounded by China’s militarization of artificial islands, where airstrips, missile systems, and surveillance infrastructure have been constructed. These moves have prompted other claimants to bolster their defenses, leading to a more volatile environment.”

    Turker said U.S. involvement would significantly escalate the situation in the South China Sea, particularly if military assets are deployed.

    “This would not only raise tensions in the region, but could also lead to direct military confrontation with China — a scenario neither side desires, given the stakes involved. A U.S.-China conflict would have global repercussions, impacting trade, regional alliances, and the geopolitical balance of power. The specter of a broader war looms if such an incident escalates beyond a controlled, localized response, especially if U.S. allies like Japan or Australia are drawn in to support collective security efforts in the Indo-Pacific,” Turker said.

    While a war breaking out in the South China Sea is a strong possibility, each country also has reasons for keeping the peace, he added.

    “Several factors deter the escalation of limited skirmishes into a full-scale war in the South China Sea. The economic costs of a major conflict are substantial, as a war would disrupt critical trade routes, affecting global supply chains and damaging regional economies, including China’s, which heavily depends on maritime commerce,” Turker said. “Regional stability remains a priority for Southeast Asian nations, which, despite their assertive territorial claims, generally favor diplomatic solutions to maintain economic stability and avoid the risks associated with a prolonged conflict. The possibility of a broader confrontation involving major powers, such as the U.S. and its allies, is another significant deterrent. A full-scale war could draw these external actors into the conflict, raising the stakes to a regional or even global level, a scenario that all parties are keen to avoid.”

    Wiegand said while she hopes there is a diplomatic solution to the territorial disputes in the South China Sea, it will be difficult to quell China’s rising ambitions.

    “The problem is that the Philippines tried a diplomatic solution through the arbitration case, and China refused to even show up to the courts; they didn’t even send representatives,” Wiegand said. “Vietnam has tried negotiations multiple times, and China just refuses to back down, and they just keep repeating the same claim: These are our territories, these are our waters. There’s only so much you can do diplomatically. For the other countries, they’re kind of stuck until China makes a move. It’s really at a standstill right now, and unfortunately, I think the status quo is just going to be a continuation of China maintaining its claims, maintaining the control of the islands, controlling the waters. It’s really up to the other disputing countries, whether they want to really pressure China any further to try to overturn that status quo. That’s a very difficult thing to do diplomatically.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 11/02/2024 – 14:00

  • "RIP My Best Friend": Outrage Ensues After Beloved Rescue Squirrel Seized By NY, Euthanized
    “RIP My Best Friend”: Outrage Ensues After Beloved Rescue Squirrel Seized By NY, Euthanized

    The internet is ablaze with rage after the state of New York seized a beloved rescue squirrel Peanut from its owner’s home Wednesday and euthanized it.

    The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation staged a five-hour raid on the home of Mark Luongo after an anonymous complaint was lodged against the P’nuts Freedom Farm, where internet sensation Peanut the squirrel was taken into custody before the state euthanized it along with a raccoon ‘in order to test for rabies.’

    “RIP MY BEST FRIEND. Thank you for the best 7 years of my life. Thank you for bringing so much joy to us and the world. I’m sorry I failed you but thank you for everything,” Longo wrote in a post announcing Peanut’s death.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsLongo has asked for financial help for a “legal battle” against the state.

    A Connecticut native, Longo moved to Elmira, NY in 2023 to start the Freedom Farm, a 501.C.3 approved nonprofit.

    “Last year we moved to NY in hopes of starting a NONPROFIT animal rescue in PNUT’s Name. [P’Nuts Freedom Farm] will forever live in PNUT’s memory,” Longo wrote in a post announcing the seizure.

    “With over 350 rescues, we’ve relied heavily on PNUT and his internet family to father donations to help more animals. I don’t even know how will [sic] continue to fundraise for this nonprofit.”

    The organization is made up of veterinarians and caregivers who rescue animals from abusive or dire situations.

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    Needless to say, people are pissed.

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    Others expressed similar outrage. And memes.

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    Editor’s note: a previous version of this article included a comment from President Trump that was confirmed as inauthentic, and there was in fact a warrant. We apologize for the squirrel-related fake news.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 11/02/2024 – 13:25

  • People Aren't Garbage. Partisan Politics Is
    People Aren’t Garbage. Partisan Politics Is

    Authored by Matt Taibbi via Racket News,

    Voting says very little about who we are, but propaganda telling us otherwise reveals a lot about America’s political leaders…

    The cycle was the usual nonsense. At a Donald Trump rally in Manhattan a comic called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” Joe Biden emerged from his crypt to croak, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.” The Internet exploded. Reporters were dispatched around the country to gauge how much more pissed off everyone was now.

    ABC’s take interviewing Harris supporters in Pennsylvania was, “Voters view one another across partisan divide with increasing animosity.” They quoted humans-in-the-street, who all felt strongly. “I would say that some of them are garbage,” said Samantha Leister, 32, while Shawn Vanderheyden, 44, opined, “I just think they are uneducated, and they believe all the lies.” ABC summed up the cultural divide: “Interviews with voters in battleground states reveal that it’s only growing deeper and more insurmountable.”

    Surely people know it, but this is all a trick. First, campaign writers only talk to people at campaign events, so the pool of quotes is automatically pared to holders of Very Strong Political Opinions. Second, the odd “Who cares?” answer is instinctively culled by campaign writers as commercially/politically unhelpful. Non-voters or even just people who care more about other things than Harris/Trump — UFOs, knitting, the girl in biology class — ruin the suspension of disbelief. You end up reading copy that hugely over-represents that strange subset of people who define themselves by their votes.

    When I was first sent to cover campaigns in 2004, a year in which 40% of eligible voters didn’t bother, I was troubled by the absence of non-voters in coverage. A Rolling Stone editor with whom I rarely worked rolled eyes and said, “We don’t cover them because they’re not part of the fucking story,” which I instantly knew wasn’t true, but I was new and to my shame I didn’t say anything. The numbers of non-voters exposed how inconsequential presidential politics was for most people. It measured the number of people left behind or out, and leaving the non-enthused out of the shot was journalism’s way of covering the holes in the charade.

    Two years later I was embedded with a group of Oklahoma reservists sent to work as MPs in Iraq. Sgt. Stephen Wilkerson was the team commander. He wore a tattoo on his foot with an arrow pointing to his big toe that read, TAG GOES HERE. His nickname was “Stretch-Nuts” because it was said he could balance a Heineken bottle on his ball-skin. On my first day he asked what I do. I cover presidential elections, I said. He made a jerk-off gesture. That was the last mention of politics on the trip.

    In the roughly twenty years since the act of not voting, or even just not really really caring about presidential politics, has been villainized. Now the emotionally healthy person, the one who has a life and isn’t consumed with fears about the Next Hitler, is assumed to harbor secret sympathies, as bad as the worst MAGAT.

    This is different from the old scam.

    Now the person who shrugs and says “Who cares?” is called a liar. Everyone must care the way they do, and if you don’t care in that right way — every waking minute, with chewed nails and a carefully weeded social circle to match the correct vote and attitude set — you’re garbage.

    Many of us have seen in recent years what this hounding has done even to friends or relatives, turning them to Flatland characters, two-dimensional nerve cases scanning everyone for signs of unsuitability.

    Whatever happens next week, I don’t ever want to be that. It’s the people who define us by votes who are garbage, not the other way around.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 11/02/2024 – 12:50

  • Ron Paul "Revolution" Reignites After Elon Musk Asks Libertarian Legend To Join Department Of Gov't Efficiency
    Ron Paul “Revolution” Reignites After Elon Musk Asks Libertarian Legend To Join Department Of Gov’t Efficiency

    With just two days left before the presidential election, Libertarians are waking up Saturday to a bunch of buzz on X about a potential “Ron Paul Revolution” in the White House—only possible if Donald Trump wins next week. 

    On Friday evening, AFpost wrote on X, “Ron Paul says he wants to join Elon Musk to cut government waste in second Trump administration.” 

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    Musk chimed in on X: “It would be great to have Ron Paul as part of the Department of Government Efficiency!”

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    Ron Paul responded: “I’d be happy to talk with you about it, Elon.” 

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    X users instantly went bananas on the prospect that Musk would give Ron Paul a role in the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, only if Trump wins. 

    For months, Musk and Trump have been discussing DOGE, which the billionaire would serve as “Secretary of Cost-Cutting” – a government agency that doesn’t exist yet… Musk would basically take his skills as a successful manager – in which he slashed 80% of the Twitter workforce a few years ago to make the ‘free speech’ social media platform operate more efficiently.

    In August, Musk said the goal of DOGE was to cut wasteful spending by the federal government and roll back massive regulations that stifle the economy. 

    Musk recently said DOGE could identify “at least $2 trillion in cuts” as part of a formal review of federal agencies. This would also mean tens of thousands of job cuts—if not more—across the federal government. 

    Just imagine if Trump wins, Musk and Ron Paul would wind down unneeded federal agencies like a scene from Argentina’s Javier Milei.

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    You hear that, Libertarian…

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    Deal of a lifetime.

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    And Libertarians, even Trump’s VP JD Vance, is coming around to Ron Paul’s argument on the Federal Reserve.

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    Ron Paul had fun on X in the overnight hours. 

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    Delayed over the years … but now entirely possible. 

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    For decades, Ron Paul has proposed a smaller government by eliminating several wasteful federal agencies, ending foreign wars, eliminating taxes on capital gains and dividends, eliminating the estate tax, and—everyone’s favorite—abolishing the Federal Reserve.

    This has become true over the years. 

    The only problem is when federal government spending accounts for 22.7% of the US GDP (in fiscal year 2023), reducing this spending could spark a recession. However, if Trump wins, DOGE could be messaged to the American people as a way to curb sky-high inflation sparked by disastrous ‘Bidenomics.’ 

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 11/02/2024 – 12:15

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Nov 02

Today’s News 2nd November 2024

  • The Paradigm Shift Is Here
    The Paradigm Shift Is Here

    Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

    Some wild shifts are taking place in our time…

    The low-tariff global trade order is falling apart.

    Nationalist movements are gaining strength in every Western nation, not just the United States.

    The major media is under serious financial strain to the point that the owner of the Washington Post has penned an editorial decrying the tendency to speak only to elites.

    A presidential candidate is talking about scrapping the income tax.

    The Supreme Court earlier this year ruled that 40 years of regulatory jurisprudence is essentially contrary to the Constitution.

    The list goes on and on with the rise of homeschooling, the reliance on alternative media, the dramatic shift in partisan affiliations over healthy food, the unpredictable alliances over the U.S. role in the world, and so much more.

    People are asking fundamental questions about issues that only a few years ago seemed fully settled. What was stable is unstable and what was believed by nearly everyone is now widely doubted.

    It’s enough to make one’s head spin. What is happening and why is it happening?

    The short answer is that we are living through a class paradigm shift.

    One is going away and another is coming. We are in pre-paradigmatic times, which are surely the most exciting times to be alive.

    The word paradigm entered into the mainstream of thought with an important book by Thomas Kuhn. His “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” appeared in 1962, and it completely upended the dominated assumptions about how science works.

    More than that, it implicitly shook how people came to understand how progress takes place. He said it is not a linear process with every generation absorbing the best from the last but rather that progress is episodic, a shift from success to failure and back again, through titanic movements of large paradigms.

    Kuhn arrived at this conclusion by looking at the long history of science and noticing the tendency toward complacency around an orthodoxy of some sort. This is the period he calls “normal science.” The practitioners have all been schooled in a certain way, deferring to teachers and dominant institutions that have captured government and the public mind. It’s a way of understanding the world and within that the main practitioners focus on problem-solving and applications.

    This period of normal science can last a month or decades or centuries, rarely questioned. And then something happens. Kuhn writes that this orthodoxy comes to be challenged by certain features of reality that are not explained by normal science. Once these are more closely investigated, the anomalies start to pile up and then overwhelm the explanatory power of the settled paradigm. The longer this goes on, the more the paradigm comes under strain, as a new generation seizes on the failures and highlights the incapacity of the orthodoxy to account for the reality all around us.

    That’s when the settled science breaks down. It can happen slowly or quickly, and sometimes paradigms overlap both in their popularity and their collapse. That collapse does not mean that every mind is changed. Kuhn observes that the practitioners of the old science continue on their merry way through retirement and final expiration, while the younger people work on cobbling together a new way of thinking that gradually emerges as the dominant paradigm.

    Kuhn was writing about science and the profession thereof but his insight has broad application to sociological, cultural, and political ideas too. They do not evolve in a linear fashion, piling victory upon victory, as a Whiggish perspective of the 19th century would have it. Instead, change occurs episodically. One generation is as likely to forget the wisdom of the past as it is to overthrow the orthodoxies of the present. We are in a forever state of cobbling together truth rather than progressively unfolding it.

    We’ve seen this happen in the postwar world, as planners built structures that were supposed to govern the world forever. But in a few short years, the world came to be divided rather than united by the Western perception of the new threat of Russian imperialism. That created the Cold War which lasted for 40 years until a new “end of history” was born, which put freedom, democracy, and U.S. hegemony on the commanding heights. That turn has been challenged by the rise of China and huge industrial shifts in the 21st century.

    A worker is pictured with car batteries at a factory of Xinwangda Electric Vehicle Battery Co. Ltd., which makes lithium batteries for electric cars and other uses, in Nanjing in China’s eastern Jiangsu Province, on March 12, 2021. STR/AFP via Getty Images

    If we were to name one dominant factor that has provoked the big change in our time, it would have to be the global response to the lab-created virus of SARS-CoV-2, which was met with Chinese Communist Party-style universal quarantines all over the world, and followed by shot mandates on most public institutions and many private businesses. These policies were extreme beyond which had been practiced in any period of history but also, and in many ways, merely an extension of the “normal science” of times.

    The media, large corporations, and nearly all governments got behind the pandemic response and jeered the non-compliers. This was a huge error because it gave rise to a full generation of the incredulous who lost trust in elites at all levels: medical, academic, media, and government. It has all fallen apart in our time, leaving people scrambling in all directions for explanations of what could have gone so wrong and what should be done about it.

    What fascinates me about our election year is not so much the issues on the table but the underlying template that everyone knows is there but no one dares mention; namely the utter discrediting of elite opinion over the last four years.

    The claims of the experts simply became too implausible to compel public assent. And this time it was personal. People’s schools and churches were closed, loved ones forced on ventilators to die alone, and whole communities were shattered when public spaces were blocked.

    In other words, the “normal science” became a threat to people’s lives, especially once the vaccine mandates came along that most people did not want or need and which ended up being far less effective and far more dangerous than advertised. That was the turning point, the mark at which the anomalies overwhelmed the orthodoxies and the expert classes fell into disrepute.

    Nothing about any of this would shock Thomas Kuhn, who gave us a map of understanding back in 1962. Finding that new way of thinking is the essence of our times, which is why everything seems to be in question. The other day, Elon Musk suggested cutting $2 trillion next year from the federal budget. It barely made the headlines, even though it is a highly credible promise.

    That’s the new world in which we live. It is being built on the embers of the old.

    To be sure, this shift will not happen all at once. It will happen in fits and starts and be accompanied by a great deal of alarm and even pain along the way. But one way or another, it is going to happen, and for one simple reason. As Jeff Bezos explained in the Washington Post, reality is an undisputed champion.

    Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 11/01/2024 – 23:25

  • Car Thefts In Washington Rise 65% As Number Approaches 1 Million Nationwide
    Car Thefts In Washington Rise 65% As Number Approaches 1 Million Nationwide

    As Democrats swear up and down that crime across the country is under control, the data continues to prove them otherwise. This week it was Washington stolen vehicle data, which showed the number of cars stolen across the nation is steadily approaching the 1 million mark. 

    In fact, vehicle thefts jumped nearly 14% nationwide from 2020 to 2022, according to data by LendingTree and reporting by KOMO News. 

    In Washington, the data was clear. Thefts rose by over 65%, with Oregon seeing a 40% increase, placing both states among the top five nationwide. Three Washington cities—Kennewick, Bremerton, and Wenatchee—rank in the nation’s top 10 for theft spikes, according to KOMO News.

    The KOMO News report says that theft rates rose in 34 states, with Vermont leading. While theft impacts insurance rates, Washington’s rates remain 22% below the national average due to other balancing factors.

    Rob Bhatt, LendingTree auto expert and insurance agent, commented: “We’re talking about smaller places that we don’t necessarily associate with big city problems like car thefts.”

    “Some of the other things that play in to the equation include things like crash rates and also the cost of medical treatment, the cost of car repairs and all those things,” Bhatt added. “The auto makers have provided a fix and I think that’s working its way through the system. Why they didn’t have this anti-theft technology in the first place is baffling.”

    Recall at the end of summer we wrote how car thefts were becoming a nationwide “epidemic”. 

    We wrote that the number of cars seized at the Port of Newark was on the rise. Jeffrey Greene, acting director at the Port of New York and Newark, oversees customs officials using x-rays to inspect containers and seize stolen cars.

    In one case this year, two junk vehicles concealed a pristine Mercedes, while another container held a stolen Chevy Silverado.

    So far this year, they’ve seized 331 vehicles, on pace to surpass last year’s total. Investigators say West African markets, especially Nigeria, offer the highest prices. Social media videos show luxury SUVs being unloaded from containers, sometimes still sporting American license plates.

    Greene commented: “So last year, the Port of New York-Newark here, we led the country in seized vehicles … We had 368 vehicles. That’s more than a car a day.”

    The CBS report says young people are often recruited for car thefts, according to Homeland Security Special Agent William Walker, who leads an auto crime task force.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 11/01/2024 – 23:00

  • The Biden-Harris Administration Wasted Nearly One Billion Dollars On Misinformation
    The Biden-Harris Administration Wasted Nearly One Billion Dollars On Misinformation

    Authored by Ian Miller via The Brownstone Institute,

    The party of “Science” apparently misled hundreds of millions of people on the actual science surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic. Stop the presses.

    Starting in early 2020, the combined efforts of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services, and their partners in the media caused an untold amount of damage to society and public health and might have even created conditions for increased Covid spread. How? By repeatedly, profoundly, and often purposefully communicating inaccurate information while spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get their preferred messages across.

    Now, a new, massive 113-page report from the US House of Representatives Energy & Commerce Committee has detailed the remarkable abuses from the Biden-Harris administration and the manner in which they communicated during Covid. 

    Biden, CDC Partners Literally Wasted a Fortune to Lie to the American People

    The report details a number of unbelievable inaccuracies in 2021 coming from the Biden administration’s communications team and the CDC’s messaging apparatus. Fauci and Francis Collins’ National Institutes of Health were also responsible, creating guidance using taxpayer money, nearly $1 billion per the report, that misled millions of people and caused unimaginable harm in the process.

    While the Biden-Harris administration’s public health guidance led to prolonged closures of schools and businesses, the NIH was spending nearly a billion dollars of taxpayer money trying to manipulate Americans with advertisements—sometimes containing erroneous or unproven information. By overpromising what the Covid-19 vaccines could do—in direct contradiction of the FDA’s authorizations—and over emphasizing the virus’s risk to children and young adults, the Biden-Harris administration caused Americans to lose trust in the public health system,” Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) said after the report’s release. “Our investigation also uncovered the extent to which public funding went to Big Tech companies to track and monitor Americans, underscoring the need for stronger online data privacy protections.”

    One of the most damaging, and woefully incorrect messaging campaigns centered on vaccine efficacy against infection. As the report details, Biden’s “Stop the Spread” campaign was a pervasive marketing effort in conjunction with the CDC that claimed vaccines would end the pandemic by reducing infections. That had enormous knock-on effects, including decreasing trust in all vaccinations and ultimately harming public health.

    “The entire premise of the Biden-Harris ‘Stop the Spread’ campaign was that if you got vaccinated for COVID-19, you could resume daily activities because they said vaccinated people would not spread the disease,” said Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Chair Morgan Griffith (R-VA). “Despite lacking scientific basis, the administration bought into this CDC claim and misled the American public. As a result, vaccination coverage with other vaccines appears to have declined, I believe because of a growing distrust of information coming from our public health institutions.”

    This campaign was even more disingenuous and purposefully misleading than previously realized. The “Stop the Spread” publicity blitz hid in plain sight a message from the CDC that even they didn’t know whether the vaccines actually stopped infection or transmission. The report shared a screenshot of a page from the Biden administration’s marketing that specifically said “science” wasn’t sure how well the vaccines worked against infection. 

    Yet the Biden administration made life-altering policy decisions such as vaccine mandates, discriminatory entry processes, and military vaccination requirements regardless. And that was in addition to the less quantifiable impacts like nudging millions of people to follow their preferred course of action.

    CDC Guidance Exacerbated Existing Problems

    The report also explains how the Biden administration relied heavily on guidance from the CDC, an organization that thoroughly disgraced itself during the pandemic. There were several examples highlighted, chief among them that CDC “experts” went far beyond what even the FDA claimed Covid vaccines could do.

    Without evidence, the report says Biden’s marketing claimed that “COVID vaccines were highly effective against transmission.” Within just a few months, it was clear that all the available evidence pointed towards the exact opposite direction. Per the report, this had a “negative impact on vaccine confidence and the CDC’s credibility when proven untrue.” 

    The CDC also had “inconsistent and flawed messaging about the effectiveness of masks,” which created seemingly endless mandates and, again, overconfidence in an ineffective policy. Some of those mandates even continue to this day.

    That’s just the tip of their misinformation. A wealth of data and public embarrassments for the CDC confirmed that the organization “consistently overstated the risk of COVID-19 to children,” the report states. That fear-mongering had disastrous consequences, from unnecessarily terrifying parents to prolonged school closures and lack of socialization—setting an entire generation of children back in the process.

    Still, after being repeatedly and profoundly proven wrong, the CDC has demonstrated they’ve yet to learn their lesson. In late 2024, the CDC continues to recommend Covid-19 vaccines for babies starting at six months old. That makes the US a global outlier compared to European nations that have maintained at least some level of intellectual honesty.

    How Do We Fix CDC Abuses?

    The report detailed several recommendations to fix these organizations after their disastrous work during the pandemic. Even implementing just a select few, listed below, would do wonders for fixing the institutional rot that influenced these mistakes. 

    • Congress should consider clarifying responsibility for evaluating the safety of vaccines and streamlining existing reporting systems for capturing vaccine injuries and adverse reactions.

    • HHS and its agencies should embrace a culture of transparency and accountability.

    • The CDC and federal public health officials should not attempt to silence dissenting scientific opinions.

    Also highlighted in the report is how the CDC and NIH used their weight in their attempts to censor scientists who dissented from their preferred narratives. Beyond their mistakes, profound inaccuracies, and nearly unlimited spending, their censorship efforts are equally concerning.

    As we learned during Covid, if there’s one thing “experts” hate, it’s being told that they were proven wrong. Instead of learning, adjusting, and apologizing, they move to censor, criticize and mislead. This new report is the latest confirmation of these unacceptable “mistakes.” And reaffirms the importance of ensuring they never happen again.

    Republished from the author’s Substack

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 11/01/2024 – 22:35

  • Is Metformin More Than Just A Diabetes Treatment?
    Is Metformin More Than Just A Diabetes Treatment?

    Authored by Mary West via The Epoch Times,

    Metformin, a common Type 2 diabetes, may offer protection against a subtype of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), according to a study published in Investigative Ophthalmology & Vision Science (IOVS).

    This is the latest among other studies suggesting that the medication may have several uses beyond diabetes, such as promoting longevity and weight loss and protecting against neurological disorders, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. Most of the proposed uses are off-label, which means the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved the medication to treat those conditions.

    While research on some off-label metformin uses is promising, studies on other uses are inconsistent. Some are controversial because they may not offer the best approach for addressing a health issue. Additionally, although metformin is generally well-tolerated, it does have some adverse effects and is not for everyone.

    Metformin and Macular Degeneration Subtype

    Macular degeneration, a condition mainly associated with aging, affects the retina and involves the loss of central vision. The primary types of AMD are wet AMD and dry AMD. Geography atrophy (GA) is a subtype of dry AMD. GA leads to legal blindness in 16 percent of those who have it.

    In recent years, anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) medications, which decrease the growth of blood vessels in the eye, have revolutionized treatment for wet AMD.

    Conversely, treatments for GA have lagged. In 2023, pegcetacoplan and avacincaptad pegol came on the market, but they only slow GA’s progression rather than prevent the condition.

    Studies on the treatment of dry AMD with metformin have been encouraging, but they have not focused on GA specifically. Because of the limited research on metformin’s effect on GA and the condition’s debilitating visual effects, researchers undertook the IOVS study.

    This case-control experiment involved older individuals with new-onset GA and a control group who did not have it. The researchers looked at exposure to metformin in the preceding year to determine whether any correlations were present. Data analysis indicated an association between metformin and reduced risk of new-onset GA. The researchers concluded that further research is necessary to verify the findings, but metformin may provide a noninvasive alternative treatment in preventing GA.

    Mechanisms of action underlying the benefit of metformin on GA are unclear, but there are several possibilities. Instead of the protective effects stemming from a blood sugar-lowering action useful for diabetes, the effects may be due to the medication’s anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties, based on animal and test tube studies.

    Metformin and Aging

    Is it possible that taking a pill can prolong your life? A review published in Frontiers in Endocrinology noted that metformin may decrease the likelihood of early death associated with diabetes, cancer, cognitive decline, and cardiovascular disease, which could lengthen the period of life spent in good health.

    Factors underlying metformin’s anti-aging effects include its ability to lower high blood sugar, boost insulin sensitivity, and decrease oxidative stress. The medication also has a direct protective effect on blood vessel function, which may improve blood flow.

    Despite these positive effects, the researchers expressed reservations about using metformin as a prophylactic (preventive) measure to promote longevity. Dependence on a pill could reduce the incentive to adopt healthy lifestyle practices, such as exercise and a nutritious diet, which have proven beneficial. Additionally, long-term metformin use may cause vitamin B12 deficiency. In light of these considerations, people should not view the drug as a “quick fix” for aging.

    Dr. Markus Ploesser, a psychiatrist and integrative medicine physician at Open Mind Health, concurs with the researchers’ viewpoint. In an email to The Epoch Times, he stated that metformin has several beneficial effects that may enhance longevity; “however, its use as an anti-aging drug is still not fully proven.”

    Ploesser added that it is essential to balance the possible benefits against risks and to consider it within a broader context of other longevity-promoting strategies, such as diet, exercise, sleep optimization, and stress management.

    “Taking a pill alone is unlikely to be the healthiest approach for most people, as a comprehensive lifestyle strategy has much stronger evidence for promoting longevity,” he said.

    Metformin and Weight Loss

    Metformin may promote weight loss, but its use is best reserved for a select population.

    A review published in Current Obesity Reports stated that it suppresses the appetite and may also increase the abundance of bacterial strains in the gut microbiome, an effect associated with healthier weight. However, research on the weight-loss effects of metformin shows either modest improvement or inconsistent results. Consequently, the FDA has not approved the medication for obesity.

    Guidelines from the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and the American College of Endocrinology advise the use of metformin for obese individuals who have prediabetes or insulin intolerance and have not responded to other medications for obesity or lifestyle modifications. Current use of the drug for obesity is strictly off-label, but doctors often prescribe it for people with a high risk of obesity-related complications who can’t tolerate other interventions, noted the Current Obesity Reports review.

    Dr. Michael Lahey, a physician specializing in metabolic health and weight management at My Weight Loss Partner, told The Epoch Times via email that although some research shows metformin might promote weight loss, it is not an anti-obesity medication.

    “In my experience, I stand to defend the facts that making the necessary lifestyle changes—such as proper dieting, reliable exercise, and positive behavioral change—has the strongest bearing for long-term, effective weight loss,” he said. “It can be suggested that metformin may be used as a second-line treatment, in particular, if insulin resistance is quite pronounced; nonetheless, it should not be used alone.”

    Metformin and Neurological Disorders

    A review published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences indicates that metformin may protect against neurological conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease and major depressive disorder.

    The mechanisms that underlie the protection are not fully understood, but several actions may play a role. Metformin may help prevent damage to the blood-brain barrier (BBB), a tight layer of cells that prevents harmful substances from entering the brain. Damage to the BBB can result in neuroinflammation and injury, leading to neurodegeneration.

    Metformin also moderates autophagy, a natural cleaning process that improves cellular function. It also regulates synaptic transmission, where neurotransmitters are released that send signals from one nerve cell to another, and plasticity, or the ability of neural networks to grow and reorganize.

    Metformin and Cardiovascular Protection

    A review published in Pharmaceuticals reported that an estimated two-thirds of the deaths of people with diabetes are attributable to cardiovascular disease. Among this group, approximately 40 percent stem from coronary artery disease, 15 percent from heart failure and other types of heart disease, and about 10 percent from stroke. Consequently, reducing the likelihood of these risks is paramount.

    Most clinical studies indicate that metformin may decrease the likelihood of chronic blood vessel-related complications of diabetes and significantly lower modifiable cardiovascular risk factors. The latter includes increased platelet aggregation, unhealthy blood lipids, belly fat, obesity, oxidative stress, high blood glucose, and inflammation.

    Metformin and Kidney Protection

    According to the Pharmaceuticals review, chronic kidney disease affects about 30 percent of people with Type 1 diabetes and approximately 40 percent of those with Type 2 diabetes. This result of chronically high blood sugar affects tiny blood vessels and frequently leads to end-stage kidney disease. Existing medications are ineffective, and many people eventually need dialysis or a kidney transplant.

    Metformin has kidney-protective properties that can stop kidney tissue injuries caused by various toxins, including high blood glucose.

    This benefit’s underlying mechanisms of action are complex and not fully known. A factor that plays a key role is metformin’s activation of the enzyme AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), which results in beneficial effects in kidney cells. AMPK serves as a vital energy source in the cell and regulates cellular protein, glucose, and lipid metabolism.

    Metformin and Cancer

    People with diabetes, particularly Type 2 diabetes, have a higher risk of developing certain cancers, including breast, bladder, endometrium, pancreas, liver, and colon and rectum, noted the review in Pharmaceuticals. Metformin has a desirable effect on certain cancer risk factors, such as high body weight, high blood sugar, and insulin sensitivity.

    Research shows the medication reduces the risk of cancer in people with diabetes, but exactly how it achieves this protective effect is only partly understood. One factor involves an indirect action on tumor cells caused by the blood sugar- and insulin-lowering effects, which may suppress cancer cell proliferation. Additionally, researchers have proposed that metformin has several direct anti-cancer effects, such as the activation of AMPK in tumor cells.

    While some studies suggest the medication may reduce the risk of cancer, others do not. The inconsistency shows that randomized studies are needed to determine the value of metformin in cancer.

    Safety Concerns

    Metformin is generally well-tolerated, but up to 30 percent of people experience gastrointestinal effects, such as nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting.

    Australian physician and board-certified nutritionist Dr. Peter Brukner told The Epoch Times via email that people with the following conditions or risk factors should avoid metformin:

    • Kidney problems: The kidneys remove metformin from the body, so the medication is not eliminated properly if they are not working well. This can cause lactic acidosis, a complication where the blood pH drops and becomes acidic, causing severe illness.

    • Liver problems: The liver also has a job in handling metformin. Liver disease puts a person at risk of lactic acidosis.

    • Breathing problems or heart issues: A person with severe breathing problems or heart issues might not get enough oxygen. This, too, can make them more likely to develop lactic acidosis.

    • History of lactose acidosis: If someone has experienced lactic acidosis before, it is a good idea not to take metformin because the problem may come back.

    • Pregnant or breastfeeding women: Metformin is not always suggested for women who are pregnant or breastfeeding since its impact on the baby is not entirely known. Doctors often seek safer choices in such situations.

    • Certain medications: Some medications do not go well with metformin and can create problems. These include those that raise the risk of lactic acidosis, such as bupropion, carbonic anhydrase inhibitors, and cephalexin and medications that enhance its blood sugar-lowering effect, such as salicylates and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Individuals should inform their doctor about all the medications they use to avoid drug interactions.

    Anyone desiring to take metformin with one of these conditions should discuss it with their doctor, Brukner advises.

    Risk Versus Benefit

    While further research is needed, metformin’s uses for disease prevention may be valid. However, doctors must weigh the benefits against the risks for each individual. In cases where a person is highly likely to develop a particular condition, the benefits may exceed the risks.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 11/01/2024 – 22:10

  • Did The Latest BRICS Summit Achieve Anything Of Tangible Significance At All?
    Did The Latest BRICS Summit Achieve Anything Of Tangible Significance At All?

    Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

    Over a week has passed since the latest BRICS Summit in Kazan so it’s possible to assess what exactly it achieved now that the dust has settled. The primary takeaway is the Kazan Declaration, which Director General of the prestigious Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) Andrey Kortunov described as “a manifesto for the new world order”. His praise shouldn’t be taken lightly since he’s an archetypical realist who also earlier tempered expectations about what BRICS was capable of agreeing to.

    Titled “What BRICS Cannot and What It Can Deliver”, Kortunov explained that: “BRICS cannot become a global economic integration project”; BRICS will not turn into a multilateral political or security alliance of an anti-Western nature”; BRICS is not likely to contribute a lot to resolving disputes between its members or disputes between its members and third parties”; and “BRICS will never become an analogue to G7.”

    He then juxtaposed these assessments with his expectations that “BRICS can promote trade and investments among its members, as well as contribute to economic and social development of these members”; “BRICS could help to shape common non-Western approaches to global problems”; “BRICS is capable of contributing to the dialogue of civilizations”; and “BRICS can become an important source of ideas and proposals for UN, G20 and other universal bodies.”

    This background places his description from the introduction into context, which will now be elaborated on. According to Kortunov, “For the first time in BRICS’ history, the Declaration sets out in detail the group’s shared vision of the current state of the international system, the common or overlapping approaches to the fundamental global problems of our time and to acute regional crises, and the contours of a desirable and achievable world order as the members of the group currently see it.”

    He then immediately added that “While the document does not provide specific timetables for individual tasks or roadmaps for specific areas of work, it does cover a number of key objectives that the group should or could pursue over the next few years.” In his assessment, “there is a clear balance between the security and development agendas”, which he considers to be a deliberate choice “to maintain its very broad mandate” instead of focusing on purely economic and financial affairs.

    He thus surmised that “BRICS intends to position itself as a multitasking laboratory of global governance, where new algorithms of multilateral cooperation and innovative models for solving the world’s major economic and political problems can be tested, including trade, finance and strategic stability.” To that end, BRICS is balancing between reforming the Western-centric world order and creating alternative institutions, and it’s the latter which excites the group’s enthusiasts the most.

    Before proceeding, however, it’s important to clarify a few matters. Putin declared prior to the summit that a common BRICS currency isn’t currently being considered and then he said during the event that Russia isn’t fighting against the dollar. Kremlin spokesman Peskov later added that BRICS as a whole isn’t trying to defeat the dollar either and that their financial messaging service won’t be an alternative to SWIFT. These policy reminders bring the analysis around to discussing the group’s three main initiatives.

    Sputnik published a handy guide here about BRICS Bridge, BRICS Clear, and BRICS Pay, which are correspondingly a financial messaging service, an independent blockchain-based depository system, and a cashless payment service. As was earlier written, they don’t aim to replace their Western antecedents but simply to create alternatives for others to use in order to hedge against the risk of the West one day weaponizing these existing platforms against them like they did against Russia from 2022 onward.

    None of them have yet to be rolled out, but progress was made on their creation and eventual implementation during the summit. The same goes for Russia’s proposals to set up grain and precious metals exchanges, which could in theory help form the foundation for a new currency or at least a common unit of account that some have simply called “the unit”. This could consist of a combination of commodities and a basket of members’ currencies, but it’ll likely take years to agree upon, if ever.

    Much more successful was BRICS’ bestowing of partnership status on around a dozen countries, though no official list has yet to be published, but some countries like Cuba already celebrated receiving this status while others like Venezuela were upset that they didn’t get it (in this case due to Brazil’s veto). Even so, it was explained last month that “BRICS Membership Or Lack Thereof Isn’t Actually That Big Of A Deal”, namely because any country can voluntarily coordinate their financial policies with BRICS.

    In other words, while this distinction is prestigious and being snubbed like Venezuela was by Brazil is thus a deep insult, it doesn’t really matter whether any country participates in discussions on financial multipolarity processes as an official member, observers as a partner, or hears about the outcome afterwards. All cooperation is voluntary so anyone – be they a member, partner, or non-associate – can either implement BRICS’ proposals or decline if they feel that they don’t meet their national interests.

    Seeing as how one’s ties with BRICS therefore don’t really matter either way, the group’s partnership expansion is thus purely symbolic, which means that nothing of tangible significance was agreed to during last week’s summit. The same came be said about every prior summit apart from the Fortaleza one in 2014 where members agreed to create the New Development Bank (NDB), which is the only tangible manifestation of BRICS’ efforts to create alternative institutions, but it’s also clearly imperfect.

    NDB President Dilma Rousseff confirmed in July 2023 that “The NDB reiterated that it is not planning new projects in Russia and operates in compliance with applicable restrictions on international financial and capital markets.” Simply put, the NDB that Russia itself co-founded complies with the US’ sanctions against it, thus making this less of a real alternative to Western institutions and more of a complement. That might also have to do with China, where it’s based, complying with most Western sanctions.

    “Russia & China’s US-Provoked Payment Problems Caught Most BRICS Enthusiasts By Surprise” after RT revealed the extent of these long-running challenges in early September here once they began to reach critical proportions following the latest US pressure on China at the time. Although India is reportedly defying these restrictions and is on pace to become the world’s third-largest economy by 2030, without China doing the same, BRICS as a whole will struggle to create truly alternative institutions.

    China has been more cautious about provoking the US’ threatened secondary sanctions than India due to it being considered by the US to be a systemic rival, the perception of which it doesn’t want to inadvertently confirm, hence why it’s complied with so many of the sanctions so far. In fact, Russia’s Special Presidential Representative for SCO Affairs Bakhtiyor Khakimov revealed last week that his country can’t even pay its dues because the bank is located in China and they also only use dollars.

    If the political will was present, then China would have devised a workaround by now instead of dragging the issue on for so long that Khakimov felt compelled to complain to the public about it, which just goes to show how strictly China is complying with the sanctions inside BRICS and even the SCO. To be sure, bilateral trade continues to grow so some alternative channels have been created, but they’re seemingly segmented based on industry (ex: energy, tech) and don’t facilitate payments to others like the NDB.

    Reflecting on everything that was shared, both Kortunov’s insight and that which followed, the latest BRICS Summit was symbolic just like every prior one apart from 2014’s that led to the creation of the clearly imperfect NDB. BRICS’ purely voluntary nature means that it’ll never become what its enthusiasts expect since there are too many asymmetries between its members. There’s also no realistic chance of BRICS making compliance with its proposals mandatory either since that would lead to its dissolution.

    These observations greatly limit what BRICS could foreseeably achieve, but they don’t rule out the creation of more alternative institutions like those represented by BRICS Bridge, BRICS Clear, and BRICS Pay. Grain and precious metals exchanges are also possible, but in those cases, only on the basis of minilaterals within BRICS that are then given the group’s branding after everyone else agrees. A common BRICS currency or a common unit of account is a much longer-term goal that’s unobtainable for now.

    The disappointing precedent established by the NDB’s compliance with US sanctions makes one worry about just how much of a true alternative the abovementioned institutions that Russia seeks to also co-found will be. There’s no doubt that Russia learned from that experience so nobody should assume that it already invested the time and resources required for creating these new institutions without first devising a way to prevent them from sanctioning it too, but it remains to be seen how this will work.

    The conclusion is that it’s a lot easier to talk about creating truly alternative institutions than actually doing so, which means that BRICS will likely just remain a talking club, or a “multitasking laboratory of global governance” as Kortunov diplomatically described it. That’s not to downplay the group’s role since it’s important for major and developing non-Western countries to discuss pressing issues of the evolving world order, especially economic-financial ones, but that’s not the same as what enthusiasts expected.

    At the end of the day, the Alt-Media Community went overboard hyping up BRICS and the latest Kazan Summit, only for nothing of tangible significance to emerge from the first since 2014’s decision to create the clearly imperfect NDB that later sanctioned Russia while the second had no tangible outcome at all. The latter did indeed lay the basis for creating more alternative institutions, although it’s unclear when they’ll be unveiled and how Russia will ensure that they don’t sanction it like the NDB ended up doing.

    The Kazan Summit therefore wasn’t a failure, and in fact, it succeeded in its only realistic goal all along of gathering its members and partners together to discuss ways to voluntarily accelerate financial multipolarity processes such as through the increased use of national currencies. The outcome was always going to be more symbolic than tangible due to the group’s purely voluntary nature, though some observers had false expectations and thus feel bitter, but now they know what BRICS is really about.  

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 11/01/2024 – 21:45

  • Mapping America's Wine Consumption By State
    Mapping America’s Wine Consumption By State

    From coast to coast, wine is often seen as a staple on tables across the U.S, with certain regions raising their glasses a little more often.

    From California’s Napa Valley to New York’s Finger Lakes, the U.S. is home to several world-renowned wine regions, and ranked third in Forbes’ list of top 10 countries for wine lovers.

    This map, via Visual Capitalist’s Kayla Zhu, visualizes the annual per capita ethanol consumption of wine in gallons in 2022, by state.

    The data comes from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), which measures alcohol consumption in ethanol volume.

    For reference, the average bottle of wine (750 mL, 12.9% ABV) contains 0.0256 gallons of ethanol.

    Consumption figures only include residents age 14 or older, and is based on alcoholic beverage sales data collected by the Alcohol Epidemiologic Data System (AEDS), the National Alcohol Beverage Control Association, and from various reports produced by beverage industry sources.

    Which States Consume the Most Wine?

    Below, we show the per capita ethanol consumption in gallons of wine for each state.

    State Per capita ethanol consumption in gallons of wine
    District of Columbia 1.05
    New Hampshire 0.8
    Vermont 0.72
    Delaware 0.68
    California 0.62
    Hawaii 0.58
    Florida 0.57
    Massachusetts 0.57
    Nevada 0.57
    Oregon 0.57
    Alaska 0.53
    Connecticut 0.53
    Rhode Island 0.52
    New Jersey 0.51
    Virginia 0.51
    Montana 0.5
    North Carolina 0.49
    Washington 0.49
    Illinois 0.48
    Colorado 0.47
    New York 0.46
    Maine 0.42
    Michigan 0.39
    Minnesota 0.39
    Wisconsin 0.39
    Arizona 0.38
    Indiana 0.36
    Missouri 0.35
    Maryland 0.34
    Tennessee 0.34
    Louisiana 0.33
    Texas 0.33
    North Dakota 0.31
    Ohio 0.31
    New Mexico 0.3
    Pennsylvania 0.3
    Idaho 0.29
    Wyoming 0.29
    Georgia 0.25
    Alabama 0.24
    South Carolina 0.24
    Arkansas 0.23
    Iowa 0.22
    Kentucky 0.22
    Nebraska 0.21
    South Dakota 0.21
    Mississippi 0.19
    Oklahoma 0.18
    Utah 0.17
    Kansas 0.15
    West Virginia 0.11

    The average annual per capita ethanol consumption from wine in the U.S. is 0.42 gallons, which is equivalent to about 16.4 bottles of wine.

    Overall wine consumption in the U.S. has been on the decline in the past few years, according to reports by Silicon Valley Bank.

    Wine sales and tasting room visitations both dropped for the second straight year, and as of 2024, an oversupply of planted vineyards may lead to discounting and price reduction.

    In 2022, D.C. residents had the highest per capita wine consumption in the U.S., with an annual average of 1.05 gallons of ethanol from wine, or 41 bottles of wine.

    New Hampshire’s lack of state sales tax makes alcohol, including wine, significantly cheaper than in neighboring states, which likely drives higher wine purchases and consumption as residents from nearby areas cross state lines to take advantage of the lower prices.

    To learn more about alcohol consumption in the U.S., check out this graphic that shows beer consumption by U.S. state.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 11/01/2024 – 21:20

  • WHO: Global Tuberculosis Cases Hit Highest Number Since Monitoring Began In 1995
    WHO: Global Tuberculosis Cases Hit Highest Number Since Monitoring Began In 1995

    Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

    New cases of tuberculosis globally reached a record high in 2023, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

    Roughly 8.2 million individuals were newly diagnosed with tuberculosis (TB) last year, which is the highest number since the organization began monitoring the disease in 1995, the WHO said in an Oct. 29 statement.

    “This represents a notable increase from 7.5 million reported in 2022, placing TB again as the leading infectious disease killer in 2023, surpassing COVID-19,” the WHO stated.

    TB caused an estimated 1.25 million deaths last year, according to an Oct. 29 WHO report.

    The total number of people falling ill with tuberculosis has been rising since 2021, the report said. Last year, 10.8 million individuals contracted the disease, a small increase from 10.7 million in the previous year, but much higher than the 10.1 million in 2020.

    The WHO noted that most of the increase in TB cases between 2022 and 2023 reflected population growth. The rate of incidence largely remained similar in both years.

    Just five nations accounted for 56 percent of new annual tuberculosis cases—India, Indonesia, China, the Philippines, and Pakistan.

    Dr. Tereza Kasaeva, director of the organization’s Global Tuberculosis Program, called the numbers a “sobering reality,” stressing the need for collective action to deal with the issue. There is an “urgent need to tackle drug-resistant tuberculosis, a significant driver of antimicrobial resistance.”

    “Reductions in the number of deaths from TB since 2022 and the slowing increase in the TB incidence rate are the result of substantial post-COVID recovery in TB diagnosis and treatment,” the report said.

    The WHO noted that a key barrier to plugging diagnostic and treatment gaps among TB-affected individuals is the financial costs. Roughly 50 percent of individuals face medical costs that are more than 20 percent of their annual incomes, which the WHO called “catastrophic.”

    “The fact that TB still kills and sickens so many people is an outrage when we have the tools to prevent it, detect it, and treat it,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

    US Tuberculosis Situation

    According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there were 8,331 reported tuberculosis cases in the country in 2022. The agency further estimated that up to 13 million individuals in the United States could be living with latent or inactive infection.

    “During 2020, TB case counts and incidence rates declined substantially, likely because of factors associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, TB case counts and incidence partially rebounded, but remained lower compared with 2019,” the agency said.

    “In 2022, reported TB cases and incidence rates increased for the second year in a row, but remained lower compared with 2019 prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

    The CDC pointed to birth outside the United States as a “key risk factor” for tuberculosis. Incidence rate among non-U.S.-born individuals was 17.1 times higher compared to those born in the country.

    While several types of bacteria can cause TB, the majority of American cases are from Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the agency noted.

    Symptoms include a cough that lasts for three weeks or longer, weakness or fatigue, coughing up blood, loss of appetite, fever, chills, and chest pain. The CDC warns that active TB can be fatal without proper treatment.

    In April, Chicago’s Health Department revealed that some of the illegal immigrants who had recently entered the city had tuberculosis. The agency estimated that 10–20 percent of people who come from Central and South America already have latent tuberculosis.

    California issued a health advisory in April, warning about a “substantial increase” in TB cases in the state. In 2023, California reported 2,100 tuberculosis infections, up 15 percent from the previous year.

    In many cases, the individuals had latent TB before the disease became active, by which time it had spread to other individuals.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 11/01/2024 – 20:55

  • BlackRock Reportedly Uses TikTok Influencers At ETF Launch Party
    BlackRock Reportedly Uses TikTok Influencers At ETF Launch Party

    Larry Fink’s BlackRock appears to have used a PR agency to tap TikTok influencers for a launch event in New York City to promote a new exchange-traded fund focused on the top 20 US stocks. 

    According to TikTok influencer Piper Cassidy Phillips, she and other influencers were invited “to an influencer event with BlackRock” earlier this week. They were invited to a wine bar in the West Village. 

    Phillips said this was the first time she had seen a financial institution inviting influencers to an event to promote an ETF product. She added that Fink’s BlackRock worked with “a huge PR agency” to put on the event. 

    Phillips discussed the iShares Top 20 US Stocks ETF (TOPT) in the video, which is focused on the 20 largest US stocks by market capitalization. 

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

    Many of Phillips’ followers on the Chinese social media platform were upset that BlackRock used influencers to promote financial products to retail investors.

    “FINRA is gonna have a field day with this one,” one TikToker wrote. 

    X users respond…

    Here’s where we are in the cycle. 

    “Selling your soul to BlackRock for a couple bucks,” another TikTok said. 

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 11/01/2024 – 20:30

  • The Illusion Of Growth: How Inflation Skews Our Perception Of The Stock Market
    The Illusion Of Growth: How Inflation Skews Our Perception Of The Stock Market

    Authored by Alexander Frei via The Epoch Times,

    Americans can readily see the effects of record-high inflation every time they shop. Prices have soared, from the grocery store to the gas pumps. Although inflation has cooled, families are still feeling the pinch.

    And the harm doesn’t end there: Inflation also is making stock markets appear stronger than they really are and cutting into returns for everyone, including those with retirement accounts.

    We seldom hear about that last point. When media outlets discuss the latest inflation rate, they typically highlight the average annual percentage change in the consumer price index. The CPI tracks a basketful of goods, including housing, food, energy, insurance, and more, measuring the average price increases of these items over time.

    From 2016 to 2020, the inflation rate averaged 1.9 percent, which resulted in a cumulative price increase of about 7.7 percent over four years. The Federal Reserve’s target rate—about 2 percent—typically goes unnoticed by consumers, as wages tend to rise at a similar pace.

    But from 2021 to the present, the inflation rate has averaged 4.9 percent, leading to a cumulative price increase of 19.6 percent. At these elevated levels, wages struggle to keep up, making inflation more noticeable for consumers. A recent poll revealed that 63 percent of voters say they believe the U.S. economy is on the wrong track and 62 percent characterize it as weak.

    Yet despite this negative sentiment, the stock market appears to be booming. On Oct. 21, the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 hit all-time highs.

    However, these indexes alone don’t tell the full story.

    Inflation can distort how we perceive market gains. Although it may appear that investments in the stock market are yielding record-breaking returns, these returns are more moderate once they’re adjusted for inflation.

    In short, inflation not only hurts consumers, it hurts investors—which includes most Americans. This hidden tax on savings and investments quietly eats away at real profits, leaving Americans with far less purchasing power than it appears on the surface.

    To estimate how this would affect someone who invested in the stock market in January 2021, you compare the Dow Jones Industrial Average with its inflation-adjusted counterpart. Although the nominal stock market gains since 2021 show an increase of 39 percent, this growth shrinks to just 15 percent when adjusted for inflation.

    Inflation, often overlooked in stock market discussions, has a tangible impact on investment returns. Investors who focus solely on nominal gains without considering inflation may develop a false sense of optimism about their portfolio’s performance.

    So how can inflation have such a notable effect?

    In simple terms, as prices rise, even significant returns lose their purchasing power. More money is required to buy the same goods and services, eroding the real value of one’s gains. As everything becomes more expensive, higher earnings or investment returns don’t stretch as far, making it harder to keep up with the true cost of living.

    For comparison, one can track the average returns starting from 2016 to 2020. During this period, both the Dow and the inflation-adjusted Dow are much closer together, suggesting that inflation had a lesser effect on eroding profits. Indeed, despite the COVID-19 shock, the inflation-adjusted Dow rose by approximately 65 percent while the non-adjusted Dow increased by 81 percent.

    Inflation is not just a consumer issue—it affects everyone, from families trying to make ends meet to investors on Wall Street. The disconnect between nominal market gains and their inflation-adjusted counterparts helps explain why many Americans, despite a seemingly booming stock market, voice concerns about the economy.

    This illusion of growth highlights the need for a sharper focus on controlling inflation. Reducing wasteful government spending and bringing down inflation is essential not only to preserve the real value of investments, but to ensure that economic prosperity is felt across all levels of society.

    Reprinted by permission from The Daily Signal, a publication of The Heritage Foundation.

    Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 11/01/2024 – 20:05

  • "Fraudulent" Mail Ballot Request Forms Found In Another Pennsylvania County, District Attorney Says
    “Fraudulent” Mail Ballot Request Forms Found In Another Pennsylvania County, District Attorney Says

    Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

    Officials in Pennsylvania’s Monroe County announced this week that they discovered mail ballot request forms in the county that were found to be fraudulent.

    Monroe County District Attorney Mike Mancuso wrote on social media that after a regular review of mail-in ballot requests and voter registration request forms, the Monroe County Board of Elections found “approximately 30 irregular forms,” which were then segregated.

    “Several of the Voter Registration Applications and Mail in Ballot Request forms have been found to be fraudulent as they were not authorized by the persons named as applicants,” he said on Tuesday, noting that the named applicant in one instance “is in fact deceased.”

    The fraudulent registration forms were traced to a specific individual and a company, Field and Media Corps, an Arizona-based organization and subsidiary of Fieldcorps working out of Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County.

    The company “in turn was responsible for submitting the forms in question to county officials,” the district attorney’s office said.

    “The broader investigation continues with reference to Fieldcorp’s involvement. Our office is in regular contact and working with investigators from the Attorney General’s Office as well as others.”

    The company is a consulting firm that specializes in media and field work for its clients, its website shows. It also helps with voter registration drives, phone banking, and text campaigns, it adds.

    Officials in Pennsylvania have said that Field and Media Corps, also called Field+Media Corps, was linked to voter registration forms and mail ballot applications that are being investigated in York and Lancaster counties.

    Field and Media Corps has also been linked to voter registration forms and mail-in ballot applications that are being looked at by York County officials, according to a report by Harrisburg TV station FOX43.

    The Epoch Times contacted Field and Media Corps for comment on Thursday but received no response by publication time.

    The company released a statement to a local news outlet, the Allentown Morning Call, that it attempted to contact York County and will speak to officials in Monroe County.

    “We are proud of our work to help expand access to voting through our nonpartisan voter registration program. We have not been contacted by election officials in PA counties and we have no additional information on the alleged problematic registration forms,” the company said in a statement.

    “We would hope that if Field+Media Corps were the subject of any active investigation, that we would be proactively contacted by the appropriate officials. If we are contacted, we will work with local officials to help resolve any discrepancies to allow eligible people to vote.”

    For the 2024 election, Pennsylvania is considered a key battleground state that could determine who wins the presidential contest between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. It is one of the most closely observed states and was the subject of considerable litigation in the 2020 election.

    New Legal Challenges

    The Pennsylvania Democratic Party submitted a lawsuit on Wednesday in Pennsylvania’s Erie County arguing that a number of voters have not received a mail-in ballot ahead of the Nov. 5 election.

    In their lawsuit, Democrats alleged that between 10,000 and 20,000 voters who requested the mail ballots “have not received or submitted such ballots” to date and that the return rate for mail ballots in the county is 15 percentage points below Pennsylvania’s mail-ballot average.

    Some 552 voters, the lawsuit also alleged, contacted a hotline that was set up by the Democratic Party in Erie County because they received “an incorrect mail-in ballot or have yet to receive any mail-in ballot whatsoever.”

    Erie County’s election board released a statement on Tuesday saying it was aware of the issue and that voters haven’t received mail-in ballots after they requested them. But the board did not disclose why the mail ballots weren’t sent out.

    “The Board has been working diligently with the Voter Registration Department, the Pennsylvania Department of State, and the United States Post Office to determine the origin and scope of this matter,” the statement said.

    A judge this week sided with Trump’s campaign and Republicans by agreeing to extend the in-person voting option in Bucks County, a suburb of Philadelphia that saw long lines this week at early polling sites.

    Judge Jeffrey Trauger wrote in a one-page order that Bucks County voters who want to apply for an early mail ballot now have until Friday, Nov. 1.

    The lawsuit sought a one-day extension, through Wednesday at 5 p.m., for Bucks County voters to apply in person for a mail-in ballot, a method referred to as on-demand mail voting in Pennsylvania. The judge’s order permits applications through the close of business on Friday.

    “Today’s ruling really is kind of a victory for making sure Pennsylvanians are going to have a secure and orderly process,” said Bill McGinley, an attorney for the Republican National Committee and Trump campaign.

    Pennsylvania does not allow early voting on voting machines in polling places, as some states do. A RealClearPolitics aggregate of recent polls shows Trump with a 0.7 percent lead over Harris in the state, which has 19 electoral votes.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 11/01/2024 – 19:40

  • They're Doing What They're Accusing Us Of Doing…
    They’re Doing What They’re Accusing Us Of Doing…

    Authored by Kevin Finn via AmericanThinker.com,

    Earlier on, I argued why I think it’s useful to debate Leftists online, knowing that it’s unlikely they” change their minds on anything.

    It’s good practice as it forces us to learn their arguments and how to counter them, and there are usually others silently following along who can be convinced.

    But another Leftist tactic is psychological projection, which is ascribing to another person one’s own feelings, thoughts, or attitudes.

    Projection is used to relieve a sense of guilt or other unpleasant feeling. Blaming your own problems on someone else seems to be de rigueur in our society of late.

    It’s worth noting that there is a great deal of overlap between lying and projection.

    In some cases the circles on the Venn diagram would exactly coincide.

    Accusations of hypocrisy are also common and it’s worth pointing out the difference between it and projection.

    In brief, hypocrisy reflects on one’s own behavior while projection concerns oneself and one’s behavior towards others.

    It would be hypocritical for person (A) who frequently rolls past stop signs to say that person (B) should always observe stop signs. It would be projection for person (A) to silently assume person (B) rolls past stop signs. It would be both hypocritical and projection for person (A) to falsely accuse person (B) of rolling past stop signs.

    In today’s heated socio-political climate I contend that we’re seeing both hypocrisy and projection being utilized on a daily basis. How many times have we heard a Leftist claim that Donald Trump is “a threat to our democracy”?

    The better question to ask is, “Who on the Left has not made that claim?”

    The people attesting to this have been noticeably silent on the case of the FBI lying to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in their quest for surveillance warrants on Carter Page.

    How much of a threat to democracy was it to conduct what amounts to a coup to remove a sitting president in the final months of his campaign and replace him with someone who never earned a single primary vote? Has that ever happened before in America?

    Practically every outlet in the Democrat Media Industrial Complex (DMIC) has accused Trump of being an authoritarian, a tyrant and a dictator. They cite examples such as President Trump is “tearing up trade deals and stepping back from global institutions.” The Paris climate greement placed unfair restrictions on Americans, even while “U.S. emissions of criteria air pollutants that impact human health and the environment declined by 74% between 1970 and 2018.”

    President Trump cancelled the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran which enriched the regime while doing little to nothing to curb their nuclear ambitions.

    The people who decried these decisions either cheered or were silent when President Biden transferred student loan obligations to the taxpayers despite the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that it was unconstitutional to do so.

    Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris supported the impeachment of President Trump for his telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with “no one is above the law.”

    When the transcript of that phone call was released, it was found that President Trump did not, in fact threaten to withhold military aid in exchange for an investigation into Burisma Holdings. At the time, Burisma was paying Hunter Biden $85k/month for … what, his expertise in the extraction, processing, sale and distribution of petroleum products? Joe Biden is on video bragging about withholding U.S. aid to Ukraine unless they fired the prosecutor who was investigating Burisma Holdings.

    Response from the Left? Crickets.

    The same Leftists who pilloried President Trump for an innocent phone call to President Zelensky gave a pass to then Secretary Of State Hillary Clinton when she illegally used private electronic devices to send and receive classified information, and then destroyed both the messages and the devices after they were subpoenaed by Congress.

    The reason for the pass? They claimed she didn’t intend to do anything wrong and “Because the government is awash in secrets, they are regularly mishandled unintentionally.” In other words, “She didn’t mean any harm and besides, everybody else is doing it!”

    I wonder how often Secretary of State Clinton emailed President Obama on one of those illegal devices. All emails to the POTUS must be cleared through the White House Communications Agency (WHCA). Ms. Clinton was not using a .gov email address, which means that WHCA and President Obama knew that she was using unauthorized devices. I suspect that when James Comey said that: “No reasonable prosecutor would indict Secretary Clinton” that he was protecting Obama, and not Ms. Clinton.

    Those are just a few of the more egregious examples of Leftists employing projection against their opponents in order to distract from their own nefarious actions. The fact that Leftists were engaging in the same, or worse actions that they were falsely accusing Donald Trump and others of committing reveals an entrée of Projection with a side order of Hypocrisy. There are many, many more examples.

    For example, Democrats have claimed that:

    • – Republicans suppress voters while Democrats founded the KKK, enacted Jim Crow Laws and, more recently committed so many suspicious actions during the 2020 and 2022 elections that Americans have lost faith in our elections.

    • – Republicans carried out an insurrection while Leftists rioted nation-wide in 2020.

    • – Republicans are Nazis while Democrats imprison grandmothers who pray in front of abortion clinics.

    • – President Trump is Putin’s stooge while the Biden family takes cash from Russia, China and Ukraine.

    In all of these examples the accusations against Republicans are false (lies) while Democrats have engaged in those or similar behaviors themselves.

    So where do we go from here? Speaking for myself, whenever I come across a claim against conservatives or Republicans from Leftists or Democrats I immediately assume that not only is the opposite true, but that their accusation is probably more accurately applied to the Left. This means that to determine the truth I need to investigate the story and find out what isn’t being told. I spend a great deal of time every day sifting through news stories on various news sites. I no longer get my news from the television or print media. This is what I think we all need to do in order to be properly informed.

    “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.” –author unknown

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 11/01/2024 – 19:15

  • Nvidia To Replace Intel In The Dow Jones Industrial Average; Stock Jumps
    Nvidia To Replace Intel In The Dow Jones Industrial Average; Stock Jumps

    Just when it seemed that Nvidia’s recent record rally was in danger of fizzling, a Deus Ex Machina arrived late on Friday when the determinations committee of S&P Dow Jones Indices, the owner of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, announced that Nvidia would replace Intel on the Dow Jones Industrial Average (which has clearly become anything but), a shakeup to the blue-chip index that replaces a flagging semiconductor company with the primary vendor of GPUs for AI. Separately, Sherwin Williams will unironically replace one-time chemical giant (and Dow Jones eponym), Dow, Inc, in the average as well. The switch will take place on Nov. 8.

    Intel shares were down 1% in extended trading on Friday. Nvidia shares rose 1%.

    Nvidia shares have climbed over 180% so far in 2024 as investors bet the company has emerged as the primary beneficiary of the AI boom. The fast rise of Nvidia on the back of its data center AI processors has led it to be one of only a handful of companies with a market cap over $3 trillion, alongside Microsoft and Apple, both of which are already included in the DJIA.

    Over the last five years, NVDA and The Dow look a little different but we are sure it will fit right in…

    On the other hand, Intel shares have tumbled more than 50% so far this year as the company struggles with manufacturing challenges, new competition for its central processors, and the sad reality that this once glorious chipmaker has missed out on the AI trend.

    The Dow contains 30 components and is weighted by the share price of the individual stocks instead of the companies total market value. Nvidia put itself in better position in May, when the company announced a 10-for-1 stock split. While doing nothing to its market cap, the move slashed the price of each share by 90%, allowing it to become a part of the Dow without having too heavy a weighting.

    The switch is the first change to the index since February, when Amazon replaced Walgreens Boots Alliance. Over the years, the industrial-heavy Dow has been playing catch up and gaining exposure to the largest technology companies. With the addition of Nvidia, four of the six trillion-dollar tech companies are now in the index. The two not in the index are Alphabet and Meta.

    The 30 companies that make up the DJIA currently are shown below:

    • 3M
    • American Express
    • Amgen
    • Amazon
    • Apple
    • Boeing
    • Caterpillar
    • Chevron
    • Cisco
    • Coca-Cola
    • Disney
    • Dow
    • Goldman Sachs
    • Home Depot
    • Honeywell
    • IBM
    • Intel
    • Johnson & Johnson
    • JPMorgan Chase
    • McDonald’s
    • Merck
    • Microsoft
    • Nike
    • Procter & Gamble
    • Salesforce
    • Travelers
    • UnitedHealth Group
    • Verizon
    • Visa
    • Walmart

    Some will point out that such Dow Jones moves tend to be a bottom or top tick opportunity, and point to the August 2020 switch in the Dow Jones when Salesforce replaced Exxon. Since then XOM has more than doubled, while CRM is unchanged.

    Will the Dow Jones also top-tick Nvidia this time, while unleashing a new golden age for Intel?

     

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 11/01/2024 – 18:50

  • "I Was Wrong": CNN Panelist Retracts Trump-Cheney "Firing Squad" Propaganda
    “I Was Wrong”: CNN Panelist Retracts Trump-Cheney “Firing Squad” Propaganda

    Update (1836ET): After the MSM spent the day in histrionics peddling the falsehood that Trump said Liz Cheney should face a firing squad, – when he was simply calling her a chickenhawk – CNN panelist Jonah Goldberg offered a mea culpa, and has retracted his claim that Trump called for Cheney’s execution.

    “This morning on CNN I referred to Trump’s “rifles” quote as him advocating a ‘firing squad’ for Liz Cheney,” said Goldberg. “I was wrong to say he was calling for a firing squad execution. After I said that, my co-panelist, Brad Todd made the case that I was wrong.”

    “I let my disgust at Trump’s comments get the better of me as this was the first time I’d heard them.“

    Watch:

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

    This is going to make the decision by Arizona attorney general Kris Mayes (D-ildo) to investigate Trump’s remarks look even more idiotic.

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

    Meanwhile the nevertrumps are fighting, with Joe Walsh of all people defending the former president.

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

    *  *  *

    The left has fabricated a new hit on Donald Trump – suggesting that he said Liz Cheney should be executed after he clearly said she should fight in the wars she advocates for.

    While discussing Cheney with Tucker Carlson, Trump said:

    “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, ok? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.

    “You know they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying ‘oh gee, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.”

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

    Here’s Drudge:

    Here’s CNN:

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

    CNBC‘s Jim Cramer and Karl Quesadilla:

    Here’s Politico senior political columnist repeating the ‘firing squad’ lie (Jonathan you typically don’t give the condemned their own rifle in a firing squad situation):

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

    KamalaHQ seized and pounced:

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

    Anyone with an IQ north of double-digits sees this for what it is:

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

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

    Meanwhile…

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

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 11/01/2024 – 18:37

  • Candace Owens Denied Australian Visa Amid Government Concerns Over 'Discord'
    Candace Owens Denied Australian Visa Amid Government Concerns Over ‘Discord’

    Authored by Monica O’Shea via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Prominent U.S. conservative commentator Candace Owens has disputed allegations that she would incite discord in Australia after the Albanese government rejected her visa application.

    Candace Owens speaks at the Young Women’s Leadership Summit at the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center in Grapevine, Texas, on June 10, 2023. Bobby Sanchez/The Epoch Times

    Owens expressed concern about Palestine deaths and said the claims against her were “untrue” during a podcast to millions of online viewers.

    This comes after Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said on Oct. 27 that “Australia’s national interest is served when Candace Owens is somewhere else.”

    “From downplaying the impact of the Holocaust with comments about Mengele through to claims that Muslims started slavery, Candace Owens has the capacity to incite discord in almost every direction,” he told reporters.

    In response, Owens expressed shock on her show, The Candace podcast, explaining that she found out about her visa cancellation at the “same time as the press.”

    “This is supposed to be a private application process, so unless I spoke about this, no one should have known about this, but they chose to leak this, which I think is absolutely stunning,” she said.

    “I am just very interested in what goes on in this country, which is supposed to be a free country, but I guess the immigration minister can unilaterally make this sort of decision.”

    She explained she had travelled all over the world, from China to Tokyo, Hungary, Croatia, Italy, and France, and had never been in any trouble.

    “And yet the reason that he gave to the public was because I had the capacity to incite discord in almost every direction … of course that’s not true,” she added.

    “I have no idea how you are alleging I am both anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic. Again all of this is just to try to present me as some sort of very scary person akin to Adolph Hitler.”

    Concerns About Palestine Deaths

    Owens, who has 5.8 million followers on X and 5.4 million followers on Instagram, said that people do not want her to get in front of an audience, adding that the “audience understands what the reason is.”

    She goes on to explain her concern about the ongoing violence in Gaza.

    “I am not comfortable with the amount of death that is taking place in Palestine. And that’s where I am at. I have made my bed, I have chosen to lie in it,” she said.

    “To me, I am not going to remove my humanity for money. It doesn’t work for me, it doesn’t work for me as a Christian.”

    Owens, 35, parted with the Daily Wire in March, and converted from Protestantism to Catholicism in April 2024. Her husband, George Farmer, is a devout Catholic.

    During the COVID-19 pandemic, Owens criticised Australia’s lockdown policies, calling the country’s response “totalitarian” and suggesting troops should be deployed to Australia.

    She also played a major role in opposing Black Lives Matter and co-founding Blexit, a movement that stands for “Black Exit” from victimhood mentality.

    Tickets Still Available Amid Potential Legal Action

    Tickets for the Candace Owens Live 2024 tour in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane, and Adelaide are still available from $95 online for general admission. In Adelaide, a VIP Meet and Greet session at $295 per person is sold out.

    Multiple Australian ticket pages for the event confirm Owens is planning to file an appeal and will process a refund if this fails.

    “The Event Organiser and Candace Owens have confirmed they will be filing an appeal, and the case will be reviewed by a federal judge in the coming days,” the notice states.

    “While they are optimistic about a favourable outcome, should the appeal be denied and cancellation become necessary, we will promptly notify all ticket holders and begin processing refunds automatically on the organiser’s behalf. Thank you for your understanding.”

    On her X page, Owens shared a post by Australian political and economic commentator John Adams stating that an appeal would be filed against the decision of Minister Burke.

    “I wonder whether the Federal Court of Australia is brave enough to allow Australians to listen to a black Catholic woman and make up their own minds,” the post states.

    John Ruddick, NSW Libertarian Member of the Legislative Council, said Candace Owens should not be banned from Australia, explaining what anyone thinks of Candace Owens’ views should be immaterial.

    He said Australia should let everyone in to speak and then the Australian people can “weigh it up.”

    “In the age of the internet, it is absurd to try and prevent anyone’s views being heard,” Ruddick said.

    “It is counter-productive state-sponsored vindictiveness against certain views. As Martin Luther King taught us, let freedom reign … especially the freedom to share ideas that some politicians and bureaucrats think are dangerous.”

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 11/01/2024 – 18:25

  • Joe Rogan Says He Gave Harris Campaign "Open Invitation", Offer Still Stands
    Joe Rogan Says He Gave Harris Campaign “Open Invitation”, Offer Still Stands

    Podcaster Joe Rogan said in an Oct. 30 episode of his show that he gave Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign an “open invitation” to sit down for an interview at any time.

    “I said anytime. I said if she’s done at 10, we’ll come back here at 10. I’ll do it at 9 in the morning, I’ll do it at 10 p.m. I’ll do it at midnight if she’s up, if she wants to, you know, drink a Red Bull,” he said, recalling what he told the campaign.

    Rogan’s show features around 14 million subscribers on Spotify, making it the top show on the platform, but it also generates significant traffic and engagement on YouTube.

    His interview with former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, released late last week, has garnered more than 41 million views on YouTube so far.

    While speaking to comedians Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster during episode 2220 of The Joe Rogan Experience…

    …Rogan said that Harris “actually reached out when she found out that [Trump] was coming on.”

    “So their camp reached out to me,” he said.

    “So I said, ‘Great, I would love to talk to her.’ But it was very difficult to tie it down. They wanted [me] to travel, and see, the thing is, if I go somewhere, then there’s going to be other people in the room. And they want to control a lot of things, I’m sure.”

    As The Epoch Times’ Jack Phillips reported, Harris was in Houston last week and held a rally there featuring an endorsement and speech from pop singer Beyoncé.

    In a social media post earlier this week, Rogan said that the Harris campaign had conditions for the Democratic presidential nominee to do the interview.

    The Epoch Times previously reached out to the campaign, which has not responded to Rogan’s remarks, for comment.

    “For the record, the Harris campaign has not passed on doing the podcast,” Rogan wrote in a social media post on Tuesday.

    “They offered a date for Tuesday, but I would have had to travel to her, and they only wanted to do an hour. I strongly feel the best way to do it is in the studio in Austin. My sincere wish is to just have a nice conversation and get to know her as a human being. I really hope we can make it happen.”

    During the episode with Kisin and Foster, Rogan also addressed speculation that he might be a covert Trump supporter.

    “Just because of my appearance, there’s always been this assumption that I’m some right-wing MAGA guy,” he said, referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.

    “I’m a politically homeless person for sure. You know, I always considered myself a left-wing person. I never thought I would ever vote right-wing, but then the tides of culture shifted in a very bizarre way. And it just made me, over time, much more aware of what this stuff is really all about.”

    Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), will also air on Rogan’s show after being interviewed at Rogan’s Austin studio on Wednesday.

    Both Trump and Harris have engaged in a flurry of campaigning as the race draws to a close. Both candidates have taken part in several podcasts ahead of the 2024 General Election as they attempt to reach new audiences.

    More than 60 million people have cast early ballots so far ahead of the Nov. 5 contest, according to data released by the University of Florida’s Election Lab.

    The Epoch Times contacted the Harris campaign for comment about Rogan’s claims but didn’t receive a reply by publication time.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 11/01/2024 – 18:00

  • CNN Admits Signs Are There For A Second Trump Term
    CNN Admits Signs Are There For A Second Trump Term

    Authored by Steve Watson via Modenrity.news,

    CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten said Wednesday that there are clear signs that president Trump is on his way to winning the election.

    Enten noted that voter dissatisfaction with the course the country is on, combined with Joe Biden’s ongoing unpopularity, as well as high Republican registration numbers are all pointing to a Trump victory.

    “Just 28% of Americans, voters think the country is going in the right direction, is on the right track. And I want to put that into a historical perspective for you,” Enten began.

    He continued, “Okay, what’s the average percentage of the public that thinks that the country is on the right track when the incumbent party loses? It’s 25%.”

    “That 25% looks an awful bit like that 28% up there. It doesn’t look anything, anything like this 42% [average when the incumbent party won] doesn’t look anything like this 28%,” the analyst added.

    “So the bottom line is very few Americans think the country is on the right track at this particular point. It tracks much more with when the incumbent party loses than with [when] it wins,” Enten further highlighted.

    “In fact, I went back through history, there isn’t a single time in which 28% of the American public thinks the country is going on the right track in which the incumbent party actually won,” he further urged. 

    “They always lose when just 28% of the country believes that the country is on the right track,” Enten declared.

    He also pointed out that Republicans appear to be doing better than Democrats for registrations in key states.

    “Republicans are putting more Republicans in the electorate, the Democratic number versus the Republican number has shrunk,” he said.

    Enten concluded that “the bottom line is if Republicans win, come next week, Donald Trump wins comes next week, the signs all along will have been obvious… You can’t say you weren’t warned.”

    Meanwhile, a Harris campaign advisor was adamant in comments to CNN that Biden’s garbage remarks won’t make any difference, claiming “We won’t lose a single voter because of it.”

    That may be so, however some who were on the fence before might not appreciate being called “garbage” and stump for Trump.

    Indeed, as we highlighted, Trump has hit an all time high against Kamala Harris on the political betting platform Polymarket.

    Pollster Frank Luntz also adamantly told CNN that the “garbage” comment was a turning point which will have a “huge” effect on moving voters away from supporting Harris.

    *  *  *

    Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 11/01/2024 – 17:40

  • North Korean Official In Moscow: US & S.Korea Plotting Nuclear Strike
    North Korean Official In Moscow: US & S.Korea Plotting Nuclear Strike

    There’s been more fallout in the wake of Thursday’s North Korean test-firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), widely described as registering the country’s longest ever flight time for a ballistic missile.

    First, South Korea has slapped new sanctions on over a dozen North Korean individuals and entities. Seoul has roundly condemned the launch. The US is also likely to ramp up its sanctions even further. 

    But to be expected, Kim Jong Un has hit back. He was cited in state KCNA as saying: “The new-type ICBM proved before the world that the hegemonic position we have secured in the development and manufacture of nuclear delivery means of the same kind is absolutely irreversible.”

    Pyongyang officials have since identified the massive rocket, which they dub “the world’s strongest strategic missile,” as a new Hwasong-19 ICBM. Given that nuclear warhead-capable ICBMs can reach several thousands of miles away, such a missile would have the capability of hitting the continental United States. And the timing has not been lost on anyone, as it was a mere days before the US presidential election.

    “It can be stored and moved anywhere, allowing for excellent mobility, stealth and survivability,” said Kim of the rocket. State media has subsequently released carefully edited, high quality footage of the ‘perfected’ missile launch, which has been widely circulating on Friday:

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

    “The increased length likely means a greater fuel capacity, which directly affects thrust and potentially increases range,” Kim added.

    And new statements from North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui suggest tensions with the West are higher than ever. She said from Moscow, where she is meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, that her country is coming under nuclear threat by the US and South Korea.

    She “accused the United States and South Korea of plotting a nuclear strike against her country,” Reuters reports Friday. “She did not provide evidence to back her assertion, but spoke of regular consultations between Washington and Seoul at which she alleged such plotting took place.”

    The top diplomat also pledged that North Korea will not stop helping Russia until it achieves ‘victory’ on the battlefield in Ukraine.

    Pyongyang and Moscow have over the past year been deepening their defense ties, having inked a new pact this past summer, and the Kremlin has cited this as the legal basis for North Korean troops being hosted in Russia.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 11/01/2024 – 17:20

  • "The American System" Made America Great
    “The American System” Made America Great

    Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,

    It’s hard to believe, but the presidential election is just days away. It’ll all come down to the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada.

    It’s a tight race, although it appears to be breaking for Trump.

    The Democratic strategy is essentially to call Trump Hitler and a would-be dictator who would jail his political opponents (sound familiar?) and destroy democracy.

    Though they focus much more on Trump the man than his actual policies, it’s important to understand Trump’s position on tariffs, for example, because it would impact millions of Americans.

    Donald Trump recently did an interview with John Micklethwait, Bloomberg’s top editor and a former editor of The Economist.

    Micklethwait made the tired point that Trump’s tariffs would raise prices and be bad for Americans.

    The Argument for Free Trade

    Most of us have been taught that free trade is good and that tariffs are bad.

    And on the surface it certainly seems true. The theory of free trade based on comparative advantage was advocated by British economist David Ricardo in the early 19th century.

    Ricardo’s theory said that trading nations are endowed with attributes that give them a relative advantage in producing certain goods versus others.

    These attributes could consist of natural resources, climate, population, river systems, education, ports, financial capacity or any other factor of production. Nations should produce those goods as to which they have a natural advantage and trade with other nations for goods where the advantage was not so great.

    Countries should specialize in what they do best, and let others also specialize in what they do best. Then countries could simply trade the goods they make for the goods made by others.

    All sides would be better off because prices would be lower as a result of specialization in those goods where you have a natural advantage.

    It’s a nice theory often summed up in the idea that Tom Brady shouldn’t mow his own lawn because it makes more sense to pay a landscaper while he practices football.

    For example, if the U.K. had an advantage in textile production and Portugal had an advantage in wine production, then the U.K. and Portugal should trade wool for wine.

    Is Free Trade Everything It’s Cracked up to Be?

    But if the theory of comparative advantage were true, Japan would still be exporting tuna fish instead of cars, computers, TVs, steel and much more.

    The same can be said of the globalists’ view that capital should flow freely across borders. That might be advantageous in theory but market manipulation by central banks and rogue actors like Goldman Sachs and big hedge funds make it a treacherous proposition.

    The problem with this theory of comparative advantage is that the factors of production are not permanent and they are not immobile.

    If labor moves from the countryside to the city in China, then suddenly China has a comparative advantage in cheap labor. If finance capital moves from New York banks to direct foreign investment in Chinese factories, then China has the comparative advantage in capital also.

    Trump understands this, Micklethwait doesn’t. Trump didn’t just make polite conversation in the interview. He called out Micklethwait by saying, “It must be hard for you to spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you’re totally wrong.” Ouch!

    Tariffs Are as American as Apple Pie

    Micklethwait certainly isn’t alone. Listening to hysterical commentary from the mainstream media about Trump’s tariffs, one would think his policies were in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

    Nothing could be further from the truth. By advocating tariffs, Trump actually wants to return to what made America great in the first place.

    In fact, tariffs are as American as apple pie.

    From 1790–1962, the United States pursued high tariff policies under a program known as the American System.

    It was created by George Washington’s secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, who drafted a report to Congress called the Report on Manufactures presented in 1791. Hamilton proposed that in order to have a strong country, America needed a strong manufacturing base with jobs that taught skills and offered income security.

    To achieve this, Hamilton proposed subsidies to U.S. businesses so they could compete successfully against more established U.K. and European businesses.

    These subsidies might include grants of government land or rights of way, purchase orders from the government itself or outright payments. This was a mercantilist system that encouraged a trade surplus and the accumulation of gold reserves.

    175 Years of Prosperity

    Hamilton’s plan was later proposed on a broader scale by Kentucky Sen. Henry Clay. This new plan began with the Tariff of 1816. Later on, Abraham Lincoln adopted the American System as his platform in the election of 1860, and it became a bedrock principle of the new Republican Party.

    It was affirmed by William McKinley at the end of the 19th century and by Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s. The 19th and early 20th centuries were a heyday of the American System. This period was characterized by enormous economic growth and population expansion by the U.S.

    The American System was also accompanied mostly by low inflation or even deflation (which increases the purchasing power of everyday citizens) despite occasional financial panics and some inflation during the Civil War.

    The key takeaway is that America grew rich and powerful from 1787–1962, a period of 175 years, using tariffs, subsidies and other barriers to trade to nurture domestic industry and protect high-paying manufacturing jobs.

    The Triumph of Free Trade Doctrine

    But under the neo-liberal, globalist international order that prevailed in the decades after World War II, free trade doctrine supplanted the American System.

    Globalism requires free trade, open borders and free capital flows or as close as you can come. In theory, this allows for price discovery, lower costs and higher returns to capital.

    In reality, it causes lost jobs, lost competitiveness and lower wages, especially for Americans. U.S. industry was stripped bare and U.S. jobs were lost by the millions, with China being the main beneficiary.

    Globalists embrace what they call “encasement.” The idea is that national governments don’t matter. What does matter is that all global powers — democratic, communist, socialist, kleptocratic — play by the same supranational rules that encase the system of sovereigns.

    Free trade is part of that system (in reality, it’s not free trade but managed trade).

    Trump is rejecting the globalist playbook. He’s pursuing the same basic policies that predominated in the U.S. from George Washington through Dwight Eisenhower.

    He simply wants to return to the American System that once made America great.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 11/01/2024 – 17:00

  • US Big Banks Suffer Biggest Deposit Outflow Since April… Until The Fed 'Adjusted' Them
    US Big Banks Suffer Biggest Deposit Outflow Since April… Until The Fed ‘Adjusted’ Them

    Money market funds saw yet another week of inflows (+$40BN), taking the total AUM to a new record high of $6.508 TN…

    Source: Bloomberg

    The inflow into MM comes as bank deposits (on a seasonally adjusted basis) dropped a modest $13BN to the week-ending 10/23…

    Source: Bloomberg

    But, on a non-seasonally-adjusted basis, total deposits plunged $133BN (the biggest weekly decline since April)…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Excluding foreign deposits, it’s even uglier. On an NSA basis, US deposits plunged $131BN – the biggest weekly drop since April (Large banks -$97BN, Small banks -$34BN). But, by the magic of The Fed’s PhDs, the ‘seasonal adjusted’ domestic deposits fell just $3BN (Large banks +$8BN, Small banks -$11BN)…

    Source: Bloomberg

    This is the biggest Large bank deposit drop since May…

    Source: Bloomberg

    This should only be worrying if we see liquidity problems in the banking system starting to occur.

    Wait, what?

    Finally, something remains afoot in the financial plumbing world. SOFR-Swap Spreads are blowing out (signaling some credit/liquidity stress)…

    Source: Bloomberg

    …and reverse repo usage is collapsing (liquidity needs?)

    Source: Bloomberg

    Is that why USA sovereign risk is blowing out?

    Source: Bloomberg

    Are they holding back a banking crisis for Trump’s victory?

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 11/01/2024 – 16:40

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Nov 01

Today’s News 1st November 2024

  • State Department Threatens Georgia With 'Consequences' Amid Rigged Election Claims
    State Department Threatens Georgia With ‘Consequences’ Amid Rigged Election Claims

    Authored by Connor Freeman via The Libertarian Institute,

    The State Department and the European Union are demanding Tbilisi repeal “anti-democratic” legislation and investigate election “irregularities” respectively after the Georgian Dream Party won this weekend’s parliamentary elections. Georgian leaders including Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze and President Salome Zourabichvili are at odds, with Zourabichvili accusing Kobakhidze’s party of winning a “total fraud” election.

    Per the official tally, Georgian Dream won 54% of the vote, with multiple opposition parties earning between 3-11%. Georgian Dream will form the country’s next government as they now hold a minimum of 90 out of the national parliament’s 150 seats. However, four opposition parties which favor integration with the EU are refusing to participate in the new legislature, deeming the election stolen, and accusing the ruling party of pushing Georgia towards a pro-Russia direction. President Zourabichvili called for protests and vowed she will not recognize the plebiscite’s results.

    Tens of thousands of Georgians protested for hours outside parliament on Monday night, the demonstrations reportedly ended with no plans for further action but dispersed peacefully. The Georgian government and electoral commission have dubbed the election free and fair.

    State Department Spokesman Matthew Miller threatened Georgia with “consequences” before adding his demands. Miller characterized the election as having taken place within an “environment shaped by the ruling party’s policies including misuse of public resources, vote buying and voter intimidation.”

    He made clear the path Georgia is taking does not bode well for its future in America’s orbit, “We encourage Georgia’s governing officials to consider the relationship they want with the Euro-Atlantic community rather than strengthening policies that are praised by authoritarians.”

    Finally Miller, speaking for a government which has extensively meddled in Georgian elections including staging a coup in the 2003 Rose Revolution, warned “We do not rule out further consequences if the Georgian government’s direction does not change.” He then insisted that Tbilisi begin “withdrawing and repealing anti-democratic legislation.”

    The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe praised Georgia’s voter participation, substantial presence of citizen and party observers, as well as the diversity of ballot choices during the election. OSCE observers “found the legal framework to be adequate for holding democratic elections.” Although they also accused the ruling party of exploiting an “already uneven playing field,” and claimed there were instances of intimidation, coercion, and pressure being put on voters including public sector employees.

    EU Council chief Charles Michel is calling on the relevant authorities in Georgia to “swiftly, transparently, and independently investigate and adjudicate electoral irregularities and allegations thereof.” He added, “These alleged irregularities must be seriously clarified and addressed.”

    Western governments are condemning Georgia’s ‘law on transparency of foreign influence,’ which requires agencies to register as “agents of foreign influence” if they are operating within Georgia and foreign sources account for over 20% of their funding. Georgia’s parliamentary speaker signed the bill into law after it was vetoed by President Zourabichvili earlier this year. The law operates similarly to the US Foreign Agents Registration Act.

    The West is also in an uproar against Georgian laws banning gender reassignment surgery, gay marriage, and so called LGBTQ “propaganda” including PRIDE-style events along with certain books and films. Although, polling shows significant public disapproval in Georgia of same-sex marriages.

    Last month, a senior US official told Voice of America, the American state-funded media outlet, that Washington is preparing sanctions on former Georgian Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, Georgian Dream’s influential founder, over his opposition to Tbilisi joining NATO and the EU.

    An analysis by Ian Proud published by Responsible Statecraft makes the case that the ruling party’s victory can be explained not by election rigging but as a popular response to various economic and immigration crises.

    Proud notes the uneven trade relationship the Caucasian country maintains with the EU since signing the EU Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement ten years ago. EU states benefit from robust exports in Georgia while purchasing four times less Georgian imports. The trade balance is more even with the Eurasian States, although they too export 1.8 times more than they import.

    At the same time, the Washington-led proxy war with Moscow in Ukraine is both funded and championed by the EU. The war has caused an immigration crisis in Georgia with nearly 90,000 people emigrating from Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine between 2022 and 2023. This has led to a surging unemployment rate of over 26%, while housing prices are up 35% and rent prices have risen as much as 50%.

    In 2008, at NATO’s Bucharest Summit, Brussels announced both Tbilisi and Kiev would one day join the Washington-led military bloc which has been mired in disastrous wars in the Balkans, North Africa, and Central Asia. The admission of both states to the alliance is viewed in the Kremlin as a major national security threat and provoked Russia’s invasions of both Georgia sixteen years ago and now Ukraine.

    As Scott Horton, the Libertarian Institute’s director, has detailed, the now jailed former president Mikheil Saakashvili, the victor of the US-backed Rose Revolution, “was incentivized to take bigger risks due to the Bucharest Declaration of America’s intent to bring them into the NATO alliance just four months before, U.S. military support and vague security assurances the Bush government had given his government that spring.

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    Saakashvili launched an attack on the breakaway province of South Ossetia in the southern Caucuses Mountains, then enjoying full autonomy and protection by Russian peacekeepers under a deal that had been brokered by [the] European Union… The Russians, suffering casualties in the initial assault, quickly struck back, destroying Georgia’s invading force and securing South Ossetia’s independence from Georgian rule.”

    Barack Obama’s administration orchestrated a coup and overthrew the government in Kiev during the 2014 Maidan Revolution. Subsequently during the Donald Trump years, the White House armed Ukraine’s military, including Neo Nazi militias ingratiated in the National Guard. Concurrently, Kiev entrenched ties with US special operations forces and the CIA as it waged a war against ethnic Russian separatists in the Donbas region.

    Under the current White House, as tensions mounted over the Donbas, the erstwhile USSR state became a de facto NATO member as Washington eschewed diplomacy with the Kremlin, refusing to discuss rescinding Ukraine’s invitation for membership with the alliance, culminating in Russia’s 2022 invasion.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 11/01/2024 – 02:00

  • Chinese Hackers Compromised Multiple Canadian Government Networks For Years, Stole Info: Security Agency
    Chinese Hackers Compromised Multiple Canadian Government Networks For Years, Stole Info: Security Agency

    Authored by Andrew Chen via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Cyber threat actors from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have been implicated in multiple breaches of networks associated with federal government agencies and departments, according to a report from the national cybersecurity agency.

    CSE chief Caroline Xavier appears at the Foreign Interference Commission in Ottawa on Sept. 26, 2024. The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld

    “Over the past four years, at least 20 networks associated with Government of Canada agencies and departments have been compromised by PRC cyber threat actors,” said the National Cyber Threat Assessment 2025-2026, released Oct. 30 by the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security.

    The centre identifies China as the top threat actor targeting Canada, noting that its cyber operations are “second to none” in scale, technique, and ambition. Beijing’s objectives include espionage, intellectual property theft, malign influence, and transnational repression, the centre says. 

    While the report highlights China’s hacking of 20 federal government networks in the past four years, information elsewhere in the report shows that Chinese hackers have had access to multiple government networks longer than that. The report says that Chinese agents have compromised Canadian government networks over the past five years, collecting communications and other valuable information.

    “While all known federal government compromises have been resolved, it is very likely that the actors responsible for these intrusions dedicated significant time and resources to learn about the target networks,” the report reads.

    At a press conference on Oct. 30, Caroline Xavier, chief of the Canadian Communications Security Establishment (CSE), would not  comment on the details of the breaches, but said mitigation measures had been “effective.”

    “The key message for us—when there are incidents that occur—is really being focused on ensuring [we] minimize the impact to the government department that may have been compromised. And that is exactly where our focus has been,” she told reporters. “We do feel that the measures were taken to be able to mitigate any of the risks, and to address the incidents in an effective manner.”

    The cyber centre is hosted within CSE, Canada’s electronic spy agency, which is responsible for collecting signals intelligence and defending against cyberattacks.

    China Targets

    In addition to federal agencies, provincial and territorial governments are also seen as valuable targets for Beijing, the report said, noting that these governments hold decision-making power over regional trade and commerce, including the extraction of critical minerals and other natural resources.

    Xavier said this targeting indicates Beijing is a “sophisticated, consistent, and persistent actor,” and that Canada needs to address the threat with a more comprehensive approach.

    “We have work to do as a nation, to continue to work, in particular with the provinces, territories, indigenous communities, because we recognize that we’re all vulnerable, or we all could be vulnerable, and we really want to continue to raise Canada’s cyber resilience,” she said.

    The cyber centre also echoed previous reports from various human rights groups, warning that Beijing’s transnational repression has primarily targeted five specific communities, referred to by the regime as the “five poisons.” These include Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Tibetans, supporters of Taiwanese independence, and pro-democracy activists.

    “PRC actors very likely facilitate transnational repression by monitoring and harassing these groups online and tracking them using cyber surveillance,” the report said. “For example, the PRC has been publicly linked to cyber espionage operations against the Uyghur minority group, including members living in Canada, using spear phishing emails and spyware.”

    Other Countries Named

    Other state-backed threat actors highlighted in the cyber centre report include Russia, Iran, and India.

    Russia’s cyber operations are characterized as “a multi-layered strategy” that combines conventional cyber espionage and computer network attacks with disinformation. Its primary goal is to enhance Russia’s global status while undermining democratic institutions in Canada and among its allies.

    A specific case cited in the report involves a breach detected by Microsoft in January, where a Russian state-sponsored cyber threat actor known as Midnight Blizzard accessed the company’s cloud-based enterprise email service.

    The group infiltrated correspondence between Microsoft and government officials in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Initially, the actors sought information about Russia itself, but later used personal data and credentials from the emails to gain access to Microsoft customer systems.

    Meanwhile, the report said Iran has been expanding its cyberattacks to western countries amid its ongoing military conflict with Israel.

    “Iran has taken advantage of its back-and-forth cyber confrontation with Israel to improve its cyber espionage and offensive cyber capabilities and hone its information campaigns, which it is now almost certainly deploying against targets in the West,” the report said.

    During the press conference, Xavier also identified India as an “emerging threat” to Canada.

    “India very likely uses its cyber program to advance its national security imperatives, including espionage, counterterrorism, and the country’s efforts to promote its global status and counter narratives against India and the Indian government,” the report said.

    Citing her recent testimony before the foreign interference inquiry, Xavier noted India could potentially “flex those cyber threat actions against Canadians” amid ongoing diplomatic tensions.

    Earlier this month, Canada expelled six Indian diplomats, prompting a reciprocal move by India, which also expelled six Canadian diplomats. This dispute arose after the RCMP announced its investigation into criminal activities allegedly involving “agents of the Government of India.” 

    ‘Ever-Present’ Threat

    The Centre for Cyber Security says Canada has entered a new era in which cyber threats are “ever present.”

    “Canadians will increasingly feel the impact of cyber incidents that have cascading and disruptive effects on their daily lives,” the report said.

    The centre says the threat has expanded as Canadians increasingly rely on online platforms and digital technologies to go about their lives.

    “These systems record and process vast amounts of data about us, often over poorly secured or untrustworthy digital networks,” it said.

    Aside from the threats from hostile state actors, the centre notes that the cybercrime business model is “underpinned by flourishing online marketplaces” where leaked data is sold along with cyber tools for criminals.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 23:55

  • "A Breach Of Protocol": White House Overrode Stenographers, Altered "Garbage" Transcript
    “A Breach Of Protocol”: White House Overrode Stenographers, Altered “Garbage” Transcript

    In a mad scramble to cover for President Biden calling half of the country “garbage,” White House press officials altered the official transcript, overriding official stenographers who objected to the alterations, the Associated Press reports.

    According to the pre-altered transcript, Biden said “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”

    However White House press office added an apostrophe, reading “supporter’s” rather than “supporters,” in order to peddle the falsehood that Biden was criticizing comic Tony Hinchcliffe, who referred to the US island territory of Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”

    The change was made after the press office “conferred with the president,” according to an internal email from the head of the stenographers’ office that was obtained by The AP. The authenticity of the email was confirmed by two government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

    The supervisor, in the email, called the press office’s handling of the matter “a breach of protocol and spoliation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices.” -AP

    According to the email, the press office demanded that stenographers quickly produce a transcript of Biden’s call with Latino activists to discuss Hinchicliffe’s comments, while Biden’s social media team posted on X that he was not calling all Trump supporters garbage – and that he was specifically referring to the “hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally.”

    The two-person stenography team on duty that evening, a “typer” and a “proofer” said that any edits to the official transcript would have to be approved by their supervisor, the head of the stenographer’s office – who was unavailable. Because of this, the White House press office went ahead and published an altered transcript on the White House website and distributed it to the press and social media in a mad scramble.

    The supervisor did not like that…

    “If there is a difference in interpretation, the Press Office may choose to withhold the transcript but cannot edit it independently,” wrote the supervisor, adding “Our Stenography Office transcript — released to our distro, which includes the National Archives — is now different than the version edited and released to the public by Press Office staff.“

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    The supervisor, a career White House employee, raised concerns about the alteration in an email to White House communications director Ben LaBolt, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and other officials.

    “Regardless of urgency, it is essential to our transcripts’ authenticity and legitimacy that we adhere to consistent protocol for requesting edits, approval, and release,” he wrote.

    The alteration was done as the White House scrambled to respond to a cascade of press inquiries over Biden’s comments – which completely upstaged Kamala Harris’ closing argument speech outside the White House.

    As journalist Michael Shellenberger points out, it was likely illegal.

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    Biden’s comment was a gift to the Trump campaign, which immediately capitalized on it – fundraising off the quote, while Trump himself held a photo op inside a garbage truck on Wednesday.

    Harris also moved to quickly distance herself from Biden’s comments, telling reporters “I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.”

    Meanwhile, House Republicans have been discussing launching an investigation into the fabrication – with House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik, R-(NY), and House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-(KY), on Wednesday accusing the White House of “releasing a false transcript” of Biden’s remarks, and called on White House counsel Ed Siskel to retain documents and internal communications related to Biden’s remarks and the transcript.

    “White House staff cannot rewrite the words of the President of the United States to be more politically on message,” the lawmakers wrote, noting that it may have been a violation of the Presidential Records Act of 1978.

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    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 23:30

  • After Godwin’s Law, Dems May Try One Last 'Get Trump' Gambit On Election Day
    After Godwin’s Law, Dems May Try One Last ‘Get Trump’ Gambit On Election Day

    Authored by Ben Sellers via Headline USA,

    Apart from getting booed by Beyoncé fans and heckled by Hamas supporters, nothing could have been more pathetic than the Kamala Harris campaign’s pivot back to Bidenesque fearmongering in the desperate final stretch of the 2024 election.

    An Iranian video imagines an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump while golfing at his Florida resort. / IMAGE: @basedmikelee via Twitter

    The Adolf Hitler trope now being deployed by Democrats is so overwrought that, since 1991, it has had its own special name in online culture: Godwin’s law.

    And yes, the eponymous law’s creator, Mike Godwin—a former senior fellow at the R Street Institute and contributing editor at Reason magazine— has often addressed, in response to media inquiries, whether former President Donald Trump deserves a special-exception rider.

    “My name gets cited in a lot of these discussions. And of course my ears are burning,” Godwin explained in a 2018 op-ed for the newly neutral Los Angeles Times.

    “It hasn’t mattered that I’ve explained GL countless times,” Godwin continued. “Some critics on the left have blamed me for (supposedly) having shut down valid comparisons to the Holocaust or previous atrocities.”

    The problem the Democrats have is that they sought precisely the same carve-out for many other Republicans: Ronald Reagan, John McCain, Mitt Romney, George W. Bush and, of course, Dick Cheney. Four have since become staunch Trump critics, and one is now actively campaigning for the Democrats.

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    “They’ve been saying that about Trump for years,” observed conservative pundit Megyn Kelly during a recent interview with Bill Maher. “They’ve been saying that about Republican candidates for years. … If you are at all center or center-right, you are used to having your candidate of choice completely demonized.”

    As Godwin clarified, his law was never intended to suggest that all comparisons to Hitler and the Nazi regime were spurious—only that most were.

    Republicans have countered the constant barrage of ad hominem attacks by pointing to the very valid ways in which the Democrats have, themselves, become the party of anti-liberal, authoritarian values, using their Trump Derangement Syndrome as justification to act on their worst impulses by shutting down all criticism and debate, while pursuing a Stalin-inspired “ends justifies the means” approach to politics.

    “I saw the party that used to have courageous voices and leaders, calling for peace, now becoming the party of warmongers,” said newly red-pilled Republican Tulsi Gabbard at a rally Saturday in Charlotte, N.C.

    “It has become the party of war,” the one-time Democratic presidential candidate added. “It used to be the party of working people.”

    INCOMPATIBLE WITH DEMOCRACY

    The resulting death spiral has left the Democratic Party in a condition where, without significant reform, it is no longer compatible with the precepts of democracy because its ideas, when it bothers presenting any, are so far on the fringe that they are rejected by the public.

    They have, instead, fallen back on astroturfing, gaslighting and importing new voters through a complex ploy that involves simultaneously undermining U.S. border security and election-integrity laws, while actively attacking any efforts by the states to address their negligence.

    Although they have set themselves up with the capabilities to steal any election, relying on both traditional ballot-harvesting methods and technological manipulation of equipment, their one vulnerability could be a landslide election in which, given the loss of credibility in the media and many government institutions, the American public outright fails to accept a fraudulent outcome.

    While polls still suggest a tight race, many other bellwethers now indicate a potential Trump blowout, at least in the Electoral College.

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    With Trump notably leading polls in the critical battleground of Pennsylvania, even Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., recently acknowledged the GOP nominee’s strong position to hold the Keystone State, according to a New York Times interview.

    Trump need only secure his 2020 states, along with Pennsylvania and Georgia, to reclaim the presidency, with four additional “swing states”—Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada—only bolstering his advantage.

    As of Sunday, the latest polling averages from RealClear Politics indicated that Trump had narrow leads in all of them. He had a 0.1% lead nationally.

    By contrast, on Oct. 27, 2020, President Joe Biden reflected a 7.4% lead nationally. Hillary Clinton, who lost to Trump in 2016, had a 5.6% advantage.

    IMPLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY

    Trump’s success, moreover, in clinching key minority demographics creates an optical problem for Democrats, who can no longer use the fig leaf of “voting rights” as a pretense to undermine election integrity.

    Democrats who disfranchise voters in the black and Hispanic communities now risk losing them permanently and incurring the same level of minority-driven anger and outrage against them that they weaponized against Trump during the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots.

    Most worrisome of all for Democrats may be that in Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina, early voting indicated that more Republicans had turned out as of Friday, Oct. 25, according to Bloomberg.

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    Three other battleground states—Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin—do not track party registration for early voting, suggesting Trump may be leading there, as well.

    This trend could further explode the narrative pushed during recent election cycles that Republicans simply waited until Election Day and were bested by Democrats’ early get-out-the-vote initiatives.

    If Trump is leading by a notable margin even going into Nov. 5 and Republicans continue to turn out at higher levels, there will be no plausible deniability for Democrats (and some corrupt GOP election officials) to delay releasing the results as they continue to scrounge up late-surfacing ballots in blue enclaves such as Arizona’s Maricopa County and Nevada’s Clark County, both of which have previously pulled last-minute reversals in 2020 and 2022.

    Having already tipped their hand to their tactics, all eyes will be watching to see whether they have the temerity to engage in what could be deemed nothing less than a seditious conspiracy.

    DESPERATE MEASURES

    With all other options exhausted, Democrats’ only hope now may be to drive massive turnout on Election Day itself. But that is a task not easily accomplished. Undoubtedly, they would need some sort of precipitating event to rally any remaining voters to the polls.

    What could it be? Here are a few possibilities that they might still pull off with just over a week remaining.

    • Escalation of war/act of terrorism:

    “I have not permitted myself, gentlemen, to conclude that I am the best man in the country; but I am reminded, in this connection, of a story of an old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion once that ‘it was not best to swap horses when crossing streams,”’ wrote Abraham Lincoln in a June 1864 letter making his case for reelection.

    The axiom has led other presidents, while politically flailing, to try to “wag the dog” by using war as a means to drive patriotic sentiment. In the Biden–Harris regime, while the patriotism may not be present, the anxiety of a foreign attack is still a powerful tool for manipulation.

    Both China and Iran have made clear their preference for the current administration—of which Kamala Harris would be, at best, an extension—over Trump’s “America First” presidency. A false flag attack on Ukraine to stir up anti-Russian sentiment is another possibility. Trump has pledged to end the war there even before taking office.

    • Intel psy-op

    We are all too familiar with the intelligence community’s role in fomenting violence at events like the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” protest and the Jan. 6, 2021 “Save America” rally. Perhaps the Harris campaign’s decision to feature them as a focal point in its closing argument is not so much an act of desperation but portention.

    There are several signals indicating that there may be a heightened presence of election-meddling FBI operatives and others on-site at polling places, who are specifically tasked with monitoring MAGA. Might the goal be to instigate some sort of unrest during the election as a weapon of mass distraction?

    • Executive Order 14019

    The Biden administration has been abjectly dishonest about many things, but its unusually opaque approach to President Joe Biden’s March 2021 edict has long raised suspicions that it could weaponize the entire federal bureaucracy as a de-facto ballot-harvesting operation for Democrats.

    In keeping with the blueprints of anti-American subversive Saul Alinsky, the Left has sought to pre-emptively accuse the Trump campaign of a nefarious plot to reshape the government through talking points about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Yet, Executive Order 14019 could be everything that it accuses Project 2025 of being and then some. The only problem is that the lack of transparency makes it impossible to tell just how Democrats intend to use this.

    • Presidential death/health crisis

    The Democrats and their deep-state allies have failed, thus far, in killing Trump, and to do so now would undoubtedly turn him into one of the greatest martyrs in U.S. history. JD Vance would coast to victory in a landslide, and with trusted college pal Vivek Ramaswamy at his side, he would set up the GOP for generations of political dominance.

    Yet, assuming Biden hasn’t been actively trying to torpedo the Harris campaign, he might be persuaded to step aside early due to a health emergency, installing the current veep as the incumbent, which would allow her to finish the final stretch with images being sworn in by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, shoring up the identity politics vote. It would, of course, leave little time for her to actually implement any policies that would sour voters further against her.

    Although Biden has recently indicated the need to “lock up” Trump—politically, he claims—Trump shrewdly hinted that he might be open to considering a presidential pardon for Hunter Biden, which could prove to be a powerful bargaining chip.

    Nonetheless, there is another president who could similarly stir up superficial sentiment at the last minute. Centenarian Jimmy Carter may, in fact, already be dead.

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    Barring further proof of life, one might be hard-pressed to believe that Carter—his mouth agape, and his skin appearing jaundiced or discolored as he lay in state at his 100th birthday celebration—still inhabits this mortal plane.

    However, maintaining the illusion is necessary, for now, since Carter already cast an early ballot for Kamala Harris, which would be invalidated, in theory, if he were to die before Election Day.

    Carter’s passing, followed by a prompt cremation, could be announced next Tuesday as voters in Georgia are heading to the polls, throwing in to disarray a must-win state that Trump appears to have locked in.

    • Literally locking Trump up

    This risky move may backfire, as all the earlier lawfare actions taken against Trump only helped to further bolster his popular support due to backlash. Nonetheless, the psychological impact of having their candidate in detention could cast enough doubt to keep some Republicans home, and would certainly motivate Democrats.

    As it stands, corrupt New York Judge Juan Merchan has pushed back Trump’s sentencing in his porn-star case to Nov. 26. The GOP leader also still remains under gag order in the D.C. trial led by dubiously appointed special counsel Jack Smith, whom Trump recently called a “scoundrel.”

    Smith and his accomplice, D.C. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, might unseal additional accusations to bait Trump into a response of some kind that could violate the order and land him in the gulag with countless other Jan. 6 detainees.

    Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 23:05

  • South Korea's Chip Output Drops For First Time In 14 Months Amid Slowdown At Samsung
    South Korea’s Chip Output Drops For First Time In 14 Months Amid Slowdown At Samsung

    Concerns over the stability of the artificial intelligence bubble intensified this week. 

    Advanced Micro Devices released a disappointing earnings report on Tuesday, revealing slower-than-expected growth in AI sales. Adding to the uncertainty, Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer, reported overnight about uninspiring demand for advanced chips in mobile devices and PCs. 

    The largest takeaway from Samsung’s third-quarter earnings report was an underwhelming performance in the company’s chip division, posting a surprise drop from the previous quarter. At the same time, overall profit was marginally higher than Wall Street estimates. Also, it saw smartphone sales slowing by the end of the year and only increasing by about 1% in 2025, despite the hype surrounding AI-enabled smartphones and other handheld devices. 

    In addition to company-level developments, new data from South Korea’s chip manufacturing base shows that production fell in September for the first time in 14 months—yet more troubling signs showing the AI boom cools. 

    More from Bloomberg:

    Nationwide semiconductor production slid 3% in September, a sharp reversal after they gained 11% a month earlier, according to data released Thursday by the government statistical office. The growth in shipments also slowed to 0.7% from 17% in August.

    Source: Bloomberg 

    Still, inventory levels showed stockpiles continue to be worked through at a rapid clip, as they declined 41.5% from a year earlier in September. The numbers paint a picture of an industry that may be cooling gradually as demand for memory chips peaks out.

    South Korea’s chip production is viewed as a proxy for global chip demand because these components are used in a wide range of electronics, from smartphones to servers to automobiles. Given the hype around AI adoption from phones to computers, this week’s news from AMD, Samsung, and now South Korea’s chip base could be symptoms of a cooling bubble. Certainly not the headlines chip bulls want to see.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 22:40

  • Restoring America's Common Enterprise
    Restoring America’s Common Enterprise

    Authored by Peter Berkowitz via RealClearPolitics,

    The United States is days away from a portentous presidential election that, however it turns out, promises to leave around half the nation believing that catastrophe has been narrowly averted and the rest believing that all is lost. Desperate hopes and apocalyptic fears suffuse the electorate. Significant swathes of the right and left – especially among the intellectual class – believe that the other side is dishonest, wicked, and bent on overthrowing democracy in America. This tendency to loathe those in the rival political camp presents an overriding threat to the nation.

    To endure, a rights-protecting or liberal democracy needs citizens who regard themselves as engaged in a common enterprise. They must share a language. They must respect basic moral and political principles. They must take pride in their nation’s accomplishments while facing up to and correcting their country’s flaws by upholding the best in the nation’s traditions and heeding justice’s enduring imperatives. They must trust that as they generally follow society’s written and unwritten rules, so too will others. And they must partake of a broad commitment – that receives expression in the exercise of toleration and civility – to securing a freedom for each consistent with a like freedom for all. Otherwise, democracy will dissolve into authoritarianism as citizens lose the ability to cooperate in nurturing their communities, maintaining a prosperous economy, and protecting their equal rights.

    Seeing themselves as engaged in a common enterprise can be a challenge for citizens of a rights-protecting democracy. That’s because rights and democracy encourage individuals – and the groups to which they belong – to go their own ways. Endowed with differing abilities and dispositions, free citizens develop distinctive interests, hold a diversity of opinions, and pursue happiness in their own manner.

    To preserve unity within this diversity, rights-protecting democracies must educate citizens about their common enterprise. That common enterprise consists in large measure, citizens must learn, in maintaining a political order that enables individuals and families – and the associations they form – to disagree peacefully and even productively not only about ordinary public policy but also about ultimate questions concerning moral excellence and the path to salvation.

    A rising challenge to America’s common enterprise stems from adamant calls to discard the Constitution. The formal crystallization of the country’s dedication to equal liberty under law, the Constitution – its premises, operations, and goals – is permanently open to discussion. But instead of arguing about the interpretation of this or that constitutional provision and rather than debating schools of constitutional jurisprudence, prominent progressive voices increasingly condemn the Constitution as a whole. To take one conspicuous example, Harvard Law School Professor Ryan D. Doerfler and Yale Law School Professor Samuel Moyn argued in the New York Times in “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed” that to save democracy we must “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”

    Leading members of the so-called “new right” – a loose association of national conservatives and common-good conservatives – join, in effect if not intent, progressives in repudiating the Constitution. Self-styled “postliberal” conservatives identify classical liberalism as the root cause of America’s moral, political, cultural, economic, and national-security woes. But the Constitution – which seeks to secure the unalienable rights affirmed by the Declaration of Independence through limited government grounded in the consent of the governed – is steeped in classical liberalism. Consequently, the new right’s attacks on classical liberalism make common cause with progressives who wish to rid the country of the Constitution.

    Against the enthusiasms for overcoming the Constitution, eminent conservatives maintain that recovery of the Constitution’s underlying political theory and its judicious design of primary political institutions can avert the crisis of democracy in America. These conservatives tend to be steeped in history and political philosophy, ancient and modern. They are disposed to support former president Donald Trump without disregarding his shortcomings. And they are well represented in “Democracy in America: a symposium,” which appears in the New Criterion’s October issue.

    Embracing its responsibility as a journal of arts, letters, and the larger public interest – and as a leading publication of thoughtful conservatism – The New Criterion addresses head-on the central issues. In his introduction to the symposium, magazine editor Roger Kimball argues that democracy in America confronts a “siege” that has been gathering momentum for more than 15 years. “Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, followed by the incomprehensible victory of Donald Trump,” writes Kimball, “has radicalized and emboldened the Left.”

    In its emboldened radicalism, Kimball argues, the left has combined in a single indictment the contention that Trump aims to institute despotism and the accusation that the Constitution undermines democracy and subverts the common good. The proof that our Constitution is anti-democratic and dysfunctional, progressive intellectuals contend, is that it allowed Trump to win election as president once and may do so again.

    In contrast, the contributors to The New Criterion symposium maintain that a principal source of the nation’s ills is the disparagement of, and departures from, the Constitution. The contributors highlight the spirit of liberty under law that animates the Constitution and the structure of government by which it maintains freedom. Inspired by Tocqueville’s 19th-century masterpiece, “Democracy in America,” they also stress such non-governmental supports of freedom as family, faith, civic association, liberal education, and the moral and intellectual virtues.

    In “Our Athenian American democracy” my Hoover Institution colleague Victor Davis Hanson argues that contrary to the Constitution’s design – and notwithstanding progressive complaints about democracy’s demise – the United States has embraced, to the detriment of freedom, a purer form of democracy. In its classical form – direct rule of the people – democracy lacked checks on majority will. Indeed, “there was never an Athenian effort to guarantee the rights of the individual against the state,” writes Hanson. “That idea only arrived in the Middle Ages, when it was embodied in Magna Carta, and it later figured prominently in the European Enlightenment and the foundation of the American Republic.” While members of America’s founding generation quarreled vociferously about proper constitutional limits, they were all but unanimous in believing that formal constraints on legislation, executive action, and judicial authority were crucial to the protection of individual rights. Hence, argues Hanson, “the greatest threat to the republican system of the United States may well be the efforts of Washington bureaucrats and agencies to destroy some 236 years of constitutional checks and balances and the political customs that have evolved along with them.”

    In “Tocqueville vs. progressive democracy” Daniel Mahoney, professor emeritus at Assumption University, agrees with Hanson that progressive conceptions of democracy subvert the basic rights and fundamental freedoms on which the American experiment in ordered liberty rests. That’s in part, argues Mahoney, because progressive conceptions of democracy incorporate highly partisan positions that erode the habits of heart and mind necessary for self-government. These include antipathy to tradition, particularly traditional views about religion and sex; preference for cosmopolitanism mixed with distaste for patriotic nationalism; and celebration of self-creation combined with disparagement of self-restraint, honor, and duty.

    Manhattan Institute senior fellow James Piereson contends in “The Washington octopus” that the current strife between the people and the elites in American reflects the old “conflict between ‘country’ and ‘court’ parties” that marked 18th-century politics in Britain and America. Like the court party, contemporary progressives endeavor to direct citizens’ lives from the capital city. Like the country party, many on the right today want to preserve, consistent with basic rights and fundamental freedoms, local control over local affairs. Reformers, argues Piereson, must reverse the concentration of power in Washington built up over decades owing to FDR’s New Deal, post-World War II national-security demands, and LBJ’s Great Society. For starters, he proposes transferring elements of the federal bureaucracy out of Washington – relocating, say, the Department of the Interior to “Montana, Idaho, Utah, or the Dakotas” and the FBI or the Department of Education to “Kansas City, Wichita, Dallas, or any number of other cities.”

    In “Tocqueville’s limitations” Claremont Institute Fellow Glenn Elmers offers a friendly corrective to the great Frenchman, who understood equality as primarily a “sociological force” fueled by a passion to level human affairs. In contrast, America’s founders viewed equality in terms of formal rights that must be institutionalized. A return to equal rights under law, argues Elmers, would limit contemporary managerial elites’ schemes to shift power from the people to federal bureaucrats in Washington. This would hinder the capital city’s imposition on the nation of versions of equity and social justice that seem to many ordinary people neither equitable nor just.

    Confronting what he regards as the progressive juggernaut, Kimball concludes “that conservatism has three main choices.” The first, “outright surrender,” is dishonorable. So is the second – “the dhimmitude of the well-pressed but housebroken Right that exchanges its pampered place on the plantation for political irrelevance.” Accordingly, Kimball opts for the third – “the perhaps paradoxical option of what we might call Alinskyite conservatism, after the canny left-wing activist Saul Alinsky.” It “eschews the quietism of surrender for the activism of what Donald Trump calls ‘winning.’”

    The activist option aimed at winning is preferable provided two conditions are met. Activism must revolve around the energetic defense of constitutional essentials. And winning must signify the restoration of a common enterprise to secure the liberty under law that is the enduring promise of rights-protecting democracy in America.

    Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2019 to 2021, he served as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department. His writings are posted at PeterBerkowitz.com and he can be followed on X @BerkowitzPeter.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 22:15

  • Police Crack Down On Street Takeovers With High-Tech Surveillance As 4th Amendment Battles Loom
    Police Crack Down On Street Takeovers With High-Tech Surveillance As 4th Amendment Battles Loom

    Authored by Beige Luciano-Adams via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    LOS ANGELES—As police across California crack down on illegal street racing, takeovers, and sideshows, technology companies are marketing new surveillance tools to meet the demand—prompting questions about the implications for privacy rights and Fourth Amendment protections.

    An automated license plate reader mounted on a pole in San Francisco, on June 13, 2024. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

    In the Bay Area and Los Angeles, where incidents have become increasingly brazen and violent in recent years, often drawing hundreds of attendees and overwhelming police, agencies already rely on planes, drones, and automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras as they aim to reduce the risk to first responders.

    And they’ve begun to see results.

    On Oct. 25 in the Bay Area, the California Highway Patrol (CHP) reported the seizure of 16 vehicles that had been involved in two separate takeovers a month prior. Officers couldn’t reach the center of the sideshow before it moved to another location, but they collected video evidence from cameras placed around the Bay Bridge. That led investigators to a list of vehicles, allowing them to request seizures orders from a judge.

    Armed with these technologies, CHP officers sent to Oakland to crack down on illegal sideshows and rising violent and retail crime have seized more than 2,000 stolen vehicles since February.

    And a controversial surveillance system used by police to detect gunshots and fireworks is now being remarketed as a tool to listen for the sounds of illegal street racing, takeovers and sideshows—like screeching tires—according to an Oct. 23 announcement from Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company that leases surveillance systems to thousands of law enforcement agencies across the United States.

    Audio detection offers an additional angle that can be integrated with existing camera networks and analytics, which Flock said in its announcement will provide a “deeper layer of insight, enabling [police] to track repeat offenders and analyze patterns linked to sideshows.”

    When the cameras mounted at intersections are used in conjunction with audio detectors, the analytics system generates a report that lists vehicles, ranked by frequency, near confirmed shootings, fireworks, sideshows or takeovers, according to the company.

    The selling point is that the AI-powered system identifies patterns nearly instantly that would typically take hours or days for humans.

    The newly reconfigured technology raises old questions about the balance between privacy and public safety, which civil rights groups have already been litigating—in the courts and in the public sphere—for years.

    For critics, the deployment of such technologies is part of a long march, a stealth encroachment on constitutional rights that has accelerated in the years since 9/11.

    “Some of these are mass surveillance technologies that shouldn’t be permitted to operate in a democratic society,” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union, told The Epoch Times. “We don’t watch everybody all the time, just in case somebody does something wrong somewhere.”

    An automated license plate reader is seen mounted on a pole in San Francisco on June 13, 2024. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

    Technologies like Flock’s cameras and audio detection devices, mounted at public intersections throughout the country in an increasingly dense network, raise questions about the “boundary between what can be done in today’s technology and what should be done,” Stanley said.

    According to a February 2020 report by the state auditor, nearly all of California’s law enforcement agencies already use surveillance cameras that automatically read and report license plate data along with other details of the vehicle, time, and location.

    These typically use infrared cameras to read license numbers and feed them into databases, but some cameras, like Flock’s, can capture more than license plates—things like car color and make, as well as small identifying details.

    According to Flock’s website, police departments in New York, California, Illinois, Texas, and Louisiana are among those already using the company’s Raven system for gunshot detection, which the company claims is 90 percent accurate in identifying gunshots.

    Accuracy Claims

    Various reports have called such claims into question—including a May annual review by the City of San Jose, which initially found around half of alerts were confirmed to be gunshots, with around a third being false positives. After some adjustments to the system, the confirmed number went up to nearly 80 percent.

    Critics argue the tendency of acoustic gunshot detection toward false positives can put people at risk, for example by sending police to a location expecting gunfire where there are innocent people. Such technologies can also record human voices, which law enforcement agencies have used in court.

    “As is so often the case with police surveillance technologies, a device initially deployed for one purpose (here, to detect gunshots) has been expanded to another purpose (to spy on conversations with sensitive microphones),” said the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on the intersection of civil rights and digital technology.

    Some cities have canceled contracts with Flock or similar providers after analysis revealed disappointing results.

    A 2021 investigation of Flock competitor ShotSpotter found the acoustic gunshot detection system generated more than 40,000 dead-end deployments in Chicago in less than two years, with the vast majority of alerts turning up no evidence of gunfire or related crime.

    The Champaign Police Department in Illinois last year opted not to renew its contract with Flock after results fell short of marketing claims. Data obtained by local journalists showed 59 out of 64 alerts were “unfounded,” with 21 of those likely caused by fireworks.

    “To date, the system has not yet lived up to performance expectations, including misidentifying some sounds—such as fireworks or a vehicle backfire—as possible gunfire,” a police official told CU Citizen Access.

    Flock did not offer an estimate of accuracy in its announcement of the Raven systems repurposed to listen for vehicular chaos, nor did it respond to an inquiry about how many communities use Raven to detect the sounds of street takeovers. But other media have reported at least two Bay Area law enforcement agencies are already using it.

    Vehicles drive over tire skid marks from other drivers doing burnouts and donuts as area residents protest an increase in street racing takeovers in the Angelino Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles on Aug. 26, 2022. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

    A Growing Network

    Cameras that read license plates and microphones that listen for gunshots have been around for decades, but in recent years, California municipalities have expanded their surveillance networks—and rapidly developing AI-powered technology is adding an unprecedented accelerant.

    On Oct. 22, the San Diego Sheriff’s Department announced plans to install 60 additional cameras in unincorporated areas, adding to five cities that have already used them with “significant investigative success,” including solving homicides, kidnappings, vehicle theft, burglaries, and assaults.

    Nodding to privacy and data security concerns, the Department said it has implemented “strict protocols,” including adherence to Senate Bill 34, state legislation from 2015 that regulates how data is used, stored, and shared, and requires regular audits to ensure compliance. San Diego keeps ALPR data for a maximum of one year unless it is being used in ongoing investigations.

    Earlier this year, San Francisco installed 400 ALPR cameras, and Oakland, in partnership with the California Highway Patrol, installed 480 Flock cameras that read license plates and other identifying details.

    “When we’re talking about car break-ins and car theft … when we’re talking about sideshows and some of the other issues that have happened in our city, automatic license plate readers can play an invaluable role in helping us to track some of the perpetrators of these crimes and hold them accountable,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed said at the time.

    In some California cities, police can now also access private security camera networks if neighbors grant them permission.

    For example, Sacramento currently has 809 cameras registered in a program that allows people to register their cameras with the police department, which lets investigators know where the camera is and request video evidence in case of an incident. Businesses and residents can also choose to “integrate” their cameras, giving the police department direct, live access to the feed.

    And “real-time crime centers” in major cities across the United States already combine these modalities. Last month, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department opened its first center in Agoura Hills, and LAPD plans to open multiple in the coming months.

    These centers can tap into license plate readers and existing cameras at intersections, as well as footage from private cameras if businesses or residents allow it.

    Citing low staffing levels and rising crime—including 50 car burglaries across the course of a single weekend in one L.A. City Council District—an LAPD report to the Board of Police Commissioners cited “an acute need to explore new measures, like the use of technology, to mitigate these impacts and improve the department’s response to crime.”

    Privacy Regulations

    In an April memo, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said the “crime-fighting cameras” installed at Oakland intersections would protect privacy by limiting data storage to 28 days and not disclosing footage to third parties beyond other law enforcement agencies, while complying with recent bulletins from the California Attorney General’s office outlining state law that governs data collection, storage and use, including SB 34.

    Police can use ALPRs to match license plates with those on a “hot list” of known offenders. But even if they don’t match, the data is still stored in a database, prompting questions about how it is protected and used.

    The ACLU raised this issue in a 2013 report titled “You Are Being Tracked,” noting that the readers “would pose few civil liberties risks if they only checked plates against hot lists and these hot lists were implemented soundly.” But the networked systems store the compiled data, not just license plates of vehicles that generate hits.

    The “enormous databases” of motorists’ location information that are created as a result, and often pooled among regional systems, are often retained permanently and shared with little to no restriction, the report argued.

    The 2020 state auditor report found that while most California law enforcement agencies use the technology, “few have appropriate usage and privacy policies in place.”

    Special cameras, like the one found on this police car, snap pictures of license plates that pass by. Police say the technology has helped them catch criminals, but some are concerned that authorities are using the system for warrantless tracking. Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images

    The report looked at four agencies—the Fresno and Los Angeles police departments, and the Sacramento and Marin County sheriff’s offices. All of them accumulated a large number of images in their ALPR systems, but most of those did not relate to criminal investigations.

    For example, 99.9 percent of the 320 million images Los Angeles stored at the time were for vehicles that were not on a hot list when the photo was taken.

    And according to a Sacramento grand jury investigation, a vast ALPR system deployed by the county’s sheriffs department and city’s police departments couldn’t distinguish between cars used for criminal activities and those operated legally.

    “And we subsequently learned that both the Sheriff’s Office and Sacramento Police Department have been lax in following state law regarding how ALPR data is shared with other law enforcement entities,” the report said.

    In fact, the investigation found that those departments regularly shared license plate data out of state, which is prohibited by SB 34.

    In an emailed statement, the California attorney general’s office told The Epoch Times such technological tools “are helpful in deterring and investigating crime, serving both to prevent wrongdoing and ensure accountability for those who violate the law,” but that they must be used with “the utmost respect for ethical and legal standards.”

    The attorney general’s office said that recently it has been working with local agencies “to ensure that they are using ALPR systems for their intended use.”

    4th Amendment Concerns

    A federal lawsuit filed Oct. 21 against the use of Flock’s surveillance network in Norfolk, Virginia, alleges the city is violating Fourth Amendment rights by tracking “the whole of a person’s public movements,” thus amounting to a search.

    The City of Norfolk gathers information about “everyone who drives past any of its 172 cameras to facilitate investigating crimes,“ and in doing so, ”violates the long-standing societal expectation that people’s movements and associations over an extended period are their business alone,” the complaint states.

    With all of this done without a warrant, the complaint continues, “This is exactly the type of ‘too permeating police surveillance’ the Fourth Amendment was adopted to prevent.”

    Flock released a statement to media countering that Fourth Amendment case law shows license plate readers don’t constitute a warrantless search because they photograph cars in public, where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy, and case precedent in numerous states has upheld the use of evidence from ALPRs as constitutional without requiring a warrant.

    Jay Stanley, the ACLU policy analyst, noted courts are still in the relatively early stages of grappling with these technologies.

    “But courts have also made a number of rulings that sweeping surveillance technology is not consistent with the Fourth Amendment. … I think that automatic license plate readers raise a lot of the same concerns that the Supreme Court addressed in some of the big privacy cases in recent years,” he said.

    Among those are United States v. Jones, in which the government tracked someone’s vehicle with a GPS tracker without a warrant for 28 days, subsequently securing a conviction with the resulting data; the court held that such constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment. Previously a lower court had ruled the data was admissible because the suspect had no reasonable expectation of privacy when his car was on public streets.

    And in Carpenter v. United States, the court held that acquisition of a suspect’s cell-site records—historical location data from cell phone providers, obtained without a warrant—constituted a Fourth Amendment search.

    “When you have enough license plate readers out there, it becomes tantamount to being tracked with a GPS. And so it raises the same issues that the court has already ruled on,” Stanley said.

    He suggested that communities need time to digest these technologies and their potential consequences before adopting them at such speed and scale.

    “Communities need to decide whether they want to allow the police departments that serve them to have the new powers these technologies convey and whether they’re even effective at reducing crime and ultimately making communities a better place—which is the whole point of law enforcement and government,” he said.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 21:25

  • Watch: DC Begins Boarding Up Ahead Of Election Over Social Unrest Fears 
    Watch: DC Begins Boarding Up Ahead Of Election Over Social Unrest Fears 

    Washington, DC authorities are hardening security for potential social unrest after next week’s presidential election. With four days remaining, workers have been busy boarding up government buildings and retail stores with plywood. 

    “Work crews have begun covering up the windows of buildings and stores near the White House as the election comes down to the final week,” DC resident Andrew Leyden wrote on X. 

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    Leyden posted a video on YouTube of himself riding around on a bike near the White House complex, showing the various buildings being boarded up. 

    In the video’s description, he wrote, “When there is a threat of civil unrest, these landlords cover their windows, much like you do when a hurricane is coming.” 

    “We do expect the Capitol complex to be much more hardened,” DC Mayor Muriel Bowser said last week, who was quoted by Axios. She told residents to be “flexible” as demonstrations and detours emerge. 

    The ultra-hardening of security around and near the White House might be preparation for a possible Trump victory. With far-left corporate media outlets pushing ‘Trump Nazi,’ ‘Trump Hitler,’ and ‘Trump fascist’ rhetoric nonstop ahead of the election, this hate speech propaganda could certainly fuel leftist radicals to become violently unhinged if Trump wins next week.

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    A new Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey showed that most Americans are somewhat worried about social unrest after or during next Tuesday night’s election results. 

    Ohio Rep. (D) Greg Landsman told Axios that even as September approached, security was “preparing in a way that is very different from what has happened in the past,” adding, “I had never seen anything like it.”

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 21:00

  • Natural Gas And AI Data Centers Provide Unique PA Political Opportunity
    Natural Gas And AI Data Centers Provide Unique PA Political Opportunity

    Authored by Tim Ryan via RealClearEnergy,

    Artificial Intelligence (AI) is more than the latest buzzword. It’s rising rapidly, permeating across industries, and is already present in our daily lives. Netflix uses AI to personalize recommendations to users, 50% of global organizations reported adopting AI in at least one business area in 2022, and more than half of Americans use voice assistants to receive information.

    Behind this tech revolution are electricity-thirsty data centers dotting America’s landscape, processing AI, crypto, e-commerce, and cloud computing. The collective rise in demand to our power grid is something not seen in decades.

    An AI Google search, for example, needs 10 times the amount of energy as a normal Google search, and all of the current data centers worldwide combined consume more power than all but 16 countries.

    AI alone is expected to add 20% more to US electricity demand by 2030 and Goldman Sachs projects natural gas will cover 60% of demand. Our grid is bound to hit a limit in its current state, according to Microsoft leadership. To provide the steady, reliable, and affordable power these facilities need, natural gas-powered electricity is increasingly the obvious choice.

    As the second-largest natural gas production state, Pennsylvania is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this opportunity quickly, benefit from new job creation and investment, and power our high-tech future if we collectively embrace natural gas as part of that solution. Doing so would be welcome news for trade unions and high-tech professionals alike, alongside local communities who benefit from new tax revenues.

    It’s clear Vice President Kamala Harris’ thinking has evolved on energy, along with other Democrats across the country.

    Harris had a front row seat as American natural gas rapidly secured our allies abroad against the fallout of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And she understands how critical natural gas is in achieving her Administration’s goals of reshoring critical manufacturing jobs, alongside renewables, that benefit America’s heartland in states like Pennsylvania. Notably natural gas, more than renewables, is the primary source of America’s world-leading carbon reductions over the last two decades and will continue to be a low-carbon solution deployed abroad to replace coal and fight climate change.

    It is this debate on natural gas: balancing economic strength, technology, global competitiveness, staying ahead of China, and fighting climate change, where Harris can cement her political position as a sensible Democrat who uniquely understands Pennsylvania.

    The Keystone State is already home to 71 data centers, with hubs in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, and has potential to attract even more given its proximity to the Marcellus Shale gas formations that have led Pennsylvania’s energy revolution in recent years. Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro has taken notice of this potential, speaking at an AI forum at Carnegie Mellon this month.

    Data centers that power AI are so energy-intensive and desperate to meet these power demands that a mothballed nuclear plant once set for decommissioning, Three Mile Island Unit 1 near Harrisburg, will be restarted as part of a 20-year power purchase agreement with Microsoft. This is a positive development, but its potential to be replicated is limited. Natural gas is abundant, flexible, and affordable.

    Some will say to build renewables only instead, but that is simplistic thinking.

    We’re already far behind the massive and costly 60% expansion of America’s power grid that Princeton University says is needed just to transition our existing grid to a net-zero future. While solar and wind are vital to a clean energy future, their weather dependence cannot fulfill 24/7 power needs.

    Harris has a track record on aligning natural gas with opportunity. Under her Administration, the U.S. became the global leader of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, and was the largest LNG supplier to Europe in 2022 and 2023, stabilizing the economies of our Allies after Russia’s Ukraine invasion.

    Pennsylvania workers were part of that victory.

    Other statewide Democrats get it. Senators Bob Casey (D-PA) and John Fetterman (D-PA) have stood up to their Party and supported the natural gas industry, and Governor Shapiro has laid out plans for a diverse, resilient electricity grid. Pennsylvanians agree: 74% support building more natural gas infrastructure and 79% said natural gas drilling is important to the state’s economy.

    Pennsylvania has the natural resources, the infrastructure, and the know-how to power the AI boom and benefit so many across the Commonwealth. Natural gas remains the obvious choice to scale up fast to meet new demands, protect our environment, and support Pennsylvania jobs. Balance is key. AI is the future, and the United States can only lead on it with practical energy policy that starts in key states like Pennsylvania.

    Presidential candidate Harris would be smart to embrace it.

    Tim Ryan served ten terms in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2003 to 2023. He serves as the co-chair of the Natural Allies for a Clean Energy Future Leadership Council.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 20:35

  • Israel-Hezbollah Ceasefire Possible Within 'Days': Lebanese PM
    Israel-Hezbollah Ceasefire Possible Within ‘Days’: Lebanese PM

    Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati has issued a surprisingly optimistic assessment of the possibility of peace in Lebanon. On Wednesday he said that a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah might be achieved in the coming days.

    He cited a ‘hopeful’ conversation with US special envoy Amos Hochstein, related to a new Washington-backed ceasefire proposal. “We are doing our best… to have a ceasefire within the coming hours or days,” PM Mikati told Lebanese broadcaster Al-Jadeed. He said he remains “cautiously optimistic.”

    Mikati explained he has reason to believe that a full ceasefire is possible and even realistic prior to the US election on November 5. On the other side, an Israeli official has told ABC News of “significant progress” toward a ceasefire in Lebanon.

    Caretaker PM Najib Mikati, via Al Monitor

    Two senior White House advisers have meanwhile arrived in Israel Thursday as part of an effort to finalize and close the deal. Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk are said to be going into it with the belief that Hezbollah has so many blows, especially the death of its longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah, that it is looking to disassociate itself from Hamas and the Gaza war.

    According to Axios: “A deal that would end the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah could be achieved within a few weeks, Israeli and U.S. officials said.” The same report has listed out the following simultaneous diplomatic engagements of the US in the region:

    • Israeli officials said Biden adviser Amos Hochstein was waiting for Israeli leaders to decide about whether to move forward with the deal before he traveled to Israel.
    • The fact that he and Biden adviser Brett McGurk are coming suggest Netanyahu is in favor of pursuing the deal, they said.
    • CIA director Bill Burns will be in Cairo on Thursday “to engage with Egyptian counterparts on bilateral matters as well as the process to secure the release of hostages,” the official said.
    • “CENTCOM Commander Gen. Erik Kurilla is traveling to the region to discuss regional defense and will visit Israel to engage with counterparts and U.S. personnel.”

    Israeli media has said that contents of the US-proposed deal have leaked online, citing Kan public broadcaster.

    “The ceasefire proposal begins with a 60-day implementation period, during which time the Lebanese army will deploy along the border and confiscate Hezbollah arms in southern Lebanon,” Times of Israel says of the documents.

    “The IDF will be required to pull all troops from Lebanon within seven days of the end of hostilities, and will be replaced by the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF),” it adds. UN peacekeeping troops will reportedly facilitate the transition, and some 10,000 Lebanese national army troops. According to more:

    At the end of the 60-day implementation period, Israel and Lebanon will hold indirect negotiations via the US on fully implementing Resolution 1701 and resolving border disputes.

    A new International Monitoring and Enforcement Mechanism (IMEM) will be created, with the US serving as chair and with the participation of Italy, France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, UNIFIL and regional countries.

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    But in the meantime Israel’s airstrikes on positions in the south, Beirut, and even in the northeast have continued. They’ve even expanded, with the Bekaa Valley getting pounded, and Tyre getting hit again on Thursday.

    But the same day Israeli is reporting that at least six civilians have been killed by Hezbollah rocket attacks on the north, including some foreign workers in the city of Metula. An Israeli woman has also been killed in Haifa Bay.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 20:10

  • Secret Service Brass Interfered In IG Assassination Probe
    Secret Service Brass Interfered In IG Assassination Probe

    Authored by Susan Crabtree via RealClearPolitics,

    Secret Service leaders meddled in an independent government investigation of the July 13 assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump and are still not following many basic agency security protocols for presidential candidates, presidents, and vice presidents in the final days before the election, according to emails reviewed by RealClearPolitics and several sources in the Secret Service community.

    As Secret Service failures came to light in the weeks after the July assassination attempt, USSS managers sent emails to employees asking them to alert them to any “direct requests for information or interview” from the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General, or DHS OIG. The internal government watchdog is conducting its probe of the failures that led to the near assassination of Trump, the killing of fireman Corey Comperatore, and the wounding of two other rally-goers at the western Pennsylvania campaign event.

    The emails, which RealClearPolitics reviewed, contained the subject line “DHS OIG Inquiries” and directed employees to tell their supervisors if an OIG official reaches out to them so Secret Service managers could coordinate “an organized response.” Supervisors sent the email five days after the same inspector general issued a negative report on the Secret Service’s actions before and on Jan. 6, criticizing the agency for failing to detect a pipe bomb near Vice President Kamala Harris and not flagging signs of potential violence to other agencies.

    Normally, responding to DHS OIG investigators without talking to superiors would not warrant coordination with supervisors, the email stated. But after the first assassination attempt against Trump, USSS leadership needed to provide the proper context and a coordinated response.

    “Generally, not an issue; however, this is NOT the normal course of action, and the Service needs awareness and to ensure an organized response with information in the correct context,” Secret Service supervisors wrote in the emails, noting that “only we know what we do.”

    The email is now under Senate scrutiny. Sen. Chuck Grassley, a longtime champion of government whistleblowers, on Wednesday sent a letter to Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe expressing concern that the email and any other communications like it could have “a chilling effect” on employee disclosures to the inspector general’s office, as well as on congressional investigations.

    “If this email is an accurate representation of the actions taken by Secret Service management, it could have a chilling effect on its employees from fully cooperating and providing information to the DHS OIG as well as congressional investigations out of fear of retaliation since supervisors will apparently be keeping tabs on their communications,” Grassley wrote in the letter, a copy of which his office provided to RCP.

    Instead of trying to control the flow and context of information, Secret Service leaders should be “encouraging” employees to “come forward to provide truthful information to the DHS OIG and Congress so that lessons can be learned to prevent future assassination attempts,” Grassley added.

    The Iowa Republican set a deadline of Nov. 13 for Rowe to hand over all records “between and among Secret Service personnel” related to providing information to the DHS OIG and congressional investigations into the July 13 attempted assassination.

    Tristan Leavitt, an attorney and president of Empower Oversight, which represents Secret Service, IRS, and other government whistleblowers, said the email demanding that potential whistleblowers coordinate communications with their bosses stifles the free flow of information, which could help improve the agency’s performance and which federal law protects.

    “Secret Service employees have every right to anonymously contact the DHS OIG without informing their supervisor,” Leavitt said. “While this email is purportedly aimed at employees contacted directly by the OIG, it will undoubtedly discourage employees who may have information about wrongdoing from contacting the OIG or Congress.”

    The Secret Service acknowledged receipt of Grassley’s letter but declined to respond to RCP’s questions about how many supervisors sent the email and whether there were other attempts to pressure employees from independently discussing problems they’ve experienced in the Secret Service with DHS OIG or congressional investigators.

    “The U.S. Secret Service is in receipt of the letter sent by Senator Grassley,” an agency spokesman said in a statement. “The Secret Service has been and will continue to examine the events of the July 13 assassination attempt and will fully cooperate with Congress and other relevant investigations. We respect the Senator’s role of oversight within the Senate Judiciary Committee and will respond through official channels.”

    In the hectic waning hours before Election Day, Secret Service agents are also complaining about security shortcuts that agency leaders are allowing, sometimes requiring, to handle last-minute venue changes and adjustments to Trump’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’s break-neck campaign schedule.

    The Secret Service still has not provided Trump’s campaign with a military aircraft three weeks after it was requested, even though President Biden said earlier this month that he had authorized the Department of Homeland Security to “give him every single thing he needs.”

    Sources in the Secret Service community tell RCP that Trump’s campaign staff have made significant changes to his schedule less than 12 hours before arrivals, hamstringing the advance team’s ability to plan, coordinate, and obtain manpower and resources properly. The last-minute changes, which are typical in the final weeks of a presidential campaign, have posed significant challenges to providing security for Trump, who is still facing known threats from foreign and domestic actors.

    After a second attempt on Trump’s life, the Secret Service started using ballistic glass to provide extra security for the Republican presidential nominee at outdoor and other venues. But at times, late schedule changes have prevented the glass from being in place when it should have been and has led to a shortage of security manpower, these sources assert.

    Secret Service agents also complain that the agency’s managers devoted to Harris’ security have instructed advance personnel to submit manpower and resource requests without knowing any of the sites in Harris’ schedule. They also complain that Harris’ staff are “disorganized” in determining sites and are dictating what resources the vice president should have against the Secret Service advance team’s strong recommendations without any pushback from agency leaders.

    “This is not new, just a continuation of poor USSS leadership,” a source tells RCP. “It puts the entire Secret Service into a cross-your-fingers-and-hope-nothing-happens situation. Sound familiar?”

    The Secret Service also has come up short in securing Harris’ communications with her advance team, so they don’t share vital movements and logistics with the public or unwanted parties, according to several sources. The White House Communications Agency provides secure communications services for only the president and vice president but does not extend those to Trump because of a lack of resources.

    However, even Harris’ campaign staff and her Secret Service advance teams have been using unauthorized communications because of a dearth of WHCA manpower and resources coupled with last-minute changes to the vice president’s campaign schedule, the sources contend.

    Secret Service sources argue that the security procedures have not only failed to improve since July 13 but have further deteriorated.

    The USSS workforce is “aggressively communicating” to their supervisors that they are providing inadequate security that fails to meet agency standards, while the agency’s leaders, ensconced in their Washington offices, are assuring everyone that “they’ll be fine and to keep up the good work,” one source argues.

    “It’s those on the front lines, who do the long hours and impossible tasks, who get thrown under the bus when everything does go wrong while leaders simply retire and move on,” the source told RCP. “No accountability.”

    The agency did not respond to questions about these alleged deviations from agency security protocols.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 19:45

  • China Weaponizes Supply Chain, Sends America's Largest Drone Maker Into Crisis
    China Weaponizes Supply Chain, Sends America’s Largest Drone Maker Into Crisis

    America’s largest drone company and supplier of unmanned aircraft to the Ukrainian Armed Forces has been thrown into a supply chain crisis after Beijing imposed sanctions, barring it from sourcing drone parts from Chinese suppliers, according to a new Financial Times report. This is another wake-up call for American companies heavily reliant on China, highlighting the urgent need to ‘friend-shore’ or ‘reshore’ critical supply chains away from the world’s second-largest economy.

    Sources familiar with the situation told FT that Beijing imposed sanctions on Skydio to prevent it from sourcing battery components from Chinese firms. 

    On Wednseday, Skydio said the sanctions by China were “for selling drones to Taiwan, where our only customer today is the National Fire Agency.”

    Skydio CEO Adam Bry met with US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell and senior White House officials last week to discuss the dire situation as the Chinese paralyzed part of the drone company’s supply chain.

    “This is a clarifying moment for the drone industry,” Bry told customers in a letter obtained by FT. He said, “If there was ever any doubt, this action makes clear that the Chinese government will use supply chains as a weapon to advance their interests over ours.”

    Bry continued, “This is an attempt to eliminate the leading American drone company and deepen the world’s dependence on Chinese drone suppliers.” 

    China initially unveiled the sanctions on October 11 as retaliation for Washington’s move to sell attack drones to Taiwan. The FT noted that the company recently secured a contract with Taiwan’s fire agency. 

    FT sources did not mention which of Skydio’s Chinese suppliers were affected by the sanctions.

    Using public trade data compiled by counterparty and supply chain risk intelligence firm Sayari, about 94.44% of Skydio’s drone component shipments came from Vietnam, 4.9% from Hong Kong, and .65% from China. 

    Source: Sayari 

    A list of Skydio’s suppliers – mainly in Asia. 

    Source: Sayari 

    Here is the latest drone part shipment data for Skydio. 

    Source: Sayari 

    One official told FT, “We suspect Skydio was targeted by Beijing because it is likely seen as a competitor to DJI,” adding, “If there is a silver lining, we can use this episode to accelerate our work to diversify drone supply chains away from . . . China.”

    It seems like a tit-for-tat-sanction war between America and the Chinese to weaken each other drone-manufacturing capabilities.

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    These Chinese sanctions undermine US defense and drone manufacturers … it’s time for ‘America First’ policies to avoid this kind of shitshow. 

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 19:20

  • "It Did Occur" – Kentucky County Clerk Confirms Voting Booth 'Glitch' Shifted Trump Votes To Kamala
    “It Did Occur” – Kentucky County Clerk Confirms Voting Booth ‘Glitch’ Shifted Trump Votes To Kamala

    Earlier in the day, a video went viral of voters in Kentucky having ‘issues’ with an electronic voting machine that selected “Kamala Harris” when the voter had pressed on “Donald Trump”…

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    Admittedly, we have seen a few of these style of clips over the past few weeks and viewed it with the same level of skepticism we usually do.

    However, this time is different because the local County Clerk just issued a statement on Facebook confirming the issue “did occur”… but not before he had denied it occurred.

    According to the Laurel County Clerk Tony Brown, the machine was taken out of service while waiting for a rep from the AG’s Office.

    Screenshot here (just in case something interesting happens to the statement)

    So, the initial reaction was:

    There is no vote rigging here. It’s just a vast right wing conspiracy.

    Then, 3 hours later…

    Ok, the voting machine was busted, but it really was just a “ballot marking device” and as long as you triple checked everything, you must have caught the error

    Here’s the full statement:

    The Attorney General’s office has been to the vote center to check the device that has been shown across social media today. In full disclosure, after several minutes of attempting to recreate the scenario, it did occur. This was accomplished by hitting some area in between the boxes. After that we tried for several minutes to do it again and could not.

    Since this is going out across the USA and the world, I want to explain to everyone that this is a ballot marking device. You insert your blank ballot into it to vote your specific ballot for your precinct. It shows you who you have chosen for each race and notifies you if you didn’t make a selection in a race before it allows the voter to continue to the next page. When you come to the end of the ballot it shows you how you voted in every race and issue.

    It confirms with each voter that they are satisfied with their selections twice before printing the ballot. Once you receive your ballot back from the ballot marking device you can review your choices again before placing it into the scanner. If you made a mistake, you may spoil that ballot and receive another one, Kentucky Law allows two spoiled ballots only. Once you are satisfied with your ballot you may place it into the scanner, and it verifies that it has been counted.

    These ballot marking devices are set for a voter to touch Inside the whole box with the name of the candidates. In the video posted you can see us going back and forth through the names with no issues. This is the same machine used by the voter in the video.

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    It remained at its location in the vote center and was set face down until the representative from the Attorney General’s Office arrived to investigate. There were no claims of any issues with the device prior, and none since it went back into service. The voter who posted the video did cast her ballot which she said was correct.

    I hate that this has occurred here in Laurel County.

    We strive to have accurate, secure and safe elections that we are proud to provide to our citizens. I hope all can get to the polls and make your voice heard November 5th. If you read through this entire post, thank you very much for your time.

    …isn’t it ‘funny’ how these ‘glitches’ are never in Trump’s favor?

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 19:00

  • Mail Ballots Without Dates Must Be Counted: Pennsylvania Court
    Mail Ballots Without Dates Must Be Counted: Pennsylvania Court

    Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    A Pennsylvania court ruled on Oct. 30 that the state’s requirement for mail-in ballots to be correctly dated in order to be counted is unconstitutional, though the 3–2 decision, according to the judge’s opinion, applies only to a past special election.

    Poll workers demonstrate how ballots are received, processed, scanned, and stored on Election Day, at the Philadelphia Election Warehouse in Philadelphia on Oct. 25, 2024. Matthew Hatcher/Getty Images

    A Commonwealth Court panel upheld a ruling by a Philadelphia judge stating that 69 ballots from the special election, submitted on time but lacking handwritten dates, must be counted.

    While Pennsylvania law requires those voting by mail to date the envelope in which the ballot is returned, “multiple state and federal courts have determined that the dating provisions are meaningless, as they do not establish voter eligibility, timely ballot receipt, or fraud,” Commonwealth Court Judge Ellen Ceisler wrote for the majority.

    “We cannot countenance any law governing elections, determined to be mandatory or otherwise, that has the practical effect in its application of impermissibly infringing on certain individuals’ fundamental right to vote,” she said later. “We are not being asked to make changes with respect to the impending 2024 General Election.”

    In a dissenting opinion, Commonwealth Court Judge Patricia McCullough said the court should not have decided on the matter now because it “surely will confuse the expectations of both voters and county boards of elections alike.”

    “The only reason that either the trial court or the Majority would rule on this question now is precisely to change the rules for the already underway general election,” she said, referring to the Nov. 5 election in which some voters are casting early or absentee ballots.

    The timing of the decision deprives the Pennsylvania Supreme Court of a reasonable opportunity to review before the Nov. 5 election, Commonwealth Court Judge Matthew Wolf said in another dissent.

    “Pennsylvania voters cannot be disenfranchised for trivial reasons,” Stephen Loney, senior supervising attorney of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, which is representing plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement. “The dates written on return envelopes are completely meaningless, and everyone agrees that these ballots are from eligible voters and were timely received. Disqualifying voters for minor errors is a violation of the state constitution, which errs on the side of the voter.”

    The ruling went against the Republican National Committee and the Republican Party of Pennsylvania, which, as intervenors, had asked the appeals court to overturn an earlier ruling by Court of Common Pleas Judge James Crumlish III. Crumlish’s ruling required the counting of the 69 ballots after finding that the date requirement violated the Pennsylvania Constitution.

    The Republicans have not yet reacted to the ruling.

    The Philadelphia Board of Elections, the defendant in the case, and which also appealed Crumlish’s ruling, did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

    Pennsylvania’s Department of State said in an Aug. 30 social media post that writing the date on ballot envelopes “provides no purpose to election administration.”

    Earlier this year, the Commonwealth Court also found the date requirement unconstitutional for voters who returned their ballots on time. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court vacated this decision, stating that the Commonwealth Court lacked the authority to review the case due to the involvement of county election boards as defendants.

    McCullough said that the new ruling suffered from some of the same problems as the ruling that was vacated.

    Mimi McKenzie, legal director of the Public Interest Law Center, said after the latest ruling that the date requirement may be adjudicated further in the future and encouraged voters to still date the envelope in which a ballot is returned.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 18:55

  • North Korea Test Launches ICBM, Capable of Hitting US, With Record-Setting Flight
    North Korea Test Launches ICBM, Capable of Hitting US, With Record-Setting Flight

    North Korea is increasingly back in the news amid soaring tensions on multiple fronts, especially following accusations that it sent some 10,000 of its troops to Russia to prepare for possible deployment to fight in Ukraine.

    Pyongyang on Thursday test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) for the first time in almost a year. What’s more is that the flight is widely being described as a North Korean rocket’s longest ever flight time.

    Given that nuclear warhead-capable ICBMs can reach several thousands of miles away, such a missile would have the capability of hitting the continental United States. And the timing has not been lost on anyone, coming a mere days before the US presidential election.

    Via Reuters/illustrative: North Korea has been test-firing long range missiles such as the Hwasong-18, shown in this photograph from 13 July last year.

    “I affirm that the DPRK will never change its line of bolstering up its nuclear forces,” Kim Jong Un declared.

    The following detailed description and analysis of the launch’s implications was provided by NBC:

    The missile was launched from a site near the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, at 7:10 a.m. local time (6:10 p.m. Wednesday ET), South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said. Spokesperson Lee Sung-joon said the missile was fired “at a very high altitude” and traveled more than 600 miles before it landed in the sea off North Korea’s east coast.

    The launch might have been held so close to the U.S. election to strengthen North Korea’s negotiating leverage and grab attention, Lee said.

    He said the weapon might have been fueled by solid propellants, which allow missiles to be launched faster and move more discreetly than liquid-fueled ones, and that it might have been fired from a 12-axle launch vehicle, which was revealed last month and is North Korea’s biggest mobile launch platform. 

    This might also be response to recent threatening language and warnings issued by US, NATO, and Ukrainian officials related to reports of North Korean troops in Ukraine.

    For example the US warned a UN security council meeting on Wednesday that North Korean troops will “come home in body bags”.

    Washington is also busy reaffirming the South Korea that it calls under America’s nuclear umbrella, according to treaties:

    “I assured Minister Kim today that the United States remains fully committed to the defense of the ROK and our extended deterrence commitment remains ironclad,” Austin said. “That commitment is backed by the full range of America’s conventional missile defense, nuclear and advanced non-nuclear capabilities.”

    He added that the US and South Korea will be returning “to large scale exercises” and “strengthening [their] combined readiness and our interoperability.”

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    And yet it is drills just like these which Kim Jong Un has cited over and over again as being justification enough to expand his nuclear arsenal.

    Pyongyang and Moscow are also in parallel deepening their defense ties, having inked their own pact this summer, and the Kremlin has cited this as the legal basis for North Korean troops being hosted in Russia.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 18:30

  • Watch: RFK Jr. Explains Plan For Reforming The CIA
    Watch: RFK Jr. Explains Plan For Reforming The CIA

    Authored by Ken Silva via Headline USA,

    Former President John F. Kennedy threatened to “splinter [the CIA] into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds” before he was assassinated in 1963. JFK’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., wants something perhaps less dramatic.

    In a Trump campaign event with Tulsi Gabbard on Saturday, RFK explained his idea for reforming the CIA. According to him, reforming the CIA is as simple as splintering the “espionage” and “plans” divisions, which handle matters of intelligence and paramilitary operations, respectively. Those divisions are referred to today as the Directorate of Intelligence and Directorate of Operations.

    RFK said the two divisions need to be reorganized so the intelligence/espionage area has oversight of the paramilitary operations. He said his father had a similar plan when he was Attorney General.

    “My father had a reform plan … Break up espionage division from the plans division, which is paramilitary division that fixes elections, buys newspapers, assassinates foreign leaders and so on,” he said.

    “I would break up those divisions and … put espionage division oversight of plans division.”

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    Such a plan may seem tepid for a man who’s accused the CIA of being involved in the murder of his uncle. But RFK’s been surprisingly cordial with the agency. His daughter-in-law and campaign manager, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, was a CIA officer for 10 years.

    RFK also revealed at Saturday’s campaign event in North Carolina that he had dinner with former Trump-era CIA Director Mike Pompeo. RFK called Pompeo a “neocon” and said he disagreed with him on many policies, but also said he admired him, calling the former agency director brilliant.

    RFK said Pompeo told him that “The worst mistake of my public lie was not fixing CIA. I could have but I didn’t do it.”

    “The entire upper echelon of that agency is made of individuals who don’t believe in the institutions of the United States of America,” RFK said.

    Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 18:05

  • Iran Readies Major Retaliatory Strike From Iraq 'In Coming Days': Israeli Officials
    Iran Readies Major Retaliatory Strike From Iraq ‘In Coming Days’: Israeli Officials

    Axios is reporting Thursday that Iran is still preparing a major retaliation in response to the Israeli aerial attack of the overnight and early morning hours of last Saturday. Israel’s strikes on missile and military facilities was itself a much anticipated response to the Oct.1st ballistic missile attack.

    While most regional observers believe the tit-for-tat has cooled down, reflected in declining oil prices this week, the Axios report cites a pair of Israeli officials to say “Israeli intelligence suggests Iran is preparing to attack Israel from Iraqi territory in the coming days, possibly before the US presidential election.”

    Wiki Commons

    This would involve large numbers of drones and ballistic missiles, they say. Throughout the Gaza war, there have been sporadic drones launched by Iran-backed paramilitary units in Iraq, but nothing on a major scale.

    Israeli sources on Thursday have suggested Iran is actually moving ballistic missiles to prepare for such an attack.

    Also, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Hossein Salami has been cited as saying that Iran’s response will be “different from any scenario” Israel might expect.

    CNN too has been reporting the fresh threats, on Wednesday writing the following based on Iranian military sources:

    Israel’s recent attacks on Iran will be met with a “definitive and painful” response that will likely come before the US presidential vote, a high-ranking source told CNN on Wednesday.

    The remarks signal a departure from Iran’s initial attempts to downplay the severity of the strikes carried out by Israel on October 25, which marked the first time Israel has openly acknowledged striking Iranian targets.

    “The response of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the aggression of the Zionist regime will be definitive and painful,” the source, who is familiar with Iran’s deliberations, said.

    Although the source did not provide an exact date for the attack, they said it “will probably take place before the day of the US presidential election.”

    Meanwhile, the Iraqi government is seething over Israeli warplanes violating its airspace during last weekend’s attack. It has lodged an official protest note with the United Nations about the illegal breach.

    It appears the some one hundred Israeli jets reportedly used in the attack fired on Iran from over neighboring Iraqi airspace. Such a tactic has long been utilized by the Israeli Air Force in attacking Syria, as it typically fires from over undefended Lebanese airspace.

    Currently US and Israeli negotiators say they are getting close to achieving a ceasefire with Hezbollah, but any new large-scale attack from the ‘Iranian axis’ would surely jeopardize such a potential deal.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 17:45

  • Make Election Day A Federal Holiday, Require In-Person Voting
    Make Election Day A Federal Holiday, Require In-Person Voting

    Authored by Ethan Watson via RealClearPolitics,

    Our calendars are full of useless holidays. Just last week, we saw Credit Union Day, Mashed Potato Day, and Raw Milk Cheese Appreciation Day. While observances like these are otherwise irrelevant at the national level, there is one day of the year that has long lacked federal “holiday” status: Election Day.

    Unlike offhanded observances such as Earth Day, on which life goes on as usual, Election Day ought to be an official federal holiday like Presidents’ Day or Thanksgiving, with all non-essential workers receiving a paid day off to carry out their civic duty. Establishing this yearly event as a federal holiday would increase voter turnout, restore faith in our elections, and, most importantly, boost morale through a shared civic display.

    Designating Election Day as a national holiday and giving workers the day off would largely mitigate the need for accommodations like mail-in voting and early voting, allowing policymakers to require in-person voting except in special circumstances. This would also make possible a mass return to paper ballots, eliminating the need for voting machines which have been swamped in scandal since 2020.

    Some say mail-in voting is ripe for manipulation; others contend voting machines are prone to hacks and glitches. While it’s difficult to quantify how much voting machines or absentee ballots have increased the risk of election-rigging, if at all, it’s clear that a significant number of Americans have lost faith in our elections – just as they’ve lost faith in our media, our government, and their friends and neighbors.

    In a world where most Americans have the day off work and vote in person, on a paper ballot, many common doubts about our election system become moot. Of course, exceptions will apply for essential workers or citizens temporarily living in a different state, but the vast majority of Americans would have to physically go to a polling place on Election Day and vote. Volunteers would then count the paper ballots onsite, significantly reducing doubts about voting machine integrity or ballots lost in the mail.

    Prominent right-wingers like Vivek Ramaswamy have actually promoted this plan over the course of the 2024 election, citing election integrity concerns. Yet, making Election Day a federal holiday would go far beyond healing the election-denial wound – it would generate patriotism with a new shared tradition.

    Civic virtue is a good thing, and public reminders of it are even better. To appreciate our democracy and commit ourselves to maintaining it, we need a public reminder that tyranny, not democracy, has been the norm throughout human history. The United States is exceptional because we establish power not through strength, but by consensus.

    As humans, we need physical reminders to keep us mindful of such abstract truths. That’s why we build churches, write great works of literature, and even get tattoos. If the principles we hold dear aren’t manifested in anything, we lose them.

    A mass migration of Americans to the polls every year would become a powerful symbol of our democracy’s resilience, a shining example to the world that our grand experiment worked. Moreover, a whole day for voting could inspire people to participate in state and local elections – affairs that have an even greater impact on their daily lives than national elections.

    People would look forward to voting. It would become a celebrated ritual in a public life otherwise devoid of shared traditions. One could imagine pre-voting brunches and post-voting barbecues. Families could go to the polls in the morning and spend the rest of the day enjoying their freedom and leisure together. Children would grow up looking forward to participating in their citizenship, just like we look forward to Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the first day of summer vacation.

    These days, Americans can’t even agree on whether the Fourth of July is a day worth celebrating (spoiler alert, it is). But without a shared culture, we cannot have a nation. It’s time to start rebuilding that shared culture with a national day that puts our exceptional founding ideals to work.

    Ethan Watson is a Young Voices contributor working towards a Master of Accounting degree at the University of Kansas. He holds dual undergraduate degrees in Accounting and Political Science with an eye toward law school in the near future. Follow him on X: @erwatson13.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 17:25

  • Apple Slides After Guiding Below Consensus, Missing On Wearables, China And Service Revenues
    Apple Slides After Guiding Below Consensus, Missing On Wearables, China And Service Revenues

    Update (530pm ET): AAPL is sliding to session lows after hours after revealing some very lukewarm guidance on the call, saying it now expects Q1 revenue to grow in the low to mid-single digits YoY (assume 4-6%). The sellside consensus is at 7%.

    As Bloomberg notes, “low to mid single digits” growth means a slowdown for Apple, which just reported a 6% sales rise. So it’s understandable why shares moved south after that pronouncement. They’re now down about 2% in extended trading.

    So much for the AI revolution sparking  a new iPhone supercycle (which would lead to double digit revenue growth).

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    Ahead of earnings, UBS had Apple sentiment at a relatively subdued 6/10. That’s because despite AI enthusiasm following Apple’s WWDC event over the summer, UBS analyst David Vogt’s checks and other ancedotal evidence indicated iPhone unit sell-through in the Sept quarter was effectively flattish year over year at around 46 mn versus global sell-through up 2% y/y. Vogt previewed, anticipating September Quarter results largely in line with his forecast of $94 bn/$158 bn with a chance for upside driven by iPad and flattish iPhone units of 46 mn versus sell-through up 2% y/y. Factoring in 5 mn iPhone channel fill, David forecasts 51 mn iPhone units and iPhone revenue of $45.7 bn and expectations of 4-5 mn beat (following a report from IDC suggesting 56 mn units in Q3) with balanced December Quarter commentary. David anticipates only a modest tailwind from AI in the Dec Quarter and forecasts 78 mn iPhone units and remains at neutral and a $236 price target.

    Furthermore, despite multiple observations that AI is not boosting iPhone sales (see “Apple Intelligence is here. Early users are underwhelmed”), investors continue to give Apple the benefit of the doubt of a successful iPhone 16 launch, which thus far is not overly supportive based on checks/sell-through. Many appear to be holding out for further confirmation until the rollout of Apple Intelligence but David anticipates balanced commentary regarding December Quarter iPhone demand. Valuation is a common pushback, but absent a significant iPhone miss UBS is not sure the Q3 results will be much of a catalyst either way for the stock. In terms of flows, more long only demand/buyers for the most part.

    So with all that in mind, here is what AAPL just reported for the quarter ended Sept 30:

    • Adjusted EPS 1.64 c vs. $1.46 y/y, beating estimates of 1.58
    • Revenue $94.93 billion, +6.1% y/y, beating estimates of $94.36 billion
      • Products revenue $69.96 billion, +4.1% y/y, beating estimates $69.15 billion
        • IPhone revenue $46.22 billion, +5.5% y/y, beating estimates  $45.04 billion, and an all time record for the company’s fiscal Q4.
        • Mac revenue $7.74 billion, +1.7% y/y, in line with estimates $7.74 billion
        • IPad revenue $6.95 billion, +7.9% y/y, missing estimates $7.07 billion
        • Wearables, home and accessories $9.04 billion, -3% y/y, missing estimate $9.17 billion
      • Service revenue $24.97 billion, +12% y/y, missing estimate $25.27 billion

    The one – very big – fly in the ointment was the usual suspect: China, where revenues unexpectedly dropped again, down 0.3% YoY:

    • Greater China rev. $15.03 billion, -0.3% y/y, missing estimate $15.8 billion

    Going down the line”

    • Total operating expenses $14.29 billion, +6.2% y/y, below estimates $14.35 billion
    • Cost of sales $51.05 billion, +4% y/y, above estimates $50.81 billion
    • Gross margin $43.88 billion, +8.5% y/y, above estimate $43.46 billion
    • Cash and cash equivalents $29.94 billion vs. $29.97 billion y/y, above estimate $26.04 billion

    And so on:

    Looking at a breakdown of sales by product category we find that revenue from the iPhone came in higher than expected, lifting overall revenue. It came in at $46.2 billion, beating estimates of $45 billion and growing over $1 billion year-over-year. Yet while Apple’s marketing engine around Apple Intelligence worked, the number came in somewhat shy of the more optimistic forecasts.

    The rest of the product suite was mixed with Mac revenue coming in line with est at $7.74bn, while both iPads and wearables missed expectations ($6.95BN vs exp. $7.07BN, and $9.04BN, vs exp. $9.17BN).

    • Macs came in with an about $100 million annual revenue increase, meeting Wall Street estimates of $7.7 billion. New Macs released this week should help that product segment in the current quarter. 
    • The iPad was a surprising miss, coming in just shy of $7 billion despite the release of the new iPad Pro and iPad Air models earlier this year. A new iPad mini released this month is unlikely to help materially.
    • Wearables, Home and Accessories was another disappointment, declining considerably and missing Wall Street expectations. There simply is not a lot of excitement in Apple’s wearables segment right now — and the new AirPods are now an early-adopter product that aren’t likely to generate much momentum in the fourth quarter.
    • The other concerning part about Wearables, Home and Accessories is that revenue continues to fall despite Apple launching a $3,500 device that is its first major new product category in a decade as part of the segment this year.

    As Bloomberg notes, the iPad and Wearables numbers “are pretty concerning” and it feels like the overall wearables segment for Apple is tapering –– but it’s worth noting two of the bigger drivers there (the Apple Watch Ultra and AirPods Pro) haven’t seen meaningful updates in two years.

    To be sure, it wasn’t all bad news: the fact that sales of iPhone — despite looking the same for half a decade and including little to no compelling upgrades over the prior few models — increased is a testament to Apple’s marketing might and brand strength. There are no signs of the iconic product slowing down.

    But, at some point, Apple is going to need to inject some innovative — not iterative — changes in order to once again stand out from the crowd. Apple is extraordinarily lucky that its competitors in the consumer electronics space are doing absolutely nothing to take advantage of the opportunity in front of them to outpace Apple.

    There was another disappointment: contrary to expectations for a modest rebound, China sales declined for a fifth consecutive quarter, down 0.3%, and printing at $15.03BN, below the $15.8BN estimate. The rest of the world saw growth, modest in the Americas at 3.9%, and stronger in Europe and APAC, both double digits.

    As Bloomberg notes, Greater China continues to be a weak spot for Apple and the company hasn’t done much to push new products, pricing and initiatives in that market — or other emerging areas — to offset the issues.

    The weakness there, which Apple will try to explain away in its conference call, is because of a combination of nationalism and interest in local products, whose designs are getting better. The local players are also trying new things like foldables while Apple continues to use the same design it rolled out five years ago.

    Still, while revenues have declined for 5 quarter, the modest upward movement in YoY sales is encouraging.

    Once again, Apple reached a new record in terms of its installed base of devices around the world. Yet with iPhone revenue ahead but China revenue missing, there’s a question: Did iPhone grow in China?

    And while we wait for the answer, there was more disappointment for AAPL because after wearables and China missed, so did Service revenue, which at $24.97BN, up 12%, came light of estimates $25.27BN.

    While services revenue was at an all-time record, the softness could become even softer in the future if governments continue to get their way and make Apple open up its App Store to alternative distribution and payment methods.

    Commenting on the quarter, CFO Luca Maestri said that “our record business performance during the September quarter drove nearly $27 billion in operating cash flow, allowing us to return over $29 billion to our shareholders. We are very pleased that our active installed base of devices reached a new all-time high across all products and all geographic segments, thanks to our high levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty.”

    Well at least the company is buying back stock hand over fist (it repurchased $25BN in the quarter), because shareholders are increasingly leery to do so. And speaking of blemishes, it is also worth noting that the dollar value for inventories in the quarter was around $900 million higher than the same period a year ago. Suppliers are a part of that: remember, Apple doesn’t make its own phones!

    Putting it together, these mixed results will affirm concerns among investors that Apple is losing its shine considerably in China while continuing to flood the market with products that consumers simply don’t find appealing, as well as devices that are only iterative tweaks from prior versions. And so far, nothing Apple has shown in terms of its AI technology has the look of a company that is set to own a core piece of that industry moving forward.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 17:16

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Oct 31

Today’s News 31st October 2024

  • The Politics Of Fear: Laying The Groundwork For Fascism, American-Style
    The Politics Of Fear: Laying The Groundwork For Fascism, American-Style

    Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.”

    – Edward R. Murrow, broadcast journalist

    America is in the midst of an epidemic of historic proportions.

    The contagion being spread like wildfire is turning communities into battlegrounds and setting Americans one against the other.

    Normally mild-mannered individuals caught up in the throes of this disease have been transformed into belligerent zealots, while others inclined to pacifism have taken to stockpiling weapons and practicing defensive drills.

    This plague on our nation—one that has been spreading like wildfire—is a potent mix of fear coupled with unhealthy doses of paranoia and intolerance, tragic hallmarks of the post-9/11 America in which we live.

    Everywhere you turn, those on both the left- and right-wing are fomenting distrust and division. You can’t escape it.

    We’re being fed a constant diet of fear: fear of terrorists, fear of illegal immigrants, fear of people who are too religious, fear of people who are not religious enough, fear of extremists, fear of conformists, fear of the government, fear of those who fear the government, fear of those on the Right, fear of those on the Left… The list goes on and on.

    The strategy is simple yet effective: the best way to control a populace is through fear and discord.

    Fear makes people stupid.

    Confound them, distract them with mindless news chatter and entertainment, pit them against one another by turning minor disagreements into major skirmishes, and tie them up in knots over matters lacking in national significance.

    Most importantly, divide the people into factions, persuade them to see each other as the enemy and keep them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.

    This is how free people enslave themselves and allow tyrants to prevail. 

    This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. Instead, fueled with fear and loathing for phantom opponents, they agree to pour millions of dollars and resources into political elections, militarized police, spy technology and endless wars, hoping for a guarantee of safety that never comes.

    All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward, and “we the suckers” get saddled with the tax bills and subjected to pat downs, police raids and round-the-clock surveillance.

    Turn on the TV or flip open the newspaper on any given day, and you will find yourself accosted by reports of government corruption, corporate malfeasance, militarized police and marauding SWAT teams.

    America has already entered a new phase, one in which children are arrested in schools, military veterans are forcibly detained by government agents because of their so-called “anti-government” views, and law-abiding Americans are having their movements tracked, their financial transactions documented, and their communications monitored.

    These threats are not to be underestimated.

    Yet even more dangerous than these violations of our basic rights is the language in which they are couched: the language of fear. It is a language spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure.

    This language of fear has given rise to a politics of fear whose only aim is to distract and divide us. In this way, we have been discouraged from thinking analytically and believing that we have any part to play in solving the problems before us. Instead, we have been conditioned to point the finger at the other Person or vote for this Politician or support this Group, because they are the ones who will fix it. Except that they can’t and won’t fix the problems plaguing our communities.

    Nevertheless, fear remains the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government.

    The government’s overblown, extended wars on terrorism, drugs, violence, disease, illegal immigration, and so-called domestic extremism have been convenient ruses used to terrorize the populace into relinquishing more of their freedoms in exchange for elusive promises of security.

    An atmosphere of fear permeates modern America. However, with crime at an all-time low, is such fear rational?

    Statistics show that you are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack. You are 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane. You are 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack. You are 404 times more likely to die in a fall than from a terrorist attack. You are 12 times more likely to die from accidental suffocating in bed than from a terrorist attack. And you are 9 more times likely to choke to death in your own vomit than die in a terrorist attack.

    Indeed, those living in the American police state are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist. Thus, the government’s endless jabbering about terrorism amounts to little more than propaganda—the propaganda of fear—a tactic used to terrorize, cower and control the population.

    In turn, the government’s stranglehold on power and extreme paranoia about the citizenry as potential threats has resulted in a populace that is increasingly viewed as the government’s enemies.

    Why else would the government feel the need to monitor our communications, track our movements, criminalize our every action, treat us like suspects, and strip us of any means of defense while equipping its own personnel with an amazing arsenal of weapons?

    So far, these tactics—terrorizing the citizenry over the government’s paranoia and overblown fears while treating them like criminals—are working to transform the way “we the people” view ourselves and our role in this nation.

    Indeed, fear and paranoia have become hallmarks of the modern American experience, impacting how we as a nation view the world around us, how we as citizens view each other, and most of all how our government views us.

    The American people have been reduced to what commentator Dan Sanchez refers to as “herd-minded hundreds of millions [who] will stampede to the State for security, bleating to please, please be shorn of their remaining liberties.”

    Sanchez continues:

    I am not terrified of the terrorists; i.e., I am not, myself, terrorized. Rather, I am terrified of the terrorized; terrified of the bovine masses who are so easily manipulated by terrorists, governments, and the terror-amplifying media into allowing our country to slip toward totalitarianism and total war…

    I do not irrationally and disproportionately fear Muslim bomb-wielding jihadists or white, gun-toting nutcases. But I rationally and proportionately fear those who do, and the regimes such terror empowers. History demonstrates that governments are capable of mass murder and enslavement far beyond what rogue militants can muster. Industrial-scale terrorists are the ones who wear ties, chevrons, and badges. But such terrorists are a powerless few without the supine acquiescence of the terrorized many. There is nothing to fear but the fearful themselves…

    Stop swallowing the overblown scaremongering of the government and its corporate media cronies. Stop letting them use hysteria over small menaces to drive you into the arms of tyranny, which is the greatest menace of all.

    As history makes clear, fear and government paranoia lead to fascist, totalitarian regimes.

    It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. Fear prevents us from thinking. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.

    A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled.

    The following, derived by from John T. Flynn’s 1944 treatise on fascism As We Go Marching are a few of the necessary ingredients for a fascist state:

    • The government is managed by a powerful leader (even if he or she assumes office by way of the electoral process). This is the fascistic leadership principle (or father figure).

    • The government assumes it is not restrained in its power. This is authoritarianism, which eventually evolves into totalitarianism.

    • The government ostensibly operates under a capitalist system while being undergirded by an immense bureaucracy.

    • The government through its politicians emits powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.

    • The government has an obsession with national security while constantly invoking terrifying internal and external enemies.

    • The government establishes a domestic and invasive surveillance system and develops a paramilitary force that is not answerable to the citizenry.

    • The government and its various agencies (federal, state, and local) develop an obsession with crime and punishment. This is overcriminalization.

    • The government becomes increasingly centralized while aligning closely with corporate powers to control all aspects of the country’s social, economic, military, and governmental structures.

    • The government uses militarism as a center point of its economic and taxing structure.

    • The government is increasingly imperialistic in order to maintain the military-industrial corporate forces.

    The parallels to modern America are impossible to ignore.

    “Every industry is regulated. Every profession is classified and organized. Every good or service is taxed. Endless debt accumulation is preserved. Immense doesn’t begin to describe the bureaucracy. Military preparedness never stops, and war with some evil foreign foe, remains a daily prospect,” writes economist Jeffrey Tucker.

    “It’s incorrect to call fascism either right wing or left wing. It is both and neither… fascism does not seek to overthrow institutions like commercial establishments, family, religious centers, and civic traditions. It seeks to control them… it preserves most of what people hold dear but promises to improve economic, social, and cultural life through unifying their operations under government control.”

    For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary. In times of “crisis,” expediency is upheld as the central principle—that is, in order to keep us safe and secure, the government must militarize the police, strip us of basic constitutional rights and criminalize virtually every form of behavior.

    We are at a critical crossroads in American history.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, fear has been a critical tool in past fascistic regimes, and it has become the driving force behind the American police state.

    All of which begs the question what we will give up in order to perpetuate the illusions of safety and security.

    As we once again find ourselves faced with the prospect of voting for the lesser of two evils, “we the people” have a decision to make: do we simply participate in the collapse of the American republic as it degenerates toward a totalitarian regime, or do we take a stand and reject the pathetic excuse for government that is being fobbed off on us?

    There is no easy answer, but one thing is true: the lesser of two evils is still evil.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/30/2024 – 23:50

  • Did Boston Dynamics Get Jealous After Spotlight On Tesla's Optimus Robot?
    Did Boston Dynamics Get Jealous After Spotlight On Tesla’s Optimus Robot?

    Less than a day after Tesla CEO Elon Musk made bold claims at the Future Investment Initiative Conference in Saudi Arabia, touting big AI growth in the coming years, which is only suggestive of powerful tailwinds for his Optimus robot, Boston Dynamics—once the leader in viral humanoid robot videos—published a clip on YouTube on Wednesday morning showcasing its robot performing typical warehouse tasks usually carried out by workers in Amazon distribution centers.

    Maybe a bit of jealousy is unfolding between Boston Dynamics and Musk’s Optimus robot, which has received a lot of attention in October – from the “We, Robot“ event on October 10 to Musk’s comment at the event in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday:

    “I think by 2040, probably there are more humanoid robots than there are people. Every country will have an AI or multiple AIs, and there will be a lot of robots, way more robots than people.”

    Back to the We, Robot event, where Musk said Optimus will cost less than $30,000 and forecasted that the humanoid robot will be the company’s most popular product in the years ahead… 

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

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

    Maybe all this attention on Optimus provoked Boston Dynamics to release a video of its bipedal humanoid robot, Atlas.  

    Here’s more from Boston Dynamics:

    Atlas is autonomously moving engine covers between supplier containers and a mobile sequencing dolly. The robot receives as input a list of bin locations to move parts between.

    Atlas uses a machine learning (ML) vision model to detect and localize the environment fixtures and individual bins [0:36]. The robot uses a specialized grasping policy and continuously estimates the state of manipulated objects to achieve the task.

    There are no prescribed or teleoperated movements; all motions are generated autonomously online. The robot is able to detect and react to changes in the environment (e.g., moving fixtures) and action failures (e.g., failure to insert the cover, tripping, environment collisions [1:24]) using a combination of vision, force, and proprioceptive sensors.

    Suppose robots and AI are forecasted to lead to millions of job losses in the years ahead. Then why did Democrats facilitate the greatest migrant invasion this nation has ever seen with low-skilled, unvetted illegal aliens when many of those jobs are likely to be automated away? Ah, yes, it’s all about the votes.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/30/2024 – 23:25

  • The Spinal Tap Election: Everything Is Turned Up To 11
    The Spinal Tap Election: Everything Is Turned Up To 11

    Authored by Charles Lipson via RealClearPolitics,

    To hear the candidates and their surrogates tell it, we live in Weimar Germany 1932. There are only fascists fighting communists, with nobody in the middle. The candidates have eagerly pinned those noxious labels on their opponents.

    MSNBC, which competes with ABC and CBS for dreadful news judgment, drove home that point with its coverage of Trump’s closing rally at Madison Square Garden. Amid clips of the Trump event, they spliced clips of Nazi rallies. Subtlety be damned.

    A better analogy than Weimar is “Spinal Tap,” the mockumentary about a hapless heavy metal band. In one scene, the band’s guitarist, Nigel Tufnel, explains why his amplifiers are louder than everyone else’s. Their amplifier dials only go up to 10. His go up to 11.

    Tufnel: It’s one louder, isn’t it? … What we do is if we need that extra … push over the cliff … you know what we do?

    Interviewer Marty DeBergi: Put it up to eleven.

    Tufnel:  Eleven. Exactly. One louder.

    That is American politics today. One louder. But with everyone louder – and angrier – no one can hear each other.

    With the amps at 11 and the country ideologically polarized, we are pushing America toward the cliff. Both parties think that’s the other’s fault.

    These intense passions won’t end when the ballots are counted, especially if the results are close. In 2020, Trump impugned the results and the winner’s legitimacy. In 2016, after Hillary Clinton lost, she repeatedly denounced Trump as an illegitimate president. That rhetoric mobilizes the most extreme followers. It’s kindling wood for violence, exactly what a constitutional democracy should avoid with the peaceful transfer of power.

    This turbulence has two sources. One is short-term, a cynical tactic to increase partisan turnout. Get them to the polls by playing on their fears. The other is long-term. Both sides are genuinely scared about what the other side will do if they win. Those two sources, long-term and short-term, reinforce each other.

    They push us toward the cliff. Before plunging over, it’s time for sensible people to take a deep breath and assess the real differences, not the hype, and consider how to cope with the dangers.

    The most fundamental point is this: America’s best protection against extreme dangers are robust constitutional institutions, combined with impartial law enforcement.

    What are these vital institutional protections?

    • Separation of powers
    • Respect for the rule of law
    • Impartial enforcement of our laws
    • Protection for the minority party’s rights, ensured by the Senate filibuster
    • Limits on presidential fiat, not governance by constant Executive Orders
    • Requirements that major rules proposed by administrative agencies receive clear approval from elected representatives before they can be implemented
    • Restraint and effective oversight on the enormous, secretive power of the FBI, Department of Justice, and intelligence agencies, whose actions must be kept within constitutional bounds and never used for domestic political gain or political blackmail

    These institutional protections are the load-bearing walls of constitutional democracy. All of them have been under enormous strain, mostly by partisans who care far more about achieving their preferred outcomes than about preserving constitutional methods for achieving them. Indeed, they would readily change those methods, such as packing the Supreme Court, to achieve their goals.

    The dangers have grown because the policy differences between the two parties today are deep and fundamental. These are not the differences between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, or between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. They are deeper, angrier, and laden with almost-religious fervor. Apostates are excommunicated.

    These opposing views are amplified in today’s media landscape, which is characterized by separate silos for separate audiences. People tune in to see their views confirmed and others’ denigrated.

    Amid these changes, the base constituencies of both parties have moved away from the center, away from the possibilities of compromise.

    These cleavages are prominent in issues freighted with social and cultural meaning. That’s certainly true for disputes surrounding abortion and transgender rights. Both issues have practical consequences, but the disputes go further. They are fights over cultural symbols that matter to many people who have no direct, personal stake in reproductive rights or gender changes.

    For many women, abortion is a hard-won right and they believe that they alone should decide whether to keep their pregnancy or terminate it. Achieving that right (codified in the 1973 Roe v .Wade decision) was the most important feminist victory since the advent of voting rights for women. Their political opponents say pregnant women should not have unfettered discretion to deal with pregnancy since it involves another, innocent life. The debate over women’s rights, human autonomy, and the protection of innocents is suffused with both practical consequences and symbolic weight.

    The same is true for transgender rights. The right of adults to choose their gender is now widely accepted, a major change from 20 or 30 years ago. The battles now are whether children should be subject to irreversible changes, who should make those decisions, whether transgender women (born men) should compete against biological women and girls in sports, whether biological and transgender girls should use the same bathrooms and locker rooms, and whether taxpayers should pay for gender-changing operations on prison inmates and illegal aliens. The numbers involved in these issues are relatively small, but their symbolic weight is large. Opposing sides face each other across a cultural chasm, drenched with contempt for the opposition.

    These differences are playing out against a disorienting background condition, which is often ignored when we discuss politics and culture. The basic structure of modern economies is changing rapidly. The last such disorienting economic change was the Great Depression and, before that, the Second Industrial Revolution in the 1890s (the advent of big steel, oil, chemicals, and large corporations to manage them). Both the 1890s and 1930s produced long-lasting shifts in voters’ political alignments.

    We are seeing another great realignment now, driven (on the economic side) by rapid innovation in computer technology, artificial intelligence, and robotics. When those are combined with low-cost transportation, virtually free communication, and trade rules that encourage globalization, the result is social dislocation and disorientation. There is a palpable threat to employment in American manufacturing and, increasingly, in service industries.

    Both political parties have responded by supporting trade protection, with Trump taking the lead. Doing so has helped him forge a populist Republican Party, centered on the working-class.

    Amid these vast changes and bitter ideological differences, it is hardly surprising to see our political discourse becoming more virulent, depicting the opposition as “enemies,” as Trump has done for some elected representatives (and not just violent extremists).

    The only way to contain those differences peacefully is to channel them through established democratic institutions, using well-established procedures. That’s the only hope the losing side will accept the results as legitimate.

    To propose major changes to those institutions risks further undermining their already-wobbly legitimacy. To impose those changes for immediate political victories, to impose them with support from only one party, is worse than foolhardy. It’s dangerous. It would keep the amplifiers pinned on 11 while we scream at each other across the deafening noise.

    Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago. His latest book is Free Speech 101: A Practical Guide for Students. He can be reached at charles.lipson@gmail.com.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/30/2024 – 23:00

  • Trick-Or-Treat Around The World
    Trick-Or-Treat Around The World

    Trick-or-treating has been associated with Halloween celebrations in the U.S. and Canada since the early 1900s, but, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz shows below, traditions of children going door to door in a quest for treats exist in many parts of the world, with one European custom being widely recognized as the precursor of the North American tradition.

    Infographic: Trick-or-Treat Around the World | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    As far back as the Middle Ages, people in the British Isles dressed up for holidays and went from door to door performing scenes in order to receive a thank-you in the form of food and drink.

    The tradition is preserved today in Scotland and Ireland under the name guising and features dressed-up children rather than theater displays.

    The origin of Halloween, celebrated on October 31, also goes back to Celtic traditions, more specifically the Samhain festival, which marked the beginning of winter and a time when fairies and spirits needed to be appeased. 

    Like many Christian holidays, All Saints’ Day (November 1) and its eve, All Hallows’ Day, coincide with the pagan festival and trick-or-treating is done in Portugal on the first day of November.

    All Saints’ Day also has a big significance in Mexico (celebrated as Day of the Dead there) but U.S. Halloween traditions have also been adopted, most heavily in the Northern and Central parts of the country, where the custom is named calaverita (litte skull) after the sugar skulls which are gifted for the festival.

    But scary dress and trick-or-treating antics are not tied to a single date: Scandinavian children engage in them around Easter, while those in Northern Germany and Southern Denmark pick New Year’s Eve. In Southern Germany, Austria Switzerland, the Netherlands and Flanders in Belgium, treats are given out not for threats, but for songs, which children perform on November 11 (St. Martin’s Day). Caroling for sweets is also performed during Ramadan in Central Asia. This is where trick-or-treating blends into Christmas caroling, which is sometimes also rewarded with food offerings, for example in Eastern Europe.

    The practice is associated most closely with England and the United States, but involves adults as well as children and more commonly the collection of money, for example for charity.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/30/2024 – 22:35

  • US Coast Guard To Expand Presence, Cooperation In Indo-Pacific Amid China Concerns
    US Coast Guard To Expand Presence, Cooperation In Indo-Pacific Amid China Concerns

    Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    The U.S. Coast Guard said that it intends to send specialized forces, training teams, and other capacity-building assets to help Indo-Pacific allies bolster their ability to safeguard exclusive economic zones and protect their natural resources from exploitation, according to the Coast Guard 2024 operational posture report released on Oct. 25.

    Crew members look out from a U.S. Coast Guard cutter before the start of a rescue exercise, on Dec. 6, 2000. Peter Parks/AFP via Getty Images

    The report states that the region remains “a top regional priority” for the United States, citing its geostrategic importance, vital role in global trade, and the need to ensure “a free, open, and rules-based maritime order.”

    “We are expanding our presence and cooperation in Southeast and South Asia, with a focus on advising, training, deployment, and capacity building,” the Coast Guard stated while also pledging to continue to support its allies’ efforts in combating “predatorial fishing practices.”

    The report comes amid growing concerns over China’s military assertiveness in the region but did not mention the Chinese communist regime by name. It stated that the United States aims to boost the capacity of regional coast guards to support them in countering “malign influence,” enforcing their laws and addressing their priority interests such as climate change.

    According to the report, the Coast Guard will deploy its National Security cutters—the centerpiece of its fleet—to the Western Pacific and move the 270-foot Harriet Lane cutter to the Indo-Pacific. The Coast Guard said it will also maintain operations of fast response cutters and buoy tenders in Oceania.

    During an Oct. 18 press conference, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin warned that China’s “increasingly coercive” behavior in the Indo-Pacific could have implications for the whole world and that cooperation with Indo-Pacific allies has become vital.

    “We’re also troubled by the growing alignment between Russia and the People’s Republic of China [PRC], including the PRC’s support for [Russian President Vladimir Putin’s] indefensible war of choice against Ukraine, and that makes our close cooperation with our Indo-Pacific friends more vital than ever,” he stated.

    The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been criticized for its increasingly aggressive actions against its neighboring countries, particularly Taiwan, the Philippines, and Japan.

    Last month, China conducted joint military drills with Russian naval and air forces in the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Okhotsk, north of Japan’s Hokkaido Island, aiming to boost their strategic military cooperation and enhance “the ability to jointly respond to security threats.”

    Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense has reported a surge in Chinese military activity around the island in recent months. On Oct. 27, the ministry said it had detected 22 Chinese military aircraft and seven vessels near the island’s vicinity, with 17 of the aircraft spotted crossing the median line of the Taiwan Strait.

    On Oct. 10, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. criticized Chinese coast guards for blasting horns, firing water cannons, and ramming Philippine maritime boats during three separate clashes near the disputed Sabina Shoal, also known as Xianbin in Beijing and Escoda in Manila.

    The United States announced last week $8 million in new funding to modernize the Philippines Coast Guard (PCG), following the U.S.-Philippines maritime dialogue held in Manila on Oct. 24.

    The funding will be used to support the PCG’s infrastructure enhancement, training program development, and resource acquisition and management planning, according to an Oct.28 statement by the U.S. Embassy in Manila.

    During the meeting, delegates from the two countries reviewed ongoing cooperative efforts and discussed ways to address maritime concerns in the disputed South China Sea.

    Both sides underscored the importance of upholding the 2016 arbitral award on the South China Sea, which ruled in favor of the Philippines in its legal action against China and declared that Beijing’s sovereignty claims had no legal basis. The CCP has refused to accept or recognize the ruling.

    Beijing has asserted territorial claims over nearly the entire South China Sea, including reefs and islands that overlap with the exclusive economic zones of Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, Taiwan, and the Philippines.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/30/2024 – 22:10

  • Nosy NYTimes Journos Uncover Elon Musk's Secret Luxury Compound In Austin  
    Nosy NYTimes Journos Uncover Elon Musk’s Secret Luxury Compound In Austin  

    The world’s richest man and Donald Trump’s most prominent supporter has reportedly acquired two mansions in Austin, Texas, within walking distance of each other, paying upwards of $35 million for the villas to support his growing family (of which there are at least 11).  

    Nosy New York Times journalists, citing sources and public records … 

    … were the first to report that Musk acquired two mansions in Austin, all within walking distance of each, for $35 million. They said one of the mansions was a 14,400-square-foot mansion resembling a Tuscan home. The other home was directly behind it. 

    Sources told the NYTimes there was a third mansion about a 10-minute walk away—this is the home Musk usually stays at while in Austin. 

    NYT journos wrote:

    Three mansions, three mothers, 11 children and one secretive, multibillionaire father who obsesses about declining birthrates when he isn’t overseeing one of his six companies: It is an unconventional family situation, and one that Mr. Musk seems to want to make even bigger. 

    Musk moved to Austin after dumping his California mansions and shifted his companies, SpaceX, Tesla, and the Boring Company, to Texas. This decision was primarily because Governor Gavin Newsom and far-left Democrats ruined California with backfiring progressive policies that sparked a tidal wave of violent crime. Plus, business conditions in the state are atrocious compared with Texas. 

    In Musk’s mind, imploding global fertility rates are the biggest crisis of our lifetime: “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces, by far.” 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/30/2024 – 21:45

  • Election Lawsuits Heat Up
    Election Lawsuits Heat Up

    Authored by The Epoch Times Staff,

    As election day approaches, courts have been making a series of decisions that bear on how Americans’ votes get counted in the 2024 election cycle.

    Virginia, a critical swing state, sought the Supreme Court’s intervention yesterday – just eight days before Election Day – after two lower courts blocked its effort to purge non-citizens from its voter rolls. The Justice Department (DOJ) had sued the commonwealth and won an injunction over its purported violation of the National Voter Registration Act’s prohibition on systematic attempts to clean up voter rolls 90 days before an election. [ZH: The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the commonwealth, allowing the removal of non-citizens).

    The U.S. Supreme Court in Washington on July 30, 2024. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

    DOJ filed a similar lawsuit in Alabama, which resulted in a separate injunction by a federal judge. The same law was part of the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) challenge to Michigan’s alleged failure to maintain its voter roles, but a federal judge dismissed the party’s lawsuit on Oct. 22.

    Mail-in ballots have been a controversial issue, especially after their widespread use during the 2020 presidential election, with questions surrounding their reliability. Two ballot boxes were reportedly burned on Oct. 28 in Washington and Oregon. 

    Two rulings on mail-in ballots have come from the Nevada Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in the weeks leading up to the election. The first held on Oct. 28 that late-arriving ballots could be counted up to three days after the election, while the other held on Oct. 25 that the Constitution required ballots be counted on election day.

    The RNC, which sought stricter limits on counting in Mississippi and Nevada, recently told The Epoch Times it was involved with more than 130 lawsuits across 26 states this election cycle. 

    The party also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to halt a ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which voted 5-4 to allow provisional ballots from individuals who improperly cast mail-in ballots.

    Elon Musk, who endorsed former President Donald Trump, came under fire in Philadelphia, where the city’s district attorney sued to halt what he described as an “illegal lottery” promoted by the billionaire. Musk’s America PAC is giving away $1 million every day to a person who has signed a petition supporting the Constitution.

    Other lawsuits have been filed over policies surrounding results certification, overseas voters, voting by convicted felons, mail-in ballots, and voter rolls. Georgia, another potential swing state, attempted to install seven new rules before the election, but each was struck down by a superior court judge earlier this month.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/30/2024 – 21:20

  • Zelensky Fumes Over White House Leak Of Secret Missile Plan To NY Times
    Zelensky Fumes Over White House Leak Of Secret Missile Plan To NY Times

    Despite all the recent billions in US taxpayer monies recently sunk into Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky is fuming after key controversial aspects to his ‘victory plan’ pitched to Biden administration officials were leaked to The New York Times.

    The following is the leaked content made public for the first time in the Tuesday NY Times piece:

    In one part not made public, Mr. Zelensky proposed a “nonnuclear deterrence package” in which Ukraine would get Tomahawk missiles, a totally unfeasible request, a senior U.S. official said. A Tomahawk has a range of 1,500 miles, more than seven times the range of the long-range missile systems called ATACMS that Ukraine got this year. And the United States sent only a limited number of those, senior U.S. officials said.

    On the whole, the NYT report comes off scathing and negative toward Zelensky, calling his recent tour to lobby Washington and the West in favor of his victory plan a failure. But then it comments that the plan was likely set up to fail.

    Via AFP

    The Times piece strongly suggests the whole thing is a political charade to begin with, and that Zelensky set up the ‘victory plan’ for failure in order to lay ultimate blame on the West for ‘lack of support’ when it inevitably rejects it:

    But the real audience for the plan might be at home, some military analysts and diplomats say. Mr. Zelensky can use his hard sell — including a recent address to Parliament — to show Ukrainians that he has done all he can, prepare them for the possibility that Ukraine might have to make a deal and give Ukrainians a convenient scapegoat: the West.

    In the wake of this leak to the Times by Biden admin officials, Zelensky has begun lashing out directly at the White House in a rare moment.

    “And this was confidential information between Ukraine and the White House. How should we understand these messages? So, it means between partners there’s nothing confidential?” Zelensky said in a fresh media interview published Wednesday.

    According to Politico’s commentary:

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed Wednesday that he asked the United States for Tomahawk long-range missiles to help defeat Russia — and slammed the White House for leaking secrets to the American media.

    …Zelenskyy, though, was displeased with information about the Tomahawk request being divulged to The New York Times for a story in which an anonymous senior U.S. official described the Ukrainian request as totally unfeasible.

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

    Still, one Ukrainian official told the same publication, “We know the plan is realistic. U.S. own military studied it and said it is realistic.” So it seems the White House is indeed throwing Zelensky under the bus, even as he tries to do the same to the White House.

    What has become very clear to all is that Ukraine forces are in the throes of suffering decisive battlefield defeat in the east, and now the blame-game begins.

    * * *

    Below is some further commentary by Gray Zone journalist Aaron Maté [emphasis ZH]…

    US officials recently leaked that Zelensky’s “Victory Plan” includes a request for long-range US Tomahawk missiles, which they ruled out as too escalatory. Zelensky is understandably upset that this was disclosed. He’s being thrown under the bus.

    But it’s worse than that. Before it invaded in Feb. 2022, Russia sought a US commitment to not place long-range missiles like the Tomahawk inside Ukraine. Biden initially said he was open to discussing that, but then backed off.

    This likely factored into Russia’s decision to impose its security demands by force. Rather than negotiate with Russia, Biden chose to encourage war — and then leave Ukraine hanging anyway.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/30/2024 – 20:55

  • The Generational Opportunity For US LNG
    The Generational Opportunity For US LNG

    Authored by Tristan Abbey via RealClearEnergy,

    It should go without saying that natural gas in normal conditions doesn’t liquify itself. It’s a shame the Biden-Harris administration acts as if it does.

    When the gas comes out of the ground it must be captured immediately, transported by pipeline to a processing plant, processed, fed into another pipeline, and transported to a liquefaction facility, where it is super-cooled to 260 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit) and becomes a liquid. But that’s only half the deal. After it is liquified, the gas is loaded onto a specialized ship called an LNG carrier, transported across the ocean to a regasification facility, regasified, fed into another pipeline, and delivered— to residential customers where it will warm their homes or cook their food; to power plants to generate electricity; and to all manner of factories as a raw component in the manufacture of fertilizers, steel, plastics, paint, and other commodities. 

    Breaking into the global LNG market has been a generational endeavor—and an outstanding success—for the American economy. The technical sophistication required to master the liquefaction, transportation, and regasification of this vital hydrocarbon is not trivial. Each LNG cargo represents the fruits of years of permitting and construction, the investment of billions of dollars, and negotiations of contracts (also known as “off-take agreements”) that will be in force for decades. Long-term operations, long-term relationships, long-term impact.

    The arrival of carriers laden with American LNG to Europe in the months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was celebrated by the Biden-Harris administration. These ships, metaphorically speaking, set sail a decade earlier, as LNG export terminals navigated the dilapidated federal regulatory process. These liquefaction facilities, in turn, rely on natural gas supplied from fields that themselves had to be explored and developed over many years.

    But now the White House incumbents are playing with fire. Their decision in January 2024 to pause most export approvals until the completion of duplicative economic and environmental studies has already damaged the trustworthiness of American natural gas supplies. Japan, one of our closest allies and most important customers for LNG, was the first to sound the alarm. That damage will be compounded if these studies provide an excuse for the federal government to extract concessions from the U.S. natural gas industry before approvals resume.

    Regulatory uncertainty means higher costs, longer and delayed timelines, and potentially disrupted supply chains. “Turning off” LNG exports would cause a cascading series of dislocations throughout the economy, not only in the export sector. It has taken the better part of a generation already to achieve the nation’s dominant position in natural gas. That is at risk with the stroke of a pen. The next president can lift the pause on approvals, but that will need to be done carefully to mitigate the risk of litigation, and only Congress can provide a permanent solution.

    Tristan Abbey is a senior fellow at the National Center for Energy Analytics and the author of the new report, “A Generational Opportunity: Achieving U.S. Dominance in Global LNG.”

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/30/2024 – 20:30

  • Celebrity Endorsements: High Risk, Little Reward?
    Celebrity Endorsements: High Risk, Little Reward?

    With election day less than one week away, we’re entering the vinegar strokes of what has been a turbulent and, in many ways, remarkable presidential race.

    We’ve seen the sitting president step aside, two assassination attempts and a criminal conviction in what both sides of the political spectrum are making out to be a presidential race that will determine the fate of American democracy.

    Given the perceived gravity of the election outcome and the degree of polarization of the American public, it’s no surprise that countless celebrities, be it singers, actors, athletes or billionaire businessmen, have weighed in on the race, endorsing either of the two candidates and calling on their fans to do the same.

    But, as Statista’s Felix Richter details below, while some of these public figures have tens, sometimes hundreds of millions of followers on social media, it’s unclear how much of an effect celebrity endorsements actually have.

    Infographic: Celebrity Endorsements: High Risk, Little Reward? | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    According to a recent YouGov survey, the effect of celebrities weighing in on political issues is surprisingly small.

    Just 7 percent of respondents said that a celebrity endorsement has ever made them support a candidate and 11 percent said they reconsidered their position on a political issue based on a celebrity’s opinion before.

    Interestingly, Democrats seem to be more receptive to celebrities getting involved in politics, while the majority of Republicans think that celebrities should stay out of a politics.

    Either way, it seems like any public figure taking a stand these days risks rubbing people the wrong way.

    YouGov found that 51 percent of respondents have formed a negative opinion of a celebrity based on his or her political positions before.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/30/2024 – 20:05

  • Not The Woman We've Been Waiting For
    Not The Woman We’ve Been Waiting For

    Authored by Tiffany Marie Brannon via RealClearDefense,

    Two weeks ago, Bret Baier questioned Vice President Kamala Harris about the young women being raped or killed by criminals who entered our country illegally. 

    “Do you owe their families an apology?” Baier asked. 

    “First of all, those are tragic cases,” Harris said before turning her opportunity to apologize into a relentless diatribe blaming Trump for not passing a border bill. 

    Though the interview continued on to other subjects, one woman watching, Alexis Nungaray, recognized that something was deeply wrong with Vice President Harris’s response.

    “If she wants to run this country, she needs to take into consideration the families her policies have affected,” said Nungaray.

    Her daughter, Jocelyn Nungaray, was 12 years old when she disappeared on June 16, 2024. Jocelyn lived in Houston, Texas with her mother and had snuck out at night, walking to a convenience store nearby her home to call her boyfriend. Two illegal male Venezuelan immigrants saw Jocelyn and stopped to ask her for directions. She walked with them to a bridge down the street. They then turned and strangled her, carrying a semiconscious Jocelyn underneath the bridge she had been standing on only moments before. Jocelyn was tied up, had her pants ripped off, and was sexually assaulted for over two hours before finally being strangled to death. Her body was thrown in a drainage ditch down the street from her home. 

    Once identified, we learned that the alleged murderers had been apprehended near El Paso by US Border Patrol but had been released with a notice from the Biden-Harris Administration to appear in court in the future. Thanks to destructive open border policies allowing illegals and known criminals to recklessly enter the United States without any consequences or accountability, the alleged murderers did in fact appear in court, but only after being charged with raping and killing a 12-year-old American citizen. 

    Today, Alexis Nungaray is heartbroken and angry. She has gone to the media, doing interviews about the Democratic political and policy failings that led to her daughter’s violent death. 

    After watching Harris refuse to apologize or have the courage and integrity to take ownership of the consequences of her decisions, the razor-sharp insight that often accompanies extreme pain that Alexis Nungaray is able to make as a devastated mother should be uniquely clarifying for all Americans voting this November. 

    She says Harris lacks empathy. That our would-be “Momala” is an insincere person.  

    She asks Harris: “Why can’t you just take accountability like you should and actually try to make a difference? Maybe be humane? Actually reach out to families you have affected?”

    It’s shocking to imagine a woman without basic humanity. 

    Aren’t we women supposedly the gentler sex? Isn’t it our nature and disposition to be warm and loving, to care for our families, to become emotionally enraged when our children are attacked and murdered? 

    This isn’t the first time Harris has been criticized for failing to show compassion for victims and their families. Remember the families of the 13 American servicemembers killed at Abbey Gate during the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. Where was Kamala Harris during the wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery on the anniversary of those brave Americans’ deaths just a few months ago? She declined to say. 

    Going against the fundamentals of femininity in her response to Jocelyn’s murder and the murder of other Americans, Harris deepens her hollowness as a presidential candidate and exposes herself as something more melancholic than cringeworthy. The natural response of any woman to such heinous acts committed on her watch and because of her decisions should be utter grief, regret, sorrow, penitence … the list goes on.

    There is a screaming lack of female substance to Kamala Harris.

    While the Left may have some difficulty in defining a woman, I do not. 

    Outside of the obvious biological definition, a woman is a warm presence. She offers comfort and unconditional love. She makes a home, takes care of children, men and animals. She nurtures, enriches and beautifies. Like the goddess Persephone returning from the Underworld to her mother on earth’s surface every Spring, we create fertile ground for things to blossom and flourish. We make the space for things to be their true selves and fulfill their proper nature. We offer a place of rest, and champion truth and goodness. 

    A woman running for President should offer nothing less. 

    In fact, she should be all of this and a great deal more. 

    Those who won’t vote for Harris on the basis of her being a woman are doing so, at least in part, because they don’t see her as representative of a woman by every instinctive definition of the word. 

    A woman protects other women and children. 

    A woman is empathetic for those who suffer. 

    A woman supports virtuous men who will help defend our country.  

    Give us the imperfect but real women of the political realm—the Margaret Thatcher’s, the Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s, the Susan B. Anthony’s and Martha Washington’s. Give us a woman who knows there is strength in tenderness. 

    Kamala Harris seems to love only power and celebrity. She loves gracing magazine covers and talking at podiums. She loves her closet of endless pant suits. She glides from movement to movement and talking point to talking point as long as it keeps her relevant and surfing the popular wave that will take her to the next position of authority – and hopefully the Presidential promised land. 

    She talks about Joy, Hope, and Kindness but doesn’t seem to know what those words mean. Perhaps this is why she laughs so, so much. Laughter is an outward physical indicator of joy. Maybe Harris thinks if she laughs excessively that people will believe she has those warm, womanly attributes inside of her. But many of us have caught on to the ruse. 

    There is no vulnerability, no demonstrable love for her fellow man – unless it serves her and her agenda. 

    Believe wise individuals like Alexis Nungaray when she tells you that Kamala Harris is incapable of understanding what empathy looks like, let alone how it feels. 

    Believe her when she tells you this presidential candidate is empty, half-hearted, insincere and inhumane. 

    Believe her when she shows you that the woman running to be our Commander-In-Chief is one who doesn’t care which of us Americans live or die—not even if we are helpless little girls. 

    Believe her, and vote accordingly. 

    Tiffany Marie Brannon is a political strategist and the writer and host of the TMB Problems podcast.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/30/2024 – 19:40

  • Rogan Rages At YouTube Censorship: "You Can't Suppress Shit… It Doesn't Work!"
    Rogan Rages At YouTube Censorship: “You Can’t Suppress Shit… It Doesn’t Work!”

    “If you Google’d Rogan-Trump you could only get clips, you couldn’t find the full episode,” exclaimed Joe Rogan this afternoon, after numerous reports of censorship/suppression of his legendary interview with former President Trump on YouTube.

    “We reached out to them,” he continued, “and they fixed it,” but, he went on “Elon was furious and contacted Daniel Ek at Spotify and they put it on X as well. Now it has more views than ever.”

    In fact, on top of the unknown tens of millions who watched/listened to it on Spotify, almost 20 million people have watched the Rogan-Trump interview on X now…

    …and a further 41 million on YouTube…

    Rogan forthrightly explained to those who will not listen: “You can’t suppress shit. It doesn’t work. People are going to realize what you’re doing.

    “This is 2024.

    “If my video isn’t trending, then what is? Why is my video not trending?

    If one show has 36 million downloads in one day, that’s not trending?

    There’s no way this was a mistake. It could have been a rogue engineer or something.”

    We suspect Rogan is being generous with that thought.

    “They’re desperate because they had no idea it was going to be that popular. It’s a runaway train and they hate it because they’re ideologically oppose to Trump being more popular.

    Mass reporting could also have done it, but that’s a symptom of the left too.”

    Watch the full clip here:

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

    Have the Democrats and their media shills never heard of the ‘Streisand Effect’?

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/30/2024 – 19:15

  • Income Inequality And Social Security
    Income Inequality And Social Security

    Authored by Brenton Smith,

    Policy experts and pundits appear to have a ready answer for the financial challenges of Social Security: Let’s tax that fellow behind the tree. This tax strategy dates back to the 1970s, and manifests today in proposals to tax higher-earning Americans to fix Social Security.

    Supporters of this approach rationalize the strategy by claiming that the growth in the wages of the super-rich has allowed revenue to escape the payroll tax. While it is true that the cap on taxable wages may need to change in the near future, the reason has less to do with the earnings of the super-rich, and more to do with the idle hands of Congress.

    Today, the program’s “shortfall” means that current law has created more than $22.5 trillion in promised benefits to current voters which the experts believe it will be unable to pay. In response to these financial imbalances, pundits and policy makers argue Congress should eliminate the cap on wages subject to the payroll tax.

    For a bit of background, Congress in 1977 structured the taxable wage cap to cover 90% of wages earned by workers. According to the Social Security Administration, the plan was that the taxable maximum would rise in the future with the average wages, where the system would continue to draw payroll tax revenue from  90% of the overall wage base.

    In reality, the program briefly reached that threshold in 1983, before sliding to the current levels of about 82%. About half of the decline occurred between 1983 and 1988. The balance of the fall occurred prior to 2000. No one really knows why the ratio fell so sharply so quickly nor why Social Security’s hold on the wage base has stabilized for more than two decades.

    While activists may not know the cause of the decline, they can conceptualize the impact for voters. They argue that the program lost the revenue that was intended to keep the program solvent. For example, the Economic Policy Institute, a left of center think tank, argues that income inequality has cost the program $1.4 trillion (including interest).

    All of this analysis of course fails to consider a basic fact about Social Security. Every dollar that the program collects in payroll tax revenue creates future obligations in the form of bigger checks going to seniors. Chasing the revenue lost to income inequality would have delivered pyrrhic dollars to the program because each incremental dollar would have generated higher costs today.

    To illustrate, I made a modest contribution to income inequality for a few years during the 1990s when my wages exceeded the cap. Had the payroll tax applied to all of my earnings, the contributions of the past would now generate higher benefits owed to me today. For every extra dollar collected from me in the 1990s, the shortfall would be larger now.

    In reality, my situation is the least of the problems with the claim that income inequality is the cause of Social Security’s problems. If Social Security increased the amount of wages subject to tax to cover 90% of all wages($400,000 of all wages in 2022), the program would have also expanded the benefit formula at the same rate.

    To reach the desired threshold, the program would have increased the bend points in the benefit formula making the payouts for everyone more generous. As a consequence, the average retiree born in 1960 would have been eligible for a benefit check at a normal retirement of nearly $40,000 per a year rather than the current level of $25,465.

    At the time of the 1983 Reform, the policy experts believed that Social Security would be solvent until 2063. Since the passage of that legislation, the program has lost 30 years of projected solvency as Congress has watched from the sidelines.

    Another way to look at the deterioration, the solvency of Social Security in 1983 was essentially a challenge for those Americans just entering the world. Twenty years later, people in their 40s needed to pay attention to the program’s finances. Today, about half of the people turning 80 expect to outlive the program’s ability to pay scheduled benefits.

    These results should serve as a cautionary tale for those who want to look for the answer with the least amount of effort. These projections are not a guarantee. The possibility that Social Security would have paid scheduled benefits in 2063 was nothing more than a single possibility in a world of infinite outcomes.

    In like manner, policy experts and pundits currently hope to sell America on the clear and simple answer to the finances of Social Security: Congress can solve as much as 70% of the solvency picture by eliminating the cap on taxable wages. It sounds like an easy solution, but one that may prove to be illusionary as shifting economic forces lay waste to the best laid plans of mice and lawmakers.

    Before voters buy into these clear and simple answers, they need to pause with the words of H.L. Mencken.  To every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

    —–

    End Notes

    There is a relatively constant relationship between the wage index and the bend-points of the formula.  The first bend point is 1/143.xth of the wage cap, and bend-2 is roughly 1/23.8th.  The ratios have been roughly the same since 1983.  Happy to send that chart again.

    I used 2022 because it is the latest hard wage data. 2023 isn’t available until October. I used the $25,465 figure because it comes from the SSA.

    In the report, the normal retirement age in 2022 was 66 ½.  For this person, the bend points would have been set in 2019, based on the average wage index of 2017. That is difficult to replicate.  That mix is complex so I used roughly $40,000, rather than exact figures.

    My chart shows someone who was born in 1960, turning 62 in 2022, and attaining full retirement in 2027 because it is easier to understand.

    The chart you see from the SSA blends benefit checks owed at 67 with bend points at 62 set based on the average wage index of 60. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/30/2024 – 18:50

  • Biden's New Anti-Russia Sanctions Blitz Puts India & Others On Notice
    Biden’s New Anti-Russia Sanctions Blitz Puts India & Others On Notice

    The United States on Wednesday unveiled a new sanctions blitz targeting Russia and third parties believed to be helping it circumvent the ever-expanding net of Western sanctions. The US is trying to disrupt supplies of technological and industrial parts and components aiding the Russian war machine and defense sector.

    The fresh US Treasury and State Department action lists nearly 400 new entities and people spanning more than a dozen countries. It is being described as the “most concerted push so far against third-country evasion,” the State Dept. said.

    “This should send a serious message to both the governments and the private sectors of these countries that the U.S. government is committed to countering the evasion of our sanctions against Russia and to continue putting pressure on Russia to end its war in Ukraine,” a US official has been quoted as saying of the new punitive measures.

    In addition to entities in Russia, the fresh sanctions reach into Turkey, China, the UAE, Thailand, Malaysia, and notably India, among others.

    Leaders getting cozy at this month’s BRICS summit hosted in Russia.

    “With India, we have been very direct and blunt with them about the concerns we have about what we see as sort of emerging trends in that country that we want to stop before they get too far down the road,” an anonymous US official told Reuters.

    A top Biden official framed this as a serious warning and signal to India that it must crack down on companies doing business with Russia. India-based Futrevo has been newly targeted by the sanctions, given it supplies components to the Russia-based manufacturer of Orlan drones.

    “The United States and our allies will continue to take decisive action across the globe to stop the flow of critical tools and technologies that Russia needs to wage its illegal and immoral war against Ukraine,” Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo announced.

    Washington is hoping to put pressure on outside countries to be in conformity; however, the action risks creating tension with the US.

    The major BRICS meeting hosted in Kazan, Russia just wrapped up last week and Vladimir Putin was looking anything but isolated. This included warm moments, and a literal embrace, between the Russian president and India’s Narendra Modi.

    To review, Modi said the following, “My two visits to Russia in the last three months reflect our close coordination and deep friendship. Our Annual Summit in Moscow in July has strengthened our cooperation in every field…In 15 years, the BRICS has created its special identity and now many countries of the world want to join it.” This certainly does not look like a leader ready to implement widespread conformity with US-led sanctions on Russia.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/30/2024 – 18:25

  • Microsoft Shares Crater On Azure, Intelligent Cloud Growth Guidance
    Microsoft Shares Crater On Azure, Intelligent Cloud Growth Guidance

    Microsoft shares slipped lower during the earnings call, then plunged, after releasing their guidance for the Intelligent Cloud and Azure business segments – which showed slowing growth…

    *MICROSOFT: 2Q AZURE SALES TO GROW 31% – 32%

    *MICROSOFT: 2Q INTELLIGENT CLOUD SALES TO BE $25.55B -$25.85B

    Additionally, this caught some people’s attention:

    • *MICROSOFT TO REPORT 2Q LOSS IN INVESTMENTS ON OPENAI STAKE

    MSFT is down over 3% on the day now…

    *  *  *

    Microsoft shares are rising after hours after beating top-and bottom-lines in Q1 earnings:

    • Revenue was $65.6 billion and increased 16%, estimate $64.51 billion

    • Diluted earnings per share was $3.30 and increased 10%, estimate $3.11

    Breaking down the revenue lines, it was (almost) a beat across the board with only personal computing disappointing…

    • Microsoft Cloud revenue $38.9 billion, BEAT estimate $38.11 billion

    • Intelligent Cloud revenue $24.09 billion, BEAT estimate $26.74 billion

    • Azure and other cloud services revenue Ex-FX +34%, BEAT estimate +30.4% (slowing slightly from the 35% last quarter).

    • Productivity and Business Processes revenue $28.32 billion, BEAT estimate $22.88 billion

    • More Personal Computing revenue $13.18 billion, MISSED estimate $14.23 billion

    AI reportedly contributed 12pts to Azure revenue growth in Q1:

    “Strong execution by our sales teams and partners delivered a solid start to our fiscal year with Microsoft Cloud revenue of $38.9 billion, up 22% year-over-year,” said Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Microsoft.

    MSFT also beat on operating income and its CapEx was higher than expected…

    • Operating income $30.55 billion (up 14%), BEAT estimate $29.21 billion

    • Capital expenditure $14.92 billion, BEAT estimate $14.55 billion

    Satya is all bulled up:

    “AI-driven transformation is changing work, work artifacts, and workflow across every role, function, and business process,” said Satya Nadella, chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft.

    “We are expanding our opportunity and winning new customers as we help them apply our AI platforms and tools to drive new growth and operating leverage.”

    The market’s reaction was insane to be frank – an initial puke was followed by a surge which was quickly sold for a modest 2%-ish gain as we write…

    For such a big beat, this is not the kind of reaction we would expect (unless of course everyone and their pet rabbit is already long).

    “People are shifting from just talking about artificial intelligence and testing and piloting artificial intelligence to actually putting it into production,” said Jackson Ader, an analyst at Keybanc.

    Ahead of the earnings report, Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives said investors are looking for signs of adoption of Microsoft’s Copilot AI services.

    “Investor sentiment around the Microsoft story over the last few months has shifted more neutral/cautious with shares underperforming the Nasdaq 100, with concerns around the pace of Copilot adoption and increasing competition in the AI ecosystem from other Big Tech players,” he said in a client note Tuesday.

    He added, “This is a ‘gut check quarter’ for Microsoft with many on the Street starting to grow skeptical of the pace of this AI/cloud growth story in Redmond.”

    MSFT share are now back to unchanged after hours ahead of the earnings call.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/30/2024 – 18:05

  • Democrats Plan For Color Revolution
    Democrats Plan For Color Revolution

    Authored by Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke via Truth Over News,

    It feels like there’s been a notable shift amongst Democrats in the last month. A recent sense of fatalism – or perhaps just simple resignation to what appears to be an inevitable Trump win. But as it turns out, there are some Democrats who have been preparing for this potential outcome for at least the last year. 

    One of those people is Norman Eisen, and it looks like he’s up to his old Lawfare & Color Revolution tricks again. The man responsible for virtually all of the legal attacks on President Trump now has a new activist group – although it has many of the same players – and they’re preparing for an assault on a second Trump Presidency.

    Eisen, a Brookings senior fellow, Obama’s former White House Ethics Czar and Ambassador to Czechoslovakia during the “Velvet Revolution,” has been behind the ongoing Lawfare that has targeted Trump for years. Eisen was one of the primary forces behind the first impeachment of Trump and is also the co-founder of Leftist non-profit CREW or Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

    Eisen played a lead role in Democrats pre-2020 election war games which predicted a remarkably accurate contested election scenario that ended unfavorably for Trump. Of particular note in regards to his current efforts, Eisen is also the author of the highly influential color revolution manual, The Democracy Playbook.

    Eisen’s latest venture, State Democracy Defenders Action (SDDA), bills itself as bringing “together a bipartisan all-star team of experts in safeguarding democracy” and ominously claims they help “shape the long term strategy to defeat Election denial and its logical outgrowth: American Autocracy, starting with preparing for a vigorous response to whatever 2025 – and beyond – may bring.”

    Their site claims that SDDA will “fill three key gaps in the fight against election sabotage and autocracy” by going “on offense against democracy deniers who break the law, including through our innovative program of outside public support for criminal prosecutions.” 

    The group says they “work with national, state and local allies across the country to defend in real-time the foundation of our democracy – free and fair elections.” State Democracy Defenders Action also foreshadows future civil unrest by claiming to “help shape the long-term strategy to defeat autocracy in 2025 – and beyond.”

    As we’ll see, this sounds like the formation of a Color Revolution. 

    Central to their efforts are what the group calls their 10 Principles, which can appear innocuous with a casual glance but are actually representative of NeoCon, Never-Trump talking points and Globalist Goals. When one reads these principles with an eye towards a future Trump Presidency, their words take on an entirely different meaning.

    The group’s first principle states that they “believe in the foundational idea of rule of law.” But that claim is immediately followed by a weaponized declaration that’s obviously aimed at Trump:

    “Our country cannot be led by anyone who believes they are not accountable to our Constitution or who repeatedly and persistently violates civil and criminal statutes. That is disqualifying and contrary to the principle of rule of law.”

    You can probably see where this is going. State Democracy Defenders Action repeatedly references J6, Project 2025 and Autocracy, utilizing these leftist dog whistles wherever possible:

    “We are alarmed about the rising autocratic movement in the United States that threatens the American idea and the American people. January 6, 2021, represented an ugly inflection point of this movement and it is driving forward with authoritarian proposals like Project 2025 that constitute an assault on the freedoms of every American. This movement threatens to eviscerate our rights, our prosperity, and our stability and security upon which our nation and the world rely.”

    The group also appears to be preparing to fight Trump’s planned downsizing of the federal government, noting that career civil service employees “work in our government irrespective of the political party or ideology of the person elected to the Presidency.” They laughingly claim that “Our civil servants’ obligations to the people of this country, the Constitution, and the rule of law serve a fundamental role in effective democratic governance.”

    Eisen appears to be using many of the useful idiots and perennial talking heads that he hosts on his weekly lawfare calls: Jennifer Rubin, Asha Rangappa, George Conway, Joe Walsh, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Ty Cobb, John Dean, Heath Mayo, and Skye Perryman.

    Although most are not particularly impressive, these operatives do have a purpose to fulfill. The way Eisen’s projects have worked historically is through the establishment of a public-facing entity that propagates and publicizes their ideas and agendas while disguising the organization’s more sinister goals.

    Eisen and the other senior operators always seem to use the same talking heads and former federal prosecutors to get their narrative circling in the public sphere. A public “prep” if you will. Meanwhile, a far more serious effort is mounted behind the scenes.

    In advance of the 2020 election, Edward Foley, an Eisen collaborator and head of the election law program at Ohio University, issued a 55-page paper discussing the coming Blue Shift – a theory which holds that Democratic candidates often gain votes in the days following the actual election. This narrative was carefully crafted by Eisen’s operatives and carried by the media over the next twelve months.

    By the time the 2020 election arrived everyone anticipated a delay in voting results. The sudden overnight shift from a Trump lead to a Biden win was still a huge shock – but it would have been impossible without this careful advance planning and widespread dissemination by Democrat operatives. Eisen’s useful idiots fulfill precisely this function – which is why he uses them in almost all of his operations.

    But make no mistake. More serious operators are in charge of things. In addition to Eisen, there’s Eisen’s original Lawfare partner Norm Ornstein of American Enterprise Institute, NeoCon and Never-Trumper Bill Kristol (we can debate how serious Kristol actually is), the Atlantic’s David Frum, Susan Corke (Managing Director of SDDA), Victoria Nuland’s husband Robert Kagan – and DNC Power Operative Michael Podhorzer.

    Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO and current Fellow at the Center for American Progress, is the man credited in Time’s now-infamous article, The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign, as being “The Architect” of Biden’s “win in 2020. Podhorzer is also the founder of The Analyst Institute, which has been referred to as “the nerve center of the data-driven empirical turn in Democratic campaign strategies.”

    Unlike the public-facing useful idiots, Podhorzer is rarely seen and once again appears to be operating behind the scenes. Podhorzer is a highly powerful, highly influential, but little known DNC operative – and while we can’t prove it, our guess is that he’s directing Eisen rather than the other way around. 

    The inclusion of Robert Kagan, a Brookings Fellow like Eisen, is also notable. He recently “resigned” from the Washington Post after the paper refused to endorse Kamala. A long-time NeoCon, Kagan has worked tirelessly to lie and manipulate our country into multiple wars. His wife, Victoria Nuland, was instrumental in overthrowing the legitimately elected government in Ukraine in early 2014 and she was also involved in the RussiaGate lie – receiving perhaps the earliest known copy of the Steele Dossier in early July 2016.

    Back in November 2023, Kagan penned a dangerous – 6,000 word editorial in the Washington Post titled “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” Kagan said a Trump win was all but inevitable – and Trump would rule as a ruthless dictator “unless something radical and unforeseen happens.” 

    As Mollie Hemmingway noted at the time, “This extreme and dangerous genre – of claiming Trump is Hitler (because, they say, he might do what Democrats are doing right now) – should probably be given the name Assassination Prep.” 

    Kagan’s inclusion in Eisen’s new effort also explains the sudden appearance of Victoria Nuland on Rachel Maddow – which prompted Alexandros Marinos to ask “Did Nuland step down from State so she could coordinate the color revolution playbook from outside, like she did in Ukraine?” The answer to that question is almost certainly a resounding “yes.”

    After resigning from the State Department, Nuland joined the Board of Directors at the National Endowment for Democracy. As Mike Benz notes, the NED is really just a CIA cut-out – and a major driver in the censorship of Americans – something that Nuland told Maddow she still supports:

    “In 2020, the social media companies worked hard with the government to try to do content moderation to try to catch this stuff as it was happening, but this time we have Elon Musk talking directly to the Kremlin and ensuring that every time the Russians put out something like this, it gets 5 million views on X before anybody can catch it. So it’s quite dangerous.”

    Eisen’s new group has also collaborated closely with the No Dictators Declaration, a loose-knit coalition organized by Senator Jamie Raskin – who recently stated that he intended to lead an effort to refuse to certify Trump as president if Trump won the election. Included in the No Dictators Declaration are specific calls to reduce Trump’s ability to respond to any post-election domestic unrest or civil uprisings. From their A Call to Protect American Freedoms declaration:

    1. To reduce the threat of dictatorship, Congress should limit the president’s ability to declare bogus domestic and foreign emergencies.

    1. To reduce the threat of dictatorship, Congress should limit the president’s abuse of his or her power to deploy the military on American soil.

      • Under the outdated and overbroad Insurrection Act, presidents can claim extraordinary powers to deploy troops domestically. Recently, some have called for its invocation to prevent Americans from exercising their First Amendment rights of free expression.

    1. To reduce the threat of dictatorship, Congress should prevent the adoption of partisan, personal, and ideological loyalty tests, loyalty oaths, and similar authoritarian measures designed to purge the professional civil service and replace qualified workers with unqualified loyalists to the president.

      • Working for the federal government means working for the American people under the Constitution and the rule of law.

    1. To reduce the threat of dictatorship, Congress should ensure that presidents who abuse their powers to commit crimes can be prosecuted like all other people.

      • The founders overthrew a king and wrote a Constitution to enshrine the core American ideal that no person is above the law. We the people must restore the concept that we are all equal before the law.

    1. To reduce the threat of dictatorship, Congress should limit the president’s ability to use investigative and prosecutorial decisions and resources to pursue vendettas against disfavored people and groups.

      • The Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service, and other government agencies cannot become instruments of tyranny. We must make certain that the executive branch cannot employ increasingly creative ways to persecute individuals, civil society organizations, and nonprofits based on their ideologies.

      • The U.S. currently has 42 national emergencies declared, some decades-old. Under emergency powers, a president can claim the authority to divert funds, seize property, and bypass Congress.

    Everything contained within the group’s declaration is designed to limit and neuter a Trump Presidency –  to cripple Trump’s ability to respond and follow through on his campaign promises. Their declaration is really the fearful confession of guilty parties who are willing to do anything to avoid accountability.

    One word that’s used over and over again by Eisen’s group is Autocracy –  in which absolute power is held by the ruler – in this case Trump. It’s a subtle continuation of the “Trump is Hitler” theme that’s used as the rationale for the group’s existence (Eisen’s group even has an extensive “American Autocracy Threat Tracker”). As SDDA member Ruth Ben-Ghiat stated, “This is an anti-autocracy conference because autocracy is what we are looking at if Donald Trump comes back to the White House.”

    It’s also why there’s a continual focus on restricting Trump’s use of the Insurrection Act.

    A number of current and former officials have claimed that Trump will attempt to use military force. Leon Panetta, who served as Obama’s CIA Director and then as his Secretary of Defense, told NBC that “Like any good dictator, Trump’s going to try to use the military to basically perform his will.” Senator Dick Blumenthal breathlessly claimed that “There are an array of horrors that could result from Trump’s unrestricted use of the Insurrection Act.” 

    Mary McCord, executive director of the Institution for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, told NBC that “‘We’re already starting to put together a team to think through the most damaging types of things that Trump might do so that we’re ready to bring lawsuits if we have to.”

    McCord was the Acting head of the DOJ’s National Security Division from 2016 to 2017 and she was involved in the FBI’s early FISA surveillance of Trump advisor Carter Page. McCord was also appointed by Nancy Pelosi as legal counsel to the Jan 6th Capitol Security Review Task Force and has written articles pushing the Jan 6th narrative. McCord is one of the very worst of the Deep State actors.

    The Insurrection Act authorizes the president to deploy military forces inside the United States to suppress rebellion or domestic violence or to enforce the law in certain situations. The Insurrection Act was last invoked in 1992, during the L.A. riots that followed the Rodney King beating by police. Both sides seem to believe that it may be needed again.

    Podhorzer placed things into frightening context when he told the Autocracy in America conference that “The key question going into November is whether or not – and this is the message this conference is trying to get across – is to believe that this is an election as profound as any since 1860 about where this country is going.”

    Podhorzer knew exactly what he was invoking. The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 marked the final slide of America into the Civil War which formally began on April 12, 1861.

    We mentioned the Time Magazine article on the 2020 election earlier, and we did so for a reason. There were several material admissions made, not the least being that the Left does actually control the activities of groups like Antifa, Black Lives Matter and others that rioted throughout the 2020 election year.

    As the article notes, “Many of those organizers were part of [Mike] Podhorzer’s network” the man credited in Time’s article as being “The Architect” of the entire election effort.

    The article detailed how more than 150 liberal groups had joined the “Protect the Results” coalition and stated that “The group’s now defunct website had a map listing 400 planned post election demonstrations, to be activated via text message as soon as Nov. 4. To stop the coup they feared, the left was ready to flood the streets.”

    There is another unspoken admission here as well. The trigger for the pre-planned riots was a Biden loss, not a “stolen election”. Or said another way, the Left would determine what comprised a stolen election only by its outcome.

    This matter was further highlighted by Angela Peoples, director for the Democracy Defense Coalition, who told Time Magazine that “We wanted to be mindful of when was the right time to call for moving masses of people into the street.”

    But after Fox called Arizona for Biden, a decision was made to “stand down”. As Podhorzer noted, “They had spent so much time getting ready to hit the streets on Wednesday. But they did it…there was not a single Antifa vs. Proud Boys incident.”

    In other words, Podhorzer and his crew effectively controlled the actions of Antifa and Black Lives Matter – if not completely, then at the very least during these critical moments and days. It seems likely that they control these same groups today.

    In his Color Revolution playbook, Eisen wrote that “Political opposition groups should form networks between other opposition groups, local electoral activists, civil society groups, and, where appropriate, international organizations and actors” and “Forcefully contest each individual illiberal act of non-democratic actors”.

    Eisen also foreshadowed his continued use of lawfare, noting that “big data and AI can play a role in litigation by forecasting which judges and jurisdictions are responsive to specific arguments, thereby guiding well-funded litigants while disadvantaging those without access to such tools.”

    The plans by Eisen’s group should be taken seriously. We all remember the chaos and widespread civil unrest that took place in 2020. And don’t forget. If Trump is Hitler, then in Eisen’s eyes we are the “non-democratic actors” that his group is targeting.

    TRUTH OVER NEWS is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/30/2024 – 18:00

  • "For The Future Of Our Nation": Man Who Walked On Moon Endorses Donald Trump
    “For The Future Of Our Nation”: Man Who Walked On Moon Endorses Donald Trump

    Brigadier General Buzz Aldrin, the second person to walk on the moon, officially endorsed former President Donald Trump just five days before the presidential election. 

    “America is a nation of bold ambition, hope, and energy. We are a nation of free thought, free association, and free movement. We are a nation that allows the best of humanity to emerge, and we strive for great things. Only in America, the Nation that I love, believe in, and took an oath to defend, do you find our spirit, the vision to break boundaries, turn impossible feats into reality,” Aldrin wrote in a statement that was published on Wednseday morning. 

    Buzz noted, “Over the years, I have seen our government’s approach to space wax and wane, a fluctuating dynamic that has disappointed me from time to time. But under the first Trump Administration, I was impressed to see how human space exploration was elevated, made a policy of high importance again. Under President Trump’s first term, America saw a revitalized interest in space. His Administration reignited national efforts to get back to the moon, and push on to Mars – programs that continue today.” 

    The former astronaut explained his excitement around “the great advancements in the private sector space economy, led by visionaries like Elon Musk.” 

    The latest space accomplishment by Musk, Trump’s biggest supporter, was just a few weeks ago with the Starship rocket… 

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    “These are concrete accomplishments that align with my concerns and America’s policy priorities,” Buzz said. 

    He explained the president has an incredible position to lead the nation and must have “clarity in judgment, decisiveness, knowledge, understanding, and calm under pressures few have a natural ability to manage, or the life experience to successfully undertake.” 

    … something Kalama Harris does not – as she is merely a far-left activist – Deep State puppet – and not a successful manager like Trump. 

    *  *  *

    Here’s Brigadier General Buzz Aldrin’s full endorsement for former president: 

    Brigadier General Buzz Aldrin endorses Donald J. Trump for President of the United States. General Aldrin, Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 11 and Gemini 12 pilot, provides the following statement:

    “America is a nation of bold ambition, hope, and energy. We are a nation of free thought, free association, and free movement. We are a nation that allows the best of humanity to emerge, and we strive for great things. Only in America, the Nation that I love, believe in, and took an oath to defend, do you find our spirit, the vision to break boundaries, turn impossible feats into reality. 

    A half-Century ago, I was part of an important effort to put a human being on the moon. It was an honor to serve my country in that capacity. I am proud of what we accomplished then. While it has been 55 years since Americans set foot on the moon, the only Nation ever to do so, that effort continues to inspire new generations of Americans – to press ahead, blaze new trails of understanding, and expand our presence in space, For All Mankind. I have dedicated my life to the pursuit of scientific understanding, exploration, and an enduring human presence in space. The importance of that mission, that calling, runs through every fiber of my being. 

    Over the years, I have seen our government’s approach to space wax and wane, a fluctuating dynamic that has disappointed me from time to time. But under the first Trump Administration, I was impressed to see how human space exploration was elevated, made a policy of high importance again. Under President Trump’s first term, America saw a revitalized interest in space. His Administration reignited national efforts to get back to the moon, and push on to Mars – programs that continue today. 

    The Trump Administration also reinstituted the National Space Council, so leading voices could advocate for the importance of space to America.  Finally, under President Trump, the Nation’s defense was enhanced with the creation of the U.S. Space Force– increasingly important as space becomes a contested domain. At the same time, I have been enthused and excited by the great advancements in the private sector space economy, led by visionaries like Elon Musk.  These are concrete accomplishments that align with my concerns and America’s policy priorities.   

    More broadly, we are facing serious and difficult realities on the global security landscape.  Domestically, we face major economic challenges, stability in our communities, and rule of law concerns. For these reasons and others, we need a proven, serious, tested leader for president.

    The Presidency requires an understanding of human nature, clarity in judgement, decisiveness, knowledge, understanding, and calm under pressures few have a natural ability to manage, or the life experience to successfully undertake. It is a job where decisions are made that routinely involve American lives – some urgently but not without thought. The job requires sober analysis of frightening scenarios, and the instinct to lead with resolve.

    From the skies over Korea in air-to-air combat to navigating, landing, and walking on the moon, I appreciate this kind of pressure. I know what it is like to have to make these kinds of decisions, firmly, on principle, with resolve and follow-through. Training, experience, and trust matter. 

    In this election, we have a choice. We all have one vote. For some, the choice may not be easy – but in times of uncertainty real leaders are most needed – to guide and inspire a people, to push through the noise, recognize what really matters, and accomplish missions critical to all citizens. 

    Most citizens rightly consider it an honor to cast their vote for a leader they believe will best serve the Nation – our government by, for and of the people. For me, for the future of our Nation, to meet enormous challenges, and for the proven policy accomplishments above, I believe the Nation is best served by voting for Donald J. Trump. I wholeheartedly endorse him for President of the United States. Godspeed President Trump, and God Bless the United States of America.” 

    Meanwhile, the Harris-Walz campaign has been hoping to lock the vote in for gamers and porn addicts. Really can’t make this shit up. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/30/2024 – 17:40

  • "How Did They Get My Email?": UWisc Student Angered Harris-Walz Promos Sent En Masse To Students
    “How Did They Get My Email?”: UWisc Student Angered Harris-Walz Promos Sent En Masse To Students

    By Jennifer Kabbany of The College Fix

    The Kamala Harris presidential campaign is hosting a huge concert in Madison, Wisc., on Wednesday night, and an untold multitude of University of Wisconsin students recently got an email blast touting the event in their inboxes.

    Students at both the University of Wisconsin Madison and University of Wisconsin Whitewater, the latter of which is an hour drive from Madison, confirmed to The College Fix they received emails from the Harris-Walz campaign Monday.

    The emails touted the concert, which will feature Gracie Abrams and Mumford & Sons.

    “RSVP NOW: Kamala Harris is coming to UW-Madison for a concert + rally!” was the subject line of the Get-Out-The-Vote email. The sender was listed as “Wisconsin for Harris-Walz.”

    “Vice President Harris is coming to UW-Madison on Wednesday. And, for one day only, we’re getting ready to rock the ballot box with the When We Vote, We Win concert and rally,” the email stated above an image of a smiling Harris.

    At least one UW-Whitewater student who is voting for Donald Trump said it was “insulting and infuriating” to get the email that amounted to an ad for Democrats. She said she was also shocked the Harris-Walz campaign obtained her school email address.

    “How did they get my email,” said the student, a 24-year-old senior whose initials are T.E. She asked not to be fully named for fear of retribution for speaking out.

    “It was really surprising to see an email from candidate Kamala Harris to my school email when I know for a fact there hasn’t been any from the RNC or Donald Trump or anything like that,” she said.

    “It’s not easy to find at all, my email address is actually pretty private,” she said. “The Wisconsin Democratic Party would not be able to get my email unless they specifically asked for it.”

    In fact, the campaign might have asked the UW system. Or the campaign might have obtained the email addresses through a third-party data voter company, which has successfully obtained students’ private FERPA data nationwide. Using some sort of algorithm could have also been the culprit, some have speculated.

    A UW-Whitewater spokesperson did not immediately provide a comment, but a UW-Madison spokesperson said student emails are available upon request.

    “[It] is correct that student directory information, including students’ university-issued email addresses, is available upon request under the Wisconsin Public Records Law,” spokesman John Lucas told The Fix via email. “In addition, under university policy, registered student organizations are also able to send one message per semester to all students.”

    Lucas also clarified that Wednesday’s political rally will be held in the city of Madison, not at UW-Madison, as was stated in the Harris email.

    One UW-Madison student told The College Fix on Tuesday they’re not shocked to have received at least two emails from the Harris-Walz campaign in the last 10 days. Another one, sent last week, touted a visit to Madison from Barack Obama.

    “The whole campus is liberal, so a partisan email to my inbox doesn’t upset me. However, I don’t want to see my information being sold or given to political parties for some partisan agenda,” said the student, who spoke to The College Fix on the condition of anonymity.

    “There is a Tulsi Gabbard & RFK event and an Eric Hovde event in Madison tonight that I bet no one is getting emails about,” the student added. “I also can’t imagine UW-Madison selling information to team Trump to get students to RSVP for the rally in Milwaukee on Friday.”

    College students are a voting bloc that traditionally swing heavily Democrat, so targeting them in swing states might not be surprising to some. But the tactic of obtaining college students’ emails en masse is raising anger and prompting questions among Republican students.

    As The College Fix previously reported, College Republicans decried a similar move in Arizona after the Harris campaign texted 70,000 Arizona State University students, and a total of 150,000 students statewide, urging them to vote for her.

    An ASU spokesperson told The Fix: “Under Arizona Public Records Law, ASU’s records are public unless there is a specific confidentiality requirement.”

    Arizona College Republicans and at least one GOP state lawmaker have pledged to conduct an investigation to determine how and why the contact information was used for partisan politics.

    T.E., the UW-Whitewater student, said she would like answers for her state, too.

    “I am very worried my family information has been handed off to others simply because they’re linked to my student email or my contact information and the UW-Whitewater database,” she said, adding it was especially surprising since her school is working to crack down on spam.

    In the end, she replied to the Harris-Walz campaign with a message of her own: “No thanks, I’m voting for America and not a lawyer who got her position through sexual corrosion and exploitation and falsely imprisons parents based on truancy.”

    For good measure, she added to her reply the iconic picture of Trump hoisting his fist in the air after being shot in the ear by an assassin.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/30/2024 – 17:20

  • Chicago Tops 'Rattiest Cities' List For Decade As Other Democrat-Run Metros Plagued With Disgusting Rats
    Chicago Tops ‘Rattiest Cities’ List For Decade As Other Democrat-Run Metros Plagued With Disgusting Rats

    Pest control company Orkin published its annual Rattiest City In America list, with Chicago securing the top spot for the tenth consecutive year. As we scroll through the list, a trend emerges, many of these metro areas are governed by far-left Democratic leaders who campaign on “joy” and “love” and “utopia” – yet the inconvenient truth is their policies transform cities into rat-infested and crime-infested hellholes.

    Orkin’s press release surrounding the list focused on Chicago…

    For the tenth straight year, Chicago has secured the top spot on Orkin’s Top 50 Rattiest Cities List, maintaining its reign since the list’s inception. This decade-long dominance highlights the city’s ongoing battle with rodents, as well as the efforts taken to treat their presence, which has been driven largely by the Windy City’s infrastructure and environment

    Chicago’s abundance of alleys provides rodents with hidden havens, offering plenty of space to hide while feasting on trash. Rodents also love to burrow, finding shelter beneath subway tracks or around underground pipes. In these hidden spots, the rodent population can grow if left unchecked.

    Following Chicago, Los Angeles ranked number 2, New York number 3, San Francisco number 4, Washington, DC 5, Denver 6, Philadelphia 7, Detroit, 8, Baltimore 9, and Cleveland 10. These cities are run by radical progressive activists – and that’s the problem. City Halls are full of activists – not managers – which is why many of these towns are falling apart or plagued by crime and rats.

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    “Mice and rats are a serious concern to the millions of homeowners who deal with infestations each fall. As the weather cools, rodents seek warm shelter and food sources,” Orkin said. 

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    John Kane, Orkin National Accounts Entomologist & Quality Manager, said these critters “can cause a lot of structural problems for property owners,” adding, “They can get in around piping and even chew through walls. These tiny culprits tend to chew through wiring, which poses an increased risk of fires.”

    Not mentioned by Orkin is that rats can carry and spread diseases to humans through direct contact, bites, scratches, and contaminated food. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/30/2024 – 17:00

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Oct 30

Today’s News 30th October 2024

  • Turkiye Debunked Bild's Fake News About India Reportedly Vetoing Its BRICS Membership Request
    Turkiye Debunked Bild’s Fake News About India Reportedly Vetoing Its BRICS Membership Request

    Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

    There was never any reason to take this report seriously in the first place…

    German outlet Bild reported late last week that India allegedly vetoed Turkiye’s BRICS membership request over its ties with Pakistan, which prompted Turkiye’s Center for Combating Disinformation to respond by clarifying that the membership process wasn’t even on the Kazan Summit’s agenda. The Turkish foreign policy expert who was quoted in Bild’s article also refuted their report and added that they didn’t include the nuances of his views that he shared with them.

    Reputable Indian journalist Sidhant Sibal earlier reported that BRICS agreed to grant Turkiye partnership status together with a dozen other countries, while Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that “everyone is interested in inviting Turkey” to join their association. “BRICS Membership Or Lack Thereof Isn’t Actually That Big Of A Deal” though for the reasons explained in the preceding hyperlinked analysis, namely that anyone can voluntarily coordinate their financial multipolarity policies with the group.

    Membership only imbues countries with the right to participate in discussions on this subject whereas partnership status lets them observe these talks in real time while everyone else waits until they’re over to hear about the results. Both have an element of prestige associated with them and that’s why so many countries want to formalize such relations with BRICS. Turkiye considers itself to be a rising power and accordingly believes that it has the right to at least observe their financial multipolarity discussions.

    Russia, which hosted this year’s summit, agrees. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was thus invited to participate in the BRICS Plus/Outreach meeting. His country has an important role to play in accelerating financial multipolarity processes due to its transcontinental location and economic influence in the Eurasian Heartland brought about by the “Middle Corridor”. The specific form in which this takes and the degree of coordination with BRICS remain to be seen but this fact exists regardless of that.

    India also appreciates Turkiye’s abovementioned role in the global systemic transition despite those two’s disagreements over the unresolved Kashmir Conflict. Its grand strategy aims to carefully multi-align between competing power and influence centers in order to maximally reap the benefits from each. India only decisively takes a side on issues that directly concern its interests, especially those related to national security, since it wants to indefinitely perpetuate this balancing act.

    Turkiye’s request to formalize its relationship with BRICS isn’t considered to be something that directly concerns India’s interests, especially not its national security ones, so it was always dubious that it vetoed this even before Turkiye’s Center for Combating Disinformation debunked Bild’s report. India also respects Russia as a state while Modi and Putin are close friends so it would have been scandalous for Delhi to get in the way of Ankara’s plans after Putin invited Erdogan to attend to lobby in support of this.

    There’s no credible indication that Russia and India had any sort of disagreement over BRICS expansion during last week’s summit. Bild’s report was therefore bonafide fake news that was published for reasons that only this outlet’s editors can account for if they were honest with the public. Whatever they may be, they were ultimately counterproductive after Turkiye itself debunked their report, which damaged Bild’s reputation and exposed it as more of a tabloid than a reliable source of news and insight.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 10/30/2024 – 02:00

  • Escobar: BRICS Make History – Can They Maintain The Momentum?
    Escobar: BRICS Make History – Can They Maintain The Momentum?

    Authored by Pepe Escobar,

    The not so simple twists of fate always allow certain cities to make their mark in History in ineffable ways. Yalta. Bretton Woods. Bandung – a 1955 de-colonization staple. And now Kazan.

    The BRICS summit in Kazan, capital of Tatarstan, under the Russian presidency was historic in more ways than one – followed with riveting attention by the whole Global Majority and with perplexity by a great deal of the declining Western order.

    It did not change the world – not yet. But Kazan should be seen as the departing station of a high-speed train journey towards the emerging multi-nodal new order. The metaphor was also spatial: the pavilions at the Kazan Expo center “station” holding the summit simultaneously connected to the airport and to the aero-express train to the city.

    The rippling effects of BRICS 2024 in Kazan will be perceived for weeks, months and years ahead. Let’s start with the breakthroughs.

    The Kazan Manifesto

    1.The Kazan Declaration. That is no less than a detailed diplomatic manifesto. Yet because BRICS is not a revolutionary agent – as its members do not share an ideology – arguably the next best strategy is to propose real reform, from the UN Agenda 2030 to the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, the WHO and the G20 (whose summit is next month in Rio).

    The kernel of the Kazan Declaration – which had been debated for months – is to move in practice towards in-depth institutional changes and to reject Hegemony. The Declaration will be presented to the UN Security Council. There’s no doubt the Hegemon will reject it.

    This paragraph sums up the reform drive: “We condemn the attempts to subject development to discriminatory politically motivated practices, including but not limited to unilateral coercive measures that are incompatible with the 5 principles of the UN Charter, explicit or implied political conditionality of development assistance, activities, aiming at compromising the multiplicity of international development assistance providers.”

    2. The BRICS Outreach session. That was Bandung 1955 on macro-steroids: a microcosm of how the new, really de-colonized, non-unilateral world is being born.

    President Putin opened and handed the floor to the leaders and heads of delegations of other 35 nations, most at the highest level, including Palestine, plus the UN Secretary General. Quite a few speeches were nothing short of epic. The session lasted 3h25. It will be circulating all across the Global Majority for years.

    The session tied up with the announcement of the new 13 BRICS partners: Algeria, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Turkiye, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Vietnam. A strategic tour de force including 4 Southeast Asian powerhouses; the top two Central Asian “stans”; 3 Africans; 2 Latin Americans, and NATO member Turkiye.

    3. The Russian BRICS presidency itself. Arguably no other nation would have been able to pull off such a complex and impeccably organized summit, held after over 200 BRICS-related meetings throughout the year across Russia conducted by unnamed sherpas, members of working groups and the BRICs Business Council. Security was massive – for obvious reasons, considering the odds of a false flag/terrorist attack.

    4. Connectivity corridors. That is the main geoeconomic theme of Eurasia integration, and Afro-Eurasia integration as well. Putin explicitly named, more than once, the new growth drivers of the near future: Southeast Asia and Africa. Both happen to be key partners of several high-profile Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects. Additionally, Putin named the top two connectivity corridors of the future: the Northern Sea Route – which the Chinese describe as the Arctic Silk Road – and the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), where the three drivers are BRICS members Russia, Iran and India.

    So that translates as BRICS China crisscrossing Eurasia from east to west while BRICS Russia/Iran/India crisscross it from north to south, with ramifications in all latitudes. And with all the energy add-ons, with Iran positioning itself as a crucial energy hub, opening the finally feasible possibility of building the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline, one of the unfinished sagas of what I described in the early 2000s as Pipelineistan.

    The Return of the Primakov Triangle

    There were immense expectations all across the Global Majority of a major breakthrough in Kazan on alternative payment systems. Realist Russian-Chinese finance tech experts commented they did “not see anything at all except for another round of initiatives about grain exchange, precious metals exchange and investment platform. BRICS Clear is being somehow developed but the rest will not work without proper sovereign infrastructure.”

    And that brings us back to the UNIT project – a form of “apolitical money”, anchored in gold and BRICS+ currencies, which was exhaustively discussed by the working groups and reached the Russian Ministry of Finance. The next necessary step is a trial run by a major business conglomerate. That may happen soon, and if successful, will stimulate other major companies in BRICS nations to tag along.

    As for the BRICS digital investment platform, it is already a go. Alongside the NDB – the BRICS bank, and Putin encouraged former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff to stay on the helm – this will facilitate Global South access to financing without the dreaded IMF/World Bank “structural adjustment” conditionalities. The BRICS grain exchange, establishing clear, transparent rules, will be essential to ensure Global South food security.

    The BRICS made it clear that the complex drive towards a new settlement/payment infrastructure is inevitable, but a long work in progress, especially when the G7 – which for all practical purposes is hijacking the agenda for the G20 next month in Rio – wants to finance at least $20 billion of a $50 billion package to Ukraine with proceeds from stolen Russian assets.

    And that brings us to the most glaring BRICS problems.

    Achieving consensus on difficult dossiers is extremely hard – and may lead, in the long run, to BRICS moving towards an absolute majority mechanism to get things done.

    The Brazilian case – vetoing Venezuela as a BRICS partner – did not go down well at all among members, among partners and across the Global South. The current Lula government may be under tremendous pressure by the Hegemon’s Democrat establishment, but that in itself does not explain the decision.

    There is a massive anti-BRICS lobby inside the highest levels of the Brazilian government, “facilitated”, as usual, by American NGOs as well as the European Commission (EC), heavily infiltrated among the proverbial comprador elites. Brasilia this year privileged the G20 over BRICS. That foresees trouble for next year, when Brazil assumes the BRICS presidency.

    Prospects are not exactly brilliant. The BRICS summit next year is scheduled for July – and the decision seems to be final. That makes no sense – to do the recap of a working agenda in the middle of the year. The official excuse is that Brazil also needs to organize the Cop-30 climate conference in November. So a suggestion will be floated by top Brazilian economist Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr to hold a parallel BRICS wrap-up session during the 2025 G20 summit, which will be held in BRICS member South Africa.

    President Putin has been very accommodating – even proposing Dilma Rousseff to remain at the helm of the NDB. Yet the Russian presidency of the NDB technically starts next year; a more suitable candidate for head of the NDB would be Aleksei Mozhin, until recently the Russian representative in the IMF.

    There’s a major takeaway of all of the above.

    Kazan proved that the driving force of BRICS is actually the notorious Primakov triangle – or RIC (Russia, India, China). It’s now possible to add Iran, and that would make it RIIC. Everything of substance in the inter-connected processes of BRICS integration and Afro-Eurasia integration depends on RIIC.

    Saudi Arabia remains an open proposition. Not even Putin answered whether Riyadh is in, out, or over the wall. Diplomatic sources hint MbS is waiting for the result of the US presidential elections. As much as Saudi Arabia’s wealth is invested in the Anglo-American sphere – and can be stolen in no time – relations with the Russia-China strategic partnership at the highest level are excellent.

    RIC scored a major hit right before the Kazan summit with Beijing and New Delhi announcing their Ladakh normalization. That was achieved by Russian mediation. Then there’s Turkiye; Erdogan was adamant to stress his BRICS enthusiasm in the few hours he spent in Kazan. Later in Istanbul, scholars confirmed he’s dead serious about Turkiye’s partner status and eventual admission as a full member.

    In the language of symbols, the minarets of the Kul Sharif mosque in the Kazan Kremlin were the de facto trademark of the summit: graphic multipolarity in effect. The lands of Islam did get the message – with serious, auspicious repercussions ahead. As for the conductors as the high-speed multi-nodal train leaves the station, all attention should be focused on RIIC. May all the Global South have a safe trip.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 10/29/2024 – 23:25

  • "Complete Lawlessness": Seattle Residents Concerned With "Chaos" Cause By Illegal Street Racing
    “Complete Lawlessness”: Seattle Residents Concerned With “Chaos” Cause By Illegal Street Racing

    We’ve already seen it wreak havoc in cities like Philadelphia, and now illegal street racing is taking over another Democrat-run, Democrat-DA led city: Seattle. And the chaos is starting to concern residents.

    Seattle police are seeking drivers involved in two weekend “street takeovers” that caused traffic jams and alarmed nearby residents and workers, KING5 Seattle reported on Monday. 

    Resident Clay Church said: “Felt like chaos and you something you see at a frat party. Ten fireworks I saw. Multiple were thrown at the cop cars directly. That’s kind of when the cops backed another block. [It was] really loud between that and the cars, complete chaos.”

    “One hundred to 150 people out here with their cars essentially, drag racing, doing donuts. Kind of complete lawlessness, really,” Church added.

    Church described the early Sunday street takeover outside his apartment at 3rd Ave and Clay St. Around 1 a.m., he saw people blocking the intersection with lime scooters and orange cones.

    “We see things on Friday nights. But you don’t expect this type of thing,” another resident said. “We were very nervous someone was going to get hit by a car. Just with the mass amount of people out there and with these cars just spinning.” 

    According to KING5, staff reported the street takeover lasted under 20 minutes. Tower camera footage showed a bystander throwing an object at a car, sparking a conflict before police intervened.

    “They need to understand what folks go through who do live in downtown and understand that it’s just not acceptable,” Church concluded. 

    A statement from the Mayor’s office read: “Mayor Harrell believes it is critical that we work to prevent this behavior and hold offenders accountable using all tools available, including law enforcement efforts, new safety technologies, and legislation recently passed by the City Council. We would defer to SPD on the specifics of these particular events and law enforcement tactics.”

    Maybe Seattle residents will think twice before urging defunding the police the next time we have a “Summer of Love”…

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 10/29/2024 – 23:00

  • What China's "Joint Sword-2024B" Military Drill Tells Us
    What China’s “Joint Sword-2024B” Military Drill Tells Us

    Authored by Carl Schuster via The Epoch Times,

    Involving over 125 aircraft and 34 coast guard and naval units, Beijing’s recent military drills around Taiwan give us some insights into Xi Jinping’s plans for forcing the island’s reunification with the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

    This latest intimidation operation was intended to warn Taipei and its potential supporters that Beijing has the capability and will to isolate the democratically governed island from any external support or assistance. However, it also signaled that Xi intends to present the initial phase of a violent reunification effort as one justified under international law.

    For example, the People’s Armed Police Coast Guard’s (PAPCG’s) opening participation indicates China may launch that gambit by declaring a maritime exclusion or quarantine zone around Taiwan. Coast Guard cutters not only circumnavigated the main island of Taiwan, they also patrolled in the waters off Taiwan’s islands just off China’s shores. Nor was this the first time the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Eastern Theater Command has incorporated PAPCG and Maritime Security Agency (MSA) patrol craft in its exercises opposite Taiwan three times since 2022.

    Seven PAPCG cutters participated in this latest exercise, and a similar number were active in last summer’s as well. Additionally, last August, the MSA’s largest patrol ship, the Type 918 Hai Xun 06, challenged a Taiwan ferry going the offshore island of Matsu. It did not board the ferry but demanded that it declare its cargo and destination and then escorted it outside Taiwan’s declared territorial waters. The patrol ship presented an intimidating presence for the ferry’s crew and passengers. The growing participation of PRC maritime law enforcement units is significant.

    In effect, Beijing is at least considering a maritime law enforcement operation to isolate Taiwan from external support. It will not declare a blockade since that is an act of war typically employed against a hostile sovereign state, a status Beijing denies Taipei. Instead, Beijing argues that Taiwan is a renegade province, making all of its islands, air space, and waters sovereign PRC territory in “rebel” hands. Beijing claims that Taiwan’s status gives China the right under international law, including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), to control access to that territory and regulate commerce and resources within Taipei’s economic exclusion zone.

    Under that mindset, Beijing can argue that any maritime quarantine it declares against Taiwan constitutes a reasonable domestic law enforcement operation authorized under international law. It can use that declaration to monitor, intercept, and search shipping entering the quarantine zone to ensure the cargos contain no contraband or materials that Beijing considers supportive of the rebellion. Xi may hope to depict any foreign attempt to assist Taipei under those circumstances as an act of war violating Beijing’s right to re-establish its authority over a province in rebellion. That may give some Western leaders pause since they may have influential “legal experts” who accept Beijing’s interpretation.

    China’s PAPCG is the world’s largest coast guard, and the waters around Taiwan off-China’s shore islands will be reinforced by the PRC’s Maritime Safety Administration’s units. Additionally, as is often the case in the South China Sea, the PAPCG will enjoy the backing of the responsible PLA Theater Command. The PLA Navy and Air Force will maintain patrols, presence, and readiness to respond to any challenges beyond the PAPCG’s capabilities. Equally important, recent missile tests by the PLA Rocket Force and past participation in Eastern Theater Command Exercises indicate preparations for potential anti-Taiwan operations if required.

    The 13-hour-long Joint Sword-2024B was neither as large nor as complex as China’s earlier intimidation exercises against Taiwan. Still, it does demonstrate Beijing’s aggressive intentions and provides some potential insights into how it intends to achieve them. The PRC employs a more adroitly crafted narrative and operates with greater care and subtlety than America’s traditional enemies. It will present its acts as legitimate and lawful actions necessary to ending a rebellion on its territory. All of its military operations have a political narrative and purpose behind them.

    Beijing’s “Three Warfares” doctrine integrates media, public opinion, and legal activities to shape the legal and political environment in its favor. The PRC often presents a positive legal façade to divide its opposition and hide its true intentions. Exposing what’s behind the façade is critical to deterring Xi’s aggressive plans. That may be the greatest challenge the United States and its allies face in deterring Xi’s destabilizing designs in the Western Pacific.

    Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 10/29/2024 – 22:35

  • The Most Devastating COVID Report So Far
    The Most Devastating COVID Report So Far

    Authored by Jayanta Bhattacharya via The Brownstone Institute,

    The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.

    HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign.

    The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake.

    The strategy:

    1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk

    2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission. 

    The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.

    Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.

    The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.

    The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.

    President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?

    In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.

    During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.

    In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.

    In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.

    Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.

    HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.

    When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.

    In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.

    The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.

    In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?

    The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.

    The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.

    I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.

    In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.

    With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.

    The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.

    Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.

    You can find a copy of the full House report here.

    The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 10/29/2024 – 22:10

  • Trump Responds After Biden Calls 80 Million Americans Human Garbage, Then Lies About It
    Trump Responds After Biden Calls 80 Million Americans Human Garbage, Then Lies About It

    Update (2147ET): President Trump has responded to Biden’s comments, saying “Remember Hillary, she said deplorable… Garbage I think is worse.”

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    Does Harris agree?

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    And of course, the media is already spinning this – suggesting that Biden said ‘Trump’s supporter’s‘ – singular, as if he was only referring to Hinchcliffe.

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    Trump running mate JD Vance responded as well – calling out journalists trying to spin this:

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    *  *  *

    You may have heard. During Donald Trump’s 7-hour, celebrity-packed rally at Madison Square Garden, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” in reference to the US territory’s well known problem with overflowing landfills.

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    The left went into absolute hysterics,

    Liberal comedian Jon Stewart was the voice of reason…

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    And just when you thought the dust had settled, President Biden called 80 million Americans human garbage:

    “Donald Trump has no character. He doesn’t give a damn about the Latino community…just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage?…The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters,” reports NBC News’ Gabe Gutierrez.

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    Update: Then he lied about it!

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    Even CNN isn’t buying it…

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    Meanwhile, Puerto Rican Trump supporters responded with a pro-Trump caravan…

    Puerto Rican politician Zoraida Buxó came out for Trump at a Tuesday rally…

    Stay classy, Biden…

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 10/29/2024 – 21:46

  • Citadel’s Griffin: "Expectation Today Trump Wins White House"
    Citadel’s Griffin: “Expectation Today Trump Wins White House”

    At Saudi Arabia’s Future Investment Initiative summit, Citadel CEO Ken Griffin and Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman shared their views on the upcoming US presidential election, which is now just six days away.

    “The expectation today is that Donald Trump will win the White House,” Griffin told the panel at Saudi Arabia’s Future Investment Initiative summit, adding, “We are at that moment of peak uncertainty. It is a race that Trump is favored to win, but it is almost a coin toss.”

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    During the same panel discussion, Schwarzman weighed in on US politics, indicating, “I don’t know who’s going to win the presidency … but it appears Trump is in a much better base of knowledge of how that job works and how to be efficient and effective in doing it.”

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    Earlier, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon told Bloomberg TV, “We do have an election, and there will be policy decisions coming,” adding, “Those will impact the trajectory in 2025 and 2026.” 

    Equity and bond markets have already moved in directions that indicate a possible Trump victory. We detailed this in length for pro subs in a note titled “These Are Goldman’s Favorite Election Trades.”

    That note highlighted Goldman’s Republican Policy pair (GSP24REP), up 7% on the year, while the Democratic Policy pair (GSP24DEM) is down 2.3%. 

    Weeks ago, we showed how Polymarket’s Trump election odds influenced the bond market. 

    The current Polymarket Trump-Harris spread is massively in favor of a Trump win.

    “The mainstream lost its monopoly over media. Now it’s losing its monopoly over polls, prediction markets and shaping public opinion as trust shifts to independent new entities,” we noted on X. 

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    According to the national polling aggregate by RealClearPolitics, Trump is holding a slight lead over Harris. 

    While Griffin and Schwarzman shared their view on the upcoming election on Tuesday, Elon Musk has gone all-in for Trump.

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    It appears America’s leading entrepreneurs want real leadership and stability after 3.5 years of uncertainty and chaos with the Biden-Harris regime. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 10/29/2024 – 21:45

  • The Importance Of Discipline
    The Importance Of Discipline

    Authored by Christian Milord via The Epoch Times,

    What does the undisciplined life look like? The picture that comes to mind would be an individual who tends to be disorganized in a number of behavioral dimensions. They might be slovenly in appearance, arrive late to appointments, avoid responsibilities, have a short attention span, give in to every impulse, take shortcuts, lack focus and purpose, and so on.

    The undisciplined life doesn’t arrive in a vacuum. It can develop in a young person’s life perhaps due to a lack of firm role models around to steer the youngster toward self-control and the hard work of character building.

    If an individual fails to form disciplined habits, he or she can more easily be buffeted back and forth by the winds of fate.

    It takes real effort to become organized and reliable. In other words, it takes discipline to become disciplined!

    The Disciplined Life

    No one needs to be undisciplined forever. An individual can learn self-control through experience (trial and error) and observation. One does not need to isolate oneself or become a monk in order to form disciplined habits. Constructive routines can be formulated regardless of the environment one lives in.

    If you are tired of being pushed around in life, developing disciplined habits will help you to take control of your life in an assertive manner. Implementing these habits starts in the morning. Over time, I developed a routine of rising very early in the morning and taking in some moderate exercise to get the circulation going. This is a purposeful start to a new day as you are eager to plunge into the day’s activities without the need for coffee. Morning prayers are also beneficial.

    Another facet of a structured life involves diet and nutrition. Consuming a healthy diet in order to stay fit requires discipline and the ability to resist the temptation of junk food that bombards us at every turn. Most folks are aware of what constitutes a healthy diet, but they have a hard time sticking to it. Self-control helps you to stay on the narrow path of good nutrition, although we all have lapses from time to time.

    Diet, exercise, and sufficient rest can help us to be confident and healthy as we dress appropriately, maintain personal hygiene, and utilize our energy wisely each day.

    Turning off electronic devices an hour or two before retiring for the night also bestows restful sleep. None of these habits come easily, but once they are part of one’s daily schedule, it becomes easier to abide by them, because you witness the positive outcomes.

    On a more practical level, delayed gratification is a positive principle that comes from a disciplined life. If we are careful at how we spend our income, we can learn how to invest and save more for the future so that we are less inclined to incur debts that can lead to downward mobility. The reckless running up of credit card debt is a prime example of a path that can send one to a poorhouse.

    Disciplining the mind is another aspect of a disciplined life. Sometimes we are faced with information overload, and it can be a challenge to quiet our thoughts down and focus on what is important. This demands practice and mindful breathing exercises to eliminate the stress and invite relaxation in. Muddled thinking can give way to clarity of thought.

    The mind is a powerful instrument that can either sabotage our goals or guide us on the road toward self-governance. If harnessed properly, the mind can enable us to help other folks more effectively as we develop social skills. By assisting others, you end up helping yourself as well.

    Practicing self-discipline can also lead one to a greater spiritual awareness regarding nature and the wonders of God’s creation. Prayer from the heart can strengthen us to cope with the hardships and rejections we all face during our lives. The key is to not give up when faced with obstacles that sometimes arrive two or three at a time.

    I’ve lost count of the number of occupational and personal hurdles I’ve encountered over the years. You learn to grow a thicker skin as the problems roll off your back. Indeed, sometimes these closed doors can point to other opportunities. Suffering can be unpleasant, because we all have feelings, but it’s a part of life that can help us to be empathetic toward other folks.

    Finally, a disciplined life can multiply our chances for success. We learn how to communicate effectively, develop sensory and situational awareness, tame our emotions, embrace lifelong learning, and show gratitude for our blessings. With discipline, we can better organize our lives, yet still have the flexibility to pivot from the structure when necessary. We can also strike a balance between purposeful work and task completion with relaxing leisure time. Self-discipline is part of what comprises a virtuous life.

    Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 10/29/2024 – 20:30

  • Trump To Unleash Financial Armageddon On Mexican Drug Cartels If He Wins: We Will Be "Seizing Assets" 
    Trump To Unleash Financial Armageddon On Mexican Drug Cartels If He Wins: We Will Be “Seizing Assets” 

    Former President Trump reportedly told allies earlier this year that he would covertly deploy Tier 1 US Special Forces operators to Mexico to wipe out drug cartel leadership if he returns to the White House. However, storming the command and control centers of cartels with guns blazing may not be the proper strategy to dismantle these criminal organizations.

    “I’m announcing that for the first time under my administration, we are seizing the assets of the criminal gangs and drug cartels and we will use those assets to create a compensation fund to provide restitution for the victims of migrant crime,” Trump said at a press conference on Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago. 

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    Trump’s comments at Mar-a-Lago suggest if he wins in November, the US Treasury Department may ramp up a financial war against the violent Mexico-based drug trafficking cartel responsible for America’s drug overdose catastrophe. 

    “When it comes to drug trafficking, we haven’t enforced sanctions against banks seriously,” David Asher, a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute specializing in US foreign policy and law enforcement, told AP News in April 2023. 

    Asher continued, “If we can sanction Russian oligarchs and banks, why can’t we do the same thing to Mexican drug lords and their bankers and bank accounts and banks — especially when we know who they are.”

    Under a Trump presidency, international fentanyl trafficking could be declared a national emergency. This would then allow the Treasury to sanction the hell out of drug cartels and their banks. This would enable Trump to confiscate the sanctioned property of fentanyl traffickers. And it’s not just targeting Mexican banks where traffickers hide their monies – Chinese banks could be targets, too.

    Sanctions would be a tool by Trump to then deter Chinese chemical firms from sending fentanyl-precursor chemicals to Mexico. When cooked, these chemicals are turned into fentanyl, shipped over Biden-Harris’ open southern borders, and then flooded into streets of American towns and cities. 

    If Trump wins, expect these illicit financial networks of the cartels and Chinese companies participating in this drug crisis scheme to be instant targets. 

    Remember, China doesn’t even have to fire a shot, and 100,000 Americans die each year from the drug death overdose crisis. Many of these deaths are folks who are prime-aged working men and women, in other words, military-aged men and women. Some say this is reverse opium wars waged by the Communists on the West. Trump may end this chaos that Biden-Harris allowed to expand drastically. 

    Will activist hedge funds short the peso and Mexican banks if Trump wins? It certainly sounds like a big theme in the making, of course, dependent on a Trump win. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 10/29/2024 – 20:05

  • October Surprise: NY Times And Media Matters To Drop Hit Piece On Conservative News
    October Surprise: NY Times And Media Matters To Drop Hit Piece On Conservative News

    Over the last 48 hours, Tucker Carlson, the Daily Wire‘s Ben Shapiro, ZeroHedge, and others have received text messages from a NY Times reporter who’s about to drop a pre-election screed on ‘misinformation’ in conjunction with radical left-wing group Media Matters – which exists to deplatform conservative voices.

    Tucker Carlson simply told them to fuck off, as one does.

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    Ben Shapiro, meanwhile, wrote in a Monday post to X, “If you were wondering what the legacy media would plan for its October surprise, wonder no longer: it’s here. Today, I received the following text from a reporter at @NYTimes.”

    “What, precisely, is NYT doing? It’s perfectly obvious: using research from Media Matters, a radical Left-wing organization whose sole purpose is destroying conservative media (see below), in order to pressure YouTube to demonetize and penalize any and all conservatives ONE WEEK FROM THE ELECTION,” Shapiro continues.

    “This isn’t about “election misinformation.” Obviously. As pretty much everyone knows, I have always acknowledged that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. And if it is “election misinformation” to point out the “rigging” of the voting rules for election 2020, resulting in massive mail-in voting and ballot harvesting, then the NYT might want to talk to…the NYT and CBS News, for starters,” Shapiro writes, noting that those outlets essentially said the same thing. 

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    ZeroHedge, yours truly, also received a nastygram from Newsguard – who Revolver News exposed as a complete joke years ago.

    Fox News explains what’s going on…

    Meanwhile, the author of the hit piece – Nico Grant, has locked his profile on X…

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    If we haven’t done so recently, we’d like to thank all of our premium and professional subscribers for helping combat this cabal.

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 10/29/2024 – 19:55

  • US Ambassador To Lebanon Promotes 'Internal Uprising' To Assist Israel: Report
    US Ambassador To Lebanon Promotes ‘Internal Uprising’ To Assist Israel: Report

    Via The Cradle

    A high-ranking Lebanese security source revealed to Al-Akhbar newspaper that the US Ambassador to Lebanon, Lisa Johnson, is continuing her agenda to prepare Lebanon for a “post-Hezbollah era” by mobilizing “internal” forces against the resistance movement while it fights the Israeli Army.

    In discussions with Lebanese politicians, Johnson reportedly said, “Israel cannot achieve everything through war; it’s time for you to do your part and launch an internal uprising under the banner of ‘Enough.’“

    Still frame via YouTube/US Embassy Beirut

    The ambassador added, “The Lebanese people must show their desire to rise up and get rid of Hezbollah and return to the context that emerged after the assassination of Rafik Hariri, especially since the regional, international, and field circumstances are in your favor.”

    According to the source, the ambassador asked the politicians, “Why do you seem afraid? Hezbollah has been defeated, its leadership is destroyed, and we are with you, and the entire free world stands by your side.”

    Johnson encouraged her Lebanese allies to advocate for the election of Lebanese Armed Forces Commander General Joseph Aoun as President of Lebanon, saying, “He (Aoun) will appoint a strong commander for the Lebanese Army, and we will support the Army in restraining all Hezbollah supporters. You will have backing from Arab states and the West. But the time to act is now.”

    According to the high-level Lebanese security source, Ambassador Johnson’s allies are conducting incitement operations to stoke internal sectarian tensions in areas where displaced persons, mostly Shia from Beirut’s southern suburbs and the south of Lebanon, are now staying after fleeing their homes due to Israeli bombing.

    Lebanon’s society is multi-confessional and multi-national, making the country susceptible to division by outside forces. Lebanon is comprised of Christians (Catholic and Orthodox), Muslims (Sunni and Shia), Druze, and Palestinian and Syrian refugees.

    Civil war engulfed Lebanon’s multifaceted society between 1975 to 1990. An estimated 150,000 people were killed. 

    The source speaking with Al-Akhbar added that “mobilization operations” are being carried out in some neighborhoods and areas controlled by the Lebanese Forces, a right-wing Christian political party, under the pretext of “protecting our areas from the chaos of the displaced and so that they do not turn into occupiers.”

    In an effort to weaken Hezbollah, Johnson has also begun calling on politicians, civil organizations, and media professionals with whom she has influence to drive a wedge between Lebanon’s Shia community and Hezbollah.

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

    The source said that Johnson has clearly stated her wish to take advantage of the current Israeli war to completely eliminate Hezbollah, not only militarily but politically as well.

    “We do not only want to limit Hezbollah’s influence, but we will strike its support lines, and we are working non-stop to bring down the regime in Iran as well,” Johnson reportedly said.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 10/29/2024 – 19:40

  • US Approves Weapons Sale To Riyadh Despite Unprecedented Iran-Saudi Drills
    US Approves Weapons Sale To Riyadh Despite Unprecedented Iran-Saudi Drills

    Authored by Kyle Anzalone via The Libertarian Institute,

    Last week, Saudi Arabia conducted unprecedented drills with its rival Iran in the Sea of Oman in a sign of warming relations between the regional powers. Following the announcement, Washington approved a massive arms sale to the Gulf Kingdom. 

    On Thursday, the US announced it had approved the sale of 1,000 Tube-launched, Optically Tracked, Wire-guided (TOW) missiles to Saudi Arabia. Raytheon will be the contractor for the $440 million deal. 

    US Army file image showing vehicle mounted TOW missile launch.

    Washington’s press release about the deal came after Saudi Arabia said it conducted joint naval exercises with Iran on Wednesday.

    “The Royal Saudi Naval Forces had recently concluded a joint naval exercise with the Iranian Naval Forces alongside other countries in the Sea of Oman,” a Saudi military official told AFP. 

    While the drills signal a strengthening relationship between Gulf powers, Washington providing a huge shipment of weapons to Riyadh as it also backs Israeli strikes on Iran could scuttle the steps towards a more stable Saudi-Iranian relationship. 

    The White House took a similar approach to the South China Sea. In July, China and the Philippines agreed to a deal that saw tensions around the Second Thomas Shoal decrease.

    However, the Biden administration then sent $500 million in military aid to Manila. Shortly thereafter, the Philippines and Chinese vessels began colliding near another reef in the South China Sea.  

    Riyadh and Tehran have been building their relationship since Beijing brokered a landmark peace deal between the two countries last year. President Joe Biden has sought to take the Middle East in a different direction, bringing Saudi Arabia into a coalition with Israel aimed at Iran. 

    The Saudis and Iranians recently went from spending decades as bitter regional enemies and rivals to holding joint military drills after a China-brokered detente…

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    The announcement of the massive arms deal for Raytheon comes after the arms merchant agreed to pay nearly $1 billion in penalties after overbilling the Pentagon and bribing foreign governments. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 10/29/2024 – 18:50

  • Maddow Wheels Out Neocon Nuland To Declare Russia Is Interfering In 2024 Election
    Maddow Wheels Out Neocon Nuland To Declare Russia Is Interfering In 2024 Election

    MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow can’t let an election go by without wheeling out the usual cadre of tired old neocons, with the latest to appear on her show being former State Department official Victoria Nuland. As expected, she sought to lump Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Vladimir Putin together in a segment on ‘disinformation’ this week.

    “He’s at it again!” Nuland claimed of Putin, resurrecting talking points heavily featured in the prior two elections as well. She accused Musk of being in essence a useful idiot of the Kremlin, allowing Putin to use “sophisticated tools” on his X platform to ‘interfere’ and influence voters. “And he has more sophisticated tools… He’s got a brand new, very powerful tool, which is Elon Musk and X,” Nuland claimed of Putin (and by extension Trump, according to her talking points).

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

    “In 2020, the social media companies worked hard with the U.S. government to try to do content moderation, to try to catch this stuff as it was happening. This time, we have Elon Musk talking directly to the Kremlin and ensuring that every time the Russians put out something, it gets five million views before anyone can catch it,” Nuland continued. And then she warned: “Trump is taking Putin lessons, as autocrats around the world are.”

    Maddow, for her part, added: “For the United States to not be the leader of the free world, but rather in effectively a sort of ‘Axis’ with the dictators of Russia and China, and North Korea.” So clearly Maddow wanted to escalate the claims to put Trump in league with all dictators of the world, absurdly enough.

    “For the United States to be allied with those countries instead of our traditional alliances — I’m not sure people have absorbed the magnitude of what you’re describing there,” Maddow followed with.

    Aaron Maté, an indepdent journalist who has spent years debunking key Russiagate talking points, issued the following commentary in reaction to the Nuland-Maddow interview segment…

    * * *

    For a third consecutive presidential election, Russiagate propagandists are accusing Russia of manipulating Americans into not voting for their preferred candidate. Here, Victoria Nuland complains that Twitter is no longer partnering with the US gov’t to censor stories — what she calls the “content moderation” that we saw “in 2020.”

    This is a reference to censoring journalism on Hunter Biden’s laptop based on the CIA lie that it was “Russian disinformation.”

    Speaking of Russia and election interference, Nuland is well-versed in practicing it: as a senior State Dept. official, she was instrumental in funneling the Clinton-funded “Steele dossier” into the FBI. She personally authorized the early July 2016 meeting where Steele gave an FBI agent his dossier, which helped kick off the multi-year Russiagate scam.

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

    * * *

    And another commenter wrote that “Nuland openly longs for the days of US Govt/Twitter 1.0 censorship collusion.”

    “Free speech on X is under constant assault — their information monopoly has been destroyed in an election cycle — and they desperately want the Twitter 1.0 censorship regime back.”

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 10/29/2024 – 18:25

  • Starbucks Warns Corporate Staff: Show Up In Office Or Get Fired
    Starbucks Warns Corporate Staff: Show Up In Office Or Get Fired

    The golden era of remote work seems to be ending. Starbucks is the latest mega-corporation to enforce a return-to-office mandate for white-collar workers.

    An internal message from the coffee chain obtained by Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal states a new “standardized process” will be implemented at the start of the new year to hold employees accountable if they don’t comply with work requirements, such as coming into the office at least three days a week. The memo stated that non-compliance could result in termination. 

    Starbucks reminded hybrid white-collar workers that working arrangements had not changed and that rules must be followed. The memo emphasized: “We are continuing to support our leaders as they hold their teams accountable.” 

    Bloomberg quoted new Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol last month as saying, “This is not a game of tracking. This is a game of winning,” adding, “I care about seeing everybody here succeed, and if success requires us being together more often than not, let’s be together more often.” 

    A company spokesperson told Bloomberg, “We are continuing to support our leaders as they hold their teams accountable to our existing hybrid work policy.” 

    The bigger picture here is the remote work revolution across corporate America was more or less a total flunk. It did not drive increased office productivity; instead, it was the opposite. More or less, hybrid work policies, a combination of home and office, will likely be the gold standard moving forward. 

    Meanwhile, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently told corporate staffers to work from the office five days a week, up from three days a week – completely reversing pandemic-era policies. Also, UPS, JPMorgan Chase, Dell Technologies, and Boeing have asked parts of their white-collar workforces to return to offices full-time. 

    We suspect Starbucks CEO Niccol’s enforcement of office work requirements is part of his attempt to turn around the sinking ship.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 10/29/2024 – 17:40

  • Government Gaslights People About The Economy
    Government Gaslights People About The Economy

    Authored by Ron Paul via The Mises Institute,

    Public opinion polls consistently show the economy is one of the top issues, if not the top issue, for American voters.

    This may strike some as odd, since official government statistics show low unemployment and declining price inflation, suggesting the Federal Reserve has engineered a “soft landing” bringing down inflation without causing a recession.

    So why the concern over the economy? One reason is more people are realizing government economic figures hide the truth about the economy.

    “Recession Since 2022: US Economic Income and Output Have Fallen Overall for Four Years” is a Brownstone Institute research paper by Dr. E.J. Antoni, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and Dr. Peter St. Onge, a fellow with the Mises Institute.

    It details how the federal government understates inflation, while making wages, profits, and economic growth appear stronger.

    Dr. Antoni and Dr. St. Onge use a more accurate measure of inflation than that used by government to uncover the true state of the economy. Their calculations show that the US economy has been in recession since 2022.

    The government claims that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increased by approximately 13.7 percent from 2019 through the first half of 2024.

    When the more accurate inflation number is used, the result is a 2.5 percent decline in GDP.

    The federal government’s figures also show the American people’s disposable income increased by 12.9 percent from 2019 through the first half of 2024.

    However, when the more accurate way of calculating price inflation is used, it shows Americans’ disposable income declined by 2.3 percent.

    Dr. Antoni and Dr. St. Onge are hardly the first to expose how the government uses doctored statistics to make the economy look stronger.

    John Williams’s ShadowStats has regularly shown how government manipulates data to underreport unemployment and price inflation.

    Government distortions of economic data mislead the people regarding the true state of the economy. They also mislead Congress, the president, and maybe even the Federal Reserve.

    Until the Audit the Fed bill becomes law, we will not know for sure what data the central bank relies on.

    Making economic policy decisions based on flawed data enables politicians to ignore the dangers posed by Congress’s refusal to cut federal spending.

    Government spending puts pressure on the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low. The Federal Reserve can keep interest rates low because the dollar’s world reserve currency status guarantees a strong demand for US dollars.

    A growing number of countries, though, are seeking alternatives to the dollar. One reason for this is resentment over the US government’s use of the dollar’s world reserve currency status to force other counties to abide by US demands.

    Saudi Arabia is moving away from exclusively using dollars for its oil trade.

    The “petrodollar” is a major reason the dollar has been able to maintain its world reserve currency status.

    If the dollar loses its world reserve currency status, America would face a major economic crisis. This crisis could lead to the collapse of the welfare-warfare state and the fiat money system that makes it possible. The danger is the replacement could be even worse as a frightened populace turns toward an authoritarian promise of security in exchange for restriction of liberty.

    However, the collapse could also result in a turn toward respect for the principles of liberty, limited government, free markets, and a foreign policy of peace and free trade.

    Those who know the truth must continue to educate our fellow citizens about the benefits of liberty.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 10/29/2024 – 17:20

  • Russian Special Forces Academy In Chechnya Hit By Drone Attack
    Russian Special Forces Academy In Chechnya Hit By Drone Attack

    A drone slammed into a building and campus in Chechnya known as the Russian Special Forces University in the early morning hours of Tuesday, regional governor Ramzan Kadyrov has confirmed.

    “At 6:30 this morning, the roof of an empty building on the territory of the Russian Special Forces University caught fire in Gudermes as a result of an unmanned aerial attack,” Kadyrov said. The town which hosts the military school lies just over 20 miles east of the capital Grozny.

    Via social media/X

    “No one was killed or injured. The fire has been extinguished,” Kadyrov detailed in the statement posted to Telegram. He claimed the attack didn’t lead to significant disruptions at the training academy. However, that seems doubtful given the photographs showing the extent of fires and damage to the roof in the aftermath. Images suggest more than one UAV may have hit.

    The institution is known for being the only private campus for training Russian military special operators. But tens of thousands have been sent through its elite training program.

    Politico has detailed that the school heavily contributes to training special operations troops deployed in Ukraine:

    “The school’s website says it instructs both soldiers and civilians in a variety of combat tactics, including shooting, artillery and parachute landing. More than 47,000 troops deployed to the front line in Ukraine have been trained there, according to the Kremlin.

    The school also reportedly has a combat drone production facility attached to it. This marks the first such major drone attack on this specific region since the Ukraine war began.

    The Amsterdam-based Moscow Times has noted it’s possible the drone was not sent from Ukraine, given the great distance of the Caucasus from the front lines. 

    “He did not say whether he believed the drone had been launched from Ukraine, noting only that police were investigating the incident,” the report said in reference to Gov. Kadyrov’s statement. “Chechnya is located around 600 kilometers (373 miles) southeast of the border with Ukraine.”

    However, there has been an emerging reporting consensus that this was the result of a Ukrainian attack, and not the result of recent tensions among rival factions on the Russian southern Caucasus republics: 

    Ukraine has frequently struck Russia with drones in the course of the war, but Tuesday’s attack appeared to be the first against Chechnya. There was no immediate comment from Kyiv.

    “They’ve bitten us – we will destroy them,” [Chechen leader] Kadyrov told reporters in a video published by Russian state news agency RIA. “In the very near future we’ll show them the kind of vengeance they’ve never even dreamt of,” he said.

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    Chechen troops have from the start of the war been very active in Ukraine, including specialized units deployed, which has outraged Kiev. Kadyrov in particular has been a regional leader who has been very vocal in supporting Putin’s decision to go to war.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 10/29/2024 – 17:00

  • Trump "Violent Rhetoric" Needs "Close Monitoring": Political 'Scientists'
    Trump “Violent Rhetoric” Needs “Close Monitoring”: Political ‘Scientists’

    Authored by Matt Lamb via The College Fix,

    Political scientists determine Trump uses more violent language than Obama by comparing the Republican’s campaign speeches to the Democrat’s White House addresses

    President Donald Trump’s “violent rhetoric” is getting worse, according to two political scientists.

    University of California Los Angeles doctoral student Nikita Savin and UCLA Professor Daniel Treisman reached their conclusion after analyzing Trump campaign and presidential speeches from 2015 to 2024.

    They compared it to President Barack Obama’s White House weekly addresses, even though a campaign speech is different in tone than a formal address. They have also said Hillary Clinton’s violent language is part of her “toughness” as a female politician confronting stereotypes.

    “While politicians’ rhetoric does not always predict their actions, Trump’s increasing attachment to violent language and populist themes may offer insight into his future approach, whether as president or in defeat,” they wrote in The Conversation.

    This recent article is based on a study published in July and updated this month. “As political scientists, we believe the rise of such rhetoric merits close monitoring because of its potential implications for the broader political landscape,” they wrote.

    Over the summer, Treisman made similar warnings. “How Trump’s vocabulary will evolve in the coming months remains to be seen,” Treisman stated in a news release for UCLA. “But the rising temperature of his rhetoric bears watching.

    Trump uses a “violent tone” and a “controversial rhetorical style,” the political scientists wrote for The Conversation.

    The study relies on a dictionary that Treisman himself developed with another researcher.

    His language is close to “authoritarian figures such as Kim Jong Un and Fidel Castro,” the scholars wrote.

    The political scientists wrote that Trump uses “aggressive” language, such as promising to “drain the swamp.”

    Old Trump used to not be as bad, according to the academics.

    They wrote:

    Trump’s rhetorical style has undergone significant changes since he launched his first presidential campaign. During his initial run in 2015-2016, his language became more inclusive, with a rise in the use of “we” and “the people” and fewer references to elites and social groups he views negatively (“them”).

    Once in office, however, his speeches exhibited a more combative style. His use of violent language surged, and references to “them” became more frequent.

    This evolution suggests that Trump’s rhetoric is adaptable, changing in response to political contexts and the audience he aims to engage.

    “His increasing use of inflammatory language and swear words after taking office contrasts with the more measured tone he adopted during his 2016 campaign,” they wrote.

    Biden was much better, according to the researchers.

    “Despite being president during the start of two foreign wars and other ongoing conflicts abroad, Biden’s use of violent vocabulary during both the 2020 and 2024 presidential campaigns was consistently less than Trump’s,” UCLA wrote in its summary.

    (Biden’s administration has labeled pro-lifers as an “extremist threat” and warned of a “dark winter” if enough Americans didn’t take the COVID-19 jab).

    The scholars also explained away violent imagery from Hillary Clinton.

    “Hillary Clinton’s use of violent words in her 2015-2016 campaign slightly exceeded Trump’s relatively moderate level at that time, which could reflect Clinton’s desire to show ‘toughness’ given stereotypes of women leaders being less hawkish,” UCLA stated in its news release, paraphrasing the researchers.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 10/29/2024 – 16:40

  • Google Jumps After Beating Across The Board
    Google Jumps After Beating Across The Board

    And they’re off.

    What until now was a solid, if not stellar earnings season, is about to go into overdrive as the tech giants report Q3 earnings, although unlike previous quarters, growth for the Magnificent 7 is expected to be far more subdued.

    So turning to the first true megacap to report earnings (after a stellar print from minicap TSLA last week) Google parent Alphabet which as a reminder yesterday Goldman pointed out that ahead of earnings hedge fund positioning here was not as excessive (at 6/10), and may be why the stock is soaring some 4% after the close on what is a solid beat across the board. Here are the details :

    • Q3 EPS $2.12, up 37% and beating estimate $1.84
    • Q3 Revenue $88.27 billion, beating estimate $86.45 billion
      • Google advertising revenue $65.85 billion, beating estimate $65.5 billion
        • Google Search & Other Revenue $49.39 billion, beating estimate $49.08 billion
      • YouTube ads revenue $8.92 billion, beating estimate $8.89 billion
      • Google Network Revenue $7.55 billion, beating estimate $7.41 billion
      • Google Subscriptions, Platforms and Devices Revenue $10.66 billion, beating estimate $9.79 billion
      • Google Services revenue $76.51 billion, beating estimate $75.24 billion
      • Google Cloud revenue $11.35 billion, beating estimate $10.79 billion
      • Other Bets revenue $388 million, beating estimate $377.9 million
         
    • Operating income $28.52 billion, estimate $26.67 billion
      • Google Services operating income $30.86 billion, beating estimate $28.47 billion
      • Google Cloud operating income $1.95 billion, beating estimate $1.11 billion
      • Other Bets operating loss $1.12 billion, missing estimate loss $1.16 billion
         
    • Operating margin 32%, beating estimate 31.4%
    • Net income was $26.3 billion, beating $22.8 billion estimate.
    • Capital expenditure $13.06 billion, beating estimates of $12.88 billion
    • Number of employees 181,269, down from 182,381 a year ago.

    A quick point on YouTube: it was bought by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion; YouTube now generates $1.65 billion of revenue every 16 days.

    The results visually:

    While Google’s cloud numbers were stellar, with revenue rising from $8.4BN to $11.3BN, and beating estimates of $10.8BN, what investors wanted to hear was more about the company’s progress on AI. This is what CEO Sundar Pichai had to say:

    In Search, our new AI features are expanding what people can search for and how they search for it. In Cloud, our AI solutions are helping drive deeper product adoption with existing customers, attract new customers and win larger deals. And YouTube’s total ads and subscription revenues surpassed $50 billion over the past four quarters for the first time.

    Like other Big Tech companies, Alphabet has been plowing money into developing artificial intelligence, a strategy that has helped drive demand for its cloud services, which saw revenue rise 32% in the first quarter. While Google remains a distant third in the cloud computing market, trailing Amazon and Microsoft, the company’s prowess in AI could help it close the gap.

    Ironically, Google developed much of the underlying technology being used in the AI boom today, and has woven it into products from web search to its suite of enterprise software from Gmail to Google Docs. Yet ever since OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released in late 2022, Google has been battling the perception that it’s lagging behind Microsoft and OpenAI in rolling out new generative AI tools. The arrival of popular chatbots such as ChatGPT, which answers questions in a conversational tone rather than providing lists of links to other websites, has posed a threat to Google’s two-decade stranglehold on search. The company is struggling to compete in generative AI without cannibalizing its core profit machine.

    Google has been scrambling to reassert its early lead in AI, after its early efforts were marred by embarrassing blunders, including a scandal over how its AI model Gemini handled race that forced the company to suspend image generation of people.

    And as the company seeks to establish itself as a leader in AI, it wants to make sure that investors are rewarded to wait, and the company not only announced a cash dividend at 20 cents…

    On October 29, 2024, Alphabet announced a cash dividend of $0.20 per share that will be paid on December 16, 2024, to stockholders of record as of December 9, 2024, on each of the company’s Class A, Class B, and Class C shares.

    … but also announced repurchased $15.3 billion in stock under its new $70 billion buyback program.

    While investors have shown they are excited about the prospects of AI, they want tech companies to continue to focus on revenue and profit in the meantime. Meta, which competes with Google in AI and also digital advertising, suffered its worst stock decline since October 2022 after reporting that it would spend billions of dollars more this year on AI efforts and projecting weaker revenue for the current quarter. For its part, Google – which does not do forecasts – paid $13.1BN in capex in the quarter, about $200 million more than estimated, but that’s not a huge difference and was more than made up for by the rise in profits in its core businesses.

    The Google owner has been suffering compared to the rest of the Magnificent Seven recently. Investors appear to be skeptical of its AI spending — and when it will filter through to the bottom line — and that’s weighed on the stock.

     

    For all the hoopla about AI, search advertising remains the engine of Google’s lucrative business, and the company is facing heightened competition there, too. Meta has been seeding AI tools throughout its advertising business and Snap Inc. has also undergone a total revamp of its ad business to improve ad targeting. The digital ad market is recovering from a post-pandemic slump, buoyed by the Olympics Games this summer, but Google is increasingly vying for those ad dollars with Meta and Snap.

    Additionally, if consumers gravitate from Google search to the new wave of chatbots, that could imperil the company’s search advertising juggernaut, which is expected to generate nearly $200 billion in revenue this year and the bulk of Alphabet’s profit.

    Cloud has been a bright spot for Google, after it first became profitable early last year. Many young AI startups are founded by former Google employees, creating a strong pipeline of cloud clients.

    For now, however, these concerns were on the backburner, with GOOGL stock jumping about 4% after hours, but still well below its all time high reached in early July when it briefly traded above $190.

    For now, however, these concerns were on the backburner, with GOOGL stock exploding about 12% after hours, and trading at a new all time high.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 10/29/2024 – 16:23

  • Megyn Kelly Eviscerates Michelle Obama Over "Whining" Speech "Ripping On The Country"
    Megyn Kelly Eviscerates Michelle Obama Over “Whining” Speech “Ripping On The Country”

    Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

    SiriusXM’s Megyn Kelly blasted multi-millionaire Michelle Obama for making a speech that yet again complained about how racist and sexist the US is.

    Obama made the speech at Kamala Harris’ rally Saturday, also bashing men in the process.

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

    She also complained that people expect a presidential candidate to be articulate and intelligent.

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

    She asked why Harris is being held to a high standard, despite the fact that she’s been Vice President for almost four years.

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    You get the gist.

    Kelly was having none of it and tore Mrs Obama to pieces.

    “The Democrats were on bended knee with two dozen red roses begging Michelle Obama to run, especially when Joe Biden started to implode,” Kelly said, adding “They would have done anything to sub her in… I’m so sick and tired of Michelle Obama whining about how racist and sexist America is.”

    “We made her rich, famous and beloved beyond any measure,” she urged.

    “Everything she has is due to this country — her Martha’s Vineyard estate, her Chicago estate, her Washington, D.C., estate, her Hawaii estate and her trips on the David Geffen yacht. I am sick and tired of her complaining about us. It’s like Oprah. Just shut up!” the host declared.

    “All of your gifts are due to us. All we want to hear you say is thank you. That’s it. That’s what we want to hear you say. Stop ripping on the country,” Kelly added.

    Watch:

    Kelly followed up with two more jabs.

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

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

    She’s right, every time the likes of Michelle Obama speak, it alienates every day Americans.

    *  *  *

    Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 10/29/2024 – 16:20

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Oct 29

Today’s News 29th October 2024

  • "Six Ways From Sunday" And The Continuity Of Government
    “Six Ways From Sunday” And The Continuity Of Government

    Authored by Sundance via The Last Refuge,

    During the rushed debate over the Patriot Act, was when I first heard political officials talking about the importance of “continuity of government.”

    I immediately recognized what all these DC voices were describing was a construct of a post-911 government that would exist and maintain itself without the elected representatives of WeThe People.

    The intelligence gathering and homeland security system put into place after the Patriot Act was passed, is a bureaucratic administrative state without the presence of elected officials controlling the apparatus. That leads to the following question:

    How can a constitutional republic function without elected officials in control of it?

    That question is at the heart of our current situation.

    That question is at the epicenter of this “new American democracy” that no one seems to understand.

    The simple answer is it cannot.

    We have been fighting this three-headed IC monster (DHS, DNI, DOJ-NSD) ever since.

    This reality the underlying predicate behind why Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the Special Counsel charges against Trump. This reality is also the underlying framework behind why the Supreme Court recently reaffirmed the plenary power of the President with control over the executive.

    In the post-9/11 system that was created by the Patriot Act, our Constitutional Republic was inextricably fractured, placing systems and silos in charge of government under the auspices of “continuity of government.”

    From that moment forth, elected representatives no longer held authority or oversight *over* the national security apparatus. Instead, the Patriot Act flipped the actual system of democratically elected representative government.

    The RESULT: Our elected officials became subservient to the institutional interests of unelected agency officials. As Senator Schumer calls them “the six ways from Sunday” coalition.

    This reality empirically surfaces with people like former AG Bill Barr saying the President does not have unilateral authority over the DOJ. Also, the Lawfare approach and narrative that a President is not the arbiter of governing power. Both statements are constitutionally false, as affirmed by SCOTUS – Thank God.

    Understand this. This is the root of the cancer that was always present, silent and lurking in the background institutions prior to 9/11. After the Patriot Act passed, that cancer fully metastasized and entered the bloodstream of American governance.

    What was previously a slimy bag of institutional snakes, kept in place by a tenuously worn nylon bag – sewn from the remaining fabric of our constitution, was released by the Patriot Act.

    Everything thereafter, including the constant bites we suffer from the unleashed weaponization, is a consequence of that moment.

    That’s the root of our modern political reality.

    This is the “new American democracy,” where the unelected officials and administrators within institutions hold power.

    Under this Patriot Act framework, representative government [executive branch, legislative branch and even the judicial branch] are subservient to those who use the shield of national security. This outcome is the direct consequence of creating a system for the “continuity of government.”

    LEARN IT!

    Then, suddenly, everything about the domestic enemy we confront gets really clear.

    Thankfully, the Supreme Court has now given indications that they understand what has taken place.

    The Supreme Court has recently affirmed that only the President of the United States has the authority to control the Executive Branch.  As a direct and consequential outcome, only the President of the United States can remove the core issue that has corrupted our constitutional intent.

    Every element vested in the “continuity of government” as a manipulation of the constitution are now aligned to eliminate the threat President Donald Trump represents.

    We have one chance.

    Vote like your freedom depends on it, because it does.

    Read the SCOTUS opinion, not from a point of view of President Trump, but from the point of view of what does this allow him to do in his second term, and what invisible straightjackets did it remove that were a threat during his first term?

    While impeachment is a political process within the Legislative Branch, and the Supreme Court is extremely hesitant to overstep their role therein, the High Court did put this sentiment clearly into the opinion about immunity: …“The President is not above the law. But Congress may not criminalize the President’s conduct in carrying out the responsibilities of the Executive Branch under the Constitution.”…

    Congress may not criminalize the conduct of the President simply for carrying out his core executive branch duties.

    Removal of Executive Branch officials is a core duty, an official act, carrying absolute immunity.

    That affirmed reality is exactly why the Deep State and Lawfare crowd are very alarmed.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/28/2024 – 23:25

  • Real Estate Bubbles: Where Rent Prices Are Going Up Or Down
    Real Estate Bubbles: Where Rent Prices Are Going Up Or Down

    Across real estate bubble cities, average rent prices have increased 5% since mid-2022 in real terms, while inflation-adjusted home prices have dropped 15%.

    This has played a role in lowering bubble risk over the last two years. In this way, higher rent prices reflect fundamental demand, such as higher population growth, rather than speculation pushing up home prices. Higher incomes across cities has a similar effect in lowering bubble risk.

    This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Dorothy Neufeld, shows the annual change in real rental costs in bubble markets, based on data from UBS’ Global Real Estate Bubble Index 2024.

    Rental Costs Are Soaring in Key Bubble Markets

    Although real rents have increased modestly across bubble cities, we can see in the table below that select cities are seeing much higher demand:

    *Paris data as of Q1 2023-Q1 2024.

    Since 2020, real rents in Dubai have surged 60%, outpacing the 40% rise in real home prices.

    This growth reflects a booming population, with 400,000 people moving to the city over the past four years. By 2040, Dubai’s population is expected to grow from 3.8 million to 5.8 million. Today, office occupancy in the financial hub now stands at 91%, surpassing many global centers.

    Similarly, Madrid has seen average rent prices climb. Surging rental costs in Madrid have led to thousands of protesters taking the streets as real rents have risen at nearly triple the rate of real home prices in the last year.

    In contrast, real rents in Singapore have fallen nearly 7%, following government efforts to curb foreign demand. This shift breaks from the previous five years, when rent prices outpaced the property market as the population expanded and housing construction faced delays.

    From a regional standpoint, bubble cities in North America saw the vast majority of declines in average real rent prices. Leading these decreases were Los Angeles (-4.0%), Toronto (-2.8%), and Miami (-2.8%), which rank among the top five bubble risk cities in 2024.

    To learn more about this topic from a U.S.-perspective, check out this graphic on the cities with the highest median rent in America in 2024.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/28/2024 – 23:00

  • After The Deluge
    After The Deluge

    Authored by Nancy Rommelmann via RealClearInvestigations,

    At 7:30 a.m. on Friday, Sept. 27, Chris Trusz was standing on one of the bridges spanning the Broad River in Chimney Rock. He wanted to get a photo. It had been raining steadily for 36 hours and the river was running 10 inches above normal. Trusz, who’d moved to the western North Carolina mountain town 18 months earlier, wasn’t worried; residents had been warned there might be a bit of flooding. He got his picture and walked up the hill to his home.

    “Normally I have a sliver of a view of the river,” he said. “Now I’m looking and can see the river clearly.” By the time he got back to Main Street, the Broad was three times as wide and running 30 inches high. Within the hour, buildings had slid off their foundations, some taken down by the furious mud-colored current and disappearing completely.

    “We were watching homes wash by, all kinds of debris,” said Trusz. Worse, he recalled, were the cars being carried away, some with their headlights still on. 

    “I can’t unsee that,” said Trusz, three weeks after Hurricane Helene took down several western North Carolina towns, paralyzed the entire region, and killed at least 123, a number that will almost certainly rise and may prove unknowable.

    It is one of several terrible unknowns the residents of western North Carolina now face. That they were unprepared for Helene is not on them – neither was the government nor anyone else. The “once in a thousand years” storm was not supposed to happen here, 500 miles from the Gulf of Mexico and 2,100 feet above sea level. There had been no local evacuation order even as the storm barreled their way. It would dump 30 inches of rain on western North Carolina and create up to 140-mile-per-hour winds. It would bring down untold thousands of trees. It would knock out the electrical grid, cell phone service, and the water supply all at once. In a matter of hours, it would obliterate the everyday security people felt, leaving survivors blinking into a new reality, wondering if they could or should rebuild lives in a place whose fragility had just been betrayed.

    “If you live here or own a business, where do you go when it’s completely wiped out? I mean, how do you start over from that?” asked Trusz, a property manager for Airbnb who’d just found out the company was forbidding area rentals until June 2025 at least.

    Further betrayal would come, during America’s overheated election season, from politicians, partisans, and conspiracists attempting to use the destruction and death caused by Helene to score political points. While mainstream news outlets suggested the area was being commandeered by armed right-wing militias, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was tweeting, “Yes they can control the weather” (no elaboration as to who “they” were).

    Echoing a common complaint, Elon Musk claimed that “FEMA is not merely failing to adequately help people in trouble, but is actively blocking citizens who try to help!” Before long, Musk would instead be thanking Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for “expediting approval for support flights.” Below the radar were the innumerable others stoking discord, including the person who tweeted at me, “Water Back on in Asheville NC. Feels like BLEACH on my skin. Very hot. Burning my face….” This just after he retweeted several racist memes and the claim that the death toll in Asheville was over 8,000.

    Because of its unexpected and painful destruction, western North Carolina has become another symbol of America’s cultural divide. One side is the politicization of everything, as human suffering was quickly transformed into a partisan cudgel swung by party operatives and media outlets who fed the public versions of events that advanced their favored narratives. On the other side was the heroic story of people and government working together as best they could in cataclysmic circumstances to aid and comfort one another. 

    That second, hopeful story is what I found while reporting in and around Asheville last week. In a hotel with no running water, guests, some of whom had multiple trees fall on their homes, made do. While the scene could resemble a pajama party gone wrong, with people shuffling to the Porto-Sans in the driveway and choosing not to comment on the smell of body odor in the elevator, most folks showed concern for what their fellow travelers were going through. They left food and drink on a table in the lobby, next to a paper plate onto which someone had written “Take what you need.” They had neither the luxury nor desire to make political hay from their brethren’s misery. And when the taps turned back on, the water was clear if not yet potable, and when you washed with it, it did not burn.

    Capitalizing on the misfortune of others is reprehensible, and no one I met in western North Carolina had the leisure time or the inclination to do so. Many are still without drinking water. Commercial districts have the same ghostly quality they had during COVID, and the shoulders of many roadways are piled with what was left of downed trees, the white oaks, maples, and pines that drew 14 million visitors a year, especially in late September and October, when the region blazes red and gold. 

    If many of those trees are now gone, what happens to the tourism economy and its $7.7 billion? What of Asheville’s major creative draw, the River Arts District, where floodwaters reached 27 feet and where what studio spaces remain have been taken down to the studs? Where do people find the courage, and the resources, to start again? And what if the thousand-year storm turns out to have a different schedule?

    “I have childhood memories up there in Chimney Rock on Lake Lure, my granddaddy took me up there,” said Beverly Ramsey. “How do you rebuild something like that?”

    Ramsey was driving to T-Birds, the bar she has frequented most days since Helene hit, not to drink but to see how she can help. The Weaverville lounge, usually known for its pool tables and karaoke, had been converted into a repository for donated goods, currently being organized by 25-year-old Alex Holt. Holt worked faster than someone running over hell’s half-acre, organizing the pet food and sleeping bags and propane tanks and maple syrup and other items brought on trailer trucks – so many that, 20 days post-Helene, they were backed up on Old Mars Mill Highway. How many were arriving a day?

    “I couldn’t give you an exact number, they’re coming from Arkansas, Pennsylvania, Mississippi,” said Holt, who clearly had zero time to chat. “We’re just trying to meet everyone’s needs.”

    “Can you imagine getting your period through all this?” Ramsey asked, sorting through a shopping bag a local woman had just dropped off, individual baggies holding six tampons and a two-pack of chocolate cupcakes.

    Ramsey had been in Weaverville, a town of about 5,000 people 11 miles from Asheville, at her elderly mother’s home when Helene hit. As for how terrifying it initially was that morning: not very.

    “I slept through it,” she said. Her main concern, when she woke up and saw the power was out, was being unable to make coffee. She decided to walk to a nearby Bojangles.

    Forty-five minutes later she was back, the scene she encountered outside both impassable and making no sense. Dozens of big trees lay across the suburban street. Climbing over limbs and under fallen power lines, she came across three men using chainsaws to cut a hole in the fallen trees. Did they know what had happened? They did not; they had no cell service. Ramsey checked her own phone. No signal. Overhead, she heard the whomp whomp of a Chinook helicopter. What the hell was going on?

    It was not until that night, when a neighbor used a power inverter to hook a car battery to his television, that Ramsey would begin to learn of the damage caused by Hurricane Helene. The flooding appeared to be the worst since The Great Flood of 1916 when the region experienced 26 inches of rain. Helene would dump 30 inches, or more than 40 trillion gallons, though Ramsey would not know as much for days; no one could, not with all communications cut, and roads crisscrossed with downed trees, and some washed away entirely. Other than by helicopter, there was no way in or out, and in some cases, people could not reach their closest neighbors, to say nothing of the outside world.

    Help nevertheless got through. “That first day, people brought us gas, water,” said Ramsey, who let those who could not get home, or no longer had homes to get to, crash on her floor. Where some blamed the government for not immediately rushing to the rescue, Ramsey praised the self-reliance of her neighbors.

    “Hillbillies and rednecks are a community. They want to talk about how Podunk we are and backwards. But no, we got this,” she said. “We need outside assistance, obviously. But we came together immediately.”

    They mourn the deaths together, too. Ramsey mentions 11 members of the Craig family buried alive in a mudslide, and shows me the cover of a local paper, a photo of Alison Wisely and her two young sons, swept away, along with her fiance, when they left their car and tried to run for safety.

    “And the farms, the water rushed out and took them down to the bedrock,” said Ramsey. “I mean, you don’t come back from that. That kind of property will never be farmed again. Not in our lifetime or even our children’s lifetime.”

    While she has no idea when or whether her commercial cleaning business will reopen, Ramsey is optimistic about the future ­– and she isn’t.

    “I don’t know that Asheville will be any different because it was already a tight community. Now as far as rebuilding places like Chimney Rock, I don’t know that that’s going to happen,” she said. “I have childhood memories up there. This is in the 70s, and very little has changed since then, as far as the aesthetics. So how do you rebuild something like that?”

    Before the rebuilding, the clean-up. How much is complete and how much there is to go, three weeks post-Helene, is not possible to know. Asheville’s River Arts District looks as though it has undergone a bombing: two square miles of crumbled warehouses, brick piles, splintered lumber, and vehicles packed with mud from when the French Broad River, which runs parallel to the RAD, left the district underwater. The fate of the structures, many of them former mills and factories built around 1900, is unknown. What happens to a 120-year-old foundation that’s been sitting under 27 feet of water? Touring the district with Buttigieg on Oct. 17, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper struck a hopeful if vague note, saying the area would “come back” but probably “in a different way.”

    Uncertainty continues as you drive east, on bridges until recently acting as catchments for debris and buildings packed with 12 feet of sludge, debris and more sludge pushed to roadsides and going on for miles. Everywhere, there are earthmovers, bucket trucks, linemen restringing electrical lines, water trucks bringing potable water – proof of life on a landscape that can otherwise appear post-apocalyptic, the town of Swannanoa leveled by the river of the same name, the town of Lake Lure sealed up tight.

    Or nearly sealed. Lake House Restaurant was empty at 4 p.m. but for one bar patron when Rodolfo and Jose Hernandez came in for a bite. The brothers wore T-shirts that read, “S*E*R*T Swadley’s Emergency Relief Team,” the charitable arm of a chain of barbecue restaurants that makes it their business to get food to disaster zones.

    “Brent Swadley, he bring a big, big kitchen and trailers from OKC. We get here last Thursday,” said Rodolfo, who is originally from Puebla, Mexico. He and Jose work as mechanics for the Swadley’s vehicles, though here, they also serve food to work crews. “The people are very happy to get real food, barbecue, steak, ribs, turkey, ham,” says Rodolfo. “Brent Swadley, he has a good heart.”

    An ecosystem of good hearts formed post-Helene: the S*E*R*T team; the hundreds of trucks pulling up to T-Birds; the AI developer who, the day after the hurricane, made it his business to figure out how to find, bottle, and deliver drinking water; the Asheville bakery giving free fresh-baked pastries to patrons who left 20s in the tip jar; the seemingly limitless number of churches (“You hear the state sometimes referred to the as the prong in the Bible Belt,” said Beverly Ramsey, who is also an ordained minister) being of service, including the man in a “Don’t Let the Bad Days Win” shirt unloading pallets of bottled water and baby diapers; private citizens volunteering to go door-to-door to do wellness checks; translators helping non-English speakers fill out aid applications; community centers providing relaxation rooms to exhausted road workers; and the man who keeps a backpack of emergency supplies at-the-ready at all times who brought his 9-year-old daughter with him as he carried life-sustaining goods to people unable to escape their mountain homes, people for whom the surprise of a little girl brought its own kind of sunshine.

    “Kids are just as motivated to help people as adults are,” the man said, adding that he did not bring his daughter on the darker missions, the ones he would not talk about.

    As the people of western North Carolina get their bearings, many who swooped in to help will move to the next disaster; S*E*R*T was also in Florida, providing meals to those hard hit by Hurricane Milton. What “recovery” looks like is as yet unknown, and already there are frustrations, if not always a logical place to put them. People cannot be mad at the storm, or not with any hope of restitution. A storm will never say, “My bad.” And so people are mad, for instance, at their insurance companies, when they find out their policies do not cover flood damage.

    “He’s having an incredibly hard time,” said one retired insurance agent, whose Asheville colleague was so besieged that she and other agents “formed a triage team so all calls went to a human voice. People needed to lay out their heart to someone on the other end of the phone.”

    If for naught: The agent estimated that no more than 2% of policy owners had elected to carry flood insurance, and why would they? Western North Carolina is above the floodplain; the area had not catastrophically flooded since the Great Flood of 1916, also known as “the flood by which all other floods are measured,” a flood Helene out-measured, leaving property owners understandably desperate for someone to tell them there’d be money coming to repair their lives.

    The best insurance could do, said the agent, was “get them a declaration form that says they were not [covered] and they could bring that to FEMA,” the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which, along with other government agencies, was experiencing its share of post-Helene consumer hatred, some of it whipped up by keyboard warriors claiming FEMA was holding “special meetings” to steal people’s homes and confiscate donations (assertions debunked by a local congressman), and that a North Carolina National Guard helicopter had deliberately sabotaged a distribution center (based on rotor wash having accidentally blown over some donated goods).

    “There’s been a lot of rumors on social media in particular, and they’re not helpful in terms of our ability to help people,” said Mike Cappannari, external affairs officer for FEMA. Looking tired but composed amid the hundreds of storm victims milling through a Disaster Recovery Center set up on the campus of A.C. Reynolds High School in Asheville, Cappannari said FEMA had about 2,000 responders in the region, that it was still tough to get to some remote areas, and that in some cases the agency was working in concert with the Department of Defense to create points of distribution as close to disaster sites as possible. As for the wilder stories online, such as FEMA workers being chased down by truckloads of armed vigilantes, “You just try and fight through that,” he said. “Fortunately, over the past handful of days, we’ve seen not as much of that and are just trying to encourage people to register for assistance with us and see how we can help.”

    Hanging out with a volunteer friend on another part of the Reynolds campus, it was hard for Kim Pierce to know what help she needed.

    “I lost everything,” said Pierce, a slip of a woman who’d closed on a new East Asheville condo on Monday, Sept. 23. It was to be the first home she would live in without any of her six grown children, a ground-floor unit for which she’d paid cash, a place she envisioned riding out her semi-retirement with other residents, most of them over 60.

    What she did not envision: waking up on Friday, Sept. 27, to find her new yard underwater. She did not envision moving a few cherished items to the trunk of her car for safety, only to watch her car sink. She did not envision falling into and scrambling out of the rushing Swannanoa River, taking refuge with neighbors she had never met, eating soup with them in a daze, and, because she was perhaps spryer and certainly more stubborn, getting the names, addresses, and prescription medications of these strangers and pledging to get to the nearest fire station to implore the fire crew to rescue them. Which she was doing when her sons-in-law showed up at her condo, found it underwater, and figured she was dead.

    “When I showed up [at my daughter’s], she came screaming out of the house, she’s sobbing and is like, ‘Mama, I was writing your eulogy!’” said Pierce. “It was so hard to see my child so traumatized.”

    Hard, too, to envision the future when the accumulation and plans of 60-plus years disappear overnight. “There is beauty that comes out of ashes. And I am experiencing it. I see it in little glimpses,” she said. “And then I go back into this fog of, I’ve lost everything.”

    “Where do you put 30 inches of rain?” asked Chris Trusz, overlooking the Broad River, running today at normal capacity.

    The question answered itself as he walked Main Street, past splintered furniture; car-sized clumps of dried mud, wood, and wire; crushed delivery trucks, dented refrigeration and a winery left precariously cantilevered by the storm.

    “They’re going to have to bring in so much fill to get back up to where you possibly could rebuild,” said Trusz. “Most people will, because it’s a strong little town, but I can’t blame people for wanting to leave.”

    While work crews continued clearing the roads, and while Trusz had nothing but goodwill for private and public sector efforts (“The community, the 101st Airborne, FEMA, everybody’s been here helping out,” he said, waving at several truckloads of National Guard), life in Chimney Rock has yet to resume, residents and business owners still figuratively rising to the surface. While the river was cleaning itself, those sorting through what was left of Gale’s Chimney Rock Shop – the clothing, souvenirs, and photos that had been inside the 77-year-old store now outside in sodden piles on a cold October afternoon – moved with deliberate slowness, trying to assess what could be saved from what was gone forever.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/28/2024 – 22:35

  • Trump Election Odds Near 67% As Polymarket Whale Bets Another $2M
    Trump Election Odds Near 67% As Polymarket Whale Bets Another $2M

    Authored by Zoltan Vardai via CoinTelegraph.com,

    Former United States President Donald Trump’s lead on the top blockchain-based betting market is nearing 67% as a mysterious whale continues to bet on his victory in the upcoming presidential election on Nov. 5.

    Trump’s odds of winning the election surpassed 66.3% on the leading decentralized predictions market on Oct. 28, according to Polymarket data.

    Presidential election winner 2024, one-month chart. Source: Polymarket

    Trump’s odds increased after a Polymarket whale, or large holder, invested another $2 million worth of USD Coin USDC$1.00 tokens into pro-Trump bets.

    The mysterious whale has spent $7.22 million on “Yes” shares, according to onchain intelligence firm Lookonchain, which wrote in an Oct. 28 X post:

    “Since Oct 11, the whale has spent 7.22 million $USDC to buy 11.28 million ‘Yes’ shares on Donald Trump winning the US election, with an unrealized profit of $256,000.”

    With only seven days until the 2024 US presidential election, decentralized prediction markets may offer more accurate predictions than traditional polling systems, according to billionaire Elon Musk.

    The Polymarket odds flipped in Trump’s favor on Oct. 4, marking a sharp reversal from September. By Oct. 12, Trump was leading by over 10 points, Cointelegraph reported.

    Mysterious Polymarket whale seems unrelated to “Fredi9999”

    The mysterious Polymarket whale, known as “zxgngl,” holds over 11.2 million “Yes” votes worth over $7.5 million, according to Polymarket data.

    Zxgngl, Polymarket whale, positions. Source: Polymarket

    The increasing positions come after the top Trump bettor on Polymarket, “Fredi9999,” bolstered Trump’s odds above 60.2% by buying over $20 million worth of “Yes” shares up to Oct. 18.

    Moreover, Fredi’s transaction patterns suggest that it controls four of the six largest Trump-voting accounts on Polymarket, all funded with Kraken deposits.

    Leading Trump bettors. Source: PolyMarket

    While 99% of zxgngl’s bets were also placed on Trump, their account was funded by Binance, not the Kraken exchange. Their transaction patterns are also different, with the last two Binance deposits being worth $338,000 and $1.68 million, respectively.

    Zxgngl, Polymarket deposits. Source: Lookonchain

    As for Fredi, the account is likely controlled by a person with deep confidence in a Trump victory, according to pseudonymous political bettor Domer, who told Cointelegraph:

    “My guess is it is a true believer who is very rich and trying to make a big bet. He is getting more confident as the price goes higher and is in a confirmation bias loop where new information keeps increasing his confidence.”

    US presidential elections fuel 565% prediction market growth

    The upcoming US elections have boosted investor interest in prediction markets.

    The betting volume on prediction markets rose over 565.4% in the third quarter to reach $3.1 billion across the three largest markets, up from just $463.3 million in the second quarter.

    Top three crypto prediction markets. Source: CoinGecko

    This significant third-quarter growth is mainly attributed to the US elections, according to an Oct. 14 CoinGecko report.

    Polymarket, the most prominent decentralized betting platform, dominated the market with over a 99% market share as of September.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/28/2024 – 22:10

  • Supreme Court Passes On 2nd Amendment Challenge To Federal Gun Law
    Supreme Court Passes On 2nd Amendment Challenge To Federal Gun Law

    Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    The Supreme Court has sidestepped a challenge to a federal law prohibiting felons from possessing firearms.

    Instead of scheduling oral argument in the case filed by Lorenzo Garod Pierre, on Oct. 21, the court granted the petition and immediately overturned the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruling that Pierre was appealing.

    The U.S. Supreme Court in Washington on Oct. 23, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

    The Supreme Court did not provide reasons for its decision. No justices dissented.

    The Supreme Court directed the 11th Circuit to reconsider its ruling in Pierre’s case in light of United States v. Rahimi, a decision the high court issued in June that the federal government said “clarified the methodology for determining whether a firearms regulation complies with the Second Amendment.”

    In Rahimi, the justices upheld Section 922(g)(8) of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, a federal law that bars people under domestic violence-related restraining orders from possessing firearms.

    Specifically, they found that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution isn’t violated when an individual is disarmed after a court has found him to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another.

    Pierre said in his petition that he was charged in July 2022 with violating Section 922(g)(1) of Title 18 of the U.S. Code for knowingly possessing a firearm after being convicted of a felony. Court papers did not provide details of the prior felony conviction.

    Pierre asked the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida to throw out the felony-level indictment, arguing that it was “unconstitutional in light of” New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, which the Supreme Court handed down in June 2022. In Bruen, the nation’s highest court held that firearms restrictions must have a historical analogue and that the Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms in public for self-defense.

    A magistrate judge filed a report that recommended denying the motion to dismiss. Magistrate judges are appointed to assist federal district judges.

    Pierre objected, and the district court refused to dismiss the charge, finding that prior 11th Circuit rulings “squarely foreclosed” the constitutional challenge and were not undermined by the Bruen precedent.

    Pierre lodged an appeal with the 11th Circuit arguing that his conviction “as applied” ran afoul of the Second Amendment. In an as-applied challenge, a litigant argues that a statute or regulation is unconstitutional in the context of a specific case.

    On March 12, the 11th Circuit affirmed the district court in a two-page decision, holding that the circuit court’s prior rulings were binding in the case.

    Pierre argued in his petition that, since Bruen was decided, federal courts of appeals have been split on whether a “defendant may mount a challenge that his individual circumstances do not supply a basis, consistent with the Second Amendment, for stripping the right” to possess firearms.

    The 11th Circuit says felons are “categorically ‘disqualified’ from exercising their Second Amendment right,” but the Seventh and Ninth circuits allow defendants to file as-applied challenges to charges under Section 922(g)(1).

    The Supreme Court should grant review to resolve the circuit split, the petition states.

    U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued in a Sept. 16 brief that the Supreme Court should grant the petition and send the case back to the 11th Circuit with instructions to review its ruling in light of Rahimi.

    The Rahimi decision contains within it the proper legal standard for evaluating the Pierre case because it “clarified the methodology for determining whether a firearms regulation complies with the Second Amendment.”

    And because the Supreme Court vacated judgments in five separate challenges to Section 922(g)(1) in July and sent those cases back to circuit courts for review in light of Rahimi, “consistent with that practice, the Court should grant the petition … in this case, vacate the court of appeals’ judgment, and remand for further consideration in light of Rahimi,” Prelogar said.

    The Epoch Times reached out for comment to Pierre’s attorney, Brian Taylor Goldman of Holwell, Shuster, and Goldberg in New York City, and the U.S. Department of Justice but had received no replies as of publication time.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/28/2024 – 21:45

  • Overton Window Shifts Towards Liberty
    Overton Window Shifts Towards Liberty

    There’s been a seismic shift in the mood of the American people. Have you noticed?

    The propaganda and manipulation by Democrats, Deep State non-profits (funded by radical leftist billionaires), and corporate media outlets have lost control of the narratives just days before the presidential election—they’re no longer effective at propping up Kamala Harris—as a majority of American people reject censorship, wokeism and whatever this is... 

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    Americans are now more interested in upholding the values of the West, the US Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence, with some youth seeking traditionalism. The far-left slant of the Overton window during the Biden-Harris administration appears to be shifting the other way/ or perhaps widening. 

    The Overton Window is a range of acceptable policy ideas within mainstream political debate. For years, corporate MSM, radical leftist non-profits, and far-left activists in government and corporations have artificially pushed the window to the left, force-feeding Americans into radical leftist ideas to transform the nation towards a pathway towards socialism/or 21st-century communism.

    History may show that Elon Musk’s X and former President Trump shifted the Overton Window from a leftist extreme to more of a center-right. Americans are increasingly giving up on woke pronouns, instead focusing on “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

    Musk has shown MSM’s matrix has glitched, with an X post stating, “The refreshing cool breeze of a wide open Overton Window.” 

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    Musk followed up on the Overton Window on Sunday evening. He said, “Ever wondered about the Overton Window?” 

    Musk quoted X user Jash Dholani, who explained the origins of the Overton Window and just exactly how this model shows wokeism is coming to an end. The window has shifted to the center-right. 

    Here is the explainer:

    The Long View states…

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    “The most important thing to understand about the Overton Window is that it is not static, it is always on the move. Not only can the window shift left or right, but the window itself can also expand and contract based on a number of different cultural and political factors,” another X user noted. 

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    Overton Window has shifted so severely in recent months… And we wonder why.

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    Like many of Trump’s new supporters this year. 

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    What’s clear is that the Overton Window has shifted towards “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” 

    Earlier this year, we stated: “Open The Overton Window.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/28/2024 – 21:20

  • Michigan's Early Voters Brave Long Lines, Break Records
    Michigan’s Early Voters Brave Long Lines, Break Records

    Authored by Nathan Worcester via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    As Michigan’s statewide early voting began on Oct. 26, long wait times discouraged more than a few would-be participants who spoke with The Epoch Times.

    The Michigan state flag waves in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Aug. 28, 2024. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

    Bill Keller decided against sitting in a two-hour line in Farmington Hills.

    “I think what I’ll do is absentee vote,” the supporter of Vice President Kamala Harris told The Epoch Times before he walked back to his car.

    Farnsworth and Tricia Howard were deterred by the line at a site in Waterford Oaks.

    Farnsworth, a retired United Auto Workers union representative, told The Epoch Times they planned to vote for former President Donald Trump in the hopes of ushering in “a new era.”

    Bill Keller was discouraged by long lines on the first day of early voting in Farmington Hills, Mich., on Oct. 26, 2024. He plans to vote absentee. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

    For all the attrition, the state posted record-breaking returns.

    It is Michigan’s first presidential election to see the process of early voting, which was instituted via a 2022 ballot proposal to amend the state constitution, and Oct. 26 saw more than 145,000 early ballots cast.

    “We’re starting a new tradition of early voting here in Michigan,” Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said in a statement announcing the figures.

    The buzz of activity was reflected in the polling numbers. By late in the afternoon, 463 ballots had been pushed through the tabulator at the Farmington Hills site.

    “This is a higher turnout than we expected,” said Dawn Raymond, who was overseeing early voting at the site.

    She told The Epoch Times that things had gone well: “We haven’t had many people with any political issues that they’re trying to bring up with us when it’s something that we shouldn’t be discussing here.”

    For senior citizen Leia, like many other voters, 2024 is about more than policy and dry statistics—it is charged with emotion. She and her husband Hans did not wish to use their real name for fear of reprisal.

    A dietician, Leia described the election as her chance to oppose Trump, a man she likened to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

    “Harris makes you feel good,” she said.

    Leia’s husband, Hans, noted that his own brother-in-law was attending a nearby Trump rally. Harris held a rally in the state the same day.

    “All my friends that like Trump think that somehow, that Trump’s going to make their lives better,” said Hans, a retired specialty store owner. “What the world would be like if Trump does everything he says he’s gonna do—that’s a scary, scary thought.”

    A few feet away, Emma Wolford had just voted in her first election as a U.S. citizen.

    “I moved to the U.S. from England when I was almost nine,” she said.

    Emma Wolford after voting in her first election as a U.S. citizen in Farmington Hills, Mich., on Oct. 26, 2024 (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times).

    Trump earned her support.

    “I left a socialist country and came here for a better future,” she said.

    Wofford is a graduate of Hillsdale College, a school known for its conservatism. Some of her friends from that institution oppose Trump, she said.

    Tricia Howard said her biggest motivator to vote was “the safety of our country.”

    Her husband Farnsworth, who is a U.S. Army veteran, was particularly concerned about the border.

    He isn’t happy that foreigners who entered the country illegally can get resources even as many American veterans are homeless.

    The retired UAW union representative is also concerned about electric vehicle mandates.

    Another couple, Adam and Michelle Stankus, waited roughly an hour in line at Waterford Oaks. They weren’t making a statement by showing up on day one of early voting—they just wanted to get it out of the way.

    “Vote now, vote later, vote mail-in—it’s all the same,” Adam Stankus said.

    They were glad to vote against Trump—“against fascism,” as Adam put it.

    Matthew Kovach, who was waiting for his ride outside the Waterford Oaks site, said he came out to fight communism and globalism. To him, that meant voting for Trump.

    Kovach was disabled after a serious car accident in 2021.

    Early voter Matthew Kovach in Waterford Oaks, Mich., on Oct. 26, 2024. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

    “They thought I was going to be a vegetable,” he recalled. He thanked God that didn’t happen.

    “They say President Trump dodged death. I dodged death. That’s the only thing we’ve got in common,” he said with a laugh.

    Kovach hopes to play hockey again someday. For now, he’s recovering his mobility. He brought his crutches to the early voting site in case of long lines.

    Andy Kollin spent an hour and fifty minutes at the Farmington Hills site.

    “I don’t want to see #45 [Trump] in office again,” he said when asked what brought him out on the first day of early voting.

    Kollin said he was glad to see people turn out in high numbers, “whichever way they’re voting.”

    Shortly before 4:30 p.m., a trio of young Michiganders appeared on the edge of the parking lot at the Waterford Oaks site. A young man and two young women were trying to cast their early ballots before the site closed for the day.

    The Epoch Times jogged with them to the door, where they barely missed the cutoff. Nathan Rehm let out a groan.

    “I’m more of a Trump guy,” said Rehm, an engineering student at Michigan State University (MSU). Winter Runyan and her sister, Gabby, both support Trump too.

    “I just can’t imagine Kamala Harris sitting down with world leaders,” he said.

    Rehm has grown more comfortable voicing support for Trump on campus. He wonders if hatred for the former president has ebbed

    Nathan Rehm, Winter Runyan, and Gabby Runyan at an early voting site in Waterford Oaks, Mich., on Oct. 26, 2024. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

    “What college major you are plays a role,” said Winter Runyan, who is also an MSU student. “He’s an engineering major, so I feel like a lot of people are more on the Republican side,” she said of Rehm.

    As a health care student, Winter Runyan’s less inclined to reveal her political preference to her peers.

    “I do feel judged, and I definitely think they’re going to have some view towards me,” she said, adding that she counts many Democrats among her friends.

    The Runyan sisters work alongside each other. Gabby is a dispatcher, while Winter is an emergency medical technician. Winter wants to be a physician assistant.

    Although the three weren’t pleased to miss out on the first day of early voting, they were determined to make their voices heard.

    “We’ll be back tomorrow,” Winter Runyan said.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/28/2024 – 20:55

  • Virginia Asks US Supreme Court To Allow Its Removal Of Non-Citizens From Voter Rolls
    Virginia Asks US Supreme Court To Allow Its Removal Of Non-Citizens From Voter Rolls

    Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,

    Virginia officials filed an emergency application with the U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 28 asking the justices to allow the state to remove suspected noncitizens from the voter rolls.

    The application was filed in the case known as Beals v. Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights.

    The application was directed to Chief Justice John Roberts, who oversees emergency litigation from Virginia.

    The lead applicant, Susan Beals, is Virginia’s Commissioner of Elections.

    The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit found unanimously on Oct. 27 that taking the names off the voter rolls within 90 days of an approaching federal election appears to violate the National Voter Registration Act.

    Federal elections are scheduled for Nov. 5.

    The Supreme Court previously held in Purcell v. Gonzalez (2006) that courts should not change rules close to an election because doing so creates a risk of causing confusion.

    Virginia counters that the legal provision is not relevant because the names being removed are not those of U.S. voters.

    But “that argument violates basic principles of statutory construction by focusing on a differently worded statutory provision that is not at issue here and proposing a strained reading of the Quiet Period Provision to avoid rendering that other provision absurd or unconstitutional,” the Fourth Circuit said.

    Such an interpretation would be problematic because it would give the words “voters” and “registrant” an identical meaning, the circuit court said.

    Moreover, Virginia had not demonstrated its appeal was likely to succeed or that it would suffer irreparable harm should the appeal be denied, the circuit court said as it affirmed an Oct. 25 ruling by U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles.

    Giles wrote that Virginia was still free to cancel the voter registration of noncitizens individually or to investigate “noncitizens who register to vote or who vote in Virginia’s election.”

    The ruling applies only to Virginia’s “systematic” effort to remove noncitizens that began after Aug. 7, she added.

    In the new application, Virginia said it objected to the district court decision because “less than two weeks before the 2024 Presidential Election, and more than a month into early voting, the district court … ordered Applicants, Virginia and its election officials, to place over 1,600 self-identified noncitizens back onto Virginia’s voter rolls, in violation of Virginia law and common sense.”

    Virginia said the Supreme Court should stay the district court ruling because it “is based on a misinterpretation of the [National Voter Registration Act], which does not prohibit Virginia from removing noncitizens from its voter rolls.”

    The ruling would also “impose significant cost, confusion, and hardship upon Virginia, creating a massive influx of work for its registrars in the critical week before the election, and likely confusing noncitizens into believing that they are eligible to vote.”

    Roberts directed co-respondents Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights, League of Women Voters of Virginia, African Communities Together, and the federal government to respond to the application by 3 p.m. on Oct. 29.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/28/2024 – 20:05

  • Trade Data Reveals Indian Biotech Firm Supplying US AI Chips To Russia
    Trade Data Reveals Indian Biotech Firm Supplying US AI Chips To Russia

    A new analysis of public trade data suggests that Brussels and Washington’s efforts to entirely block Moscow from accessing cutting-edge Western technology may have encountered a critical stumbling block. An apparent loophole has emerged in India: A biotech firm, possibly acting as a front company, has purchased servers with advanced US chips, which are then rerouted and shipped to Russia. 

    Investigative reporters with Bloomberg shed light on Shreya Life Sciences, a so-called biotech firm located in Mumbai. They cite trade data compiled by trade-tracking firms ImportGenius and NBD that show Shreya exported 1,111 units of PowerEdge XE9680 Rack Servers produced by Dell Technologies to Russia.

    On Dell’s website, the product description for the PowerEdge XE9680 reads, “Take on demanding artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning. Rapidly develop, train and deploy large machine learning models with this high-performance application server made for artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and deep learning. Dell’s PowerEdge XE9680 delivers the industry’s best AI performance.” 

    Further down in the product description, Dell notes the servers are equipped with either Nvidia or AMD chips. 

    Bloomberg noted that the servers and chips are on a blacklist by the US and the European Union, preventing the flow of technology to Moscow. The EU, in cooperation with the US, UK, and Japan, has said these sanctions on Russia are “to target sensitive sectors in Russia’s military-industrial complex and to limit its access to crucial advanced technology.” 

    Source: Bloomberg

    According to Bloomberg journalists, trade data shows that two Russian trading companies, Main Chain Ltd. and IS LLC, imported AI servers with US chips totaling $300 million to Russia.

    Source: Bloomberg

    Taking this investigative report even further, public trade data compiled by counterparty and supply chain risk intelligence firm Sayari shows Russian buyers Main Chain, IS, and Mine Hine imported these PowerEdge XE9680s from Shreya in April and May. 

    Source: Sayari

    Data compiled by Sayari is then produced in a web visual form to show how the Indian pharma company pumped hundreds of these Western AI servers into Russia earlier this year. 

    Additional trade data by the supply chain risk firm shows that 81% of Shreya’s total exports this year have been directed to Russia.

    Source: Sayari

    Most of the export shipments to Russia were computers and processing machines… Not really biotech-ish, eh? 

    Source: Sayari

    Maybe the journos at Bloomberg have stumbled upon a front company that allows Russia to evade Western sanctions on procuring AI tech. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/28/2024 – 19:40

  • NATO Chief Says North Korean Troops Are Helping Regain Territory In Russia's Kursk
    NATO Chief Says North Korean Troops Are Helping Regain Territory In Russia’s Kursk

    NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on Monday has introduced yet another new bombshell claim related to allegations of North Korean troops fighting in Ukraine alongside Russian forces.

    At a press conference in Brussels, which reportedly followed a private briefing by South Korean intelligence officials, Rutte claimed that there is intelligence confirming that North Korean military units have been deployed to Russia’s southwest Kursk region.

    The Kursk region has been subject of a Ukrainian cross-border offensive which began in early August. It shocked Kremlin leadership, given Ukrainian soldiers were able to hold on to hundreds of kilometers of territory.

    Part of Kiev’s aim appears to have been to distract Russia’s military from its operations in Ukraine’s east, and divide resources, forcing the Russians to deal with clawing back their own territory.

    But now the accusation appears to be that Kim Jong Un’s North Korean military is assisting in getting Kursk back. Rutte has called it a sign of “growing desperation.”.

    “The deepening military cooperation between Russia and North Korea is a threat to both the Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic security,” Rutte said at the press conference. “The deployment [of] North Korean troops to Kursk is also a sign of Putin’s growing desperation.”

    Butte urged: “NATO calls on Russia and the DPRK to cease these actions immediately.”

    Zelensky’s office has once again used alleged North Korean involvement to call for more immediate military help from Western allies. “This is an escalation. Sanctions alone are not enough. We need weapons and a clear plan to prevent North Korea’s expanded involvement in the war in Europe,” Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak said.

    “Today, Russia brings in North Korea; next, it could broaden their engagement, and then other autocratic regimes may see that they can get away with this and come to fight against NATO,” Yermak added. “The enemy understands strength. Our allies have this strength.”

    President Joe Biden also on Monday slammed the apparent North Korean troop deployment as a “dangerous” development: 

    “Very dangerous,” Biden said when asked about the North Korean deployment, as he spoke to reporters after casting his early vote in the US presidential election in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.

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

    For the first time, the Kremlin has appeared to admit some level of North Korean military troop assistance related to the Ukraine conflict: 

    In a response, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov pointed to a security and defense treaty signed by Moscow and Pyongyang in June.

    “We have said many times that the treaty is not secret, it is public, the entire text has been published, and it in no way violates any provisions of international law, because it involves, among other things, the providing of assistance in case one of the countries that is a party to the treaty is militarily attacked,” he told a press conference in Moscow, in comments reported by the Interfax news agency.

    Lavrov added: “So our position here is absolutely honest and open.” But nothing has been disclosed in terms details of precisely where DPRK soldiers might be operating.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/28/2024 – 18:50

  • The Political Theology That Maintains State Power
    The Political Theology That Maintains State Power

    Authored by John Kennedy via The Mises Institute,

    For religions throughout the world, established rules, studies, and practices are instrumental for their legitimacy. Established religious institutions throughout the world train theologians to study the nature of God and their belief system. For the Sunni Muslims, theologians in the Hanafi school consist of legal studies in line with Islam, while others like the Murji’ah sect focus on moral teachings of work and faith. Catholics too prescribe specialized areas of study to theologians, whether that be social teachings on leading a moral life or supernatural studies of God.

    Whatever the case, each of these studies offers legitimacy to the faith and to the clergy, so the state, in all its omnipotence, follows suit. The late German jurist Carl Schmitt held that the “omnipotent state” practices its legitimacy similarly.

    Writing in his book, Political Theology, that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”

    As the age of monarchs came to a close in the early 20th century and the age of massive ideological states came into play, new concepts and ideas had to be developed, as they did not have a “mandate of heaven” to legitimize their power.

    The United States government, for instance, has had an army of academics, experts, and celebrities to legitimize its actions.

    Their political theology consists of some of the following: economics, law, and the hard sciences.

    Analyzing these concepts, we can see how the state and its clergy weaponize them in order to maintain their power.

    Economics

    In 1994, Charlie Rose interviewed the British businessman James Goldsmith. Sir Goldsmith was campaigning in the European Union against the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), a component of the WTO agreement. In 1995, 125 countries had signed onto the agreement, which included agricultural subsidies. Goldsmith warned in the interview that this would lead to massive emigration from third-world countries and that people in western society had come to serve an economic index that harms them.

    He claimed that, if the GATT were adopted, we would be:

    Creating mass immigration, which none of us could control. We would be destroying the towns, which are already largely destroyed. Look at Mexico; look at our own towns, and we’re doing this for economic dogma because we’ve got to get it done by the end of December. We can’t wait another year or two to see the results. Otherwise some political gimmick like Fast Track will go out of the way. What is this nonsense? Everything is based in our modern society on improving an economic index. How do we get greater economic growth? How do we grow the GNP? The result is, we are destroying the stability of our societies because we are worshiping the wrong god, economic index.

    It is economic orthodoxy today that GDP must grow and that financial stimulus is one way of doing this. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States government issued stimulus checks from the low of $600 to a high of $1,400 per person. Assistant professor Christina Patterson of the University of Chicago suggested that when Congress pumped the money into the economy during COVID, the highest growth came from the individual household. Her suggestion: “Lawmakers should give the money to people who will spend most of it, rather than sock it away in savings.”

    To suggest that the COVID stimulus grew the economy is preposterous. Some of the real effects of the “stimulus” are as follows: nearly 7,000 firms are considered “zombie firms” that are laden with debt, an increase of 30 percent over the last ten years; the average price inflation rate in 2022 was 8 percent, with a high of 9.1 percent in June 2022; grocery prices increased by 20 percent. The inflationary expansion of the money supply and adjustment of interest rates by the Federal Reserve during this time caused the increase in prices. The Federal Reserve propping up the stock market led to the rise of zombie firms because of malinvestment, but mainstream economists refuse to believe their orthodoxy is wrong.

    Law

    The United States has prided itself on being a land of law, where the rule of law reigns supreme and all its subjects, even the president, cannot usurp it. This is an illusion in our current political theology. America’s “supreme law of the land,” the Constitution, has been nothing more than a suggestion for much of its history. Whether that be censorship against the freedom of speech and press, as seen with the Espionage Act of 1917, or with the illegal mass surveillance by the NSA as exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013. Each case violated amendments in the Constitution, the 1st and 4th respectfully. Despite the controversy, the Espionage Act is still in effect and Edward Snowden is in exile in Russia.

    Despite this, the establishment is still unwavering in their claims of being defenders of American law and democracy. What they’re really defending is their so-called mandate of heaven. Just as the Chinese Emperors had this supernatural mandate, the president, the Congress, and the bureaucrats each have the supernatural concept of “law” on their side. Hugo Krabbe, a Dutch political scientist, developed an explanation for the legitimacy of constitutional law in his book The Modern Idea of the State, saying:

    We no longer live under the dominion of persons, either natural or fictitious legal persons, but under the dominion of norms [laws], of spiritual forces. In this is revealed the modern idea of the state…. These forces rule in the strictest sense of the word. Obedience can be freely rendered to these forces, for the very reason that they do proceed from the spiritual nature of mankind. (italics in original)

    The entire constitutional legal order is, therefore, based on man’s sense of right and wrong. Just as Moses took down the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai to the Israelites, so do we receive the law from the politicians on Capitol Hill and in the halls of bureaucratic departments. This is how the American establishment is able to maintain its power, by linking their positions of authority to American “morality” that they claim is linked to the law. Any attack against them or to the law is a threat to the American way of life and the regime will use all the means at its disposal to silence you. The former British PM, Tony Blair, had described himself and all who govern as a Moses-like figure in his book, On Leadership. He had stated:

    I liken governing to leading people on a journey. You don’t just start by stepping out. You begin with a description of the destination—the house on the hill you might call it…. Think of Moses and the Exodus from Egypt. You might have thought that since he was leading his people out slavery and oppression, they would have been perpetually grateful. But they weren’t. They complained bitterly much of the time. They dissented. They rebelled. They frequently averred that they would have been better off if he had just left them where they were.

    Many of the bureaucrats that rule, whether from places such as London, Brussels, or Washington DC, have a Messiah complex. All they do is for the benefit of the democratic system and, therefore, the whole Western world. From here, the regime can continue to manage its economy and wars without interference, as James Burnham said in his book The Managerial Revolution:

    They proclaim the rules, make the law, issue the decrees. The shift from parliament to the bureaus occurs on a world scale. The actual directing and administrative work of the bureaus is carried on by new men, a new type of men. It is, specifically, the MANAGERIAL type. The active heads of the bureaus are the managers-in-government, the same, or nearly the same, in training, functions, skills, habits of thought as the managers-in-industry.

    Because of the form the law has taken, we’re no longer ruled; we’re administered. The term “law and order” becomes merely a tool to contain what Carl Schmitt has called the “exception.” When the current regime finds the state of things abnormal, they can declare war on it. Whether they be abstract concepts such as “disinformation,” against populists like Donald Trump, or against ideologies like “fascism” and white supremacy.

    Conclusion

    In the past, kings could legitimize their power through alliances with a church or spiritual leader to show that their rule was established by a higher authority, an alliance of the throne and altar.

    Today, politicians and bureaucrats use the “sciences” and their experts to establish their authority.

    Economists at the Federal Reserve and IMF fund the government’s schemes, judges support laws via theories that violate the Constitution, and you, while dissenting, will follow the “new Moses” to the house on the hill.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/28/2024 – 18:25

  • After "Colossal" Exodus Of Subscribers, WaPo Boss Bezos Explains "The Hard Truth" About Not Endorsing Kamala
    After “Colossal” Exodus Of Subscribers, WaPo Boss Bezos Explains “The Hard Truth” About Not Endorsing Kamala

    In what is likely even more harrowing for the Op-Ed editors at The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos has just penned an explainer for his decision to not allow the liberal rag to endorse Kamala.

    We present the opinion piece here in full (with some emphasis by us) – this is shocking levels of honesty!

    The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media

    The credibility gap can be bridged by independence.

    In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.

    Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.

    Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.

    Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.

    I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally. Dave Limp, the chief executive of one of my companies, Blue Origin, met with former president Donald Trump on the day of our announcement. I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision. But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand. Even Limp didn’t know about it in advance; the meeting was scheduled quickly that morning. There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false.

    When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post. Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials. I once wrote that The Post is a “complexifier” for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post.

    You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up. You are of course free to make your own determination, but I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests. It hasn’t happened.

    Lack of credibility isn’t unique to The Post. Our brethren newspapers have the same issue. And it’s a problem not only for media, but also for the nation. Many people are turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions. The Washington Post and the New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves. (It wasn’t always this way — in the 1990s we achieved 80 percent household penetration in the D.C. metro area.)

    While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight. It’s too important. The stakes are too high. Now more than ever the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice, and where better for that voice to originate than the capital city of the most important country in the world? To win this fight, we will have to exercise new muscles. Some changes will be a return to the past, and some will be new inventions. Criticism will be part and parcel of anything new, of course. This is the way of the world. None of this will be easy, but it will be worth it. I am so grateful to be part of this endeavor. Many of the finest journalists you’ll find anywhere work at The Washington Post, and they work painstakingly every day to get to the truth. They deserve to be believed.

    The irony, of course, is that the alt-media space (and most non-liberal reporters) have been saying much of this for years – only to be cajoled, banned, black-balled, refused-access.

    The question is – now that Bezos has smashed the glass ceiling of elite aloofness – will we see the usual tsunami of screaming, hysterical resignations (“I could never work for someone who said those words in his out loud voice”) – or…

    Is this the turning point – is this the moment when media reverts back to news and not opinion?

    Where will all those ‘resigning’ reporters go to work if other media owners follow Bezos’ path? Substack? How’s that working out for the liberalati?

    We suspect (strongly) that this will not be a quick turnaround. The blinkered libtard defense of all that is righteously progressive (and therefore ‘the truth’) will not disappear overnight.

    A generation of so-called ‘journalism students’ need to be de-programmed from “their truth” (preferably not in camps), and they (and their professors) won’t go quietly into the night, that is for sure.

    And along those lines, shortly after Bezos dropped this op-ed, another major mainstream news outlet decided NOT to endorse Kamala…

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

    *  *  *

    As we detailed earlier, Jeff Bezos’ decision for The Washington Post not to endorse a presidential candidate this year has resulted in a total shitshow for the progressive newspaper, with staffing members having epic meltdowns and editor-at-large Robert Kagan (husband of Victoria Nuland) walking off the job on Friday. Even more troubling for the paper is the mass exodus of liberal subscribers being reported by NPR News on Monday afternoon. 

    According to two sources within the paper and familiar with the subscriber exodus, over 200,000 digital subscription cancellations had occurred by Monday afternoon. 

    Not all cancellations take effect immediately. Still, the figure represents about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well. The number of cancellations continued to grow Monday afternoon. -NPR

    Former Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli told NPR, “The problem is, people don’t know why the decision was made. We basically know the decision was made, but we don’t know what led to it.”

    The editorial page editor, David Shipley, told colleagues that WaPo’s publisher, Will Lewis, said the reason for the lack of a Harris-Walz endorsement was to create an “independent space” where the newspaper does not tell people for whom to vote.

    WaPo has mostly endorsed Democrats for nearly a century (with only 3 Republicans since 1928): 

    • 1932 to 1944: Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat)

    • 1948: Thomas Dewey (Republican)

    • 1952 & 1956: Dwight D. Eisenhower (Republican)

    • 1960: John F. Kennedy (Democrat)

    • 1964: Lyndon B. Johnson (Democrat)

    • 1968: Hubert Humphrey (Democrat)

    • 1972: George McGovern (Democrat)

    • 1976 & 1980: Jimmy Carter (Democrat)

    • 1984: Walter Mondale (Democrat)

    • 1988: Michael Dukakis (Democrat)

    • 1992 & 1996: Bill Clinton (Democrat)

    • 2000: Al Gore (Democrat)

    • 2004: John Kerry (Democrat)

    • 2008: Barack Obama (Democrat)

    • 2012: Barack Obama (Democrat)

    • 2016: Hillary Clinton (Democrat)

    • 2020: Joe Biden (Democrat)

    • 2024: Neutral 

    Back to WaPo’s mass exodus of subs, Google search data shows “cancel Washington Post subscription” has gone parabolic nationwide since the weekend. Most cancelations are based in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. 

    And Amazon cancellations, too?

    This is true…

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

    The move comes after the Los Angeles Times declined to endorse Kamala Harris. And perhaps the rationale given the timing – just days before the presidential election –  comes as the race is neck-and-neck with former President Trump. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/28/2024 – 18:00

  • Soros-Backed Philadelphia DA Sues To Block Elon Musk's $1 Million Voter Giveaway
    Soros-Backed Philadelphia DA Sues To Block Elon Musk’s $1 Million Voter Giveaway

    Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times,

    Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner is suing to halt Elon Musk’s $1 million giveaway to swing state voters.

    The suit, filed on Monday in the Common Pleas Court in Philadelphia, accused the tech billionaire and his America PAC supporting former President Donald Trump’s candidacy of “running an illegal lottery in Philadelphia, as well as throughout Pennsylvania.”

    The case is based on Pennsylvania’s lottery and consumer protection laws.

    Krasner, a Democrat, clarified in the complaint that is was not about state and federal laws that prohibit vote-buying.

    “Running an illegal lottery and violating consumer protections is ample basis for an injunction and concluding that America PAC and Musk must be stopped, immediately, before the upcoming Presidential Election on November 5,” Krasner told the court in his suit.

    “That is because America PAC and Musk hatched their illegal lottery scheme to influence voters in that election.”

    Specifically, the district attorney alleged that Musk failed to meet Pennsylvania’s requirements for lottery operators, which mandate publishing a “complete set of lottery rules” and detailing measures to protect participants’ personal information. He also raised concerns that the selection of winners may have been rigged.

    “Though Musk says that a winner’s selection is ‘random,’ that appears false because multiple winners that have been selected are individuals who have shown up at Trump rallies in Pennsylvania,” the lawsuit alleges, arguing that the lottery rules are “deceptive.”

    Oh, here’s one more thing to consider…

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    The suit came after Musk announced the eighth winner of his super PAC’s $1 million prize in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and doubled down on his pledge to give out awards to registered voters in seven battleground states every day until Election Day.

    To be eligible, participants must sign a petition on the PAC’s website affirming their support of the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution. The online petition form says one has to be a registered voter to participate, but voting itself is not required.

    “We’re trying to get attention for this very important petition to support the Constitution,” Musk told the audience at the Oct. 26 event. “We need the right to free speech; we need the right to bear arms.

    “So we’re going to be giving out a million dollars every day through Nov. 5. All you have to do is sign the petition in support of the First and Second Amendment. That’s it. You don’t even have to vote. It’d be nice if you voted, but you don’t have to. And then just basically sign something you already believe in, and you get a [chance] to win a million dollars every day from now through the election.”

    The America PAC didn’t respond to a request for comment by publication time.

    President Biden thinks it is “totally inappropriate”…

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    …but over-ruling the Supreme Court to offer vote-buying bailouts to student loan recipients is “appropriate”?

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/28/2024 – 17:40

  • Ford Shares Sink After Company Reports Cost Improvements, But Guides Below Street Expectations
    Ford Shares Sink After Company Reports Cost Improvements, But Guides Below Street Expectations

    Ford shares jumped before tumbling after hours on Monday, as the legacy automaker reported guidance that was on the low end of expectations. Like many other automakers, Ford continues to grapple with balancing the costs of EV production, high interest rates and a tapped out American consumer. 

    Ford announced third-quarter revenue of $46 billion, with net income totaling $0.9 billion. This figure includes a $1 billion charge related to its electric vehicle business, which the company had previously disclosed. Adjusted earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) for the quarter came in at $2.6 billion.  

    Here are all the company’s Q3 figures versus estimates, via Bloomberg:

    • Total Revenue: $46.2 billion, up 5.5% year-over-year (y/y), surpassing the $43.07 billion estimate.

    • Ford Blue Revenue: $26.2 billion, exceeding the $24.63 billion forecast.

    • Ford Model e Revenue: $1.2 billion, below the $1.42 billion estimate.

    • Ford Pro Revenue: $15.7 billion, above the $15.28 billion projection.

    • Adjusted EPS: 49 cents, matching analyst expectations.

    • Adjusted EBIT: $2.6 billion, up 18% y/y, though below the $2.77 billion estimate.

    • Adjusted EBIT Margin: 5.5%, improving from 5% y/y but short of the 6.3% forecast.

    • Ford Blue EBIT: $1.63 billion, missing the $1.77 billion estimate.

    • Ford Model e EBIT Loss: $1.22 billion, smaller than the expected loss of $1.34 billion.

    • Ford Pro EBIT: $1.81 billion, outperforming estimates.

    The automaker’s Ford Pro division saw solid growth, with revenue rising 13%. Additionally, Ford Pro Intelligence, the company’s paid software service, reported a 30% increase in subscriptions, reaching nearly 630,000 users.  

    Ford also declared a regular fourth-quarter dividend of 15 cents per share. For the full year of 2024, the company now expects adjusted EBIT to reach approximately $10 billion.

    Ford revised its full-year 2024 outlook, now projecting adjusted earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) of approximately $10 billion. This is a narrowing from its previous guidance of $10 billion to $12 billion. However, the automaker maintained its forecast for adjusted free cash flow, which is expected to remain between $7.5 billion and $8.5 billion.  

    Here’s a full look at its year forecast:

    • Adjusted EBIT: Now expected to be $10 billion, down from the prior range of $10 billion to $12 billion, and below the Bloomberg consensus estimate of $10.63 billion.
    • Ford Pro EBIT: Forecast unchanged at $9 billion, compared to the prior range of $9 billion to $10 billion.
    • Ford Blue EBIT: Now expected at $5 billion, down from the previous range of $6 billion to $6.5 billion.
    • Ford Model e EBIT Loss: Projected to be $5 billion, in line with earlier guidance of a $5 billion to $5.5 billion loss.
    • Ford Credit EBT: Anticipated to reach approximately $1.6 billion.
    • Capital Expenditure: Revised to $8 billion to $8.5 billion, compared to the previous forecast of $8 billion to $9 billion, and close to the Bloomberg consensus estimate of $8.39 billion.
    • Adjusted Free Cash Flow: Maintained at $7.5 billion to $8.5 billion.

    Ford President and CEO Jim Farley said: “We are in a strong position with Ford+ as our industry undergoes a sweeping transformation.”

    He added: “We have made strategic decisions and taken the tough actions to create advantages for Ford versus the competition in key areas like Ford Pro, international operations, software and next-generation electric vehicles. Importantly, over time, we have significant financial upside as we bend the curve on cost and quality, a key focus of our team.”

    Recall last month Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas had downgraded Ford on Chinese supply and rising delinquencies. Jonas mentioned affordability concerns in the U.S. market, claiming it is highly stretched, with inventory levels now back to pre-COVID norms.

    Meanwhile, Auto Asset-Backed Securities (ABS) data shows a growing proportion of consumers are staying delinquent for longer, with higher severity rates. Although subprime defaults are lower in 2023 compared to 2022, prime defaults have increased.  

    The capital intensity required to compete in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Autonomous Vehicles (AV) is often overlooked, Jonas says. As the AI and data themes gain traction in the automotive sector, automakers will need to invest tens of billions in proprietary AI models.

    Ford Vice Chair and CFO John Lawler commented: “We are remaking the company with Ford+ into a higher-growth, higher-margin, more capital-efficient and more durable business.”

    “The work we have done over the past few years to restructure our global business — and tailor our product lineup to segments where we know our customers best — is driving continued growth and generating stronger and more consistent cash flow,” he added. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/28/2024 – 17:20

  • Israel Threatens Syria's Bashar al-Assad: You Might Be Next
    Israel Threatens Syria’s Bashar al-Assad: You Might Be Next

    Via The Cradle

    Israeli government minister and war cabinet member Gideon Saar threatened Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad on Sunday, warning that he will be “in danger” if his country continues to act as a “conduit” for Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah.

    Saar – who rejoined Benjamin Netanyahu’s government late last month – said during a conference that Tel Aviv “missed an opportunity” to “collapse” Assad’s government, which was “saved” by Iran and Hezbollah. 

    Image edit by Enab Baladi

    Syria must not be permitted “under any circumstances to be a conduit for weapons supply from Iran to Hezbollah,” the minister went on to say, adding that “Israel must make clear to Assad that if he chooses to harm Israeli security in this manner, he places his regime in danger.”

    Israel “will not agree to Hezbollah’s renewed buildup of power through Syria, and will not agree to the opening of a front against it from Syrian territory,” he said. “Removing Assad from the Iranian axis will have far-reaching consequences for Israel’s security.” 

    Israel was heavily involved in supporting extremist groups against the Syrian government at the start of the US-led regime change war against Damascus, which began in 2011. 

    Fighters from Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front were given Israeli air cover during the 2014 battles against Syrian government troops and Hezbollah in Quneitra. Wounded Nusra Front fighters were also treated at Israeli hospitals in the occupied Golan Heights. 

    Over the past several years, Israel’s air force has been waging an unofficial campaign of indiscriminate attacks against Syria, which aim to stifle the flow of weapons from Iran via Syria to the resistance in Lebanon.

    According to Lebanese analyst and journalist Khalil Nasrallah, this unofficial campaign – dubbed the ‘battle between wars’ – has failed. Israeli attacks on Syria have increased since the start of the war in Gaza and Lebanon in October last year. 

    Since Israel’s massive escalation against Lebanon last month, nearly 2,000 people have been killed and over a million displaced. Israel has begun to target Lebanese–Syrian border crossings under the pretext that they are used to facilitate the delivery of Iranian weapons to Lebanon. 

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

    Hezbollah has promised its follower base recently that its military capabilities and weapons are in “great shape,” despite Israeli claims to the contrary. The group has not yet used its more sophisticated and destructive weaponry against Israel. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/28/2024 – 17:00

  • Fetterman: Trump Support In PA Is 'Astonishing,' Musk Factor Is 'Going to Really Matter'
    Fetterman: Trump Support In PA Is ‘Astonishing,’ Musk Factor Is ‘Going to Really Matter’

    Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman is working to help Kamala Harris win the Keystone State’s 19 electoral votes, but can’t help but marvel at the intense, highly-visible support for Donald Trump he sees across the pivotal battleground.   

    A decorated pickup truck promotes Trump’s candidacy on Route 23 in Chester County, Pennsylvania — one of the critical “collar counties” surrounding Philadelphia (Tom Gralish/Philadelphia Inquirer) 

    Agreeing “one hundred percent” with the idea that Trump has a special connection with Pennsylvanians, Fetterman told the New York Times that while Democrats may have trouble grasping it, the phenomenon is undeniable: 

    “There’s a difference between not understanding, but also acknowledging that it exists. And anybody who spends time driving around, and you can see the intensity. It’s astonishing.

    I was doing an event in Indiana County. Very, very red. And there was a superstore of Trump stuff, and it was a hundred feet long, and it was dozens of T-shirts and hats and bumper stickers and all kinds of, I mean, it’s like, Where does this all come from? It’s the kind of thing that has taken on its own life. And it’s like something very special exists there. And that doesn’t mean that I admire it. It’s just — it’s real.” 

    Trump won Pennsylvania by 44,292 votes in 2016 and lost it by 80,555 in 2020. While the 2024 race appears to be another close one, six of the last seven Pennsylvania polls tracked by RealClear Polling put Trump in the lead, by margins ranging from one point to three points. Polymarket bettors are bullish on a Trump win: As this is written, the prediction market gives Trump a 63% chance of winning the state. As for his odds of winning the nationwide contest, Trump has edged up to a 2024-campaign-high of 66.5%, while Harris has fallen to 33.7%. 

    Trump speaking at a June rally at Temple University, which is located in crime-ridden North Philly (AFP – Getty Images via New York Post) 

    Fetterman also acknowledged the formidable campaign power of Elon Musk, who’s been sharing rally stages with Trump, holding his own town halls, and handing out million-dollar random prizes to registered swing-state voters who sign a petition:

    “Now Musk is joining him. I mean, to a lot of people, that’s [Marvel Comics Iron Man billionaire alter-ego] Tony Stark. That’s the world’s richest guy. And he’s obviously and undeniably a brilliant guy, and he’s saying, ‘Hey, that’s my guy for president.’ That’s going to really matter.”

    Addressing a key election issue, Fetterman distinguished himself from many in his party by reiterating the importance of having a secure border so American communities aren’t overwhelmed by people needing support.

    Fetterman, who no longer identifies as a Progressive, chided fellow Democrats for being in a state of denial about the negative impact of a large and uncontrolled flow of destitute third-worlders. “[They’re] trying to tell people, ‘well, don’t believe your eyes, it’s going to be OK, it’s all working out.’ It’s not,” said the ever-slovenly Fetterman, who showed up for his video-recorded interview with the Times dressed something like a destitute third-worlder himself — in a black hoodie and gym shorts. 

    Fetterman added: 

    “I’m the most pro-immigration guy there is. But that has to be compatible with a secure border, and I will never listen to anyone’s other side until you can explain, like, how? How do we take care of them? Where did those resources come from? And where do they go? Nobody could provide a serious answer to that.”

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    Fetterman concluded the interview by predicting that Trump will lose an election that he says is more “visceral” than issue-driven: “I do believe enough people will choose Harris. But it’s going to be much, much closer than anyone would want.”  

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/28/2024 – 16:40

  • The "Righteously Pissed Off" Are Ready To Go To Work To Fix Whatever They Can
    The “Righteously Pissed Off” Are Ready To Go To Work To Fix Whatever They Can

    Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

    Speaking of Abortion…

    “Good rule of thumb: those who frequently use the word “disinformation” are the ones most likely to be pushing it”

    – Elon Musk

    What were they thinking after they shoved “Joe Biden” into the abyss, like an old refrigerator over the edge of the landfill, and afterward settled — instantly it appears, with no process at all — on Kamala Harris to lead the party to victory in the fall election?

    I will tell you: they were not thinking at all.

    The collective mind of the Democrat elite was a vast vacuum devoid of thought, mass, or light, like a corner of deepest space, lacking even a particle of cosmic debris to evoke the existence of existence.

    Such mindlessness was the consummate expression of a party that for eight years worked every angle of political mental illness toward the loss of its mind, driven by whatever dark energy seeks escape from truth, life, and God — whatever is opposite of creation and being. What you are witnessing is a colossal act of being un-born. The party put out a call to the universe and the universe ordered. . .  an abortion of the Democratic Party! You are reminded again: be careful of what you wish for.

    And so do things stand one week before the election. You have not seen such a vivid demonstration of slowly-and-then-all-at-once since the implosion of Lehman Brothers as the collapse of the Democratic Party this fateful October. Poor Kamala is just collateral damage at this point. She goes out before some manufactured audience and seven-minutes onstage delivering a door-dash order of precooked blather is all she can stand before being overwhelmed by the emptiness and futility of her task. . .  and then she flees back to the waiting limousine (and the chardonnay bottle).

    Meanwhile, her allies — that is, the Democratic Party’s allies — play their own roles in this political abortion. The LA Times and the WashPo declined their usual proforma endorsements, two kisses of death. Those actions last week provoked nervous breakdowns in both newsrooms, cries of anguish, resignations, professional suicides. The news media find themselves in a peculiar position, having gone along for years with the gathering mental illness of the Democratic Party, like incompetent parents in a large dysfunctional family, offering unconditional support for their kids’ intolerable and unacceptable behavior.

    They are flying to pieces now on the CNN chat panels. James Carville, the party’s shriveled Gollum, has gone to IV infusions of Jim Beam, seems like. Jake Tapper gets Sunday schooled by JD Vance and turns into a mewling cat-lady right before your eyes. Anderson Cooper goes all waxy and mute. Joy Reid surrenders to echolalia as her MSNBC fans are subjected to the guest list of P. Diddy’s “freak-offs,” ranting about Hitler. Lawrence O’Donnell is looking more and more like Vincent Price in Return of the Fly. Reality-optional hardly suffices to describe cable news these days.

    You’ve got to ask: can they just let it be? Can they just let go of their insane Jacobin rebellion now and let it fade into history? Then, kick back, recuperate, get their minds right, put their house and family in order, and move on as a legit political faction in a functioning republic? Or, do they burn the asylum down?

    The signals are troubling. They are chattering about Mr. Trump “using the military” against them in the months to come — as if the Abrams tanks were going to roll up to DNC headquarters and blast away. By now, you know that such thoughts expressed by Democratic pols and news pals are always projections of their own wishes. The New York Times published just such a classic paranoid projection exercise last week “. . . telling Americans that if he [Trump] wins, he plans to bend, if not break, our democracy.”

    Surely it is too late, with early voting well underway, to stop any ballot harvesting and other election shenanigans as engineered by master fraudster Marc Elias. In fact, frauds are already being discovered (e.g., Lancaster County, PA.) Not a good look. It is exactly what a conspiracy (to commit election fraud) means in law, and the actual people who cooked the ballots and transported them are going to rat-out those who instructed them to do it. Wait for that, and wait for it to pop up elsewhere around the country. This time, watchers are watching, much more carefully.

    Of course, you know there will be long delays, perhaps a week or more, before definitive election results will get posted. The country’s in a bad way, really frightened of what these desperate Democrats with their mitts still on the levers of power might do. Judge Merchan is scheduled to deliver his bit of mischief November 26 in the New York “Stormy Daniels hush money” case. You can bet that the Supreme Court will squash him like a sow-bug five minutes later and vacate his stupid case.

    Reasonable observers (Rickards, Armstrong) are whispering about martial law and blood in the streets following the election. Yet Mr. Trump’s MAGA legions, appear supernaturally confident now, fortified with a sense of mission. They’re righteously pissed-off about all the hoaxes, the lawfare, the swarming illegal migrants, their squandered tax dollars, and much more. But they are ready to go to work, eager to put their shoulders to the wheel to fix whatever they can and, as they do, the death of the Democratic Party is one abortion they will not shed any tears over.

    Another reminder of who we are as Americans and the mysterious workings of Providence: Father Mapple’s sermon — Orson Welles in the John Huston movie version of Melville’s Moby Dick:

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/28/2024 – 16:20

  • Stocks 'Squeeze' Higher, Crude Crushed, Bitcoin Bid Ahead Of Catalyst-Heavy Week
    Stocks ‘Squeeze’ Higher, Crude Crushed, Bitcoin Bid Ahead Of Catalyst-Heavy Week

    Today saw the quiet (short squeeze higher) before the storm of risk catalysts ahead this week (including 41% of SPX earnings and a handful of key macro data – JOLTS, GDP, PCE, NFP). But October Dallas Fed manufacturing activity was better than expected today, adding to momentum in the Citi US Macro Surprise Index…

    Source: Bloomberg

    The ‘good’ data sent rate-cut expectations (hawkishly) lower with 2024 now a coin toss between 1 and 2 25bp cuts and 2025 down to pricing in just 3 cuts…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Goldman’s trading desk noted that market volumes are down -5% and top of book depth is only $8.4mm with a “squeezy price action” evident in stocks: Bitcoin Equities (GSCBBTC1, +7.5%); China ADRs (GSXUCADR, +4.6%);  Non-Profitable Tech (GSXUNPTC, +3%) & Most Short Rolling (GSCBMSAL, +2.8%) – third major squeeze day in a row…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Mag7 stocks ended very marginally higher on the day after a short-squeeze open.

    Source: Bloomberg

    Bear in mind that today marks the first day of the estimated open window period for corporate buybacks with ~50% in open window today. We have already seen a number of companies start entering into new 10b5-1 plans over the past week.

    Taking all that into consideration, Small Caps were the days best performer (squeeze) while Nasdaq was the laggard (barely holding on to unchanged). The S&P lagged The Dow…

    VIX was lower today but the vol term structure for the S&P 500 is very much anticipating some malarkey over the next couple of weeks…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Bond yields pushed higher with the ‘Trump Trade’…

    Source: Bloomberg

    With yields up 3-4bps across the curve – but it was a wild day in bond-land with TSYs bid across Europe and then offered during most of the US session…

    Source: Bloomberg

    The dollar ended the day unchanged after extending Friday’s gains, falling back then inching back up to unch…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Bitcoin surged back up within a few ticks of $70,000…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Crude prices were clubbed like a baby seal today as the Iran-Israel theatrics seemed to calm traders minds and erase geopolitical risk premium….

    Source: Bloomberg

    Finally, USA Sovereign risk continues to rise quietly behind the scenes…

    Source: Bloomberg

    …as the world bids on the ultimate ‘insurance’ bet into an election surprise (red or blue sweep)…

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/28/2024 – 16:00

  • Treasury Trims Debt Estimates For Current Quarter, But Q1 Borrowing Surge To Follow
    Treasury Trims Debt Estimates For Current Quarter, But Q1 Borrowing Surge To Follow

    Back in July and exactly one quarter ago, when the US Treasury published its debt issuance forecast for the balance of 2024, we said that the “anticipated numbers came close to our estimates for Q3, but well above our forecast for Q4” with the highlight being the Q4 debt issuance number which the Treasury estimated at $565 billion, $115 billion above our estimate of $450 billion (in part due to the Treasury higher TGA estimate of $700 billion vs our assumption of $650 billion).

    Fast forward to today when ahead of Wednesday’s Quarterly Refunding Announcement, at 3pm ET the Treasury published its debt sources and uses forecast for the current and coming quarters, and it showed that the Treasury trimmed its estimate for borrowing for the current quarter, while raising more debt than it previously expected in the quarter ended June 30; The Terasury also continues to expect a $700 billion cash balance at the end of the year, just before the federal debt ceiling kicks back in. Then as we enter 2025, the Treasury expects to raise $823 billion in new debt in the first calendar quarter of 2025, in large part because it expects that the Treasury cash balance will rise by $150 billion to $850 billion, or in other words, the Treasury does not assume another debt ceiling crisis which would push the cash balance sharply lower in Q1 and onward.

    Here are the details from the Treasury statement:

    • During the July – September 2024 quarter, Treasury borrowed $762 billion in privately-held net marketable debt and ended the quarter with a cash balance of $886 billion, more than the $850 billion initially expected. In July 2024, Treasury estimated borrowing of $740 billion and assumed an end-of-September cash balance of $850 billion. Privately-held net marketable borrowing was $22 billion higher largely because of a $36 billion higher ending cash balance partially offset by higher net cash flows.  
    • During the October – December 2024 quarter, Treasury expects to borrow $546 billion in privately-held net marketable debt, assuming an end-of-December cash balance of $700 billion. The borrowing estimate is $19 billion lower than announced in July 2024, largely due to a higher beginning-of-quarter cash balance partially offset by lower net cash flows.

    • During the January – March 2025 quarter, Treasury expects to borrow $823 billion in privately-held net marketable debt, assuming an end-of-March cash balance of $850 billion. Of note,the end-of-March cash balance assumes another successful “enactment of a debt limit suspension or increase” which, assuming Trump becomes president, is virtually guaranteed will not happen. Indeed, should we get another debt ceiling crisis, the Treasury is quick to note that while the debt limit is not currently binding, “Treasury’s cash balance may be lower than assumed depending on several factors, including constraints related to the debt limit.” Translation: Q1 cash balances will be sharply lower than expected since the odds of a successful debt ceiling renegotiation are slim to none if Trump wins next week.

    Here is the debt schedule in table format:

    Source: Treasury

    Dealers’ expectations for the new borrowing estimate had varied ahead of Monday’s release. Strategists at JPMorgan Chase & Co. expected a cut to $529 billion. But the team at BNP Paribas predicted an increase to $600 billion, based in part on October and November making up nearly a quarter of the federal government’s annual deficit, a gap that has been steadily widening.

    Meanwhile, the projected $823 billion borrowing need in Q1 2025 would be the highest since the Sept 2023 quarter.

    “We estimate that the Treasury will begin to limit bill supply in March 2025 and will cut bill supply aggressively in Q2,” a team of strategists a TD Securities including Gennadiy Goldberg wrote in a note, which would be expected since by then the Reverse Repo buffer will be all used up. Before then, however, the TD team said that  “with a debt ceiling increase or suspension likely in Q3, Treasury will then ramp up bill issuance aggressively as the cash balance is rebuilt to a more normal level.”

    Wrightson ICAP economist Lou Crandall didn’t expect officials this week to provide any color on their specific expectations for the upcoming debt ceiling timeline. He had predicted a $540 billion October-through-December borrowing estimate ahead of Monday’s release.

    Today’s report comes ahead of Wednesday’s quarterly refunding announcement, when the Treasury will unveil its plans for long-term debt issuance. Bond dealers widely expect that the refunding auctions will total $125 billion for the third straight quarter. Many also expect a ramp up in Bill Issuance in the tail end of the year, which would be a big problem at a time when the Reverse Repo facility only holds just over $200 billion, and is in danger of being rapidly depleted, sparking another repo market crisis.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 10/28/2024 – 15:48

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Oct 28

Today’s News 28th October 2024

  • Korybko: Brazil's Veto Of Venezuela's BRICS Bid Exposes Multipolar Rift
    Korybko: Brazil’s Veto Of Venezuela’s BRICS Bid Exposes Multipolar Rift

    Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

    Brazil’s ruling Workers’ Party (PT per its Portuguese abbreviation) has presented itself as an Ibero-American champion of multipolarity since its inception, as has its leader President Lula since his first term began in 2003, but these narratives are now challenged like never before after last week.

    Brasil de Fato cited diplomatic sources to report that Brazil vetoed Venezuela’s BRICS partnership request while Putin also acknowledged during a press conference that Russia and Brazil disagree on Venezuela.

    This outcome was made all the more scandalous by Lula’s unexpected “head injury” that was allegedly responsible for him not flying to Kazan and Venezuelan President Maduro’s surprise visit to the event. Lula might have either made-up his injury or exaggerated it in order not to embarrass himself any further by arguing in person against his multipolar neighbor’s requested BRICS partnership. He might also have caught wind of Maduro’s plans and thus ducked out in order to avoid a potential confrontation there.

    In any case, one of the world’s top energy producers wasn’t able to achieve the consensual support required for partnering with the world’s top financial multipolarity platform, though this analysis here from last month explains how non-members and -partners can still coordinate their associated policies with BRICS. Be that as it may, it was still a blow to Venezuela’s prestige not to be inaugurated as an official partner, but Lula’s PT harmed its own reputation in a much worse way by reportedly vetoing this.

    Keeping in mind the abovementioned insight about how any country can voluntarily coordinate its associated policies with BRICS even in the absence of formal membership or partnership status, Brazil could have let Venezuela join in order to keep up the PT’s charade about being a multipolar champion. Instead, it maliciously prevented this, which only served to virtue signal support for the US’ ruling Democrats’ shared policy towards that country at the expense of the trust that Brazil built within BRICS.

    It was explained in August how “Ortega’s Condemnation Of Lula’s Meddling In Venezuela Debunks A Top Alt-Media Lie”, which hyperlinked at the end to a list of over 50 related analyses from October 2022 till then about Lula’s post-imprisonment ideological alignment with that aforesaid imperialist party. In brief, he and his party were never true multipolar champions like they presented themselves as, but were always more akin to “social democrats” or what’s been called the “compatible left” by traditional leftists.

    All the while, however, the PT’s social media influencers and cultish clique of supporters across the world aggressively gatekept the false narrative that their “heroes” pushed. This most often took the form of viciously “canceling” anyone who dared to even remotely question this debunked dogma. This charade was thus kept up until last week when it became impossible to deny that Lula’s PT had betrayed regional multipolar leader Venezuela solely to curry favor from what might soon be the US’ outgoing ruling party.

    There shouldn’t be any question about the veracity of Brasil de Fato’s diplomatic sources either after Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry came out with an official statement slamming Lula’s veto. They described it as an “immoral aggression” that “reproduce[ed] the hatred, exclusion and intolerance promoted from the centres of power in the West.” They then added that “The Venezuelan people feel indignation and shame” after what Lula just did. These are very strong words that should be taken very seriously.

    Readers should also know that while Lula hasn’t acknowledged Maduro’s re-election, Putin proudly thundered during last week’s event that “Venezuela is fighting for its independence, for its sovereignty…We believe that President Maduro won the elections, won fairly. He formed a government.” His words threw the PT onto the horns of yet another narrative dilemma by suggesting that Brazil’s stance is against another fellow Global South country’s “independence” and “sovereignty”.

    The Venezuelan Question is therefore a black-and-white issue: one either supports Lula and Biden’s regime change efforts in Venezuela, with each advancing this in their own but still coordinated way, or they support Maduro and Putin’s defense of Venezuela’s independence and sovereignty.

    There’s no middle ground no matter what lies top PT influencers might soon spew. Honest members from the Alt-Media Community will accurately report this while dishonest ones will keep covering up for the PT.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 10/27/2024 – 23:20

  • Porn-Addicts For Kamala Harris: Billionaire-Funded Far-Left PAC Pushes Cringe Ad 
    Porn-Addicts For Kamala Harris: Billionaire-Funded Far-Left PAC Pushes Cringe Ad 

    Reid Hoffman, billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn and independent director on Microsoft’s board, appears to have donated a substantial amount of money to the “Progress Action Fund” — a PAC led by a far-left activist and former Obama administration alumnus. PAF pushed out one of the cringiest pro-pornographic political ads to drum up support from chronic masturbators for Kamala Harris. 

    Let’s dive directly into the woke left’s cringe-fest ad… 

    Here’s the original report from X user Collin Rugg: 

    NEW: Democrat groups release an ad of a young man m*sturbating in an effort to get people to vote for Kamala Harris. The Democratic Party: The party of abortion and p*rn addicts. Progress Action Fund and Defend the Vote have released a $2.5 million ad campaign with the 30-second ad. The ad was called “Republicans Rubbing You the Wrong Way,” with an actor playing a Republican congressman watching the young man rub one out. The ad campaign is being displayed on streaming services in all seven swing states.

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    PAF noted on its website that it “runs hard-hitting ads to defeat Republicans in swing districts, including the viral ad Keep Republicans Out Of Your Bedroom.” 

    Heading PAF is former Obama activist Joe Jacobson, who identifies as a “he/him.”

    Jacobson is a radical leftist with prior ties to the Service Employees International Union, AFL-CIO, and the Obama administration. 

    According to data from Open Secrets, billionaire Hoffman appears to have funded some of Jacobson’s woke adventures at PAF. Hoffman splurged on PAF this year, donating as much as $500,000 on Sept. 25 and $50,000 on Sept. 19. 

    Daily Wire reporter Megan Basham wrote on X, “It’s a PAC run by an Obama administration alum. And a major funder is Reid Hoffman, co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn.” 

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    What a cringe-fest for Democrats… After unleashing the ‘Trump Nazi’ bazooka in leftist corporate media last week…

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    Now, they are trying to drum up support from porn-addicted Americans funded by Palo Alto elites. Weird.

    Well, it’s not weird unless you understand that this is desperation from Democrats and their billionaire funders. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 10/27/2024 – 22:45

  • Jury: Workers Fired For Refusing COVID-19 Vaccine To Get More Than $1 Million Each
    Jury: Workers Fired For Refusing COVID-19 Vaccine To Get More Than $1 Million Each

    Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Rail transit officials in California’s Bay Area have been ordered to pay more than $7 million to transit workers who were fired because they refused to get a COVID-19 vaccine years ago.

    A woman closes her eyes while receiving a COVID-19 vaccine at Sydney Road Family Medical Practice in Balgowlah, in Sydney, Australia, on Jan. 10, 2022. Jenny Evans/Getty Images

    On Oct. 23, a federal jury in the U.S District Court for the Northern District of California sided with six former San Francisco Bay Area Regional Transit (BART) workers who had refused to get the vaccine for religious purposes.

    BART was ordered to pay the group more than $7.8 million, with each individual receiving between $1.2 million and $1.5 million, the Pacific Justice Institute, which represented the transit workers in the trial, said in a statement on Oct. 24. The institute, a law firm representing the six former employees since 2022, said the eight-person jury deliberated for two days this week before returning the verdict that awarded the employees the compensation.

    About a week ago, the federal jury also determined that BART had failed to prove that it suffered an undue hardship by denying accommodations to the ex-employees in the case.

    On Oct. 23, the jury further found that the six employees met the burden of showing that there was a conflict between their religious beliefs and the BART vaccine mandate, which was implemented in 2021.

    According to the law firm, the jury also agreed with the figures that the plaintiffs had provided for lost wages that they had suffered after losing their jobs. The jury then added $1 million each to those figures, the firm said, describing the verdict as a “legal earthquake.”

    “The rail employees chose to lose their livelihood rather than deny their faith. That in itself shows the sincerity and depth of their convictions,“ Kevin Snider, the Pacific Justice Institute’s chief counsel, who served as lead trial attorney, said. ”After nearly three years of struggle, these essential workers feel they were heard and understood by the jury and are overjoyed and relieved by the verdict.”

    The law firm stated: “During the trial, jurors heard compelling testimony from dedicated employees. One of the plaintiffs had worked for more than 30 years for BART, with a stretch of 10 years perfect attendance, before being unceremoniously dismissed. Another had been out on workers comp for months, with no scheduled return date, when she was fired.”

    Lawyers for BART argued that multiple employees who had conflicts with receiving the vaccine had secular—rather than religious—reasons. But the jury disagreed with those arguments, the Pacific Justice Institute said.

    The vaccine mandate was approved by BART’s board of directors in October 2021 and stipulated that all employees must get the COVID-19 vaccine. It allowed some employees to be exempt from the vaccine, including for religious reasons.

    A year later, BART employees filed a class-action lawsuit accusing the operator of denying religious accommodations that violated state law.

    U.S. District Judge William Alsup, who presided over the lawsuit against BART, ruled that the operator’s policies did not violate the employees’ right to religious freedom, according to an order he issued in March.

    A separate order issued by Alsup in January found that BART received 188 requests for a religious exemption and accommodation, and of that figure, 40 chose not to complete the process. They were either terminated from employment or ultimately got the vaccine.

    “Plaintiffs’ putative class fails because its members have little in common beyond their request for religious accommodation,” the judge further said in his order. “They do not share a common religious objection. They do not share a vocation or a set of contractual rights. They do not present a similar set of potential accommodations and associated burdens. They do not present similar health and exposure concerns.

    “Potential accommodations do not impact the same pool of coworkers. Those coworkers do not have the same bargained-for rights.”

    The Epoch Times contacted BART for comment on Oct. 25 but received no reply by publication time. The rail operator’s spokesman, James Allison, told local news outlet SFGate that it had “no comment” on the verdict.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 10/27/2024 – 22:10

  • NYC Mayor Says Trump Not A Fascist, Urges Politicians To 'Dial Down The Temperature'
    NYC Mayor Says Trump Not A Fascist, Urges Politicians To ‘Dial Down The Temperature’

    Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    New York City Mayor Eric Adams rebuffed recent claims that former President Donald Trump is a fascist and said that Trump’s Madison Square Garden event should go ahead.

    “I have heard those terms hurled at me by some political leaders in the city, using terms like [Nazi leader Adolph] Hitler and fascist,” the Democratic mayor said at a news conference in New York City on Saturday.

    New York City Mayor Eric Adams speaks during a news conference in New York City on April 5, 2024. Brittainy Newman/AP Photo

    “I know what Hitler has done, and I know what a fascist regime looks like. I think, as I have called for over and over again, that the level of conversation, I think we can all dial down the temperature,” Adams said at the conference in which he also detailed a significant police presence planned for Trump’s event at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan Sunday.

    He made the comment after Vice President Kamala Harris and her surrogates criticized Trump in recent days after his former chief of staff John Kelly accused him of praising Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Germany dictator’s generals while he was in office. Trump has refuted Kelly’s comments.

    Referring to the claims, Harris told voters Wednesday at a CNN town hall that “I invite you to listen and go online to listen to John Kelly” make the allegations against the 45th president. “This is a serious, serious issue. And we know who he is. He admires dictators,” Harris said.

    Kelly told the New York Times and the Atlantic that the former president wanted generals like Hitler had.

    “He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too,’” Kelly told the New York Times.

    Kelly’s comment was not publicly corroborated by other former Trump White House officials and was refuted by Trump in the past week.

    During a media event, Trump told reporters that he never said positive things about Hitler during his time in the Oval Office, saying that he “would never say that” and criticized The Atlantic and its reporting.

    Former Vice President Mike Pence’s former chief of staff Mike Ayers has also rebutted the claims.

    “I’ve avoided commenting on intra-staff leaks or rumors or even lies as it relates to my time at the White House but General Kelly’s comments regarding President Trump are too egregious to ignore,” Ayers posted on X. “I was with each of them more than most, and his commentary is *patently false.*”

    After Harris’s statement, Trump’s campaign spokesman Steven Cheung accused the Democratic candidate of spreading “outright lies and falsehoods.”

    Adams, who is currently facing federal bribery charges, said Saturday that he disagrees with the notion that Trump’s rally should be scrapped over Kelly’s comments.

    “This is America. This is New York, and I think it’s important that we allow individuals to exercise their right to get their message clear to New Yorkers,” the mayor said. “And our job as a city and as a Police Department is to make sure they can do that … in a peaceful way.”

    Adams’s comments about lowering “the temperature” also appeared to echo a comment made by President Joe Biden earlier this year in the immediate aftermath of the first assassination attempt against Trump in Pennsylvania. At the time, Biden called on Americans to “cool it down” after the shooting, in which a bullet clipped Trump’s ear.

    Trump became the subject of a second assassination attempt in mid-September after the Secret Service engaged with an individual who was pointing a rifle through a perimeter fence while the former president was golfing in Florida.

    In mid-October, Trump spoke at the Al Smith charity dinner in New York and made reference to the federal charges Adams is facing, as well as those he is facing. “They’ve gone after me, Mr. Mayor, and you’re peanuts compared to what they’ve done to me,” he said on Oct. 18. “And you’re going to be OK.”

    The Associated Press contributed to this report.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 10/27/2024 – 21:00

  • How Much Do G7 And BRICS Countries Rely On The Taiwan Strait?
    How Much Do G7 And BRICS Countries Rely On The Taiwan Strait?

    With China continuing to conduct military drills near Taiwan, as well as recently reaffirming that use of force will always remain an option to bring Taiwan under its control, concerns have grown over how potential Chinese actions in the region could impact global trade through the Taiwan Strait.

    This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Kayla Zhu, visualizes the share of exports and imports that move through the Taiwan Strait, broken down by the G7 and BRICS countries.

    The data comes from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and is updated as of October 2024.

    Which Countries are Most Reliant on the Taiwan Strait?

    Below, we show the share of exports and imports that transit through the Taiwan Strait by both G7 and BRICS countries.

    BRICS countries overall are more exposed to disruptions to trade routes in the Taiwan Strait, specifically China, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran. The latter two have 24% or more of its exports pass through the strait.

    China and Japan are the most reliant on the Taiwan Strait for both imports and exports, specifically imports. Almost a third of both countries’ imports pass through the Taiwan Strait.

    According to CSIS, over 95% of Japan’s crude oil comes from a select group of Middle Eastern countries, much of which is transported through the Taiwan Strait, making this route integral to Japan’s energy security.

    As for China, while CSIS estimates that 15% of its exports pass through this waterway—a relatively lower share than other countries—the total value of these exports is still over $551 billion.

    The Taiwan Strait is not only essential for China’s international trade but also plays a key role in its domestic commerce. More than half of the voyages through the strait connect the numerous ports along China’s eastern seaboard, according to CSIS.

    Aside from Japan, G7 countries generally have much lower reliance on the Taiwan Strait. The U.S., UK, Canada, Italy, Germany, and France each have single-digit percentages for imports and exports through the strait.

    The Taiwan Strait has been the site of multiple major crises between China and Taiwan since the 1950s, many of which involved military confrontations such as artillery bombardments, missile tests, and naval deployments.

    To learn more about how G7 and BRICS stack up agains eachother in other areas, check out this graphic that compares G7 and BRICS countries by GDP.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 10/27/2024 – 20:25

  • Watch: Megan Kelly Crushes Bill Maher's "Trump Is Hitler" Insanity
    Watch: Megan Kelly Crushes Bill Maher’s “Trump Is Hitler” Insanity

    Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

    Sirius XM host Megan Kelly Absolutely crushed Bill Maher’s tired assertion that Donald Trump is a fascist, prompting him to immediately try to change the subject and then end the interview on his HBO show.

    Maher said of Trump, “the things that he’s been saying, and all the people in his administration who’ve said he’s a fascist, he wants to be fascist, his friends are all dictators.”

    Kelly told Maher she doesn’t care about any of that “Because they’ve been saying that about Trump for years, they’ve been saying that about Republican candidates for years. It has a long, storied history. If you are at all center or center-right, you are used to having your candidate of choice completely demonized, whether it’s the f-word, the r-word, the misogynist word.”

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    She continued, “They tried to tell us Mitt Romney was a raging sexist because of binders full of women. They tried to tell us John McCain was a raging racist, notwithstanding the fact that he adopted a daughter from Bangladesh. They’ve been doing this for every Republican, and they get to Trump, and we are no longer listening to them.”

    “Trump has incendiary rhetoric, there’s no question, but we have four years to judge him by, and the country was going pretty well, unlike the four we’ve had with these two,” Kelly urged, referring to Harris and Biden.

    When Maher then attempted to argue that Trump inherited a good economy from Obama, Kelly responded “So, walk me through it. So Trump has Obama to thank for his economy, but Biden can’t thank Trump for anything?”

    “Okay, let’s get off this,” Maher responded, before going back to calling Trump a fascist and literally Hitler.

    “I see; he hid his Hitlerism the first four years and is going to come out in full force the second four years,” Kelly told Maher, highlighting how stupid the assertion is.

    Kelly then urged that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are the ones acting like fascists, running through their weaponisation of the Justice Department against Trump and the fact they they have ignored Supreme Court rulings.

    Maher then quickly ended the interview.

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    Earlier in the interview, Maher also managed to lose an argument about Democrats denying election results for a second time to Kelly.

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    Kelly also hit Maher’s lefty audience with some other horrific facts they didn’t want to hear about what is being done to children in the name of ‘inclusion’.

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    Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 10/27/2024 – 19:50

  • One Dead, 35 Injured In Suspected Terror Truck-Ramming Near Mossad Headquarters
    One Dead, 35 Injured In Suspected Terror Truck-Ramming Near Mossad Headquarters

    An area north of Tel Aviv was scene of a Sunday morning incident being dubbed in Israeli media a “terror truck-ramming attack” at a bus stop, which left one person dead and at least 32 wounded. Subsequent reports said that 35 were injured, with five in serious condition.

    The perpetrator and only deceased has been identified as Rami Nasrallah, an Arab Israeli driver who lives in Qalansawe, in central Israel. However, there remains some ambiguity over whether it was an intentional ‘terror attack’ or possibly the result of a horrific accident.

    Emergency responders at the scene after a driver apparently rammed his truck into a crowd of people at a bus stop in Ramat Hasharon, AFP.

    The event is still under investigation, with the Times of Israel reporting of the deceased bus driver that “His body was sent to the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute for an autopsy to check if he suffered a medical condition that caused the accident.”

    Suspicion has widely fall on the intentional attack theory, given it happened just outside the well-known Glilot military base in central Israel, and in a location near the Mossad headquarters and several IDF intelligence units.

    Additionally, police said that that the suspect was “shot and neutralized” at the scene, while still not saying necessarily that it was an attack.

    A lot of the injured were senior citizens who had just stepped off a bus at the moment the bus was rammed. They were planning to attend a museum exhibit memorializing the fallen of the Oct.7 Hamas terror attack.

    While not directly taking responsibility for the apparent terror incident, Hamas praised the “heroic ramming attack” that was carried out near “Mossad headquarters.”

    The group described that it was “a natural response to the crimes of the Zionist occupation against our Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem, and its ongoing brutal massacres, especially in the northern Gaza Strip.”

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    “Photos and videos on social media showed several people pinned down under the truck as medics and rescuers tried to help,” Al Jazeera has described of the gruesome scene. Police cordoned off the area and a security helicopter hovered above.

    A number of the injured were witnessed lying on a sidewalk near the truck. One source said that armed civilians may have shot the driver as it was clear he was about to ram people. Another eyewitness saw eight people “trapped under the truck.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 10/27/2024 – 19:15

  • Watch: Trump And Rogan Have A Wild Interview
    Watch: Trump And Rogan Have A Wild Interview

    Former President Donald Trump appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast Friday, where they discussed a wide range of topics for three hours.

    Watch:

    Highlights:

    Getting rid of income taxes:

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    Hoaxes perpetrated against Trump:

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    Why Democrats are in favor of illegal immigration:

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    Trump on bad White House hires:

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    Keeping Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas in check:

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    The two discussed the horrible condition California is in thanks to Gov. Gavin Newsom:

    Trump on getting shot:

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    Trump on Musk:

    “Surreal” – On what it was like when Trump won the 1st time:

    “I want to be a whale psychiatrist” – Offshore windmills and how they affect whales:

    “You’ve said a lot of wild shit!” – Why Trump became so popular:

    Trump on Barron:

    “Big pharma wasn’t thrilled” – Trump on pressure not to work with RFK Jr.:

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    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 10/27/2024 – 18:11

  • Dramatic Video Shows Assassination Attempt On Bolivia's Ex-President Morales
    Dramatic Video Shows Assassination Attempt On Bolivia’s Ex-President Morales

    At a moment the South American country of Bolivia is already on edge due to rising inflation and shrinking gas production, ex-president Evo Morales said his car was shot at on Sunday.

    He and officials close to him say a pair of vehicles forced his to stop in the middle of a freeway, and that’s when heavily armed unidentified gunmen fired on his car, with a bullet reportedly passing “centimeters” from his head. There are reports saying that Morales’ driver was wounded.

    Current president Luis Arce has recently accused Morales and his supporters of “destabilizing” the country amid weeks of roadblocks, which have resulted in supply chain problems which have impacted grocery stores and gas stations.

    Morales has been facing what he says is a politically motivated investigation by a government prosecutor, concocted by his enemies, especially the Arce administration.

    The former president is accused of statutory rape and human trafficking, which he calls sham charges. He led Bolivia from 2006 to 2019 and was the country’s first indigenous president.

    Supporters of the rival political parties in Bolivia have recently engaged in street clashes, with at times entire city areas shut down and key roads blocked amid the mayhem.

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    Morales’ team is claiming this new incident was a planned assassination attempt. The Morales-aligned bloc of the divided MAS party claimed the following:

    “This is not an isolated incident. It’s clear evidence that we are facing a fascist government that does not hesitate to attack the life of former President Evo Morales.”

    And according to more related by the Associated Press:

    The statement said that two vehicles with heavily armed men dressed in black ambushed Morales’ convoy. Bullets whizzed just “centimeters” from the ex-president’s head, it said. Video posted on the website of Morales’ radio station showed helicopters buzzing over an airstrip where the incident occurred.

    President Arce’s statement in the aftermath appeared to confirm this as a serious and credible incident.

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    “The exercise of any violent practice in politics must be condemned and clarified,” Arce wrote on X. “Problems are not resolved by trying to kill people or by partisan speculation.”

    As video of the assassination attempt spreads, authorities fear new unrest could be unleashed…

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    However, other key government ministers suggested it may have been a false flag orchestrated by Morales and that he was never truly in danger.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 10/27/2024 – 18:05

  • Martin Armstrong Sees Trump "Landslide"; Fears Desperate Deep State Wants War & Martial Law
    Martin Armstrong Sees Trump “Landslide”; Fears Desperate Deep State Wants War & Martial Law

    Via Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com,

    Legendary financial and geopolitical cycle analyst Martin Armstrong says we are getting down to the wire with the 2024 Election, and the Deep State Dems are in panic mode. 

    Could we have a false flag, martial law, debt crisis, default, war or all of the above? 

    Armstrong says,

    “They want war.  There is no question about that… Lindsey Graham was on Face the Nation a couple of months ago, and he slipped and told the truth for once. 

    I was shocked that he actually slipped and told the truth for once.  He said there was a $10 trillion to $12 trillion natural gas asset under Crimea, and we can’t allow Russia and China to get that…

    This is like Iraq.  We are going after the oil.”

    On martial law, Armstrong says, “I am very concerned about martial law…”

    “They (Supreme Court) have kind of hinted that martial law is a common law type thing.  When the courts are closed, then you have martial law.  It is justified under ‘necessity.’  This is what the Supreme Court has said.  So, I am very concerned that these neocons are so desperate that they are definitely going to try to create some sort of a false flag or anything they can do perhaps the last week in October going into the election.”

    On the war front, we just had Israel bomb Iran, and NATO is still poking Russia.  Armstrong says,

    “NATO is a retirement home for neocons.  It should have been shut down.  They are trying to take the world into World War III. 

    They are now raising a $100 billion so they can continue the war against Russia in case Trump is elected.”

    Armstrong is still seeing Trump winning in 2024 in a “landslide.”  Kamala Harris is going the other way.  A few months back, Armstrong said Kamala’s real approval rating was 10.5%.  Armstrong says he just ran new Kamala Harris approval ratings with his Socrates computer program. 

    Armstrong says, “It’s actually down to 6.5% to 7.5%.  It’s really appalling.”

    Armstrong says Kamala has “negative coattails,” which will spell big losses for Democrats down ballot in November.

    On the economy, Armstrong says,

    “We are in this debt Ponzi scheme where they issue new debt every year to pay off the old debt.  People say the debt is $34 trillion, but the level of the debt does not matter.  It could be a quadrillion dollars…

    China holds 10% of America’s debt.  They sold $53 billion at the beginning of the year.  This is where the danger comes.  If you don’t have someone to take up what China is not buying, guess what?  You can’t pay, and when you can’t pay, that’s when a default comes.  This is why they want war . . . so they can default on everything…

    They take us to war, and there goes Social Security and everything else.”

    On the 2024 Election, Armstrong says,

    “The 2024 Election will be the last election. . . . The US will break up into three or four sections. . . .

    We are committing suicide. . . . This is how governments die. . . .

    Gold goes up when people lose confidence in government.  This is why central banks want gold. 

    They are afraid of governments defaulting on their debt in war…

    In the war, we lose it next time.  They want terrorism so they can lock us down.  This is the future we face.”

    There is much more in the 1-hour and 3-minute interview.

    Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com as he goes One-on-One with Martin Armstrong as he gives his analysis on martial law, debt default and world war for 10.26.24.

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    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 10/27/2024 – 17:30

  • The Vampire Fiat Money System: How It Works and What It Means for Your Wealth
    The Vampire Fiat Money System: How It Works and What It Means for Your Wealth

    Authored by Thorsten Polleit via The Epoch Times,

    Who doesn’t know them: the blood-sucking vampires, the eerie undead, immortalized in countless films, and inspired primarily by Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula” (1897). Just think of iconic movies like the silent film “Nosferatu—A Symphony of Horror” (1922), “Dracula” (1958) with Christopher Lee, Roman Polanski’s parody “The Fearless Vampire Killers” (1967), or “Nosferatu—Phantom of the Night” (1979), starring Klaus Kinski as Count Dracula.

    Vampires are demons who rise from their graves at night, seeking to drain the blood of innocent victims. Not only do they steal the life force that sustains them, but they also spread their curse. Many victims, bitten by vampires, are “turned,” becoming undead themselves, thus joining the vampire’s dark domain.

    The enemies and hunters of vampires face a formidable challenge: vampires can disguise themselves, transforming into creatures like wolves or bats, and often display immense, superhuman strength. They can only be repelled by traditional defenses—garlic cloves, rosaries, holy water, or the Christian cross. But truly destroying a vampire requires decapitation, driving a wooden stake through its heart, or bright sunlight that turns them to dust.

    The vampire is an ancient and widespread myth. The image of a blood-sucking undead creature, or similar concepts, has existed across many cultures. This demon embodies superstition—acting as a projection of primal fears, the inexplicable, and evil as the counterpart to good. The notion of a creature that emerges at night, drains its victims’ blood, and draws them from light into darkness is undoubtedly a profoundly threatening one.

    When you reflect a little longer on the horror story of the vampire demon, you will inevitably begin to see parallels (or at least points of contact) with the fiat money system that exists worldwide today.

    Under Cover of Darkness

    It takes place under the cover of darkness: It is fair to say that the vast majority of people are unaware of how today’s fiat money system is structured, how it operates, or what its effects are. Students in schools and universities are, for the most part, left in the dark about it, and the consequences of the fiat money system, therefore, take most people by surprise—unprepared and relentless. Indeed, how many people know that our current fiat money system is a system in which the state’s central bank holds a coercive monopoly on the creation of fiat central bank money, while commercial banks issue their own fiat commercial bank money based on central bank fiat money.

    Who knows that fiat money is literally created out of thin air, representing a form of money creation that has no connection whatsoever to “real savings”? And who explains to people that, from an economic perspective, expanding the fiat money supply is inflationary, leading to uneven higher prices for goods and services compared to a situation where the money supply had not been increased? It is also unknown to many that the issuance of fiat money via the credit market causes a misallocation of capital, initially triggering a boom, only to be followed by a bust; that it drives economies into excessive debt; and that it allows the state to grow ever larger at the expense of the freedoms of citizens and entrepreneurs.

    In short, for most people, the damage caused by fiat money is unknown; it creeps upon them under the cover of darkness, like a vampire.

    Vulnerable Victims and Life Sucked Away

    The victims are often helpless and unaware, with the fruits of their labor effectively being siphoned away. Fiat money has something vampire-like about it, enabling one group (those allowed to create fiat money) to live at the expense of others (those forced to use the monopolized money). The first recipients of newly-created fiat money are the beneficiaries. They can use the new money to purchase goods and services whose prices have not yet risen, making them wealthier.

    As the money changes hands, it increases demand, and prices of goods rise accordingly. As a result, the late recipients of the new money can only buy goods at higher prices, leaving them at a disadvantage. The first recipients improve their position at the expense of the late recipients. The most severely affected are those who receive nothing from the newly-created money supply—they are, in effect, the ones “sucked dry.”

    The vampire-like redistributive effect of fiat money, which operates in the shadows, particularly benefits commercial banks that create fiat commercial bank money, as well as those in a position to take out new bank loans in fiat money.

    First and foremost, it is the state and those who benefit from it who are among the biggest winners of the vampire fiat money system. The state finances a significant portion of its expenditure with newly-created fiat money, using it to pay its representatives, employees, and their pensions, as well as the companies from which it purchases goods and services. The state and its beneficiaries are among the early recipients of the newly-created fiat money, making them the primary beneficiaries at the expense of the many who are not closely connected to the state.

    One might argue that a redistribution of income and wealth, brought about by the increase in fiat money, would also occur in a commodity or precious metal money system. This is true in principle, but the increase in, say, a gold money system, would be less pronounced than in a fiat money system. The fact is that the latter was deliberately chosen for its vampire-like nature. It benefits the state, banks, and big business at the expense of the general population, keeping them below their economic potential.

    Creating Minions

    Like a vampire, fiat money infects its victims, turning them into accomplices of the fiat money system. Fiat money quite literally enslaves its users, making them dependent. For instance, fiat money incentivises firms and private households to incur debt and live beyond their means, made possible through artificially low interest rates. People are also encouraged to invest in assets (such as houses and companies) because the chronic inflationary nature of fiat money ensures a continual rise in asset prices. Once people are lured into exposure to fiat money, their economic and financial well-being becomes dependent on the continuation of the inflationary fiat money system and on it being “rescued” by the state and its central bank during times of crisis—even at the expense of those who do not benefit from the system, or benefit much less.

    Politicians, bureaucrats, bank employees, and companies that receive government contracts all develop a vested interest in ensuring that the fiat money system is maintained. In this sense, they become fiat money vampire thralls, feeding off the lifeblood of those engaged in productive work by claiming a share of their income.

    Moreover, holders of fiat money are the ones who lose out, as fiat money continually loses its purchasing power. In a fiat money system, the central bank ensures that interest rates are kept artificially low—often negative after accounting for inflation—so that savings in time deposits, savings accounts, and bonds are effectively eroded.

    Aversion to Light

    The vampire and the fiat money system cannot withstand the bright light of day; both will crumble to dust when exposed to sunlight. If people truly understood the negative effects of fiat money and the damage it causes to the world, they would likely reject it—along with the production and employment structures it creates. This is likely why so little is taught about fiat money in schools and universities. Its darker aspects are concealed, with the statist education system as particeps criminis ensuring the bright light of knowledge does not shine on the fiat money system.

    Remember that central bank councils are typically referred to as “the guardians of the currency,” and it is said that they “fight” inflation. Nothing could be further from the truth—much like a vampire who welcomes his guests and engages in witty conversation without revealing his true nature. Just as sunlight kills a vampire, sound economic knowledge would destroy the fiat money system, especially when coupled with a simple, well-understood ethic like “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

    Until that day comes, investors should be aware of the serious economic and ethical flaws of fiat money. The uncomfortable truth is that long-term prosperity and peace cannot be sustained under a fiat money system. Therefore, it is in everyone’s best interest for the bright light of truth to expose and thus end the fiat money system. But how can this be achieved?

    By proactively and honestly informing people about the evils of fiat money; by advising them to reduce their dependence on it, both in their lives and their savings; and by promoting a free market for money, while encouraging technological innovations in the monetary sphere that lie beyond the state’s control. Together, these efforts will act like a ray of sunlight striking the vampire-like fiat money system—ultimately causing it to crumble to dust.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 10/27/2024 – 16:20

  • Seeking Middle East Peace, Michigan Muslim Leaders Endorse Trump At Saturday Rally
    Seeking Middle East Peace, Michigan Muslim Leaders Endorse Trump At Saturday Rally

    In the latest vivid demonstration that once-durable Democratic constituencies are being completely shattered in 2024, former President Donald Trump on Saturday welcomed Michigan Muslim leaders onto a stage and heartily accepted their endorsements. “I’m thrilled to accept the endorsement of these highly respected leaders,” Trump told the crowd in Novi, a Detroit suburb.

    The principal motivator of the endorsements appears to be outrage over the Biden-Harris administration’s support of Israel’s long, astoundingly destructive war on Gaza — and a belief that even ardent Israel-backer Trump would be far more likely to bring the carnage to an end. Imam Belal Alzuhairi took to the stage in the Detroit suburb of Novi to voice that very sentiment: 

    “We, as Muslims, stand with President Trump because he promises peace, not war! We are supporting Donald Trump because he promised to end war in the Middle East and Ukraine. The bloodshed has to stop all over the world, and I think this man can make that happen. I personally believe that God saved his life twice for a reason.”

    Alzuhairi also commended Trump’s commitment to protect children from school curricula that undermine family values, and to creating a strong border and stopping illegal immigration: 

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    Dearborn Heights mayor Bill Bazzi likewise embraced Trump as potential peacemaker, telling the crowd, “We’re going to stop the wars, we’re going to make the United States safe again, and we’re going to make the world safe.” Amer Ghalib, Muslim mayor of Detroit suburb Hamtramck, endorsed Trump on Oct. 20. Liberals celebrated when Hamtramck elected a majority-Muslim city council in 2015, and then Ghalib as its first Muslim Mayor in 2021, but they recoiled and even felt betrayed when the council barred LGBTQ Pride flags from city flagpoles last year.  

    As is the case with seemingly every other issue, Kamala Harris has chosen not to stake out a position on the Israel-Gaza war that’s even modestly different from that of the Biden administration — such as merely putting conditions on the billions of US dollars shoveled into the country. Here she is lamely dodging the issue in her train wreck of a town hall performance in Philadelphia on Wednesday night: 

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    That approach could well cost Harris Michigan’s 15 electoral votes and the 2024 election, as Michigan has one of the largest Muslim populations in America. The issue could also be decisive in states with lesser Muslim populations but tightly-contested races. An Arab News/YouGov poll released last week found that Trump is narrowly winning the Arab-American vote, 45% to 43%. In 2020, 86% of Muslims voted for Biden, with just 6% backing Trump.

    As if her refusal to take a different approach to Israel weren’t doing enough damage with Muslims, Harris has put herself in an even deeper hole by embracing the endorsements of arch-Middle-East-interventionist Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Rep. Liz Cheney — and even toting Liz along for multiple appearances in Michigan. By some estimates, upwards of one million people have died as a result of the Dick Cheney-orchestrated invasion of Iraq on false premises. 

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    Sharing a view that’s no doubt widely held among Michigan Muslims, Hamtramck Mayor Ghalib told reporters last week: 

    “It was surprising for us as Arab Americans to have Kamala Harris bringing someone whose family name always reminds us of war crimes in the Middle East….To bring this person to our backyard, to remind us all of the tragedies that happened in the Middle East, is something that tells us that there would be more wars coming if Kamala Harris is elected.”

    A cheerful embrace of warmonger Liz Cheney has helped crush Muslim support of Kamala Harris (AP/Mark Schiefelbein via WLNS)

    While it’s certainly not universal, the substantial Muslim embrace of Trump is particularly remarkable given Trump’s demonstrated devotion to the State of Israel and relentless pandering to its backers inside the United States. 

    Trump’s political campaigns have been fueled by enormous donations from the late Sheldon and still-living Miriam Adelson, a billionaire couple whose foremost policy concern has been ensuring steady financial, military and political support for the State of Israel, and aligning Washington with the agenda of Israel’s right wing. The Adelsons have been closely allied with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even publishing a free Israeli newspaper that boosts Netanyahu and his Likud party. 

    The couple donated a jaw-dropping $90 million to Trump’s 2020 campaign, rewarding him for his Israel-catering policies, including relocating the US embassy from Tel Aviv to contested Jerusalem, exiting the Iran nuclear deal and recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which Israel captured in 1967’s Six-Day War. Trump also awarded Miriam Adelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In the 2024 race, Miriam Adelson has donated another $100 million to a PAC that works to elect Trump.  

    The remarkable fracturing of Muslim support of the Democratic Party comes alongside similar erosion of other once-reliable cornerstones of the Democratic electorate, including blacks, Hispanics, union members and young voters. Can this race really be as tight as “experts” tell us? 

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 10/27/2024 – 15:45

  • CNN Data Analyst Admits Trump On Course To Win Popular Vote
    CNN Data Analyst Admits Trump On Course To Win Popular Vote

    Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

    CNN’s data analyst Harry Enten suggested Friday that Donald Trump could be on course to win the popular vote on November 5th.

    That hasn’t happened for a Republican candidate for 20 years.

    If it happens, Trump will almost certainly win the electoral college and the election.

    Enten noted that a New York Times/Siena College poll was released last week showing Trump tied with Kamala Harris at 48% in the national popular vote.

    “Everyone has been talking about this idea that Trump may win in the Electoral College, but Kamala Harris may win the popular vote, but Trump may finally get his great white whale,” Enten stated.

    He added that Wall Street Journal and CNBC polls also have Trump ahead of Harris in the popular vote.

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    “Part of my job is to warn our viewers, on either side of the aisle, of an event that may occur, that they don’t necessarily like, and Donald Trump winning the popular vote could ABSOLUTELY happen,” Enten urged.

    He added “You might as well wrap your minds around it now folks if you don’t like Donald Trump,” noting that Democrat supporters heads are currently “exploding.”

    The RCP average has Trump in the lead for the popular vote for the first time in his political career by two points.

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    If he did it, Trump would only be the second Republican in 36 years to win the popular vote.

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

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    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 10/27/2024 – 15:10

  • LGBT Activists Meet With Pope, Urge Him To End Vatican Opposition To Trans Ideology
    LGBT Activists Meet With Pope, Urge Him To End Vatican Opposition To Trans Ideology

    LGBT activists have a strange obsession with religious acceptance, specifically from the Catholic Church.  Rational minds would argue that if a group is diametrically opposed to your lifestyle then you would avoid associating with that group.  Why clamor for their attention?  

    In the early days of the gay rights movement the attitude of proponents was essentially that they would go their own way – All they wanted was for religious taboos to no longer be codified into law and used to regulate their lives.  It sounds fair enough, but the problem with the political left is their underlying agenda of incrementalism and their unhealthy tendencies toward moral relativism.

    In other words, give them an inch and leftists will steal a mile.  They see compromise as an invitation to dominate.  Giving concessions to a leftist is the same as inviting a vampire into your house; do it once and they’ll keep coming back to feed whenever they please.

    The gay rights issue is a perfect example of this ugly habit.  In the 1990s the community was widely accepted in the west, the only right they didn’t enjoy was to have their marriages recognized nationally.  They claimed that once that right was achieved they would ask nothing more of the Christian community or the church.  And of course, that was a lie.  

    Today, gay and trans rights groups demand that all church denominations accept trans ideology and trans membership.  This includes gay and trans church leaders that teach “tolerance”, mixing activist mantras into religious lessons and supporting “trans visibility”.  Going their separate ways is not enough and lack of association is unacceptable.  Leftists require that their beliefs be adopted by everyone everywhere. 

    The Vatican under Pope Francis has been surprisingly reticent to welcome the trans movement into the fold, despite Francis being a devout globalist on more than a few hot button issues. Earlier this year the Pope called gender ideology the ‘worst danger today’, noting:

    ‘I would like to emphasize one thing: It is very important that we have this meeting, this meeting between men and women, because today the worst danger is gender ideology, which erases differences.’

    In response, LGBT activist groups are increasing their focus on pressuring the Vatican to change their public position.  Trans representatives met with the Pope this month in an 80 minute private discussion.  The group included a Catholic sister who works with LGBTQ people, a member of the transgender community, and a U.S. medical doctor who helps run a clinic providing gender-affirming hormonal care for adults.

    “I really wanted to share with Pope Francis about the joy that I have being a transgender Catholic person,” Michael Sennett, who took part in the meeting, told Reuters.

    Sennett, a transgender man (a biological woman) from Boston, said she told the pontiff about “the joy that I get from hormone replacement therapy and the surgeries that I’ve had that make me feel comfortable in my body.”  The group say they specifically urged the Pope to reconsider his opposition to gender affirming care (sex change hormones and surgeries).

    It’s not know exactly what was said during the event, but activists that met with the Pope claim he expressed an interest in appointing bishops in the US that are ‘more open’ to transgender Catholics.  Considering the idea is a violation of multiple Biblical ideals and doctrines, it’s hard to say how this would be possible. 

    As mentioned, this scenario sounds once again like the incrementalism of the progressive left.  It starts with compromises on LGBT membership, then trans ideology makes its way into the church, then it takes over the church and you end up with this disturbing result:

    Activists claim they just want to worship like other Christians do, but that’s not the trend we see in the western world.  The argument being promoted is that Christianity must “adapt to the times” and that Biblical beliefs must “evolve.”  It’s the typical futurist method of removing opposing systems that act as obstacles to their control.  The notion is that everything new is better and everything old should be abandoned.  It’s the Marxist view of religion, which does not compromise. 

    Even for those that are not religiously inclined the end game should be obvious – The inevitable erasure of Christianity.  The push for Trans affirmation by the Vatican is likely an attempt to destroy conservative ideological opposition from within while installing a new kind of religion in Christianity’s place.            

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 10/27/2024 – 14:35

  • Russia's Landmark BRICS Summit And The Specter Of De-Dollarization
    Russia’s Landmark BRICS Summit And The Specter Of De-Dollarization

    Authored by Adam Morrow via The Epoch Times,

    This week saw a landmark summit of the BRICS group of nations, a nine-country economic bloc led by Moscow and Beijing, which drew representatives from 36 countries, including 22 heads of state.

    Held from Oct. 22 to 24 in the Russian city of Kazan, the event focused largely on “de-dollarization”—the idea of phasing out the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency and preferred medium of global exchange.

    “We do not reject … the dollar,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the summit. “But if we are prevented from working with it, what do we have to do? We have to search for alternatives. And this is what is happening.”

    Most Western experts, however, dismiss the idea of de-dollarization as unrealistic, if not downright impossible given the greenback’s longstanding position as the world’s standard currency for commercial transactions.

    “To build an alternative financial clearing system to accommodate transactions in rubles or yuan may be possible for BRICS members—but it’s a long shot,” Ariel Cohen, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank devoted to international affairs, told The Epoch Times.

    Ambassador Matthew Bryza, a former White House and senior State Department official, agreed.

    Bryza told The Epoch Times that the notion of de-dollarization—as espoused by Moscow and Beijing—had “no prospects for moving forward as a result of the BRICS.”

    “It’s possible the United States will overuse sanctions and leave a critical mass of countries, eventually, to want to de-dollarize the economy,” he said.

    “But whether or not to use the dollar—for now—is driven by the financial utility that most of the world sees in using the dollar,” added Bryza, who sits on the board of the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation.

    Others, however, take a different view.

    “The aim of BRICS isn’t to replace the dollar as a global currency,” Mamdouh Salameh, a UK-based global energy expert, told The Epoch Times.

    Rather, he said, it is to “create their own financial system based on a common currency for conducting transactions among themselves, thus avoiding the adverse impact of the dollar on their economies, trade, and finances.”

    According to Salameh, a former visiting professor of energy economics at ESCP Europe Business School, London, BRICS members believe the dollar “could be headed for a major devaluation—if not collapse—due to a rising national debt that reached almost $37 trillion in 2024.”

    Cohen dismissed these fears, saying the dollar’s leading position is rooted in the strength of the U.S. economy—and U.S. military power.

    “As long as the United States plays a global economic and financial role, supported by military power, people shouldn’t worry about the dollar,” he said.

    “If, however, with the continuation of the national debt increase, or military weakness, then all bets are off—especially if the United States starts to disengage from its global role,” Cohen added.

    BRICS was founded in 2006 by Brazil, Russia, India, and China, with South Africa joining in 2010. This year, Iran, Egypt, and Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates also joined the expanding club. Saudi Arabia has been invited to join, but is not currently a member.

    As it currently stands, the nine-member bloc is said to account for between 40 and 45 percent of the world’s population and roughly one third of the global economy.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin gives a speech during a BRICS business forum in Moscow on Oct, 18, 2024. Mikhail Metzel/Pool/AFP via Getty Images

    ‘Weaponizing’ the Dollar

    Under the Bretton Woods system, the U.S. dollar became the world’s go-to medium for commercial exchange in the aftermath of the Second World War.

    BRICS seeks to challenge the dollar’s leading position by reducing its use in financial transactions in favor of the national currencies of its member-states.

    Speaking at the summit, Putin said that some 95 percent of all trade between Russia and China is now transacted in rubles and Chinese yuan.

    Addressing participants on Oct. 24, he said that the Bretton Woods system had served to ensure the dollar’s supremacy in the post-war global order.

    “At that time, the stability of the dollar was ensured … by its linkage to gold,” he said, adding that this linkage was broken in the 1970s, when the dollar was taken off the gold standard.

    “Now, the only guarantee of the stability of this world currency [i.e., the dollar] is the stability of one economy: the U.S. economy,” Putin said.

    Some BRICS members view de-dollarization as a means of protecting themselves from U.S.-led sanctions, which have discomfited Russia for the past 10 years.

    A joint declaration issued in Kazan decried the “disruptive effect of unlawful unilateral coercive measures, including illegal sanctions, on the world economy [and] international trade.”

    Addressing the summit on Oct. 23, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, whose country has long been the target of U.S. sanctions, accused the United States of “using the dollar as a weapon … to control other nations.”

    But according to Bryza, just how de-dollarization would insulate BRICS states from possible sanctions would “depend on how many countries join the ‘de-dollarized’ currency union.”

    “It doesn’t matter if Russia and other BRICS countries come up with a way to conduct their trade based on something other than the dollar,” he said, “as long as the rest of the world continues using the dollar.”

    “And the rest of the world doesn’t want to risk being subject to U.S. sanctions, or be banned from using the U.S. financial system,” Bryza said.

    The U.S. Treasury Department in Washington on Oct. 3, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

    Bypassing SWIFT

    The notion of de-dollarization also involves the creation of alternative methods of cross-border payment so as to achieve independence from Western systems.

    Currently, the primary system for international payments is the Belgium-based SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), which was set up in 1973.

    Because the U.S. Treasury Department has considerable oversight over SWIFT, Russia, along with other BRICS states, claim the system has been “weaponized” by Washington and its allies.

    Therefore, BRICS states hope to create an alternative system, which would—theoretically—insulate its members from the threat of U.S.-led sanctions.

    The joint declaration issued in Kazan calls for “more efficient, transparent, safe, and inclusive cross-border payment instruments built upon the principle of minimizing trade barriers and non-discriminatory access.”

    Ferit Temur, a Turkish political analyst specialized in Russian affairs, noted that Russia has already launched its own “Mir” payment system, although this has met with limited success.

    “But whether the Mir system—or another system—is developed, it isn’t a realistic goal for BRICS countries to quickly eliminate SWIFT,” Temur told The Epoch Times.

    “This is due to the SWIFT system’s high rate of use, both among BRICS states and in trade with the rest of the world,” he said.

    Nevertheless, de-dollarization—as envisioned by Moscow and Beijing—“may find a response in a significant part of the world over the next 10 to 15 years,” he said.

    According to Bryza, an alternative system has “zero prospect of succeeding, because SWIFT works great—as long as you don’t invade another country.”

    “Russia’s political ambitions won’t ever be able to overcome the enormous financial and economic benefit the SWIFT system provides,” he said.

    “They can try to de-dollarize all they want,” Bryza said. “But until the entire world has a de-dollarized economy, this won’t have much of an impact at all on insulating these countries from sanctions.”

    Salemeh, by contrast, described de-dollarization as a “very realistic approach” to the economic problems facing certain BRICS states.

    BRICS members, he said, want to protect their economies from “the weaponization of the dollar, U.S. sanctions, and the dollar’s fast-declining purchasing power.”

    “They are further encouraged by central banks reducing their dollar holdings and buying gold because of the lack of confidence in the dollar,” Salemeh added.

    Cohen conceded that a rival, de-dollarized system “may be a possibility,” going on to assert that such a move would “make sanctions enforcement more difficult.”

    “However,” he said, “it won’t make the dollar obsolete.”

    Cohen said Russia is “taking the lead” on the de-dollarization scheme, “but the country that can really pull it off—in terms of the size of its economy—is China.”

    Wesley Alexander Hill, lead analyst and international program manager for energy, growth, and security at the International Tax and Investment Center, described all the talk about de-dollarization as “totally overblown.”

    Russia and China, he said, are both fully aware that “the systems they have set up cannot compete with the dollar.”

    “China does have the theoretical capacity to challenge the dollar in the global financial system,” Hill told The Epoch Times. “But this is an extremely long-term project—the work of 20 to 30 years.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 10/27/2024 – 14:00

  • GEOINT Data Shows Israel Hit Iran's Former Nuke Weapons Test Building, Missile Production Facility
    GEOINT Data Shows Israel Hit Iran’s Former Nuke Weapons Test Building, Missile Production Facility

    On Friday evening, Israel Defense Forces launched three waves of fighter jets targeting high-value military assets in Iran. IDF officials described the operation as retaliation for “months of relentless attacks” orchestrated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on Israel and regional allies. No videos or images of the Israeli strikes were published online, but as of Saturday evening, geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) data revealed a former nuclear weapons building and missile sites were targeted. 

    David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector, and Decker Eveleth, an associate research analyst at CNA, a Washington-based think tank, used commercial satellite imagery in separate assessments about the effectiveness of Israeli strikes.

    They told Reuters that IDF fighter jets hit Iran’s Parchin military base with missiles and bombs. This site is where the International Atomic Energy Agency suspects IRGC to have previously performed tests of high explosives that could trigger a nuclear explosion.

    Nearby Khojir military base was also hit by missiles and bombs. Some analysts believe an underground tunnel system and missile production site lie beneath this military base. 

    Eveleth pointed out that IDF’s strike may have “significantly hampered Iran’s ability to mass produce missiles,” adding satellite imagery data from commercial satellite firm Planet Labs showed IDF jets hit three ballistic missile solid fuel mixing buildings and a warehouse at Khojir. 

    Here’s more Reuters:

    The buildings were enclosed by high dirt berms, according to the image reviewed by Reuters. Such structures are associated with missile production and are designed to stop a blast in one building from detonating combustible materials in nearby structures.

    “Israel says they targeted buildings housing solid-fuel mixers,” Eveleth said. “These industrial mixers are hard to make and export-controlled. Iran imported many over the years at great expense, and will likely have a hard time replacing them.”

    With a limited operation, he said, Israel may have struck a significant blow against Iran’s ability to mass-produce missiles and made it more difficult for any future Iranian missile attack to pierce Israel’s missile defenses.

    “The strikes appear to be highly accurate,” he said.

    On X, Eveleth posted satellite imagery of the damage at Khojir and Parchi…

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    In our view, this is likely the first round of IDF strikes on Iran to paralyze the IRGC’s command and control center. The leaked US intel of IDF preparations indeed delayed the operation – and perhaps the leaker was trying to postpone the fireworks until after the US presidential elections. Additional strikes on Iran could potentially target IRGC’s financial network and ability to export crude to China. 

    In markets, the geopolitical risk premium for Brent crude has faded recently as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken runs around the Middle East to ensure World War III does not occur before the US presidential elections in early November.

    But maybe after the elections… the fireworks fly. And this would mean Brent crude prices move much higher.

    Before the IDF strike on Iran on Friday, the US offered a defense guarantee to Saudis.

    This is likely because the Abqaiq refinery (the largest crude oil stabilization plant in the world) – is likely in the crosshairs of potential future IRGC missile and drone attacks.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 10/27/2024 – 13:25

  • Former Vatican Ambassador Calls Kamala "An Infernal Monster Who Obeys Satan"
    Former Vatican Ambassador Calls Kamala “An Infernal Monster Who Obeys Satan”

    Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

    Former Vatican Roman Catholic Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò endorsed Donald Trump for president this week, urging that Kamala Harris represents “an anti-Catholic, anti-Christian, and anti-human vision of society.”

    Viganò, who was the Vatican’s ambassador to the US from 2011 to 2016, writes in a letter to Catholics “The choice is between a conservative President, who is paying with his very life for his fight against the deep state, and an infernal monster who obeys Satan.”

    “For a Catholic, there can be no question: voting for Kamala Harris is morally inadmissible and constitutes a very grave sin. Nor is it morally possible to abstain, because in this war declaring oneself neutral means allying oneself with the enemy,” he further asserts.

    A vote for Trump “means firmly distancing ourselves from an anti-Catholic, anti-Christian, and anti-human vision of society,” Viganò continues, adding “It means stopping those who want to create a hellish dystopia that is even worse than the one announced by George Orwell.”

    Viganò urges that Trump is “the only possible choice to counter the globalist coup that the woke Left is about to implement definitively, irreparably, and with incalculable damage for future generations.”

    The former archbishop further describes Harris as a George Soros “puppet,” who is controlled directly by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

    Viganò was excommunicated from the Catholic Church in July after repeatedly voicing opposition to the current Pope and modern changes made to the Roman Catholic Church.

    He was extremely outspoken in opposing COVID vaccines, charging that public health authorities were conducting “experimentation on the entire world population,” and slamming the Catholic church for going along with it.

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    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 10/27/2024 – 12:50

  • Japan's Ruling Coalition To Lose Majority For First Time Since 2009: What Happens Next And How Will Markets React
    Japan’s Ruling Coalition To Lose Majority For First Time Since 2009: What Happens Next And How Will Markets React

    In a surprising turn of events, Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its coalition partner are set to lose their majority in Sunday’s election, according to a forecast from public broadcaster NHK, raising questions about the future of Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba.

    Amid voter discontent over a slush-fund scandal, not to mention Japan’s worst runaway inflation in generations, the LDP and Komeito appear likely to fall short of the 233 seats needed for a majority in the lower house of parliament, NHK forecasts. Ishiba had aimed to secure a majority with his coalition partner, recognizing that the LDP would not retain the 247 seats it held before the election.

    Falling short of that goal would mark the first time the LDP has lost a coalition majority in an election since 2009.

    Public support for the LDP nosedived after the revelations last year that party members were secretly enriching themselves with funds from supporters, similar to what politicians do everywhere else around the world and especially in the US. As a result, nearly every poll before the election suggested the LDP would lose seats and possibly its majority with Komeito because of the scandal.

    “We couldn’t dispel public anger over the political funds issue,” Ishiba said Sunday. When asked if he would consider forming a coalition with other parties, he said no decisions had been made, but added that he was willing to cooperate with others if policies align.

    The early vote count shows the LDP and Komeito with a combined 145 seats, according to NHK. The main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan has 112 seats, the broadcaster said.  CDP leader Yoshihiko Noda said he would seek to take over the government if the coalition loses its majority.

    “If the LDP does indeed lose its majority powers, this could create a quagmire regarding the legislative process — a scenario which may not bode well for the yen and the Nikkei, at least in the short term,” said Tim Waterer, Sydney-based chief market analyst at KCM Trade.

    Shinjiro Koizumi at the Liberal Democratic Party’s headquarters on Oct. 27.

    What does this mean for Japan’s markets?

    Below we share some preliminary thoughts from Goldman Japan FICC trader Ippei Yamaura, who writes that “the bottom line is negative for Japan equities” and while “positioning looks good, investors are too optimistic for helps from DPP and/or Ishin.”

    Estimated result

    Here is the estimated range of each party as of now(9:40pm JST). Several news sources say LDP+Komei fail to keep majority(233 seats or more).

    What is the expected price action?

    In Yamaura’s view, the Nikkei will drop on Monday and end down 2% or so, less than option market indicated as of last Friday. This is because investors are somewhat prepared for this scenario. However, the selloff will continue for a week or so as investors realize that it will be difficult for LDP to get support from DPP and/or Ishin. 

    Is this surprising?

    The outcome is not a big surprise but was not fully priced in. After Asahi (highly reputed poll conductor for general elections) reported the chance of LDP+Komei to lose majority, market started to price in it through selling equities. NKY option market looked pricing roughly 3-4% move on tomorrow as of last Friday. Assuming investors looked at 5% selloff in NKY in the scenario of LDP+Kome failure, market might price 60-80% chance of this result. From this point, the option market was well prepared but (as you know,) options are just one aspect of investors’ view. Experts(including Goldman’s political analyst) saw around 50% chance of this scenario. For these investors, this result should be a surprise.

    What was the expected implication and how much was priced in as of last Friday?

    1. LDP would keep simple majority(233+)=5%. In this scenario, the expected market move would be equities to go higher, yen to strengthen.
    2. LDP+Komei would keep majority(233+) = 35%. In this scenario, the expected market move would be equities to go higher and JPY to go stable.
    3. LDP+Komei would fail to keep majority = 60%. In this scenario, the expected market move would be equities to go lower and JPY to weaken as LDP may need support from Ishin or CDP, both of which favor easy monetary policy.

    So it means #3 scenario is realized although more investors might see it as main scenario. 

    What will happen now?

    Prime minister Ishiba must hold a special diet session by Nov 26 and appoint the prime minister. The new prime minister will need to get nomination from both upper house and lower house. And if there is conflict between upper house and lower house, lower house nomination will be prioritized. Upper house nomination is not an issue as LDP+Komei have majority. But as they lose their majority in the lower house, without cooperation from some lower house members outside of LDP+Komei, they cannot nominate the new prime minister. Ishiba may now try to get support (with early Nov the likely limit). Here are some options.

    1. Re-endorse LDP members who couldn’t get endorsement from LDP due to money scandals.

    This is the most probable scenario. But there are 2 problems. First, there may not enough numbers of members this time. As of now, it is expected that only 4 members out of 10 non-endorsed members will be back to parliament. 4 is not enough to cover such a big loss. Second, it is unclear if the abused members will help Ishiba. Some LDP members, especially right wing members, already complained about Ishiba and cabinet during campaign period. According to Goldman, “there may be big dissatisfactions.”

    2. Try to get support from CDP and/or Ishin

    DPP and Ishin have some similarities like defense policies etc. As #1 is not effective option anymore, Ishiba may try to pursue this option by forming a cabinet together. It looks like majority of investors are optimistic about this option. However, it’s worth highlighting that the leader of both DPP and Ishin denied this option in advance. Of course, this can be a political bluff. But experts believe it is not. The reason is upper house election which will be held on July 25, 2025. Experts think if DPP and Ishin joined cabinet now, they would soon lose popularity as majority of voters for them expected they would fight with LDP.

    What will happen if LDP+Komei cannot get help from anybody?

    Ishiba may be forced to form “Minority government”. It means he would need to manage a cabinet without support from parliament. In order to get nomination from lower house, he may need to do many concession and get support from some opposition parties. As many of the majority parties’ policies are not market friendly, this can possibly affect market negatively. Opposition parties may change their stance policy by policy. It means Ishiba and LDP cannot implement their policies as they stand.

    What are other things to watch?

    The supplemental budget should be a big focus. Ishiba previously said he would form a supplemental budget of JPY13 trillion or more (although he previously denied such a big fiscal expenditure). LDP may want to form as big budget (including cash distribution to lower income people) as possible to recover popularity. But opposition parties may try to limit it. Usually, Japanese equities favor a bigger budget (as do all equities, everywhere). So closely watch what opposition parties say on this. Generally speaking, at least the DPP is supportive of fiscal expansion.

    Tax is also a key focus too. Ishiba is generally supportive of raising taxes. However, after such a big loss, there may be big opposition for further tax hikes. DPP is said to be supportive for fiscal expansion. It means raising tax (especially income tax) is less likely now (Except for financial income tax).

    What does the positioning look like now?

    Overall positive.

    CTAs=Flat to slightly negative. 

    CTAs have already re-built longs for Japan equities. Goldman’s strats team expects CTA to sell again if the market goes lower. But also worth noting that positions for Japan equities is less than its peak. 

    Long/Short=flat

    Our PB data suggests net allocation for Japan equities remain low despite big fluctuation of China market. Long/Short investors have not come back yet since the big selloff in early Aug.

    Long onlys = Positive

    As Japanese equities went lower with weakening yen, the asset is the worst performance in major assets MTD. Yamaura  expects some investors may need to buy Japan equities into month end to keep the same level of exposure.

    Retail = Not bad

    If you look at margin data, retail position has not been fully back yet since Aug selloff. They may have some room to buy on dip.

    To summarize Goldman’s view: Monday’s selloff will be milder than the option market indicated, but the selloff will not be limited to just 1 day.

    More in the full Goldman note available to pro subs.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 10/27/2024 – 12:15

  • Americans Are More Dependent Than Ever On Government Handouts, New Report States
    Americans Are More Dependent Than Ever On Government Handouts, New Report States

    Authored by Kevin Stocklin via The Epoch Times,

    Payments from the government have become the fastest-growing source of income for Americans, according to a new study.

    A report by the Economic Innovation Group (EIG), a public policy research organization, titled “The Great Transfer-mation,” states that Americans have become substantially more dependent on government support, with the share of national income coming from transfer payments more than doubling over the past 50 years.

    Transfer payment programs include Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, unemployment and disability, food stamps, and veterans’ benefits.

    Transfer payments increased from 8 percent of U.S. total income in 1970 to 18 percent today, the report states, crowding out private income from wages and investments.

    “There is a large range of experiences driving transfer reliance across communities,” Benjamin Glasner, EIG economist and one of the report’s authors, told The Epoch Times. “But it’s unavoidable to look at the fact that transfer reliance has grown rapidly across the country, and it’s something we need to deal with.”

    According to Federal Reserve data, government transfer payments increased from about $70 billion in 1970 to more than $6 trillion in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, before falling back to the current level of $4.3 trillion. According to the EIG report, if government transfer payments were spread evenly among all Americans, they would have amounted to an annual payment of $11,500 per person in 2022.

    One factor driving much of the shift from private income to government dependence is that the U.S. population is, on average, getting older. According to demographic data from USAfacts, the percentage of Americans 65 years and older increased from 13.1 percent of the population in 2010 to 17.3 percent in 2022. During the same period, the percentage of Americans under the age of 20 fell from 26.9 percent to 24.4 percent.

    “The primary driver that we found in our report is demographic related, specifically the fact that the country has aged so rapidly,” Glasner said. “And the transfer programs that target that aging population also have grown significantly more expensive over time.”

    Of all government assistance payments in 2022, 56 percent went to the elderly, mostly for Medicare, the EIG report stated. Health care costs were a major factor, both because more Americans qualified for Medicare and Medicaid, and because the cost of medical treatment rose significantly.

    According to data compiled by Peterson-KFF, a health care policy analytics organization, total health spending in the United States was $74.1 billion in 1970. By 2022 total health spending was $4.5 trillion, indicating an exponential increase in medical costs per capita.

    Public Finances Under Strain

    The growth in transfer payments have taken their toll on state and federal budgets.

    The 2024 Pension Solvency and Performance Report, authored by Ryan Frost and Mariana Trujillo for Reason Foundation’s Pension Integrity Project, stated that public pensions are increasingly falling behind on their ability to pay.

    As of 2023, the authors state, total unfunded public pension liabilities across the United States hit $1.59 trillion, and the median funded ratio was 76 percent. The U.S. federal deficit is currently $1.8 trillion, and interest payments on U.S. government debt increased from $31 billion in 1970 to more than $1 trillion today.

    In addition, some analysts say that this growing dependence on government comes at the cost of personal autonomy and responsibility.

    “The surge in transfer payments during the past 50 years is just one manifestation of the trend to politicize and tangle up all aspects of Americans’ lives with the government,” Steve Hanke, professor of Applied Economics at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the board of directors of the Federal Fiscal Sustainability Foundation, told The Epoch Times. “It results because of politicians’ inevitable attraction to buy votes by promising ‘free lunches,’ and the fact that politicians don’t face statutory or constitutional spending constraints.”

    To illustrate the extent of the shift to government dependence, EIG created maps showing the percentage of income that came from transfer payments, broken down by county, over time.

    In 1970, only about 1 percent of all U.S. counties reported that government transfers made up more than 25 percent of total income in their county; by 2022, more than half of U.S. counties reported dependence at that level.

    Transfer payments as a percent of total income, by county, in 1970; 15 percent or more in green; 25 percent or more in yellow. Source: Economic Innovation Group

    Government transfer payments as a percent of total income, by county, in 2022; 15 percent or more in green; 25 percent or more in yellow. Source: Economic Innovation Group

    Aging, Shrinking Populations

    While the reasons for this dependence varied from region to region, aging populations, and outward migration were common themes, particularly in rural counties. Often, young people leave small towns for better jobs in cities, and this both increases the percentage of retired people and decreases the number of people earning private wages in rural areas.

    In addition, as societies industrialize, people migrate from farms to cities, and women enter the labor force in larger numbers, and fertility rates fall. While this trend has been observed over the past several decades throughout the world, the United States has been experiencing this trend for two centuries.

    In 1825, the average woman in America gave birth to more than six children, according to Statista, a data collection firm. As the United States industrialized and urbanized, the birth rate declined, hitting a low of two children per woman in 1940 before rebounding to 3.58 children in 1960, during the “baby boom” generation.

    The minimum fertility rate to sustain a population is 2.1 children per woman. The United States dipped below this rate in 1973 and has remained below replacement level ever since, according to data from Macrotrends. While U.S. fertility rates increased marginally through 2008, they have since fallen back to the current rate of about 1.8 children per woman.

    While countries such as Japan have seen their populations fall due to low fertility, the United States has experienced continuous population growth. But this is largely due to immigration rather than native-born Americans having children.

    The Congressional Budget Office projects that, without immigration, America’s population will begin to shrink, starting in 2040.

    Economic Security Versus Prosperity

    The increasing dependence on the government for income raises the issue of how the United States can balance economic security for its dependents against overall economic growth and prosperity.

    “The increased politicization of life will put a damper on economic prosperity,” Hanke said. “For every dollar taken out of one taxpayer’s pocket and put into another’s, there is a cost, an excess burden.

    “This burden is the result of distortions thrown into the economy by imposing a tax, and the administrative costs of levying the tax and of running the government’s transfer payments system,” he said.

    Arthur Laffer, a noted economist who specializes in tax policy, wrote in his 2023 book, “Taxes Have Consequences,” that raising taxes much beyond current levels will choke off economic growth, thus reducing the tax base.

    “The more you redistribute, the greater will be the drop in total income,” Laffer said in a 2023 interview with The Epoch Times.

    Consequently, governments are increasingly caught between a rock and a hard place regarding how to pay for social programs.

    Interest payments on America’s federal debt are currently the third largest budget item, after Social Security and non-defense discretionary spending, and exceeding Medicare and military spending, an August 2024 report by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation states based on Congressional Budget Office projections published in June.

    Treasury data for the fiscal year 2024, running Oct. 1, 2023, to Sept. 30, show that interest expense was $896 billion.

    According to projections from the Congressional Budget Office, interest payments on the federal debt will double as a percentage of GDP by 2054 and will become the largest single item in the federal budget by 2051.

    Potential Solutions

    According to Glasner, there are three options for governments to continue providing transfer payments. The first is cutting benefits, but that appears to be politically untenable, and neither Democrats nor Republicans have expressed any intention to do so.

    The second is raising taxes, he said, “but there’s some risk to that, because overdoing increases in taxation can potentially cut off sources of economic growth, undercutting our actual capacity to deal with this.”

    The third and most viable option, Glasner argues, is to increase economic growth and private income. Among the ways to do this, he says, are “investments in research and innovation, better-designed immigration policy, and tax and regulatory policies that foster economic dynamism and increased participation in the workforce.”

    Although America’s financial situation may appear dire, a September report from the Manhattan Institute titled “America’s Surprisingly Effective Welfare State,” argues that the United States is in better shape than many other Western nations.

    While Europe’s social programs provide support payments regardless of need, America’s transfer systems are more selective and thus less costly while delivering more money to the poorest.

    “Europe’s welfare states are dominated by costly publicly funded ‘social insurance’ programs, which attempt to fully support middle-class lifestyles through periods of unemployment, ill health, disability, or retirement,” the report states. “By contrast, American public entitlement programs are more focused on providing a safety net against poverty, and they more strictly limit eligibility for cash and health care benefits to those who are unable to work.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 10/27/2024 – 11:40

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