Today’s News 24th March 2021

  • Moscow Declares "No Relations" With EU As Brussels Has Unilaterally "Destroyed" Ties
    Moscow Declares “No Relations” With EU As Brussels Has Unilaterally “Destroyed” Ties

    On the defensive following the latest wave of Western sanctions targeting the two countries, Russia and China are lashing out. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov held a press conference to address the spiraling tensions while standing alongside his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi as a show of unity against Western attacks following a meeting in Guilin, China.

    This month the European Union (in coordination with the US and others) slapped Navalny-related “human rights violations” sanctions on multiple top Russian officials, while on Monday anti-China sanctions were announced over the Uighur crackdown. And somewhat underreported on the same day were EU sanctions against two Russian officials for “persecuting gay and lesbian people in the southern Russian region of Chechnya.”

    Lavrov on Tuesday issued his fiercest words yet, declaring the EU has “destroyed” Russia’s ability to have relations with Brussels. He said “there are no relations with the EU as an organization. The entire infrastructure of these relations has been destroyed by unilateral decisions made from Brussels.”

    Via Russian Foreign Ministry, TASS

    However, he did emphasize that while relations with the bloc are essentially non-existent, a handful of individual countries are still seeking positive ties with Moscow as they remain “guided by their national interests.” 

    “If and when Europeans decide to eliminate these anomalies in contacts with their largest neighbor, of course, we will be ready to build up these relations based on equality,” Russia’s top diplomat added. 

    Lavrov went so far as to threaten the breaking off of any diplomatic contact with the EU altogether if it begins attempting to hit “sensitive parts of the economy” with punitive measures, adding the caveat that “of course we do not want to isolate ourselves from living in the world, but we must be ready for this. If you want peace, prepare for war.

    Standing alongside Lavrov, Wang Yi Chinese Foreign Minister similarly rejected outside criticisms and attacks on both governments

    Wang sharply criticized coordinated sanctions against Beijing by the EU, Britain, the US and Canada over human rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims in China’s far western Xinjiang region.

    “Countries should stand together to oppose all forms of unilateral sanctions,” Wang said. “These measures will not be embraced by the international community.”

    Lavrov said Russia and China both viewed the US as seeking to rely on Cold War military alliances to undermine the “international legal architecture.”

    Interestingly, Lavrov highlighted that Moscow and Beijing see Washington as attempting to strengthen the West’s Cold War military alliances ultimately to undermine developing multi-polarity and the “international legal architecture”.

    By the time of the Tuesday joint Russia-China press conference, Beijing had retaliated with sanctions of its own on no less than ten European officials and four institutions charged with “damaging China’s interests”.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/24/2021 – 02:45

  • COVID Restrictions To Remain In Place For Years, Says UK's Public Health Official
    COVID Restrictions To Remain In Place For Years, Says UK’s Public Health Official

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    Despite the UK’s largely successful rollout of the coronavirus vaccine, a public health official says masks and other social distancing restrictions are likely to remain in place for years because the public has become used to them.

    Mary Ramsay, the head of immunisation at Public Health England, said the measures would remain in place while other countries complete their vaccination programs, a process likely to take years.

    “People have got used to those lower-level restrictions now, and people can live with them, and the economy can still go on with those less severe restrictions in place,” said Ramsay.

    “So I think certainly for a few years, at least until other parts of the world are as well vaccinated as we are, and the numbers have come down everywhere, that is when we may be able to go very gradually back to a more normal situation,” she added.

    The doctor said that so long as people continue to be infected, the rules won’t be abolished.

    Ramsay’s comments once again highlight the fact that the plan never was to get “back to normal.”

    Now that Brits have allowed society to be permanently deformed, with polls routinely showing vehement support for lockdown and other pandemic rules, things are never going to be the same again.

    Having allowed the precedent that the government can put the entire population under de facto house arrest on a whim, look for the policy to be repeated over and over again with different justifications that have nothing to do with COVID-19.

    As we highlighted earlier this month, one of those justifications will be man-made global warming, with climate lockdowns set to become a regular reality.

    *  *  *

    In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. I need you to sign up for my free newsletter here. Support my sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown. Also, I urgently need your financial support here.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/24/2021 – 02:00

  • Escobar: Welcome To 'Shocked & Awed' 21st Century Geopolitics
    Escobar: Welcome To ‘Shocked & Awed’ 21st Century Geopolitics

    Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

    With a Russia-China-Iran triple bitch slap on the hegemon, we now have a brand new geopolitical chessboard…

    It took 18 years after Shock and Awe unleashed on Iraq for the Hegemon to be mercilessly shocked and awed by a virtually simultaneous, diplomatic Russia-China one-two.

    Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (L) meets Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (R) in Beijing, China on March 23, 2021. Photo: Russian Foreign Ministry/Handout/Anadolu Agency

    How this is a real game-changing moment cannot be emphasized enough; 21st century geopolitics will never be the same again.

    Yet it was the Hegemon who first crossed the diplomatic Rubicon. The handlers behind hologram Joe “I’ll do whatever you want me to do, Nance” Biden had whispered in his earpiece to brand Russian President Vladimir Putin as a soulless “killer” in the middle of a softball interview.

    Not even at the height of the Cold War the superpowers resorted to ad hominem attacks. The result of such an astonishing blunder was to regiment virtually the whole Russian population behind Putin – because that was perceived as an attack against the Russian state.

    Then came Putin’s cool, calm, collected – and quite diplomatic – response, which needs to be carefully pondered. These sharp as a dagger words are arguably the most devastatingly powerful five minutes in the history of post-truth international relations.

    In For Leviathan, it’s so cold in Alaska, we forecasted what could take place in the US-China 2+2 summit at a shabby hotel in Anchorage, with cheap bowls of instant noodles thrown in as extra bonus.

    China’s millennial diplomatic protocol establishes that discussions start around common ground – which are then extolled as being more important than disagreements between negotiating parties. That’s at the heart of the concept of “no loss of face”. Only afterwards the parties discuss their differences.

    Yet it was totally predictable that a bunch of amateurish, tactless and clueless Americans would smash those basic diplomatic rules to show “strength” to their home crowd, distilling the proverbial litany on Taiwan, Hong Kong, South China Sea, “genocide” of Uighurs.

    Oh dear. There was not a single State Dept. hack with minimal knowledge of East Asia to warn the amateurs you don’t mess with the formidable head of the Foreign Affairs Commission at the CCP’s Central Committee, Yang Jiechi, with impunity.

    Visibly startled, but controlling his exasperation, Yang Jiechi struck back. And the rhetorical shots were heard around the whole Global South.

    They had to include a basic lesson in manners:

    “If you want to deal with us properly, let’s have some mutual respect and do things the right way”.

    But what stood out was a stinging, concise diagnostic blending history and politics:

    The United States is not qualified to talk to China in a condescending manner. The Chinese people will not accept that. It must be based on mutual respect to deal with China, and history will prove that those who seek to strangle China will suffer in the end.

    And all that translated in real time by young, attractive and ultra-skilled Zhang Jing – who inevitably became an overnight superstar in China, reaping an astonishing 400 million plus hits on Weibo.

    The incompetence of the “diplomatic” arm of the Biden-Harris administration beggars belief. Using a basic Sun Tzu maneuver, Yang Jiechi turned the tables and voiced the predominant sentiment of the overwhelming majority of the planet. Stuff your unilateral “rules-based order”. We, the nations of the world, privilege the UN charter and the primacy of international law.

    So this is what the Russia-China one-two achieved almost instantaneously: from now on, the Hegemon should be treated, all across the Global South with, at best, disdain.

    An inevitable historical process

    Pre-Alaska, the Americans went on a charming offensive in Japan and South Korea for “consultations”. That’s irrelevant. What matters is post-Alaska, and the crucial Sergey Lavrov-Wang Yi meeting of Foreign Ministers in Guilin.

    Lavrov, always unflappable, clarified in an interview with Chinese media how the Russia-China strategic partnership sees the current US diplomatic train wreck:

    As a matter of fact, they have largely lost the skill of classical diplomacy. Diplomacy is about relations between people, the ability to listen to each other, to hear one another and to strike a balance between competing interests. These are exactly the values ​​that Russia and China are promoting in diplomacy.

    The inevitable consequence is that Russia-China must “consolidate our independence: “The United States has declared limiting the advance of technology in Russia and China as its goal. So, we must reduce our exposure to sanctions by strengthening our technological independence and switching to settlements in national and international currencies other than the dollar. We need to move away from using Western-controlled international payment systems.”

    Russia-China have clearly identified, as Lavrov pointed out, how the “Western partners” are “promoting their ideology-driven agenda aimed at preserving their dominance by holding back progress in other countries. Their policies run counter to the objective international developments and, as they used to say at some point, are on the wrong side of history. The historical process will come into its own, no matter what happens.”

    As a stark presentation of an inevitable “historical process”, it doesn’t get more crystal clear than that. And predictably, it didn’t take time for the “Western partners” to fall back into – what else – their same old sanction bag of tricks.

    Here we go again: a US, UK, EU, Canada “alliance” sanctioning selected Chinese officials because, in Blinken’s words, “the PRC [People’s Republic of China] continues to commit genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang.”

    The EU, UK, and Canada didn’t have the guts to sanction a key player: Xinjiang party chief Chen Quanguo, who’s a Politburo member. The Chinese response would have been – economically – devastating.

    Still, Beijing counterpunched with its own sanctions – targeting, crucially, the German far-right evangelical nut posing as “scholar” who produced the bulk of the completely debunked “proof” of a million Uighurs held in concentration camps.

    Once again, the “Western partners” are impermeable to logic. Adding to the already appalling state of EU-Russia relations, Brussels chooses to also antagonize China based on a single fake dossier, playing right into the Hegemon’s not exactly secret Divide and Rule agenda.

    Mission (nearly) accomplished: Brussels diplomats tell me the EU Parliament is all but set to refuse to ratify the China-EU trade deal painstakingly negotiated by Merkel and Macron. The consequences will be immense.

    So Blinken will have reasons to be cheerful when he meets assorted eurocrats and NATO bureaucrats this week, ahead of the NATO summit.

    One has to applaud the gall of the “Western partners”. It’s 18 years since Shock and Awe – the start of the bombing, invasion and destruction of Iraq. It’s 10 years since the start of the total destruction of Libya by NATO and its GCC minions, with Obama-Biden “leading from behind”. It’s 10 years since the start of the savage destruction of Syria by proxy – complete with jihadis disguised as “moderate rebels”.

    Yet now the “Western partners” are so mortified by the plight of Muslims in Western China.

    At least there are some cracks within the EU illusionist circus. Last week, the French Armed Forces Joint Reflection Circle (CRI) – in fact an independent think tank of former high officers – wrote a startling open letter to cardboard NATO secretary-general Stoltenberg de facto accusing him of behaving as an American stooge with the implementation of NATO 2030 plan. The French officers drew the correct conclusion: the US/NATO combo is the main cause of appalling relations with Russia.

    These Ides of March

    Meanwhile, sanctions hysteria advance like a runaway train. Biden-Harris has already threatened to impose extra sanctions on Chinese oil imports from Iran. And there’s more in the pipeline – on manufacturing, technology, 5G, supply chains, semiconductors.

    And yet nobody is trembling in their boots. Right on cue with Russia-China, Iran has stepped up the game, with Ayatollah Khamenei issuing the guidelines for Tehran’s return to the JCPOA.

    1. The US regime is in no position to make new demands or changes regarding the nuclear deal.

    2. The US is weaker today than when the JCPOA was signed.

    3. Iran is in a stronger position now. If anyone can impose new demands it’s Iran and not the US.

    And with that we have a Russia-China-Iran triple bitch slap on the Hegemon.

    In our latest conversation/interview, to be released soon in a video + transcript package, Michael Hudson – arguably the world’s top economist – hit the heart of the matter:

    The fight against China, the fear of China is that you can’t do to China, what you did to Russia. America would love for there to be a Yeltsin figure in China to say, let’s just give all of the railroads that you’ve built, the high-speed rail, let’s give the wealth, let’s give all the factories to individuals and let the individuals run everything and, then we’ll lend them the money, or we’ll buy them out and then we can control them financially. And China’s not letting that happen. And Russia stopped that from happening. And the fury in the West is that somehow, the American financial system is unable to take over foreign resources, foreign agriculture. It is left only with military means of grabbing them as we are seeing in the near East. And you’re seeing in the Ukraine right now.

    To be continued. As it stands, we should all make sure that the Ides of March – the 2021 version – have already configured a brand new geopolitical chessboard. The Russia-China Double Helix on high-speed rail has left the station – and there’s no turning back.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/24/2021 – 00:05

  • Comparing Luxury Investment Around The World
    Comparing Luxury Investment Around The World

    Do you enjoy the finer things in life? For many of the world’s wealthy individuals, acquiring luxury goods such as art, fine wine, and watches is a passion.

    Unlike traditional investments in financial assets, luxury goods can be difficult to value if one does not have an appreciation for their form. A rare painting, for example, does not generate cash flows, meaning its value is truly in the eye of the beholder.

    To gain some insight into the market for luxury goods, Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu created the following infographic, using data from Knight Frank’s 2021 Wealth Report, to compare the preferences of nine global regions.

    Global Tastes in Luxury Goods

    To rank the most popular luxury investments in 2020, Knight Frank surveyed over 600 private bankers, wealth advisors, and family offices. The following table summarizes their findings, as well as each category’s growth according to the Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index.

    Art was unmistakably the top category for 2020, ranking first in every geographic region except Africa and Asia, where it placed second instead. The global market for artwork was estimated to be worth $64 billion in 2019, and is often facilitated through auction houses such as Sotheby’s.

    In terms of asset appreciation, rare whiskeys have climbed the most in value over the past 10 years. Connoisseurs of this spirit will be familiar with distilleries like The Macallan, whose rare bottles can sell for more than a million dollars.

    Comparing Luxury Investment Between North America and Asia

    Below, we’ve compared the rankings of Asia and North America to get a better idea of how preferences can vary.

    The biggest differences here are watches, which ranked first in Asia but fourth in North America, and classic cars, which ranked second in North America but fifth in Asia. The remaining eight categories took similar spots across the two regions.

    Asia’s stronger preference for watches was likely driven by Chinese consumers, who are now the biggest buyers of luxury watches globally. Demand throughout the COVID-19 pandemic proved resilient, with exports of Swiss watches to China increasing by 17.1% between January and November 2020.

    Classic cars, on the other hand, may be more popular in North America due to the region’s longer automotive history. Two of America’s most iconic automakers, Ford and General Motors, have both been around for over a century!

    The Biggest Sales of 2020

    Here were some of the most extravagant and noteworthy luxury sales from 2020.

    Art

    Francis Bacon’s 1981 Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus was sold by Sotheby’s for $84.6 million in June 2020. A triptych is an artwork that is divided into three sections but displayed as a single piece.

    Other paintings by Francis Bacon have sold for even larger amounts. In 2013, Three Studies of Lucian Freud was sold by Christie’s auction house for $142 million.

    Classic Cars

    A 1932 Bugatti Type 55 Super Sport Roadster sold for $7.1 million in March 2020, making it one of the biggest classic car sales of the year.

    Founded in 1909, Bugatti has produced some of the world’s most sought-after cars. The French brand was acquired by the Volkswagen Group in 1998, and since then, has released numerous special edition cars with price tags reaching well into the millions.

    Handbags

    An Hermès Himalaya Niloticus Crocodile Retourné Kelly 25 sold for $437,330 in November 2020, becoming the most expensive handbag ever sold at an auction. Founded in 1837, Hermès is commonly regarded as one of the world’s most prestigious makers of handbags.

    COVID-19 Dampens Luxury Investment

    When compared to 2019, total sales for Sotheby’s declined 16% in 2020, while Christie’s, another leading auction house, reported a 25% decline. Despite these decreases, executives remain optimistic.

    “The art and luxury markets have proven to be incredibly resilient, and demand for quality across categories is unabated.”

    – Charles Stewart, CEO, Sotheby’s

    The industry has been largely successful in transitioning to online operations, with Sotheby’s reporting that 70% of its auctions in 2020 were held online, up from 30% in the previous year.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/23/2021 – 23:45

  • Could Biden's Stumble Be An Omen Of A Bigger Fall?
    Could Biden’s Stumble Be An Omen Of A Bigger Fall?

    Authored by Bruce Wilds via Advancing Time blog,

    It has not been a secret that much would be gained by those in the Kamala Harris camp if she were to replace Biden as President. Some people have even voiced the opinion this has been the game plan all along and Biden has simply been a pawn in the power game played by those pulling the strings. If such a scenario does unfold it will be most interesting to see how it unfolds. Will he fight being removed from office or resign? Would Biden be thrown under the bus or be treated as a sympathetic figure?

    Over the past few weeks, we have seen the media putting a positive glow upon Harris and pointing out how she has been busy communicating with foreign heads of state. This may be in an effort to fortify her status. We should remember as a first-term Senator she could muster little support during the primaries and her campaign had been left for dead. In fact, during her Presidential run, Harris came under a great deal of media criticism for things in her past. Still, recent media actions indicate she may be destined to become Washington’s next darling.

    Biden Stumbles Before A Bigger Fall?

    Media coverage of Biden’s stumble while climbing onto Air Force One and his verbal blunders could simply be an omen of what is about to come. In this case, it may be a lead-up to what many people have predicted will happen in the future. It circles around the idea that Joe Biden was far past his prime and has an expiration date stamped somewhere on his body just out of sight.

    It could be argued the media did little or nothing to expose this during the election. During that time Trump bashing occupied their focus. Biden’s fragility was not nearly scrutinized nearly as much as Trump’s health in 2016. At that time Trump was put under a microscope due to his age. Biden has a history of making verbal slip-ups and being a train wreck when he goes off-script but as he has gotten older claims of dementia have grown.

    No longer are Biden’s missteps seen as mere gaffs but as a sign his mental competence is on the wane. Largely overlooked in the past have been Biden’s slips referring to a Harris Biden Administration or President Harris. That being said, some in the media are now becoming more vocal over Biden not having a live news conference since the inauguration. Claims are even surfacing that he is hiding from the media and being tightly handled. Now that the left has full control of the White House it appears even some of those in the media that had so much to do with getting Biden elected are ready to push him off the stage.

    This bye-bye Biden, hello Harris theme has some rather strong ramifications for a country already strongly divided. With many Americans feeling Biden was thrust upon them against their will the idea that someone they are even less impressed with is unsettling. Most Americans don’t really know much about Kamala Harris. Sadly, to some people, the fact she is the United States’ first female vice president, the highest-ranking female official in U.S. history, or the first African American and first Asian American vice president is more important than her qualifications or views.

    Unfortunately, Harris’s qualifications have little to do with what happens if and when Biden is put out to pasture. Still, kicking this issue down the road would be the best path forward and at least add credence to the idea voters were not duped into voting for a man that never should have been put in the oval office. In all honestly, regardless of how you feel about Joe Biden, the fact is the Presidency has not always been held by brilliant or honest individuals. In politics, such people are a rare breed.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/23/2021 – 23:25

  • "Like Taking A Vitamin Pill" – World's First Oral COVID Vaccine Nears Human Trials
    “Like Taking A Vitamin Pill” – World’s First Oral COVID Vaccine Nears Human Trials

    For the first time since the pandemic, a COVID vaccine in pill form is set to enter the first phases of clinical trials within months.

    The company working on the drug (a JV of Israeli-American Oramed Pharmaceuticals and India-based Premas Biotech), announced in a press release that it hopes to begin the first phase of clinical trials for its drug Oravax in humans by June.

    Oral vaccines are an option being assessed for “second-generation” vaccines, which are designed to be more scalable, easier to administer, and simpler to distribute.

    An oral vaccine could “potentially [enable] people to take the vaccine themselves at home,” Nadav Kidron, CEO of Oramed, said in the release.

    The capsules would become particularly useful if COVID-19 vaccines are eventually “recommended annually like the standard flu shot,” he added. 

    Prabuddha Kundu, co-founder of Premas Biotech, told Indian media that administering the vaccine would be “like taking a vitamin pill” and that “we are more than 100% sure that the technology works and is promising.”

    Results from the preliminary animal tests would soon be published in a scientific journal, he added.

    The news comes as Pfizer announces the beginning of human trials of a new anti-viral pill to treat the coronavirus that could be used at the first sign of illness.

    If it succeeds in trials, the pill could be prescribed early on in an infection to block viral replication before patients get very sick. The drug binds to an enzyme called a protease to keep the virus from replicating. Protease-inhibiting medicines have been successful in treating other types of viruses, include HIV and Hepatitis C.

    Among major drugmakers, Merck & Co. has one of the few coronavirus pills that is far along in human testing. Its experimental antiviral drug molnupiravir works by a different mechanism than the Pfizer drug and is in late-stage human trials.

    However, ‘pillifying’ the vaccine will make it easier to convince people to take the X doses per year we all ‘need’ for the rest of our lives.

    One word: Soma

    “Swallowing half an hour before closing time, that second dose of soma had raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds.”

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/23/2021 – 23:05

  • H.R.1 – Is It Really "For The People"?
    H.R.1 – Is It Really “For The People”?

    Authored by Chris Farrell via The Gatestone Institute,

    A lot has been written about H.R.1 — the so-called “For the People Act of 2021.” Former Vice President Mike Pence has opined on the bill. The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal sounded the alarm back in January. The editors of National Review come right out and call it a “partisan assault on American democracy.”

    H.R.1 purports to, “expand Americans’ access to the ballot box, reduce the influence of big money in politics, strengthen ethics rules for public servants, and implement other anti-corruption measures for the purpose of fortifying our democracy, and for other purposes.” The Bill is 791 pages long.

    Here are just a few of the more egregious federal power grabs in H.R.1 concocted against the 50 states that run elections under the U.S. Constitution:

    1. Ban voter ID laws and allow ballot harvesting;

    2. Expand Election Day to “election season” by mandating mail-in ballots be counted 10 days after the election would normally be over;

    3. Automatic voter registration of people who apply for unemployment, Medicaid, Obamacare and college, or who are coming out of prison.

    There is a lot more, and it gets worse. Substantially worse. There are First Amendment restrictions on political speech and on the support or opposition of a bill and/or a candidate. Remember: This is supposed to be “fortifying our democracy.”

    If you are interested in a “through the looking glass” annotated analysis of H.R.1 — then head over to the Brennan Center for Justice. They are happy to explain how those pesky constitutional rights can be whittled down to something more “fair” for everyone. For example, the Brennan Center analysis confidently assures readers about how H.R.1 “affirms Congress’ power to protect the right to vote, regulate federal elections, and defend the democratic process in the United States.” It seeks to airbrush Article I, Section 4 — The Elections Clause — from history and practice. The Clause directs and empowers states to determine the “Times, Places, and Manner” of congressional elections. H.R.1 would federally strangle the Elections Clause.

    In order to find our way out, it is helpful to know how we got into this terrible predicament. The foundation for the madness of H.R.1 is legal positivism, a thesis, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which states “that the existence and content of law depends on social facts and not on its merits.”

    H.R.1 is nearly 800 pages of meritless, militant, social engineering targeting the foundations of the U.S. Constitution, voting rights and political free speech — all dressed-up as being “for the people.”

    Authoritarians — socialists and communists of different stripes, geography and eras — like to use legal positivism because it allows enormous latitude to design, implement and (especially) enforce whatever they dream up as the way things ought to be. What better way to design a worker’s paradise? Or — hypothetically, of course — to make sure that a stolen election stays stolen, is never audited, and lays the groundwork for reproducible results for the next century?

    It’s neat and easy under legal positivism. Draft up a one-sided, detailed plan (loaded with outrageous schemes) of nearly 800 pages that NO ONE will read or understand. Ram it through the one-party legislature and have the same party’s president sign it into law. Presto! — cheating has become nice and “legal.”

    For readers who find this technique troubling, or wonder why it does not sound like the great tradition of debate and compromise described in our founding documents and political history, there is good reason. The United States was founded on a theory of Natural Law, which adheres to universal moral principles for ethical and legal norms of human conduct whether a particular government recognizes them or not — that is, essentially, the antithesis of legal positivism. There are now generations of Americans who have never been exposed to these ideas.

    The “mind wipe” of Americans for all that is authentic and real about the foundation of our country as a constitutional republic began through the education system. We allowed people like Howard Zinn to dictate the historical framework for understanding who and what we are as Americans for millions of high schoolers and undergraduates. An intellectual diet of relativism, critical theory, deconstruction and subjectivity. That delegation of our educational standards was reckless, lazy and stupid. When you do not know any better, how can you act any better?

    The co-opting and hollowing out of our education system is the main explanation for why and how we are wrestling with the loss of the Republic by legislative militancy, topped off with the Executive pen stroke.

    This is terribly serious stuff and no one is telling you WHY you are losing. There is a lot of hand-wringing and outrage, and rightly so. But that nagging feeling tormenting you about why America seems to be slipping away — and why everything you believed in is now being turned into a crime or a shaming social media joke — well, no one is explaining that to you. Until now.

    Now is the time to snap out of our Covid-induced somnolence and passivity. If President Joe Biden’s election “victory” wasn’t enough to get your attention — then H.R.1 must be. Please let everyone influential know, clearly and politely, exactly what you think.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/23/2021 – 22:45

  • USAF Spy Plane Makes Unprecedented Flight Off China's Coast 
    USAF Spy Plane Makes Unprecedented Flight Off China’s Coast 

    A reconnaissance aircraft operated by the USAF made the closest-ever flight on China’s coast on Monday, coming within 25.33 nautical miles, according to South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative (SCSPI), a think tank based in Beijing. 

    SCSPI said the USAF Boeing RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft flew closer to China’s coast than ever before. The intelligence-gathering plane entered the South China Sea on Monday through the Bashi Channel to conduct reconnaissance operations on China’s southern coastal regions, the think tank said. 

    At one point, the spy plane was flying 25.33 nautical miles away from China’s coastlines, a new record, according to the think tank. A USAF spy plane’s usual distance is around 50 to 70 nautical miles, but the 25.33 nautical miles were unexpected. 

    The event comes days after the first meeting between the Biden administration and Chinese officials ended with hostility as it appears President Biden shows no sign of changing former President Trump’s aggressive policy. 

    “USAF RC-135U Combat Sent #AE01D5 just set a new record of 25.33NM, the shortest distance US reconnaissance aircraft have reached from the China’s coastlines, based on public data so far.” according to SCSPI. 

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

    Last week, SCSPI released its annual report on the US military operating in the South China Sea in 2020. It said USAF spy planes flew nearly 1,000 sorties in the highly contested waters last year. US bombers and warships have been increasing missions around China’s militarized islands in South China under the Biden administration. A move to exert “maximum pressure” on Beijing. 

    Bank of America’s analyst Francisco Blanch recently told clients in a note titled “Climate Wars” that a “great power competition between the world’s two largest economies, or between the world’s two largest military spenders, is set to continue for a long time.” 

    Blanch continued, “What form will it take next? For decades, America levered its economic and military might to secure global supply chains, including those of conventional energy resources in the Middle East and other key regions. China’s economy has converged and surpassed US GDP based on Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), but still lags in real GDP terms. Of course, its military might is still limited compared to that of the US on a broad range of metrics, and energy security of supply remains a key concern for the Chinese leadership. Yet with GDP in 2020 having contracted by 3.5% in America and expanded by 2.2% in China, the economic gap between the two superpowers is quickly closing.” 

    The Centre for Economics and Business Research, a UK-based consultancy group, believes China will overtake the US to become the world’s largest economy in 2028, five years earlier than previously anticipated, after weathering the virus pandemic much better than the US. 

    The threat of China overtaking the US in terms of GDP and military might have pushed the great power competition into hyperdrive as both countries modernize their militaries for potential conflict.  

    As global powers rise and fall, it appears the US and China are falling into Thucydides’ trap. War game simulations don’t appear promising for the US… 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/23/2021 – 22:25

  • "Our Defenses Are Down" – Border Agent Gives 'Insider' Account Of Over-Crowded Facilities
    “Our Defenses Are Down” – Border Agent Gives ‘Insider’ Account Of Over-Crowded Facilities

    Authored by Charlotte Cuthbertson via The Epoch Times,

    The family-unit holding cells smell like urine and vomit. Fights break out in the unaccompanied-minor cells. Scabies, lice, the flu, and COVID-19 run rampant.

    Up to 80 individuals are squeezed into each 24- by 30-foot cell, and there aren’t enough mattresses for everyone. Sheets of plastic divide the rooms.

    “Any diseases that are in there, it’s being kept in there, like a petri dish. The smell is overwhelming,” a Border Patrol agent said, describing the conditions in a facility in south Texas.

    The agent, Carlos (not his real name), spoke to The Epoch Times on condition of anonymity, for fear of repercussions.

    Border Patrol agents on the front lines are getting so frustrated that they’re now risking their livelihoods to reveal what’s really going on in the illegal immigrant processing facilities.

    One or two agents are left to control 300 to 500 people during a shift. No agent wants to report physical or sexual assaults between the aliens because they’ll get blamed for “letting it happen.” They’re also forced to separate a child from an extended family member because he or she is not a biological parent.

    The number of unaccompanied minors—children under 18 who arrive without a parent—is buckling the system. The law requires Border Patrol to prioritize unaccompanied minors and transfer them to the Department of Health and Human Services within 72 hours.

    “We’re getting them out of here as quickly as possible, but we are so overwhelmed right now,” Carlos said.

    “It used to be easy to get them out in 72 hours. Not anymore. They’re staying here for 10, 12 days. It’s horrible.”

    So far this fiscal year (from Oct. 1, 2020), Border Patrol has apprehended more than 29,000 unaccompanied children crossing the border illegally. In all of fiscal 2020, just over 33,000 were apprehended, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statistics.

    This year’s numbers are on a trajectory to surpass the 2019 crisis numbers, when 80,634 minors were apprehended.

    CBP declined to provide the number of unaccompanied minors currently being held. “In general, CBP does not provide daily in-custody numbers, as they are considered operationally sensitive because CBP’s in-custody numbers fluctuate on a constant basis,” CBP spokesman Nate Peeters wrote in an email to The Epoch Times on March 23.

    Health and Human Services confirmed on March 23 that its Office of Refugee Resettlement is holding approximately 11,350 children.

    CBP and Health and Human Services have opened several extra facilities to deal with the influx, with the latest being the San Diego Convention Center.

    Carlos confirmed that the majority of unaccompanied minors coming across the border already have parents or family members in the United States.

    “Everybody that shows up here – even if it’s a 3-year-old kid with no one around – they all have an address on them. And they’ll give it to you: ‘Here’s my address; this is where you are sending me,’” Carlos said.

    “And that’s what we do. This is the way we are being played.”

    Most of the unaccompanied minors come from the Central American countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

    “We’re dealing with a different culture who’s not afraid to send all their kids under the age of five, knowing they’re going to get raped, knowing they’re going to get killed,” Carlos said.

    “You talk to the adults or the teenagers and they’ll tell you, ‘They raped three or four girls, and they kicked them off the trains.’ They’re going to die.”

    Two-thirds of migrants traveling through Mexico report experiencing violence during the journey, including abduction, theft, extortion, torture, and rape, according to Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which has been providing medical and mental health care for migrants and refugees in Mexico since 2012.

    Almost 1 in 3 women surveyed by MSF said they had been sexually abused during their journey—60 percent through rape.

    Border Patrol agents apprehend about two dozen illegal immigrants in Penitas, Texas, on March 11. 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

    Families Released

    A new directive from the Biden administration is allowing for family units to be released into the interior of the United States without a notice to appear—the paperwork that states the date an illegal immigrant must turn up in court to plead their case.

    “There’s no repercussions. I’m not even going to give you a court date. You don’t even have to show up at court if you don’t want to. It’d be nice, but you don’t have to. That word gets out immediately. And I mean overnight,” Carlos said.

    He said it’s now common knowledge that if you bring a child, you’ll be quickly released into the United States. They’re being transported all over the country, but popular destinations include Houston, New York, and California, as well as Maryland and Washington, D.C.

    “They’ll put them in a hotel for a couple of days until their flight is ready to fly them to where they are going. That’s tax dollars,” Carlos said.

    “There’s no end in sight. The people that we’re apprehending are warning us of the larger caravans that are on their way.”

    He said President Joe Biden’s rollback of the Trump administration’s border policies is the direct cause of the surge.

    “One hundred and ten percent. They were already ready before Biden was even in office. They knew that the doors were going to be open. And now we’ve got a point where we cannot stop it,” he said.

    The administration hasn’t allowed media to access the processing facilities and, according to agents, it’s even requiring that agents in the field move illegal aliens they apprehend onto private land to process them.

    “Keep trying until you find us on a public road. But we’ve been instructed to move all the traffic onto ranches to make sure there’s no public eye,” an agent said.

    Biden’s strict on that. Trump was a different story. This administration is a no-go on media, I’m guessing because they don’t want to let the word out on what’s going on here on the border—to make him look good.”

    Carlos said the agency has stopped dropping illegal immigrants off directly at bus stations now. “We were given strict orders from Washington, D.C., that that ceases—it’s drawing too much attention,” he said.

    Now they drop the illegal immigrants nearby or at a local NGO facility near the bus station, he said.

    The administration hasn’t yet called the current situation a crisis, and Biden said on March 21 that he’ll visit the border “at some point.”

    Illegal border crossers, mostly from Central America, are dropped off by Customs and Border Protection at a bus station in the border city of Brownsville, Texas, on March 15, 2021. (CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images)

    ‘Our Defenses Are Down’

    Morale among Border Patrol agents has plummeted, Carlos said. “The attrition rate right now is ridiculous,” he said. “We don’t want to work for the Border Patrol anymore. It’s not the Border Patrol.”

    During the Trump era, agents felt “empowered” to do their jobs, he said. “Whatever deals he made, everything was working just fine. Now we’ve got this trash.”

    As agents get moved to deal with the increase in family units and unaccompanied minors, the smuggling organizations and cartels move drugs and other individuals through other, unpatrolled areas.

    “Our manpower is being depleted because we need to go babysit these people, move them as fast as possible to release them into the country,” Carlos said.

    “It’s ridiculous. We have no backup. We’re losing more than we’re catching. And it’s no secret.

    “Our defenses are down. So if there’s anybody that we should be worried about, they know this is the time to come in. They know it.”

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/23/2021 – 22:05

  • Largest Dry Cargo Ships Haul Unusual Loads As Dry-Bulk Market Squeezed
    Largest Dry Cargo Ships Haul Unusual Loads As Dry-Bulk Market Squeezed

    With global supply chains stretched thin, an unprecedented amount of fiscal stimulus circulates the world resulting in sharp demand spikes for raw materials, causing commodity and or product shortages, port congestion, container shortages, soaring shipping rates, and even delayed shipments. 

    Robust demand for commodities on the backs of record fiscal stimulus has tightened the global market for dry-bulk vessels. Shipments of timber and grain are being loaded on larger ships generally reserved for other cargo. 

    According to Platts shipping data, timber from Uruguay and grain from Brazil have been loaded on Capesize vessels, the largest dry cargo ships. These two commodities usually are transported worldwide via smaller vessels such as Panamax. 

    Panamax

    Genco Shipping & Trading Ltd. Chief Executive John Wobensmith told Bloomberg that “it just shows you how tight the overall dry-bulk market is, and it’s only going to get tighter.” He said soaring shipping rates are “not something that is for the next three months – this has got legs going well into 2022 because of the low supply situation.”

    Wobensmith said dry-bulk freight rates had averaged around $18k per day this year, up 40% from last year. Rates are expected to continue to climb into the second half of the year as volumes of commodities sourced from emerging markets will remain elevated. 

    Goldman Sachs’ economist Jan Hatzius agrees with Wobensmith’s view of supply chain distress extending into 2022. For more on Goldman’s perspective, read their latest note to clients titled “”Things Are Out Of Control” – There Is A Shortage Of Everything And Prices Are Soaring: What Happens Next.” 

    Even before the virus pandemic disrupted global supply chains, the dry-bulk industry was already under pressure, and ports observed declining cargo deliveries, according to Gerry Craggs, managing director at Stemcor S.E.A. Pte Ltd. It was only when government stimulus across the world supercharged demand in a way that supply chains were caught completely off guard with new orders. 

    “We’re in the phase of fiscal stimuli virtually everywhere in the world,” Craggs said in an interview Friday. “It’s driving up demand for virtually everything, and we see that effect in the steel sector and in commodities sectors.”

    Readers may recall we outlined how central banks and governments have overstimulated the global economy that will continue to exacerbate supply-chain disruptions.

    Lars Mikael Jensen, head of Global Ocean Network at A.P. Moller-Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company, recently warned he has “never seen anything like this,” while referring to the disruption of the global supply chain. 

    More disorder nears as President Joe Biden’s $1.9-trillion relief bill is making its way into the economy, expected to turbocharger consumer demand for products made overseas, which will only result in additional stress on the global supply chain. 

    Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Lee Klaskow noted last week that dry bulk had begun 2021 on a “high note. China and an expected global economic recovery have set up one the strongest opening quarters for dry-bulk demand in a decade.” 

    The lesson to be learned is that global supply woes are being amplified by government and central bank interventions to save the global economy. As a result of letting economies run hot, inflationary expectations worldwide are moving higher as government bond yields soar. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/23/2021 – 21:45

  • The Latest Manufactured Narrative: 'Anti-Asian Racism'
    The Latest Manufactured Narrative: ‘Anti-Asian Racism’

    Authored by Dennis Prager via WND.com (emphasis ours)

    If you rely on The New York Times, the Democratic Party or CNN – they are interchangeable – for your perception of reality, you now believe America is reeling from the latest expression of white supremacy: Anti-Asian racism.

    It is a lie, the purpose of which is to:

    a) Further demonize America.

    b) Further demonize white Americans.

    c) Further divide Americans by race and ethnicity.

    d) Reinforce – or create – the belief among Asian Americans that they are widely hated (and must therefore rely on the government and especially the Democratic Party).

    e) Engender ethnic identity among Asian Americans, most of whom have heretofore essentially considered themselves Americans who happen to be of Asian descent.

    Is there anti-Asian racism in America? Of course. Ethnic bigotry is a tragic part of the human condition. There is no country in which members of different races live that is bereft of ethnic or racial bigotry.

    Therefore, the only question decent, wise or honest people ask is: How much?

    And the answer in America is: very, very little.

    But the left lacks decency, wisdom and honesty. Therefore, it offers continuous reporting about anti-Asian racism, most of which so wildly exaggerates the issue as to constitute a lie.

    Let’s begin with last week’s attack in Atlanta, in which a 21-year-old white man murdered eight people in Asian massage parlors, six of them Asian Americans.

    Thus far, there is not a shred of evidence that the Asian Americans were killed because they were Asian. The reason the shooter killed them, according to those who knew him before the shootings and investigators who have spoken to him since the shootings, was that he had a sex addiction, for which he had already been in rehab, and had frequented some or all of the massage establishments he targeted, which he blamed for contributing to his addiction. As of today, there is also no evidence of the killer ever having expressed any anti-Asian sentiments on social media or in private conversation.

    Nevertheless, the lying media – a term that has become redundant – have portrayed the shootings from the moment they reported them as anti-Asian racism.

    Typical is this report in the Los Angeles Times: “Asian Americans and their supporters gathered Saturday across California and the nation in response to this week’s shooting rampage in the Atlanta area, which claimed eight lives, including six women of Asian descent.”

    The Atlanta lie is part of the greater lie that there is a national epidemic of white supremacist anti-Asian racism. On March 18, for example, The Washington Post reported: “Anti-Asian hate crimes have spiked 150 percent since the pandemic began, according to a recent study.”

    The study cited by The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN and the other left-wing media is from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. The 150% increase in anti-Asian American hate crimes is contained in its “Fact Sheet: Anti-Asian Prejudice March 2020,” according to which the number of anti-Asian American incidents rose from 49 in 2019 to 122 in 2020. So, the entire edifice of hate against Asian Americans is predicated on an alleged increase of 73 incidents.

    Given that there are about 330 million Americans, and assuming a different American was responsible for each of the 122 anti-Asian incidents, that would mean that 1 in every 2,704,918 Americans committed an anti-Asian incident. And “incident” includes perceived slights.

    As regards violent acts against Asian Americans, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics from September 2019, blacks have committed the greatest percentage of violent crimes against Asian Americans. But the mendacious media do not report that.

    The New York Times, the leader in mass hysterias fomented by the left – hysteria is the oxygen of the left – printed this headline last week: “Attacks on Asian-Americans in New York Stoke Fear, Anxiety and Anger.” And the subhead reads: “Hate crimes involving Asian-American victims soared in New York City last year.”

    Focus on the word “soared” and you will appreciate the Times’ commitment to truth.

    If one reads past the headline – which most people do not – the article gives the actual numbers: “The number of hate crimes with Asian-American victims reported to the New York Police Department jumped to 28 in 2020, from just three the previous year.”

    You read that right: The number of incidents “soared” and “jumped” to 28. In a city of 8.4 million people, including, as of 2010, over 1 million Asian Americans. So, about 1 in every 300,000 New Yorkers committed a hate crime against an Asian American, and about 1 in every 36,000 Asian Americans living in New York was a victim of a hate crime. To put this number into perspective, the odds of your dying in a motor-vehicle accident are about 1 in 9,000.

    Another New York Times article, under the headline “A Tense Lunar New Year for the Bay Area After Attacks on Asian-Americans,” opens with this:

    “The videos are graphic and shocking. In January, a local television station showed footage of a young man sprinting toward, then violently shoving to the ground, a man identified as Vicha Ratanapakdee, 84, who had been out for a morning walk in the Anza Vista neighborhood of San Francisco. He later died.”

    The Times piece never reveals the name or race of the perpetrator: Antoine Watson, a 19-year-old black man.

    But, in what could be called “compound lying,” the Times did blame “former President Donald J. Trump, who frequently used racist language to refer to the coronavirus.”

    Of course, the Times did not provide an example of Trump’s racist language with regard to the coronavirus. One must assume that blaming the Chinese government for the virus or referring to the virus as the “China virus” or “Wuhan virus” is regarded as racist, even though virtually every prior epidemic was named after its city or region of origin: the “Spanish Flu,” “Hong Kong Flu,” “Ebola Virus,” etc.

    Meanwhile, the blanketing of the country with the Atlanta lie and the anti-Asian violence continues. The cover of this week’s Time features a drawing of a young Asian woman under the headline: “We Are Not Silent: Confronting America’s Legacy of Anti-Asian Violence.”

    It’s all a lie in service to the left’s hatred of America.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/23/2021 – 21:25

  • VW's North American Chief Says They Offer A "Counterbalance" To Tesla
    VW’s North American Chief Says They Offer A “Counterbalance” To Tesla

    VW’s North American Chief took to Bloomberg this week to continue the ongoing PR tour that the company is doing in hopes of keeping its stock price screaming and making itself a formidable player in the EV space.

    Scott Keogh used his appearance on national television this week to trade barbs with Tesla, who is undoubtedly in the legacy automaker’s crosshairs.

    “There never is someone who controls 85% market share, and that’s basically what Tesla has in the U.S. There is always a counterbalance,” Keogh said of Tesla. He continued to make the case that Volkswagen would benefit from its global scale and its strong dealership network, two things that – from an infrastructure perspective – Tesla can’t reliably fall back on. 

    Despite VW’s obvious target being Tesla, Keogh said that the company’s ID.4 electric SUV targets more traditional ICE vehicles, like Toyota’s RAV and Honda’s CRV. The SUV will be made in the U.S. starting September 2022.

    Finally, Keogh said that an ongoing patent dispute between LG Energy and SK Innovation will be “straightened out”.

    Recall, we have been closely covering Volkswagen’s ascent – not just in stock price, but in making a name for itself in the EV space – over the last couple weeks. Most recently, we wrote that Deutsche Bank said its EV business could be worth up to $230 billion. 

    Analysts led by Tim Rokossa lifted their price target for VW shares by 46% to 270 euros this week. Last week, VW surpassed SAP as the largest member of the DAX. 

    Rokossa said there is a “good chance VW’s EV deliveries surpass Tesla’s in short order as its ID.4 compact SUV is rolled out globally”. Meanwhile, VW has said that it plans on turning its factory outside Barcelona into an EV hub with goals of making more than 500,000 vehicles per year. 

    He also pointed to reduction of cost in items like batteries as key drivers of the financial bull case for VW:

    VW’s truck unit, Traton SE, also said it was boosting investments into electric technology from 1 billion euros to 1.6 billion euros in 2025. Traton Chief Executive Officer Matthias Gruendler commented: “The future of commercial vehicles won’t be shaped by diesel anymore but by electric trucks.”

    The note concludes:

    “While we keep our existing valuation model, we increase the applied multiple that we think the market will deem fair and introduce a blue-sky valuation of the BEV business separately with this note. Applying the multiples of EV pure plays such as Tesla or NIO on sales generated by the MEB platform would yield a value of almost EUR400 per share (DBe) and we even ignore the premium PPE and luxury J1 platform in that calculation. We also ignore the potential value creation from a Porsche IPO (DBe: worth >EUR60bn). Overall, given the earnings momentum and the greater credibility of its EV story, we remain on Buy and increase our TP to EUR270.”

    Recall, last week VW upgraded its profit guidance laid out plans for expanding the company’s EV offering out through 2030 which also includes dethroning Tesla as the reigning EV world champ. VW hosted its “Power Day” yesterday and revealed plans to build six “gigafactories” with a total capacity of 240 gigawatt hours per year. 

    “The company is aiming to achieve an operating margin between 7% and 8% after 2021. VOW also confirmed it is looking to finish the year at the upper and of a 5% – 6.5% range in 2021. Higher profitability will be achieved through lower costs with as much as 2 billion euros savings identified for 2023 compared to 2020,” the company said yesterday, according to StreetInsider

    Chief Executive Herbert Diess said on CNBC: “This period is probably the most crucial for the whole industry. Within the next 15 years we will see a total turnover of the industry. Electric cars are taking the lead and then software really becomes the core driver of the industry.”

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/23/2021 – 21:05

  • The COVID-19 Baby-Bust Is Here And It's Likely Permanent
    The COVID-19 Baby-Bust Is Here And It’s Likely Permanent

    Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,

    Nine months after the pandemic began birthrates are falling in numerous countries.

    Plunging Birthrates

    Please consider the Covid Baby Bust.

    “All evidence points to a sharp decline in fertility rates and in the number of births across highly developed countries,” said Tomas Sobotka, a researcher at the Wittgenstein Center for Demography and Global Human Capital in Vienna. “The longer this period of uncertainty lasts, the more it will have lifelong effects on the fertility rate.”

    In the U.S., a survey by the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization, found that one-third of women polled in late April and early May wanted to delay childbearing or have fewer children because of the pandemic.

    The Brookings Institution estimated in December that, as a result of the pandemic, 300,000 fewer babies would be born in the U.S. in 2021 compared with last year. 

    Birthrate Declines

    • Italy: -21.6%

    • France: -13.5%

    • Japan: -9.3%

    Likely Permanent

    No rebound followed the global financial crisis. The U.S. birthrate—after rising to its highest level in decades in 2007—plunged after the 2008 crisis and has declined gradually ever since.

    Not to worry. The Fed has a plan to make things more expensive for everybody. That will help, right?

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/23/2021 – 20:45

  • "You Can't Escape The Smell" – Mouse Plague Of Biblical Proportions Overruns Eastern Australia  
    “You Can’t Escape The Smell” – Mouse Plague Of Biblical Proportions Overruns Eastern Australia  

    New South Wales and Queensland are being overwhelmed by a biblical wave of mice, which have taken over homes, stores, farms, hospitals, and automobiles. These nasty little rodents are eating everything in sight, leaving a path of destruction. 

    Reuters said, “the Australian state of New South Wales is suffering their worst plague of mice in decades after a bumper grain harvest.” 

    “At night… the ground is just moving with thousands and thousands of mice just running around,” farmer Ron Mckay told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

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

    The plague of mice has cost farmers millions of dollars. Here’s a video of hungry rodents swarming hay bales. 

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

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

    “It’s a real kick in the guts,” farmer Rowena Macrae of Coonamble told Queensland Country Life. “It’s so tough to watch.”

    In Gulargambone, north of Dubbo, Naav Singh, told The Guardian he catches hundreds of mice per night at the supermarket he works at. 

    “We don’t want to go inside in the morning sometimes. It stinks, they will die, and it’s impossible to find all the bodies … Some nights we are catching over 400 or 500,” Singh said.

    “It’s been going on for three months. It’s going to be really hard, and we have lost so many customers,” he said. 

    Pip Goldsmith in Coonamble told The Guardian she has caught at least 100 mice in her car and believes thousands are in her home. 

    “They stink whether they are alive or dead, you can’t escape the smell sometimes … it’s oppressive, but we are resilient,” Goldsmith said. 

    Local media said the mouse population continues to expand, and poisoning efforts have failed as dead ones end up in residential water tanks. The government is warning residents about the potential for bacteria in the water. 

    “You can imagine that every time you open a cupboard, every time you go to your pantry, there are mice present,” rodent expert Steve Henry told Reuters. “And they’re eating into your food containers, and they’re fouling your clean linen in your linen cupboard, they’re running across your bed at night.”

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

    The mice can also transmit diseases such as hantavirus, leptospirosis, salmonellosis, tularemia, and the plague. 

    Local governments are weighing the option to spend tens of millions of dollars to exterminate the mice or let an eventual deep chill in temperatures with heavy rains wipe out the critters. 

    … and with the bubonic plague already surfacing in Africa – Australians should be on guard for a potential outbreak of disease. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/23/2021 – 20:25

  • On The Climate Front: Tensions Where Green Jobs Meet Blue Collars
    On The Climate Front: Tensions Where Green Jobs Meet Blue Collars

    Authored by Vince Bielski via RealClearInvestigations (emphasis ours)

    The construction workers who traveled to central Kansas to erect a wind farm for utility giant American Electric Power thought it would be a good job. Then they fell victim to the troubling side of the renewable power industry.

    The nomadic band of workers had come to the Flat Ridge III project from Texas, Michigan and other states to install 62 turbines with towers as tall as 300 feet using cranes and heavy machinery. But after a few months the project broke down. Subcontractor C2 Logistics Solutions stopped paying the crew, causing workers to protest and walk off the job. Some quit in disgust.

    At least 60 employees and possibly dozens more are owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in wages, overtime and travel expenses, according to workers and a lawsuit against the company. “We still haven’t been paid, from the supervisors on down to the hands,” says David Saucedo, the former C2 general foreman who say he’s owed about $10,000. “You have to understand, I went late on my rent and car payments because I didn’t get paid.”

    Flat Ridge III is a cautionary tale as renewable power balloons into a big industry that may eventually employ a few million mostly blue-collar workers. The Biden administration stresses the good-paying jobs that await Americans in selling its plans for a fast expansion of clean power to curb climate change. Marketers burnish this upbeat image, with photos on company websites of men and women smiling under hardhats amid sunshine and blue skies.

    But that’s not the on-the-ground reality in many states today. Sure, skilled workers who hook up with established wind and solar contractors can make a solid middle-class living, particularly in a handful of states with strong labor practices like California, Minnesota and New York. Elsewhere, the influx of smaller operators and a lack of labor standards are spurring complaints about wage theft, starting pay as low as $10 an hour, scant training and safety lapses causing injuries and death, according to interviews with workers, union organizers, developers and state regulators.

    Every little construction company wants to get into wind, but they don’t know what they are doing and sometimes they don’t have the money,” says Saucedo, who has built wind farms for big and small firms for eight years. “I hear lots of complaints about small companies that don’t pay, or pay late, and treat workers like dogs.”

    A Prevailing (i.e., Union-Scale) Wage

    Trade union leaders have taken the battle to Washington, pressing President Biden to keep his green-jobs promise. Their top priority in America’s clean energy transition is a set of labor standards – particularly a guarantee of a prevailing wage, says Yvette Pena-O’Sullivan, executive director of the 500,000-member Laborers’ International Union of North America (LiUNA).

    A prevailing wage, which typically equals union rates and benefits, is about more than paychecks. It could transform the growing renewable industry by triggering the use of apprenticeship programs and attracting more skilled workers and reliable companies that invest in training, says Carol Zabin, an economist at UC Berkeley who researches low-wage labor markets and green energy.

    Climate politics come into play too. If Biden can deliver a win for construction workers, he may get something in return – less resistance from trade and utilities unions to his anticipated push to slash carbon emissions. Good union jobs in hundreds of uneconomical coal power plants and mines would be first in line to go.

    But a prevailing wage for clean energy, which could be part of the upcoming infrastructure package, is certain to face strong opposition in a divided Senate. Republicans and business groups have long denounced the country’s most prominent prevailing wage law, a Great Depression relic called Davis-Bacon. It applies only to federal public work projects such as highways but is touted as a model to use in the private renewable energy industry.

    Critics say Davis-Bacon distorts the market by boosting labor costs, which in turn can reduce the number of workers a company hires in order to control expenses. Budget hawks point out that repealing Davis-Bacon would save the government about 1% of what it spends on construction, or $12 billion in the decade ending in 2028, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

    Wind and solar workers earn less than enough to support a small family in many states.

    Green energy workers make more money than Walmart clerks but less than union members doing similar tasks. A report commissioned by Environmental Entrepreneurs and other business groups found that in 2019 wind technicians made a median hourly wage of about $25 and solar installers somewhat less along with some health care and retirement benefits. The wages are above the national median average but not enough to support a small family in many states, according to the Living Wage Calculator created by a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    “The vast majority of our jobs are high-paying, secure jobs,” says Erin Duncan, vice president of congressional affairs for the Solar Energy Industries Association. “Over the next decade, the solar industry will be creating hundreds of thousands of careers.”

    The Labor Brakes on Breakneck Growth

    The industry posted another year of record growth in 2020, thanks to a combination of federal tax credits, state requirements for supplying clean energy and rapidly declining costs. It has installed 4,900 wind and solar farms in the U.S., at times working closely with unions, particularly when developers need a large skilled workforce for difficult projects. The 2020 deal between Denmark’s Orsted and North America’s Building Trades Unions to erect offshore wind farms in the Atlantic Ocean was heralded by both sides as a breakthrough for labor-industry collaboration on clean energy.

    But labor issues threatened the industry’s ability to grow at the breakneck pace needed to meet Biden’s ambitious goal of cleaning the power grid of carbon emissions by 2035. The industry suffers from a shortage of managers, engineers, technicians and installers, with 83% of solar firms reporting difficulty in hiring the qualified employees they need, according to a 2019 jobs census from the Solar Foundation. The industry is trying to fill the gap by tapping groups like Hiring Our Heroes for military veterans who want training for solar jobs. “But we certainly don’t have the numbers of people that we need to facilitate the increasing growth of the industry,” Duncan says.

    The industry’s poor labor practices are part of the problem in luring blue-collar talent, says UC Berkeley’s Zabin. To keep costs in check, developers often rely on a peripatetic workforce of manual laborers, electricians, ironworkers and heavy-machine operators. They travel almost year-round from state to state and job to job, sleeping in cheap hotels and campgrounds. Many of them report to temporary staffing agencies and brokers, which — across various industries — often tend to depress wages and blur the lines of accountability when labor disputes over pay and unsafe conditions erupt, according to research by the National Employment Law Project.

    Job training would help these roving green workers build careers that can support a family. But training is hard to find other than at the biggest firms like GE and Vestas, says a worker who asked to remain anonymous. He dropped out of Southern Texas University for a wind job and was certified as a gearbox technician. But after five years in the business he’s stuck making about $25 an hour. “I love working in wind but I need to get to the right company that will give me the opportunity to learn,” he says.

    Occupational Hazards

    One major developer can spot a reckless contractor with poorly trained crews by the “crazy low bids” it submits. “There are some contractors with crews that put on Wild West shows,” says an executive at the renewables company who asked to remain anonymous. “Things happen on land where they’re not supposed to, equipment being in places where it’s not supposed to be, and there are safety issues too.”

    At least eight workers have died in the dangerous occupation of wind farm construction since 2008, according interviews with employees, filings with the Occupational Health and Safety Administration and media reports. Workers are suspended from towers hundreds of feet in the air as huge cranes swing massive steel parts into place in sometimes windy and mountainous conditions. The deaths include a man in South Dakota who was run over by a semi-trailer truck and a worker in California who fell to the ground through an open hatch on a tower.

    Last year, a 24-year-old man suffered what authorities called a preventable death on a wind farm in Washington. He jumped into a deep and unshored-up trench to rescue a trapped co-worker when it collapsed and buried him alive. A group of workers spent hours trying to dig him out of an enormous dirt pile.

    Wind-energy workers often face dangerous–and sometimes fatal–conditions, operating heavy machinery hundreds of feet in the air. Above, wind turbine rescue training off Virginia Beach.
    (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

    Renewable Energy Systems Americas, a major player in clean energy, was among the companies fined a total of more than $500,000 for many safety violations. A state agency found that digging such a deep trench after days of rain without bracing the walls was a “recipe for disaster.”

    Most large firms like Mortenson and White Construction are known as safe operators that follow rules. But some companies disregard time-consuming safety procedures in order to meet milestones, such as quickly erecting 10 towers, to get paid.

    “In order to get these paychecks, they tell us to do really risky things,” says Grant Schermitzler, who has worked on many wind crews over the years. “In 42-mile-an-hour winds, above the legal limit, they have us lift tower parts with a crane. They don’t understand how dangerous it is. It happens all the time.”

    Big Labor Goes to Bat

    Unions often intervene to address safety concerns with employers. But they have only a very small presence in wind and solar construction because of the difficulties in organizing workers employed by temp agencies — workers who don’t stay in one place long enough for a union campaign, says Steve Schwartz, LiUNA’s director of organizing.

    So organizers resort to other tactics, such as going directly to developers and urging them to sign project labor agreements on wages, benefits and training in exchange for a skilled workforce. The agreements are widely used in California’s buildout of renewables. When developers in other states reject them, unions make their case to regulators — with mixed results.

    In Minnesota, where unions have long held sway over jobs, a perfect storm was brewing a few years ago. While coal plants in the state were set to be retired, thus eliminating union jobs, wind and solar projects were springing up and being built by traveling workers with out-of-state license plates.

    Union leaders complained to the state Public Utilities Commission. Developers had sold these projects to regulators as job creators for Minnesotans, but they weren’t getting the work, says Kevin Pranis, LiUNA’s marketing manager in the state.

    The PUC responded by telling developers to begin disclosing the local composition of their workforce, sending a clear signal to hire more Minnesotans without actually requiring it. Renewable goliath NextEra Energy and RES Americas protested.

    They complained that local hiring is too hard and costs more and will mess everything up,” Commissioner Joe Sullivan says. “But developers came to realize that the commission wants to promote economic development, and they have complied and continue to build projects.”

    The number of Minnesotans hired, often from unions, has shot up in a state with 477 wind and solar farms. Locals made up less than a fifth of workers on a project in 2018, just after the reporting requirement began. Two years later, on another wind farm, the number had increased to three-quarters.

    In Colorado, unions have watched from the sidelines as traveling workers built most of 125 renewable plants. The Keep Jobs in Colorado Act of 2013 seemed like a win for organized labor in a state where it has a small footprint. It required the utilities commission to consider labor practices such as wages, training and local hiring in approving energy construction and acquisitions.

    But commission delays implementing the statute and a loophole for companies to avoid reporting their labor practices undermined it. “There’s a race to the bottom on labor costs, and that hurts the economy in Colorado and nationwide,” says former Commissioner Frances Koncilja, who found the PUC to be unsupportive of unions.
     

    State Democrats recently put teeth into the law to force developers to report labor practices. It gives unions leverage as Xcel Energy, Colorado’s largest utility, prepares to double renewable energy generation by 2030. But unions aren’t celebrating. That’s because the commission is still free to take the low-cost road, says Gary Arnold, business manager of a Denver Pipefitters local.
     

    “We always seek ways to use union labor on projects where it does not put us at a competitive disadvantage and allows us to deliver the lowest cost energy to our customers,” Xcel spokeswoman Julie Borgen says.

    Who Foots the Bigger-Paycheck Bill?

    Faced with a hodgepodge of state practices, LiUNA and other big unions are now lobbying for a federal prevailing wage law to set a floor on pay across the country. They want the pay requirement to apply to projects that receive federal tax credits and other incentives, arguing that if developers get a government handout, then workers should benefit too.

    Will energy consumers foot the bill for green workers’ bigger paychecks? For decades, academic researchers have examined whether prevailing wage laws, which exist in many states, boost labor costs. Their answer is sometimes.

    In most of the many peer-reviewed studies since 2000, costs didn’t go up because higher wages attracted more skilled and productive workers and prompted developers to shave other expenses, according to researchers at the Midwest Economic Policy Institute and Colorado State University.

    After losing a bid for a prevailing wage mandate in December, unions are banking on support from the labor-friendly Biden administration and Democratic heavyweights in Congress. Rep. Richard Neal, chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee, is an outspoken proponent. And Sen. Joe Manchin, a key swing vote, defended a prevailing wage law in his home state of West Virginia before it was repealed.

    The solar trade group, which has joined the discussions in Washington, has a more nuanced position. It might support a pay standard if it’s optional and tied to an additional subsidy for developers, says SEIA’s Duncan.

    “It’s a stark choice,” says Zabin at UC Berkeley. “Either we have low-wage, dead-end jobs or we use the tools of government to make companies better employers and create real careers.”

    Conclusion of a Cautionary Tale

    C2 Logistics, which was building the Kansas wind farm, shut down in December after failing to pay its crew. Owner Jim Clark didn’t have experience in the construction or energy industries before moving into the wind business, according to his LinkedIn page. He ran a trucking company.

    Wood, a global engineering and consulting firm that hired C2 to build Flat Ridge III, took over the messy project and hired the workers after Clark left. The crew’s morale and productivity tanked after the paychecks stopped coming, and the wind farm has since missed its deadline for completion, former employees say.

    Flat Ridge III is also ensnarled in lawsuits. The workers are suing both Wood and C2 Logistics for backpay and damages. U.K.-based Wood says it won’t pay the employees money that Clark allegedly owes them because that’s his responsibility. Wood is also suing Clark for defaulting on his agreements to the workers and the project. And C2 is suing Wood and a subsidiary, claiming they withheld funds from the small wind company, which is why it didn’t pay its workers.

    Wind farm owner American Electric Power — which earned $2.2 billion in net profits in 2020 — could easily pay the crew and make this controversy go away. But the utility doesn’t plan to make the workers whole. “We expect our suppliers to fulfill their commitments,” a spokesman says.

    Meanwhile, Clark has been plotting his return. He aims to start another wind business and tried to recruit some of his former C2 workers, says crewman Schermitzler, who served on the Kansas project. Over a meal in Texas, he says, Clark asked him not to join the lawsuit and instead come aboard his new venture. Clark denies he is trying to launch a new business. 

    Schermitzler, who is owed about $6,400, has learned his lesson. He joined the lawsuit.

    I want to get the word out so what happened to me doesn’t happen to anyone else,” he says.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/23/2021 – 20:05

  • Toyota Moving Fuel Cell Manufacturing From Japan To China After Beijing Offers Support
    Toyota Moving Fuel Cell Manufacturing From Japan To China After Beijing Offers Support

    Toyota is going to be producing the components necessary for fuel cell vehicles in China beginning next year. It marks the first time Toyota will produce these components outside of Japan, according to Nikkei

    Currently, components are being manufactured in Japan, before being sent to China to be assembled. 

    Beijing reached out to Toyota and asked the company to produce the components in the country, offering up support in hopes of moving toward its goal of putting 1 million fuel cell vehicles on the road by 2035. Beijing continues to push FCV as the “next generation” EV, offering cities incentives for establishing production facilities. 

    “Toyota is working with a Tsinghua-affiliated company to build a manufacturing facility for the driving systems of fuel cell cars,” Minggao Ouyang, a Tsinghua University professor, told Nikkei. The company will manufacture fuel cell stacks and other components. 

    Components made in China will be used in commercial vehicles and busses. Toyota is still currently in the process of working out the details of its partnership with Tshighua. The automaker and Tsinghua University established a joint venture in 2020. 

    A new production facility is targeted for 2022 and 2023 and could cost “hundreds of millions of dollars”.

    Toyota has sold about 11,000 FCVs as of September 2020, cumulatively. 3,600 of the units were sold in Japan and 6,500 were sold in the U.S. 

     

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/23/2021 – 19:45

  • Taibbi: A Biden Appointee's Troubling Views On The First Amendment
    Taibbi: A Biden Appointee’s Troubling Views On The First Amendment

    Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

    When Columbia law professor Timothy Wu was appointed by Joe Biden to the National Economic Council a few weeks back, the press hailed it as great news for progressives. The author of The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age is known as a staunch advocate of antitrust enforcement, and Biden’s choice of him, along with the appointment of Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission, was widely seen as a signal that the new administration was assembling what Wired called an “antitrust all-star team.”

    Big Tech critic Tim Wu joins Biden administration to work on competition policy,” boomed CNBC, while Marketwatch added, “Anti-Big Tech crusader reportedly poised to join Biden White House.” Chicago law professor Eric Posner’s piece for Project Syndicate was titled “Antitrust is Back in America.” Posner noted Wu’s appointment comes as Senator Amy Klobuchar has introduced regulatory legislation that ostensibly targets companies like Facebook and Google, which a House committee last year concluded have accrued “monopoly power.”

    Jonathan Knee, James Ledbetter, and Timothy Wu attend a Michael Wolff book launch party in 2019.

    Wu’s appointment may presage tougher enforcement of tech firms. However, he has other passions that got less ink. Specifically, Wu — who introduced the concept of “net neutrality” and once explained it to Stephen Colbert on a roller coaster — is among the intellectual leaders of a growing movement in Democratic circles to scale back the First Amendment. He wrote an influential September, 2017 article called “Is the First Amendment Obsolete?” that argues traditional speech freedoms need to be rethought in the Internet/Trump era. He outlined the same ideas in a 2018 Aspen Ideas Festival speech:

    Listening to Wu, who has not responded to requests for an interview, is confusing. He calls himself a “devotee” of the great Louis Brandeis, speaking with reverence about his ideas and those of other famed judicial speech champions like Learned Hand and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In the Aspen speech above, he went so far as to say about First Amendment protections that “these old opinions are so great, it’s like watching The Godfather, you can’t imagine anything could be better.”

    If you hear a “but…” coming in his rhetoric, you guessed right. He does imagine something better. The Cliff’s Notes version of Wu’s thesis:

    — The framers wrote the Bill of Rights in an atmosphere where speech was expensive and rare. The Internet made speech cheap, and human attention rare. Speech-hostile societies like Russia and China have already shown how to capitalize on this “cheap speech” era, eschewing censorship and bans in favor of “flooding” the Internet with pro-government propaganda.

    — As a result, those who place faith in the First Amendment to solve speech dilemmas should “admit defeat” and imagine new solutions for repelling foreign propaganda, fake news, and other problems. “In some cases,” Wu writes, “this could mean that the First Amendment must broaden its own reach to encompass new techniques of speech control.” What might that look like? He writes, without irony: “I think the elected branches should be allowed, within reasonable limits, to try returning the country to the kind of media environment that prevailed in the 1950s.”

    — More ominously, Wu suggests that in modern times, the government may be more of a bystander to a problem in which private platforms play the largest roles. Therefore, a potential solution (emphasis mine) “boils down to asking whether these platforms should adopt (or be forced to adopt) norms and policies traditionally associated with twentieth-century journalism.”

    That last line is what should make speech advocates worry.

    Wu’s appointment may not matter a lot to those concerned about constitutional freedoms because, as Stanford professor Nate Persily puts it, the current Supreme Court would be very hostile to any attempt to water down the First Amendment. “If there’s one thing that’s consistent about the Roberts court,” says Persily, “it’s very strong speech protections.”

    However, there’s a paradox embedded in this new Democratic mainstream thinking about speech in the Internet era. As one activist put it to me last week, the new breed of Democratic-leaning thinkers like Wu wants to be anti-corporate and authoritarian at the same time. Their problem, however, is that in order to effect change through authoritative action, they need to enlist the aid and cooperation of corporate power.

    This paradox casts even the “antitrust all-star team” narrative about people like Wu and Khan in a different light. What may begin as a sincere desire by the Biden administration (or, at least, by figures like Wu, who by all accounts is a real antitrust advocate) to break up tech monopolies, may end in negotiation and partnership.

    While the liberal tradition of the party tilts toward antitrust action, the new, more authoritarian form of progressivism currently gaining traction is tempted by the power these companies wield, and instead of breaking these firms up, may be more likely to seek to appropriate their influence.

    You can see this mentality in the repeated exchanges between Congress and Silicon Valley executives. An example is the celebrated October 23, 2019 questioning of Mark Zuckerberg by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a House Financial Services Committee hearing. The congresswoman, as staunch a believer in the new approach to speech as there is in modern Democratic Party politics, repeatedly asks Zuckerberg questions like, “So, you won’t take down lies or you will take down lies?” and “Why you label the Daily Caller, a publication well-documented with ties to white supremacists, as an official fact-checker for Facebook?”

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

    Grasping that everyone who’s ever thought about speech issues throughout our history has been concerned with the publication of falsehoods, incitement to violence, libel, hate speech, and other problems, the issue here isn’t the what, but the who. The question isn’t whether or not you think the Daily Caller should be fact-checking, but whether you think it’s appropriate to leave Mark Zuckerberg in charge of naming anyone at all a fact-checker. AOC doesn’t seem to be upset that Zuckerberg has so much authority, but rather that he’s not using it to her liking.

    A minority of activists within Democratic Party circles believes that the fundamental reason platforms like Facebook end up being what journalist Matt Stoller describes as speech “dumpster fires” has to do with the financial model of these companies.

    “These are advertising monopolies who have centralized control over the discourse,” is how Stoller puts it. He published a piece for the American Economic Liberties Project recently that suggests, “A possible reform path would be to remove protections for firms that use algorithms to monetize data.” His point is that firms like Facebook are incentivized to push users of all political persuasions toward the most angering, conspiratorial, sensational content, while also discouraging exposure to alternative or debunking points of view — a primary driver of our fact-starved political dilemma.

    In another piece the AELP published after January 6th, “How To Prevent the Next Social Media-Driven Attack On Democracy—and Avoid a Big Tech Censorship Regime,” the Project noted that banning Donald Trump from Twitter is ineffective even as a draconian solution, because it doesn’t alter the platforms’ basic incentive structure. Targeting the clickbait ad sales model for regulatory reform isn’t a panacea, either, but from the standpoint of traditional liberalism, breaking up surveillance advertising monopolies has to be better than partnering with said monopolies to switch out one elitist concept of speech control for another.

    This is where the paradox comes in. Every time a Democratic Party-aligned politician or activist says he or she wants the tech companies to take action to prevent, say, the dissemination of fake news, one has to realize that it makes little sense for those same actors to then turn around and advocate for breakups of those same firms. Anyone genuinely interested in clamping down on “harmful” speech would consciously or unconsciously want the landscape as concentrated as possible, because an information bottleneck makes controlling unwanted speech easier.

    This idea of needing a more activist conception of speech control is clear in Wu’s writing. He speaks about the First Amendment operating as a “negative right against coercive government action,” while in the modern environment, the government not only needs to secure the freedom to speak, but freedom from abuses. He posits a First Amendment that acts as a “right that obliges the government to ensure a pristine speech environment.” Because that would be difficult to accomplish in the First Amendment’s current form, he suggests “expanding the category of ‘state action’ itself to encompass the conduct of major speech platforms like Facebook or Twitter.”

    This is the subtext of those constant congressional demands that tech platforms fix the “problems” of unfettered speech. We have another round of such hearings coming this week. The House Energy and Commerce Committee will be having Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in to discuss, “Disinformation Nation: Social Media’s Role in Promoting Extremism and Misinformation.”

    The Committee’s ranking members and subcommittee chairs, Frank Pallone, Jr. of New Jersey, Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania, and Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, are adopting the now-familiar line of pushing to hold the tech firms “accountable” for their speech environments, saying congress “must begin the work of changing incentives driving social media companies to allow and even promote misinformation and disinformation.”

    Do these members of congress, or thinkers like Wu, want to break up these monopolies, or harness them? To date, the answer has run decidedly in one direction. Previous congressional hearings involving tech CEOs — I’m thinking particularly of an October, 2017 hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee in which Hawaii’s Mazie Hirono demanded that the platforms come up with plans to keep bad actors who “sow discord” from manipulating social media — already resulted in an overt partnership between Washington and Silicon Valley over “content moderation” decisions. The only question is, will that partnership become more expansive, as politicians become increasingly tempted by the power of these companies?

    As Stoller puts it, the Democrats have turned the tech battle into something like a Lord of the Rings contest, where the fight ends up being over the “one ring” of speech control. Others point out that the situation for new government appointees in the Biden administraiton will be complicated by the input of the intelligence services, whose point of view on this issue is clear and absolute: they love the bottleneck power of the tech monopolies and would oppose any effort to dilute it.

    Still others wonder about the wisdom of creating powerful new partnerships with Silicon Valley, given that political realities may change and another set of actors may soon be driving the content moderation machine. “It’s not like all this ends with the Biden White House,” is how Persily puts it.

    Wu’s comment about “returning… to the kind of media environment that prevailed in the 1950s” is telling. This was a disastrous period in American media that not only resulted in a historically repressive atmosphere of conformity, but saw all sorts of glaring social problems covered up or de-emphasized with relative ease, from Jim Crow laws to fraudulent propaganda about communist infiltration to overthrows and assassinations in foreign countries.

    The wink-wink arrangement that big media companies had with the government persisted through the early sixties, and enabled horribly destructive lies about everything from the Bay of Pigs catastrophe to the Missile Gap to go mostly unchallenged, for a simple reason: if you give someone formal or informal power to choke off lies, they themselves may now lie with impunity. It’s Whac-a-Mole: in an effort to solve one problem, you create a much bigger one elsewhere, incentivizing official deceptions.

    That 1950s period is attractive to modern politicians because it was a top-down system. This was the era in which worship of rule by technocratic experts became common, when the wisdom of the “Best and the Brightest” was unchallenged. A yearning to return to those times runs through these new theories about speech, and is prevalent throughout today’s Washington, a city that seems to think everything should be run by people with graduate degrees.

    Going back to a system of stewardship of the information landscape by such types isn’t a 21st-century idea. It’s a proven 20th-century failure, and signing up Silicon Valley for a journey backward in time won’t make it work any better.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/23/2021 – 19:25

  • The Great COVID Migration: 31% Of Young Adults Relocated During The Pandemic
    The Great COVID Migration: 31% Of Young Adults Relocated During The Pandemic

    The great Covid Migration of 2020 and 2021 for people between 18 and 21 continues.

    We have extensively documented the exodus from major cities not only by Gen Z and millennials, but also by corporations, over the last 12 to 18 months. This is why we weren’t surprised when it was reported that 31% of people aged 18 to 31 “relocated either permanently or for an extended period of time” during the pandemic, according to CNBC.

    This figure compares to 16% of adults overall who moved. Among the findings of a Bankrate.com survey, CNBC reported:

    • Gen Z — who range from ages 18 to 24 — were most likely to pick up stakes, with 32% relocating. That was followed by millennials — ages 25 to 40 — at 26%.
    • Members of Gen X — ages 41 to 56 — and baby boomers — ages 57 to 75 — were least likely to relocate, with 10% and 5% having made moves, respectively.

    In terms of motivation for moving, 31% of people said they moved to be closer to friends and family. 27% said it was due to affordability and 21% said they were relocating for a job. 18% said they wanted more space and 17% said it was due to a newfound ability to work from anywhere.

    And while technically they left the cities, they didn’t go too far. The survey reveals that three of the five most popular relocation destinations from New York City were under 15 miles away. 

    When respondents left cities like Austin, Texas, Dallas, Houston or Orlando, Florida, they chose new living locations that were “less than 30 miles away”, the report notes. 

    The survey included 5,158 adults and U.S. Postal Service address requests from January to December 2020. According to the survey, “Bankrate analyzed 12,681,085 USPS change of address requests, which covered Jan. 1 through Dec. 31, 2020. They were compiled by zip code and only registered moves within or between zip codes with at least 10 requests over that period. For example, if three people or families moved from Bethpage, NY 11714 to Myrtle Beach, SC 29577, that would not show up in the dataset, but if 11 people or families made that same move, it would.”

    Zach Wichter of Bankrate.com concluded: “It really seems like people are just leaving the densest neighborhoods to go to places where they may be able to get a bit more bang for their buck.”

    He continued: “Millions of the most popular moves last year were within the same zip code and the same county, illustrating the desire for more affordability while staying close to home. It will be interesting to see if people have relocated permanently, or if they will return to their previous locations once we return to some sense of normalcy following the pandemic.”

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/23/2021 – 19:10

  • Morgan Stanley Identifies The Source Of Massive Treasury Selling
    Morgan Stanley Identifies The Source Of Massive Treasury Selling

    In recent weeks we have been pointing out the stark divergence between markets in various geographic time zones, most notably the variance in equity “moods” between the Europe and US, where it often appears that there are two regimes: one ending when Europe closes and another starting, with both usually mirror images.

    But while we mostly focused on how geography impacts stock markets, a far more interesting observation was made this week by Morgan Stanley’s chief rates strategist Matthew Hornbach, who over the weekend identified the origin, if not quite the identity, of the persistent seller of Treasurys over the past few months, who has sparked such a violent rout across not just the US rates space but also stocks and other core assets.

    As the following remarkable chart from Hornbach makes very clear, the cumulative downward price movement in Treasury futures has been concentrated in the Tokyo session. Furthermore, after a brief respite in the first week of March, selling in the Tokyo session accelerated dramatically ahead of the FOMC meeting and it continued afterward.

    Of course, the initial burst of Treasury futures selling – which appears to have originated out of Japan every time – would then have a domino effect on the rest of the world, and as Morgan Stanley notes, “weak price action during the Tokyo session led to additional selling during the London session” although to a lesser extent. As the next chart shows, since the start of the year, 85% of the cumulative decline in TY futures prices occurred in the overnight session, i.e., Japan is almost single-handedly responsible for the dump surge in yields this year!

    Why does this matter?

    Because if Morgan Stanley is right, and if the seemingly daily Treasury selling indeed originates out of Tokyo, there is finally good news for bond bulls: Hornbach writes that “we have good reason to believe the selling from Japan won’t last… into April.” That’s because the fiscal year in Japan ends on March 31. “At that point, liquidation of non-yen bond holdings should stop, if not reverse at some point in the April-June quarter.

    But why did Japan sell non-yen bonds in the first place?

    According to Morgan Stanley, Japanese commercial banks hold a large number of equity shares, and the Nikkei 225 equity index put in its best fiscal year performance in decades. In other words, for the commercial banks, the income from bond holdings wasn’t necessary to make the year a successful one. Consider it one massive pension rebalance ahead of the March 31 fiscal year end… only this one was among commercial banks.

    In addition, Hornbach adds that it was no longer necessary to take the risk that bond yields would keep rising, thereby subjecting their bond portfolios to capital losses in the last quarter of their fiscal year. At the same time, with a new fiscal year comes new revenue targets. And unless the banks have confidence in the Nikkei 225 index continuing to rise, the much more attractive carry and expected rolldown in the Treasury market will seem very appealing, according to the Morgan Stanley strategist.

    In addition, the ability to realize that expected rolldown has been greatly enhanced by the higher bar the Fed set for tapering asset purchases and hiking rates.

    Summary: Japan’s persistent year-end selling led to an adverse domino effect around the globe, which eventually sparked a global bond – and stock – market turmoil. However, that’s now over, and Japanese banks are about to start buying massive amounts of US TSYs again once the fiscal year is over. And while it remains to be seen where stocks will trade in the coming week (see “Month-End Set For Epic Clash Between Forced Pension Selling And Quant Buying“), it now appears that Q2 is set to start with a bang, as between sliding yields and stimmy checks, the S&P is set to finally rise above the mythical 4,000 level.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/23/2021 – 18:55

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Today’s News 23rd March 2021

  • The 15th Century Medici Bank Is Getting A 21st Century Re-Launch And Also Will Serve Crypto Firms
    The 15th Century Medici Bank Is Getting A 21st Century Re-Launch And Also Will Serve Crypto Firms

    The Medici Bank name, most notably associated with the 15th century banking giant in Italy that, at the time, was the largest and most respected banking institution in Europe, is getting a reboot by one of its descendants.

    Prince Lorenzo de’ Medici, who is part of the same Italian banking family that ran the original Medici bank, has opened a new Medici Bank in Puerto Rico. And it’s getting a 21st century upgrade as a crypto-friendly institution.

    The new Medici Bank has been  “born out of frustration with the current financial services landscape” and is going to “offer faster, cheaper and more transparent services” as well as serving cryptocurrency firms, according to CoinBase

    Lorenzo de’ Medici founded the bank alongside former managing director of Americas at Fidor Bank, Ed Boyle. Boyle also previously worked for American Express and now serves as the CEO of Medici, while de’ Medici sits as Director. 

    Boyle told CoinDesk that the bank has already “obtained an International Financial Entity (IFE) license from Puerto Rico’s Office of the Commission of Financial Institutions” and that the bank isn’t seeking an FDIC charter in the U.S. 

    de’Medici’s announcement said: “The original Medici Bank of Florence, founded by my family in the 14th century, revolutionized the world’s economy. Many of their innovations that drove the development of international commerce — like holding companies, double-entry bookkeeping, and letters of credit — are still in use.”

    “The Medici Bank of today will be a reawakening of that innovative spirit; we are re-imagining modern-day banking by leveraging technology that creates seamless, digital customer experiences and expands financial opportunity across global markets,” he concluded. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/23/2021 – 02:45

  • Ukraine Between Biden And A Hard Place
    Ukraine Between Biden And A Hard Place

    Authored by J.Hawk exclusively for SouthFront,

    Joe Biden’s extensive interest in Ukraine during his tenure as Obama’s vice president meant that US attention toward the country would be instantly elevated in the eyes of the new administration. The Burisma scandal which implicated Hunter Biden and which became a problem for Joe Biden on the campaign trail, combined with Biden’s own apparent frailty and avoidance of extensive public engagements, have meant that Biden is yet to have a telephone conversation with Zelensky.

    Whether he deliberately chose to outsource Ukraine policy to his trusted advisors or they are taking initiative in order to fill the vacuum of power left by their boss’ incapacity, US-Ukraine policy has taken a number of new twists and turns in the less than two months of Biden Administration.

    End of Indirect Control?

    Biden Administration’s actions so far indicate a certain degree of impatience with the goings-on in Kiev which is behaving in an all too independent fashion on many issues. Kiev’s decision to nationalize Motor Sich, an aircraft engine manufacturer whose purchase was sought by Chinese investors robbed Ukraine of a significant influx of badly needed hard currency, took place after Washington expressed displeasure at Chinese companies’ foothold in Ukraine and moreover access to Soviet-era technologies attractive to China’s aerospace industries. This action was taken in spite of considerable risk of Chinese retaliation, which took the form of China’s Foreign Ministry informing its Ukrainian equivalent that it would no longer respect its wishes concerning economic activities in the Crimea, something that Chinese firms have shied away from so far. US Embassy in Kiev’s instant endorsement of Zelensky’s shutdown of three opposition TV stations and the placement of sanctions, in violation of Ukraine’s own laws, on one of Ukraine’s opposition leaders Medvedchuk on the grounds that they were involved in spreading so-called “Russian disinformation” suggests that Washington was at the very least aware of the move and may have even prompted it. US sanctioning of Igor Kolomoysky on the basis of his corrupting Ukraine’s politics indicates that Zelensky has not gone far enough in fulfilling Washington’s wishes. In doing so Washington demonstrated it is willing to publicly humiliate Zelensky should he fail to display appropriate deference to its wishes. The question at this point becomes, in what direction will Washington push Zelensky? How far, what means will Washington use to get its way, and to what extent will Zelensky resist?

    Giving War Another Chance?

    The greatest service that Ukraine could render Biden’s administration is by launching an all-out assault on Novorossia. A pitched battle between Ukrainian and DPR/LPR forces would instantly create necessary headlines, provide additional pretexts to condemn Russia and introduce more economic sanctions, and deliver the outcome that no amount of phony poisonings of Navalny could, namely the suspension or even shut-down of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that has become a thorn in the side of the Anglo-Saxon powers and a matter of national self-assertion for Germany. A major military campaign involving several brigades supported by airpower and the now-operational Bayraktar TB-2 drones in an effort to replicate Azerbaijan’s success against Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh would place Moscow before the unenviable choice of abandoning the Donbass to its fate or committing its regular military forces to battle in Novorossia’s defense.

    Whether Ukraine’s political leadership is willing to undertake such a desperate measure, in a country whose president suffers from a 20% approval rating and which has seen extensive recent protests against the increase in utility payment rates, is another question. On the one hand, Ukrainian troop movements on the Donbass have generated considerable attention, and exchanges of fire between Ukrainian and Novorossian forces appear to have continued at an elevated pace in the past several weeks. At the same time, no extraordinary measures such as the recall of reservists or closure of borders in order to prevent military-age males from leaving the country have been observed. While Ukraine’s Rada is considering laws making draft evasion more harshly punishable, these laws will not have an immediate impact, and appear to be a reaction to the failure to build up a professional army of volunteers or even to give the draftees a positive reason to serve. It has even been pointed out that the Ukrainian troop movements have been so ostentatious and lacking in even elementary efforts to preserve concealment and surprise that they represent a “war of nerves”, an exercise in brinksmanship, and possibly an effort to simulate action for the benefit of Washington, rather than genuine preparations for an offensive. A train carrying a reinforced tank company that has been spotted slowly passing three different railroad crossings in eastern Ukraine over the course of several days looks like an operation staged for the benefit of ubiquitous smart phone cameras.

    Therefore the likelihood of Ukrainian military opting for a large-scale offensive remains low due to fear of heavy and pointless losses which might cause Ukraine’s military morale to collapse, with unpredictable consequences. Small-scale raids to capture select positions, shelling of Novorossia’s towns and cities, even a staged atrocity, remain more plausible and attractive from the political point of view. Ukraine’s most dangerous military capability is represented by Bayraktar drones, cruise missiles like the Neptun, and short-range ballistic missiles currently in service and being developed, because their use would not entail the danger of major Ukrainian personnel losses. Moreover, Novorossia’s forces would be hard pressed to retaliate against such strikes in kind, Russian efforts to do so would be highly provocative internationally, and moreover carry the risk of causing Ukrainian civilian casualties. Fortunately for Novorossia, the drone park remains fairly small and the drones themselves are vulnerable to Novorossia’s air defenses, while the cruise and ballistic missiles are still years from large-scale operational deployment. The sort of missile bombardment that would represent genuine threat to Novorossia’s unrecognized republics is still years away, if not beyond. By the time they are, Novorossia’s forces will likely have their own means of retaliation in the form of barrage munitions, also referred to as “suicide drones” that could be produced on the spot in Donetsk and Lugansk. However, Ukraine’s current capabilities are sufficient to launch provocations, including through bombardment of civilian targets as was the case in Mariupol in 2014.

    The Blackmail Factor?

    That Ukraine’s military is unwilling to risk another mis-adventure against Novorossia is evident enough, as is Zelensky’s reticence to go down in history as the president who destroyed Ukraine. These considerations are unlikely to be salient for decisionmakers in Washington who need Ukraine to advance US interests, rather than US to advance Ukraine’s. But the lengths to which Washington is willing to go to pressure Zelensky are still unclear, though the possibility of outright blackmail has raised its head when a prominent Maidan propagandist Dmitry Gordon announced that on March 15, the “Ides of March” immortalized by the assassination of Julius Caesar, would face a trial of historic proportions once a certain bombshell news story were revealed. While March 15 came and went with no bombshells or even duds, Gordon did reveal that the event consisted of a Bellingcat “investigation” into the SBU plot to lure Wagner PMC contractors into Ukraine in order to have them put on trial. The “bombshell” aspect of the Bellingcat effort is that the plot failed because of a highly placed source in Zelensky’s own presidential cabinet who leaked it to Russian intelligence services. Considering Bellingcat’s reputation as a firm which does info-warfare “hits” on designated targets, and Gordon’s hyping of the impact of the film once it becomes public, one has to consider the possibility Bellingcat is part of a campaign to blackmail or even oust Zelensky from office should he fail to satisfy Washington’s demands. According to Gordon, the movie’s release is planned for early April, which presumably gives Zelensky a bit of extra time to deliver the goods.

    As noted above, Zelensky has taken a dim view of Washington’s meddling in Ukraine’s affairs, though it remains to be seen whether he is able to stand up to even his own national security officials who ostensibly are subordinate to him but in reality take orders from Washington. Lacking an independent power base that allowed Poroshenko to resist Washington’s initiatives in “reforming” Ukraine’s economy, Zelensky may yet prove the ideal president from Washington’s perspective, if not Ukraine’s.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/23/2021 – 02:00

  • 10 Killed, Including 1 Cop In Boulder Grocery Store Shooting; Suspect In Custody
    10 Killed, Including 1 Cop In Boulder Grocery Store Shooting; Suspect In Custody

    Update (2359ET): The death toll is now up to 10 people, including a police officer.

    “I thought I was going to die,” said meat department employee Alex Arellano, 35, who heard a series of gunshots and witnessed people running toward a nearby exit.

    The deceased officer has been identified as 51-year-old Eric Talley, who joined the department in 2010 according to the New York Times.

    Dean Schiller, who posted a live video from the scene shortly after the shooting began, said he heard about a dozen shots and saw three people who appeared to be wounded — two in the parking lot and one inside the supermarket.

    As officers secured the building, more than a dozen people were led out of the supermarket, a King Soopers in a residential area a couple of miles south of the campus of the University of Colorado. The grocery store usually draws a mix of families and college students. -NYT

    *  *  *

    In what is being billed as the second major mass shooting in the US since the country’s COVID-plagued economy started to reopen in earnest, six people – including a police officer – were killed inside a Colorado grocery store on Monday afternoon.

    Speaking during a press briefing held just minutes after SWAT police confronted another armed suspect inside an apartment near a high school in Boulder, police confirmed details from the earlier shooting, including the fact that a cop had been killed by the shooter, who was taken into custody.

    Video of SWAT officers confronting the second suspect, reportedly named Thomas Hanger, is already circulating on social media. People nearby were warned to shelter in place.

    Monday’s attack took place outside a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder. In addition to the shooter, a second person of interest, who was injured, was taken into custody at the scene, according to Boulder Police Department Commander Kerry Yamaguchi.

    Officers A law enforcement source told ABC News officers were responding to a report of someone being shot in the parking lot, and when they arrived at the scene, the suspect opened fire on them using a long gun. Back up in the form of other agencies, including the SWAT team, quickly arrived. ABC News also confirmed that the death toll is at six. Officers are waiting until family members have been notified to release a final death toll, along with names for the victims.

    “Without that quick response, we don’t know if there would have been more loss of life,” Yamaguchi said.

    The commander and Boulder District Attorney Michael Michael Dougherty said at the news conference that they will be releasing more information on the deceased victims, including the exact number of victims soon, as they are still notifying families.

    Video from the attack, including one shot showing the suspected shooter being taken into custody, have been circulating online.

    Watch the full evening press briefing from the Boulder police below:

    The shooting notably follows roughly one week after another shooting in Georgia directed at three massage parlors and spa, where 8 victims, including Asian women who worked at the spas, were killed. That attack prompted the media to declare that mass killings, which had disappeared from the headlines during the pandemic, have returned in the US.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 23:59

  • The New Normal "Reality" Police
    The New Normal “Reality” Police

    Authored (somewhat satirically) by CJ Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

    So, according to Facebook and the Atlantic Council, I am now a “dangerous individual,” you know, like a “terrorist,” or a “serial murderer,” or “human trafficker,” or some other kind of “criminal.” Or I’ve been praising “dangerous individuals,” or disseminating their symbols, or otherwise attempting to “sow dissension” and cause “offline harm.”

    Actually, I’m not really clear what I’m guilty of, but I’m definitely some sort of horrible person you want absolutely nothing to do with, whose columns you do not want to read, whose books you do not want to purchase, and the sharing of whose Facebook posts might get your account immediately suspended. Or, at the very least, you’ll be issued this warning:

    Now, hold on, don’t click away just yet. You’re already on whatever website you’re reading this “dangerous,” “terrorist” column on (or you’re reading it in an email, probably on your phone), which means you are already on the official “Readers of Mass-Murdering Content” watch-list. So you might as well take the whole ride at this point.

    Also, don’t worry, I’m not going to just whine about how Facebook was mean to me for 2,000 words … well, all right, I’m going to do that a little, but mostly I wanted to demonstrate how “reality” is manufactured and policed by global corporations like Facebook, Twitter, Google, the corporate media, of course, crowdfunding platforms like Patreon and PayPal, and “think tanks” like the Atlantic Council and its Digital Forensic Research Lab (“DFRLab”).

    First, though, let me tell you my Facebook story.

    What happened was, I made a Facebook post, and a lot of people tried to share it, so Facebook and the DFRLab suspended or disabled their accounts, or just prevented them from sharing it, and sent them the above warning. Facebook didn’t suspend my account, or censor the post on my account, or contact me to let me know that they have officially deemed me a “dangerous individual.” Instead, they punished anyone who tried to “boost” my “dangerous” post, a tactic anyone who has been through boot camp or in prison (or has watched this classic scene from Full Metal Jacket) will be familiar with.

    Here’s the “dangerous” post in question. (If you’re particularly sensitive to “terrorist” content, you may want to put on your “anti-terrorism” glasses, or take some other type of prophylactic measures to protect yourself from “offline harm,” before you venture any further.)

    The photo, which I stole from Gunnar Kaiser, is of an art exhibit in Düsseldorf, Germany. My commentary is self-explanatory. As you can see, it is extremely “dangerous.” It literally radiates “offline harm.”

    OK, before you write to inform me how this was just the work of a dumb Facebook algorithm, think about what I described above. If an algorithm was preventing sharing and suspending people’s accounts based on keyword spotting, it would have censored my original post, and presumably suspended my account. Or, if Facebook has an algorithm that recognizes certain “dangerous” phrases, and then censors or suspends the accounts of people who share a post including those phrases, but doesn’t censor the original post or suspend the account of the author of the post … well, that’s kind of strange, isn’t it?

    In any event, shortly after I posted it, I started seeing reports like this on Facebook:

    Those are just a few examples, but I think you get the general idea.

    The point is, apparently, the Corporatocracy feel sufficiently threatened by random people on Facebook that they are conducting these COINTELPRO-type ops. Seriously, think about that for a minute. I am not Stephen King or Margaret Atwood. I’m not even Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi. I’m a midlist-level author of unusual literature, and a political satirist, and a blogger, basically, and yet Facebook, and their partners at the Atlantic Council, and AstraZeneca, and Pfizer, and Moderna, and who knows which other global corporations and transnational, non-governmental entities like the WEF and WHO, consider someone of my lowly status enough of a threat to their “New Normal” narrative to warrant the attention of the Reality Police.

    Now, let me be clear about who I’m talking about when I’m talking about the “Reality Police.” Facebook’s partnership with the Atlantic Council is only one example, but it is a rather good one. Here’s a quick profile of the Atlantic Council …

    “The Atlantic Council of the United States was founded in 1961 as a think tank and anticommunist public relations organization to prop up support within the US for NATO in the post-World War II era … [its] current, honorary and lifetime directors list reads like a bipartisan rogues gallery of American war-criminals, including Henry Kissinger, George P. Shultz, Frank Carlucci, James A. Baker, R. James Woolsey, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta. Among the former Atlantic Council chairman have been Obama administration officials James L. Jones, (national security advisor) and Chuck Hagel (secretary of defense). The chairman of the council is Brent Scowcroft, the retired US Air Force officer who held national security and intelligence positions in the Nixon, Bush I and Bush II administrations. [It] is funded by substantial government and corporate interests from the financial, defense and petroleum industries. Its 2017 annual report documents substantial contributions from HSBC, Chevron, The Blackstone Group, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Ford Motor Company, among many others. Also listed is Google Inc. in the $100,000 to $250,000 donor category. Among the largest council contributors are the US State Department, The Foreign & Commonwealth Office of the UK, and the United Arab Emirates. Other contributors include Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Boeing, BP, Exxon and the US Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.” — Kevin Reed, World Socialist Website

    These are the folks that are policing “reality” (the “reality” they have manufactured, and are manufacturing moment by moment), deciding what officially happened, and didn’t happen, and what it means, and who qualifies as an “authoritative news source,” and “fact-checking” everything we see on the Internet. It’s not a bunch of pimply-faced IT nerds writing sloppy code in Menlo Park. It’s GloboCap and the Military-Industrial Complex.

    If you’re one of my “New Normal” ex-friends and colleagues (or one of my Facebook or Twitter trolls) who, for some unknown reason, is still reading this column, perhaps on your way to get experimentally “vaccinated” or report one of your neighbors for not wearing a mask or being outdoors without a valid reason, this is who has manufactured your “reality” and the so-called “science” you claim I am “denying,” even as reality stares you in the face …

    This did not begin with the “New Normal,” of course. Every system of power manufactures its own “reality” (totalitarian systems more fanatically than others). No, I’ve been writing about the manufacturing of “normality,” and the War on Dissent and Populism that GloboCap has been relentlessly waging on anyone and everyone opposing its hegemony or refusing to conform to its ideology, since back when I was still writing heretical columns like this for CounterPunch … before the editors saw which way the wind was blowing and ideologically purged its roster to get back into the good graces of GloboCap (following which ideological purge, Google restored it to the ranks of “real news”).

    And that is how reality-policing works. It’s a bullying operation, basically. The entire “cancel culture” phenomenon is. “Cancel culture” is a silly name for it. We are talking about a global empire imposing total ideological conformity (or, in simpler terms, its version of “reality”) on the entire planet through fear and force. The Nazis referred to this process as Gleichschaltung.

    Global capitalism has reached the stage where it no longer needs to tolerate dissent (any kind of dissent, from any quarter) to maintain the illusion of “freedom and democracy,” because there is no alternative to global capitalism. It is everywhere. There is nowhere to run or hide. When the Reality Police find you, and threaten to “cancel” you, you have two choices … obey or be vaporized.

    If you’re a Palestinian, a Syrian, a Yemeni, the president of an uncooperative African country, or some other type of non-Western person, you might very well be physically vaporized. For Westerners, vaporization is less dramatic and final. You will simply be disappeared from the Internet, fired from your job, socially ostracized, deemed a “dangerous individual,” a “racist,” an “anti-Semite,” a “conspiracy theorist,” a “white supremacist,” a “domestic terrorist,” an “anti-vaxxer,” a “Covid denier.”

    If you’re a member of the independent media, or a prominent activist, or a lawyer, or doctor, or just someone with a big social media platform, and have not seen the “New Normal” light, you will be demonized, demonetized, deplatformed, censored, and subjected to the type of creepy COINTELPRO-type tactics I described above. If you don’t believe me, just ask Robert F. KennedyRainer FuellmichVanessa BeeleyWhitney WebbJames CorbettKen JebsenCory MorningstarThe Last American VagabondGeopolitics & EmpireThe Centre for Research on GlobalizationOffGuardian, and countless other people and outlets that have challenged the official “New Normal” narrative.

    Or have a look at this “warning” you get on Twitter if you attempt to read anything published by OffGuardian …

    I could go on and on with this, and I’m sure I will in future columns. It’s kind of the only story at the moment, the changeover from simulated democracy to pathologized-totalitarianism as the governing structure of global capitalism. For now, I’ll just leave you with one more image in this already overly pictorial column. Don’t worry, it’s been thoroughly “fact-checked,” so there’s no need to read or question the fine print (even though I have a feeling you will) …

    Do watch out for those “unrelated coincidences.” Some of them, I hear, can be rather nasty.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 23:40

  • Human Traffickers Made Up To $14 Million Per Day In February Border Rush: Report
    Human Traffickers Made Up To $14 Million Per Day In February Border Rush: Report

    Human trafficking organizations sending men, women and children over the US-Mexico border to take advantage of President Biden’s backfiring immigration policies earned as much as $14 million per day in February, according to Fox News, citing sources within the US Border Patrol.

    “Trafficking is a multibillion-dollar industrym,” according to just-retired Tucson Border Patrol Chief Roy Villareal, who had been with the agency for 30 years. “A lot of these vulnerable populations use their life savings. Some are essentially indentured servants and they’re working off this debt for a long period of time. In other cases, some of these migrants are asked to transport narcotics or some form of crime to work off a different part of their debt.”

    The human smuggling windfall comes as U.S. taxpayer costs for the border crisis continue to spike, topping $5 million a day, based on 2019 figures provided by Health and Human Services that put daily “influx” shelter costs at $800 per migrant. Additionally, last week the Biden administration awarded a $86 million contract for hotel rooms to hold 1,200 migrant families as the crisis exceeds ICE holding capacity.

    Additional costs will include overtime and hotel costs for the hundreds of agents reassigned to Texas from other areas. For context, in 2019 Congress appropriated an extra $4.6 billion to handle a similar migrant surge. In 2014, Congress gave President Obama an extra $2.7 billion to deal with his border crisis. –Fox News

    According to the report, human traffickers are paid a portion up front, and typically paid the rest over time by the worker, their family, or an employer. The initial funds cover food, shelter, transportation, and a coyote (guide) to lead them over the border and into the United States.

    Earlier this month, 13 people were killed in California when the SUV they were in collided with a semi-truck. The deceased were believed to have been illegally smuggled across the border.

    “We pray for the accident victims and their families during this difficult time,” said El Centro Sector Chief Patrol Agent Gregory Bovino in a news conference following the accident. Agents, he said, believe the deceased individuals were part of a larger group of about 44 migrants who were smuggled through a hole in the fence near Calexico, a California city that lies along the border and is next to the Mexican city of Mexicali.

    Bovino added that an “initial investigation into the origins of the vehicles indicate a potential nexus to the aforementioned breach in the border wall,” while adding that “human smugglers have proven time and again they have little regard for human life.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 23:20

  • The Six-Year Epic Failure: Riyadh’s Crusade On Yemen
    The Six-Year Epic Failure: Riyadh’s Crusade On Yemen

    Submitted by South Front,

    Six years of the Saudi-led war have passed in Yemen, and it keeps going with no sign of a peaceful solution on the horizon. The “occasion” was “commemorated” with a briefing by Ansar Allah, or as they are popularly known – the Houthis. Some impressive numbers were shared.

    Houthi spokesperson Yahya Sari said that the Saudi-led coalition carried out more than 266,150 airstrikes throughout these 6 years. The predominant number of those strikes targeted Yemeni citizens, homes, cities and other infrastructure.

    On the side of the Houthis, at least 1,348 separate missile operations were launched, with nearly 500 being behind enemy lines on key military facilities of the Kingdom and the UAE. In total, the Houthi Air Force carried out 12,623 raids with drones. In 2021 alone, Ansar Allah has carried out 1,464 operations, including 124 attack operations, and the rest reconnaissance.

    The Ansar Allah ground forces carried out 12,366 combat operations throughout the years. When it comes to losses, the Houthis didn’t share theirs. They claimed that over the 6 years, the Saudi-led coalition had suffered some significant losses. In total, more than 240,000 fighters were either killed or injured.

    This includes UAE forces, Sudanese mercenaries, Saudi armed forces, as well as the troops of the Yemen puppet government.

    As expected, the update focuses more on what the Houthis achieved and what Saudi Arabia has lost, but it has been an open secret that Riyadh’s intervention in Yemen hasn’t been a glowing example of success.

    In just the past few days, leading up to March 22nd, the Houthis carried out a significant attack on Aramco oil facilities. A refinery was struck by 6 suicide drones. The Saudi Ministry of Energy claimed that the attack caused a fire that was “quickly” controlled by the refinery’s staff. Satellite imagery, however, showed the damage to be much more extensive than Riyadh let on.

    Saudi Arabia, on its part, released footage of its airstrikes on Ansar Allah in the Marib province. The videos presented 17 pinpoint airstrikes by Riyadh warplanes on vehicles and positions on several fronts of the province. The Saudi-led coalition also released a video showing precision airstrikes on a cave supposedly used by the Houthis to store suicide drones. It is purportedly located near Yemen’s capital Sana’a.

    In spite of these videos, and the Saudi attempt to present the situation in a somewhat positive light, the Saudi-led coalition has been slowly retreating in Marib.

    Six years of war have passed in Yemen, in which massive amounts of funds were “invested” by Riyadh to fight a war that it still can’t even go near winning.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 23:00

  • Richest 1% Of Americans Hiding 20% Of Income From IRS
    Richest 1% Of Americans Hiding 20% Of Income From IRS

    America’s richest 1% aren’t paying taxes on up to one-fifth of their income, according to Bloomberg, citing a new study which concludes that US tax evasion is far more widespread than previously estimated.

    The authors of the study found that while random audits can detect some tax evasion, the IRS misses more sophisticated schemes to avoid reporting income – including offshore structures and private business entities. According to the report, if the Treasury was able to collect the unpaid income tax from the top 1%, revenue would increase by $175 billion per year – which is roughly twice the amount Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) wants to slap on the rich with a prospective wealth tax (and which would promptly move offshore as well).

    Last week, IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig told a House panel that audit rates for high-income taxpayers have dropped precipitously over the past decade due to staff shortages among the group which audits wealthy individuals.

    “We stress that our estimates are likely to be conservative with regard to the overall amount of evasion at the top,” the authors wrote, adding that while basic audits can uncover discrepancies between income reported by employers and tax returns, private business profits and complex investment partnership schemes are far more difficult to identify.

    The hidden income at the top means that income and wealth inequality could be more skewed than researchers have previously estimated, the authors concluded. The study was conducted by two IRS researchers, John Guyton and Patrick Langetieg, and three professors: Daniel Reck of the London School of Economics, Max Risch of Carnegie Mellon University, and Gabriel Zucman of the University of California at Berkeley. -Bloomberg

    The solution? The researchers suggested that the IRS deploy “additional tools” to “effectively combat high-income tax evasion,” which could include more specialized audits and whistleblowers. We assume the latter means rewards for dropping the dime on one’s employer.

    Congress is currently discussing allocating more funding to the IRS after years of budget cuts, so that the tax collection agency can hire specialized auditors and improve their technology – while also allowing them to collect more data from banks and financial institutions.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 22:40

  • Leviathan Mobilizes For Decisive Battle
    Leviathan Mobilizes For Decisive Battle

    Authored by Alastair Crooke via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Globalist forces are being mobilised to win a last battle in the ‘long-war’ – looking to break-through everywhere.

    In The Revolt of the Public, Martin Gurri, a former CIA analyst, contends that western élites are experiencing a collapse of authority deriving from a failure to distinguish between legitimate criticism and – what he terms – illegitimate rebellion. Once control over the justifying myth of America was lost, the mask was off. And the disparity between the myth and public experience of it became only too evident.

    Writing in 2014, Gurri foresaw that the Establishment would respond by denouncing all evidence of public discontent, as lies and disinformation. The Establishment would, in Gurri’s telling, be so constrained within their ‘bubble’ that they would be unable to assimilate their loss of monopoly over their own confected ‘reality’. This Establishment denial would be made manifest, he argued, in a delusional, ham-fisted authoritarian manner. His predictions have been vindicated with Trumpist dissidence denounced as a threat to ‘our democracy’ – amidst a media and social platform crackdown. Such a response would only confirm the suspicions of the public, thus setting off a vicious circle of yet more “distrust and loss of legitimacy”, Gurri concluded.

    This was Gurri’s main thrust. The book’s striking feature however, was how it seemed so completely to nail the coming Trump and Brexit era – and the ‘anti-system’ impulse behind them. In America, this impulse found Trump – not the other way around. The point here essentially being that America no longer saw Red and Blue as the two extended wings belonging to the bird of liberal democracy. For something around half of America, the ‘system’ was rigged towards a profiteering 0.1%, and against them.

    The key point here surely is whether the élites’ Great Re-set – to reinvent themselves as leaders of the ‘re-vamped’ values of liberalism, overlayered by a newly up-dated, AI and robot-led, post-modernity – is destined to succeed, or not.

    Continued ‘westification’ of the globe – the principal component to ‘old’ liberal globalism – though tarnished and largely discredited, remains mandatory, as made clear in the cogent reasoning recently advanced by Robert Kagan: Absent the justifying myth of ‘seeding democracy across the world’ around which to organise the empire, the moral logic of the entire enterprise begins to fall apart, Kagan argued (with surprising frankness). He thus asserts that the U.S. empire abroad is required – precisely in order to preserve the myth of ‘democracy’ at home. An America that retreats from global hegemony, he argues, would no longer possess the cohesive binding to preserve America as liberal democracyat home either.

    Gurri is ambivalent on the élite’s ability to stick fast. He both asserts that “the centre cannot hold”, but then adds that the periphery had “no clue what to do about it”. The public revolts would likely arrive unattached to coherent plans, pushing society into interminable cycles of zero-sum clashes between myopic authorities, and their increasingly furious subjects. He called this a “paralysis of distrust”, where outsiders can “neutralize, but not replace the centre” and “networks can protest and overthrow, but never govern”.

    There may indeed be some truth in this latter observation, yet what is happening today in the U.S. is but one ‘battle’ (albeit a key one) in a longer strategic war, reaching far back. The notion of a New World Order is nothing new. Imagined by globalists today, as before, it remains a teleological process of the ‘westification’ of the globe (western ‘universal values’), pursued under the rubric of (scientific) modernism.

    What sets the current Great Re-set apart however, is that it is a later, more updated, version of Western values — not the same Western values as they were yesterday. The reek of colonialism has been exorcised from the imperial project through the launch of war on ‘white supremacy’ and on racial and social injustice. Global leadership has been recast as ‘saving the planet’ from climate change; saving all humanity from the pandemic; and safeguarding us all from a coming global financial crisis. Mothers’ milk. Who would resist such a well-intentioned agenda?

    The current Great Re-set is a process of metamorphosis – a change in Western values, and paradigm. As Professor Dugin writes:

    “And this is important — it is a double-process to update the West itself – and [at the same time], to project an updated version to the world beyond. This is a kind of postmodern combination of the Western and the Modern”.

    But its essence – the root to this meta-historical struggle – always has been the world order, open society focus on dis-embedding humans from all forms of collective identity. Firstly, to dis-embed Renaissance Man from his notion of being a microcosm interpenetrating within a vast surrounding, living macrocosm (this aim being largely achieved via the advent of empirical Scientism); then the de-coupling from Latin Catholicism (via Protestant individualism); and lately, liberation from the secular nation-state (through globalism). And finally, we reach the shedding ‘late-stage’ – the severance from all collective identities and histories, including ethnicity and gender (both now to be self-defined).

    It is the passage to a new kind of liberalism, one that sweeps gender and identity into full, liquid fluidity. This latter aspect is not some secondary ‘accessory’ or add on – it is ‘something’ essentially embedded within in the logic of liberalism. The logic is inescapable. And the ultimate logical end to which it leads? Well, to the dis-embedding of the subjective self into trans-humanism. (But let’s not go there; it is dark – i.e. being human is to impose the subjective on the objective – “We need to liberate the objects from the subjects, from humanity, and explore the things as they are – without man, without being a tool of man”).

    And here, Gurri’s insight is salient: The plan is out of control, and becoming progressively more bizarre. The American unipolar moment is ‘done’. It has created oppositions of various kinds, both abroad and at home. Conservative and traditional impulses have reacted against the radical ideological agenda, and crucially, the 2008 Financial Crisis and near collapse of the system foretold to the élites of the ultimate coming end to the U.S.’ financial hegemony, and concomitantly to America’s primacy. It forced a critical juncture.

    Now they are at a crucial impasse. When they speak about Re-set, this means a forced return to the continuation of the agenda. But it is not as straight-forward as it seems. Everything seemed almost primed to fall into place twenty years ago; yet now, the Establishment is having to fight for every element of this strategy because everywhere they encounter a growing resistance. And it is no insignificant resistance. In America alone, some 74 million Americans reject the cultural war being waged on them.

    Fyodor Dostoevsky described in The Demons the consequence to all this severance from meaning, as discovered at the deepest levels of the collective human psyche. Transcendence? ‘You can’t just be rid of it’. Yearning for meaning; for knowing who we are, is hard-wired into the human psyche. In the Demons, its denial and rejection leads only to warped violence (including child-rape), wanton destruction, and other extreme pathological behaviour.

    Dostoevsky originally envisioned Demons as a political polemic, but horrified by news reports of a Russian nihilist leader’s orchestration of a pointless political murder, Dostoevsky fictionalised the story, hoping to shed light on how the sensitive, genteel, well-meaning Russian secular liberals of the 1840s had prepared the way for their 1860s generation of radicalized, ideology-maddened children bent on tearing down the world.

    In a sense, Dostoevsky’s exploration of the psychology of secular liberal Russians in the 1840s (who passed on their criticisms of the establishment to the next generation) were somehow forerunners to the Woodstock generation of the 1960s – of easy-going, spoiled youth in search for meaning and transcendence from boring ‘reality’ through music, sex and drugs. Both produced angry children driven by hate towards a world conspiring constantly to frustrate their vision of how things ‘should be’.

    If asked why Western culture has been trapped in an oscillating dynamic between liberalism and nihilistic radicalism for roughly two centuries with no end in sight, Dostoevsky would probably answer that it is because of our dis-embedding from the deeper levels of what it means to be human. This loss inevitably creates pathologies. (Carl Jung came to the same view).

    So will the Re-set be realised?

    The élites still cling to westernisation (‘America is back’ – although no-one is greatly enthused). The obstacles are many and growing. Obstacles and crises at home – where Biden visibly is shedding authority. U.S. decision-making seemingly lacks a ‘Chair’, or shall we say, a functioning ring-master. Who is in charge of foreign policy? It is opaque. And America itself is irreconcilably split and weakened. But also, for the first time, the U.S. and EU are increasing seen abroad to be inept at managing the most simple of affairs.

    Nonetheless, the globalist call to arms is evident. The world clearly has changed during the last four years. Globalist forces, therefore, are being mobilised to win a last battle in the ‘long-war’ – looking to break-through everywhere. Defeating Trump is the first goal. Discrediting all varieties of European populism is another. The U.S. thinks to lead the maritime and rim-land powers in imposing a searing psychological, technological and economic defeat on the Russia-China-Iran alliance. In the past, the outcome might have been predictable. This time Eurasia may very well stand solid against a weakened Oceana (and a faint-hearted Europe). It would shake Leviathan to its foundations. Who knows what might then emerge from the ruins of post-modernity.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 22:20

  • ECB Finally Ramps Up Bond Purchases After Pledging To Fight Rising Yields
    ECB Finally Ramps Up Bond Purchases After Pledging To Fight Rising Yields

    After three weeks of consecutive disappointments from the ECB (see here and here), when the central bank would purchase fewer bonds in the open market via QE despite jawboning its readiness and eagerness to purchase more, and then making it official two weeks ago when the ECB formally announced it would conduct purchases under the PEPP at a “significantly higher pace”, Christine Lagarde’s bank finally delivered on its promise to boost the pace of emergency bond-buying to offset the economic threat of tighter financial conditions from higher yields.

    The ECB revealed today that net purchases settled last week (through March 17) jumped by €21.1 billion, up from €14 billion the week prior and the most since the start of December (the figure is reduced by redemptions, with the the gross value of purchases set to disclosed on Tuesday). According to Bloomberg, the latest weekly purchases were higher than the €18 billion weekly net average since the program started last year.

    This suggests an increase in the PEPP pace following the March ECB meeting of around €5bn/week, according to Goldman analysts who notes that a more precise assessment will emerge through time, as weekly data is partial and can be distorted by undisclosed reinvestment flows. Goldman expects net purchases to run at an elevated pace of €20bn/week through Q2 and to gradually fall thereafter. In the meantime, they believe that policy intentions will be conveyed by ECB communication rather than weekly financial statements.

    “We again caution against over-interpreting weekly data points, as they remain a noisy signal of policy intentions, especially since both ECB President Lagarde and Board Member Schnabel have underscored that the PEPP pace should be assessed over longer horizons” Goldman’s Sven Jari Stehn wrote in a note to clients. Going forward, he expects a relatively inertial week-to-week net purchase pace in Q2 “and a gradual reduction of the purchase pace after a reassessment at the June Governing Council in conjunction with fresh inflation projections; in the meantime, we look to ECB communication as the clearest signal of policy intentions.”

    The acceleration in debt monetization was widely expected after the ECB’s recent announcement, when the central bank decided to significantly increase buying under the program – due to run for at least another year – after a global bond sell-off spurred by reflation bets because of massive U.S. fiscal stimulus.

    The faster purchases came after weeks in which traders and bank officials expressed concerns about rising rates, yet official data showed no sizable or sustained pickup in buying. As Bloomberg notes, “officials fear that Europe’s extended virus lockdowns and a slow vaccination rollout mean it isn’t ready to cope with higher borrowing costs.”

    Commenting on the acceleration in QE, Bloomberg economist David Powell said that “the new pace of purchases may be enough to prevent bond yields from rising further, but it’s unlikely to reverse the recent increase.”

    Sure enough, the report had little impact on market rates with German bunds holding marginally higher on the day, with 10-year yields dropping one basis point to minus 0.31%. Those on their Italian peers were steady at 0.66%, with the spread between the two hovering above this year’s lows. The euro rose 0.2% to $1.1925.

    The recent selloff in European bonds has been triggered by a surge in US yields as a result of expectations that the overheating economic recovery will reignite inflation and could lead to a premature rate hike.

    On Monday, ECB President Christine Lagarde said in a blog post that the near-term outlook remains uncertain, and reiterated her promise to keep financing conditions favorable.

    She said the central bank would measure its progress using “a joint test that appraises the prevailing financing conditions against the euro area’s economic and inflation outlook”. It has €900bn of capacity left under PEPP, its main crisis-fighting tool, which is due to run until at least March 2022.

    “We retain the option to adjust the pace of purchases at any point in time in response to potential changes in market conditions,” she said. “While much progress has been made and we can see light at the end of the tunnel, we cannot be complacent.”

    But Klaas Knot, head of the Dutch central bank and ECB governing council member, indicated PEPP could be wound up earlier than expected if the pandemic was contained quickly and the economy rebounded strongly. “As long as we are in a situation with contact restrictions, it’s clear that the pandemic emergency purchase program won’t stop,” Knot, who heads the Dutch central bank, said in a press conference. “But if we make good progress with vaccinations, that moment will come somewhere later this year.”

    Quoted by the FT, Peter Schaffrik, RBC Capital Markets global macro strategist, said: “Whilst it seems clear that the ECB is able to make European fixed-income markets outperform versus, say, the US and the UK, it is less clear whether they can stand in the way of higher bond yields in general.” Still, Schaffrik said the ECB could already “feel vindicated” after real yields, adjusted for inflation, remained “well anchored” on eurozone sovereign bonds and returned close to record lows after the central bank’s last meeting two weeks ago.

    Analysts noted that the ECB has taken a different tack to its peers, as the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England have not joined it in pushing back against rising yields.  “The ECB, as the one central bank to have pledged to actively counter the rise in bond yields, is left in a pickle,” ING analysts said.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 22:00

  • In Syria, The War Of Hunger Is Taking Over From The War Of Guns
    In Syria, The War Of Hunger Is Taking Over From The War Of Guns

    Authored by Patrick Cockburn via The Unz Review,

    Great dollops of hypocrisy invariably accompany expressions of concern by outside powers for the wellbeing of the Syrian people. But even by these low standards, a new record for self-serving dishonesty is being set by the Caesar Civilian Protection Act, the new US law imposing the harshest sanctions in the world on Syria and bringing millions of Syrians to the brink of famine.

    Supposedly aimed at safeguarding ordinary Syrians from violent repression by President Bashar al-Assad, the law is given a humanitarian garnish by naming it after the Syrian military photographer who filmed and smuggled out of the country pictures of thousands of Syrians killed by the government. But instead of protecting Syrians, as it claims, the Caesar Act is a measure of collective punishment that is impoverishing people in government and opposition-held areas alike.

    Bad though the situation in Syria was after 10 years of warfare and a long-standing economic embargo, the crisis has got much worse in the nine months since the law was implemented on 17 June last year. It has raised the number of Syrians who are close to starvation to 12.4 million, or 60 per cent of the population, according to the UN.

    Already, more than half a million children under the age of five are suffering from stunting as the result of chronic malnutrition. As the Syrian currency collapsed and prices rose by 230 per cent over the last year, Syrian families could no longer afford to buy basic foodstuffs such as bread, rice, lentils, oil and sugar.

    “The war of hunger… scares me more than the war of guns,” says Ghassan Massoud, the Syrian actor famous for playing Saladin in the 2005 Ridley Scott film Kingdom of Heaven. A politically neutral and popular figure in Syria, Massoud is quoted as saying that government employees are earning 50,000 Syrian pounds ($13/£9) a month when they need 800,000 Syrian pounds to survive. “I am a vegetarian but I do not accept that a citizen is not able to eat meat because a kilo costs 20,000 Syrian pounds.”

    The Caesar Act threatens sanctions on any person or company that does business with Syria and thereby imposes a tight economic siege on the country. Introduced just as the Covid-19 epidemic made its first onset in Syria last summer and soon after the implosion of the Lebanese economy to which Syria is closely linked, the law has proved the final devastating blow to Syrians who were already ground down by a decade of destruction.

    It was supposedly aimed at Assad and his regime, but there was never any reason to believe that it would destabilize them or compel them to ease repression. Since they hold power, they are well placed to control diminished resources. As with the 13 years of UN sanctions directed against Saddam Hussein between 1990 and 2003, the victims were not the dictator and his family but the civilian population. Iraqi society was shattered, with results that are still with us, and the same is now happening in Syria.

    “Sanctions and other measures that are meant to penalise repressive rulers usually wind up hurting ordinary people the most,” concludes the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.

    I wrote in the 1990s that sanctions were killing more Iraqis than Saddam, but the defenders of the embargo would claim that its critics were aiding the Iraqi leader and, if there really was significant civilian suffering, it was all his fault. The same discredited arguments are now used today to justify the Caesar Act, though it hits people living in the 30 per cent of Syria outside Assad’s rule just as much as it harms them in the 70 per cent under his control.

    A university teacher in government-held Latakia on the Mediterranean coast says that she is trying to survive on a salary worth the equivalent of $18 a month. She is eating less and depends on fruit and vegetables from relatives who are farmers. In Damascus, people say that Covid-19 spreads easily because they do not have the money to buy both food and masks.

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    In rebel-held Idlib, where people face both bombing and Covid-19, one woman said that she thought that 95 per cent of people were worse off because of the pan-Syrian economic collapse. Even in former Kurdish areas now occupied by the Turkish army, the inhabitants are paying to be smuggled across the border into Turkey where they can get jobs that pay them a living wage.

    The newscasts and overviews of the Syrian conflict broadcast or published this week on the 10th anniversary of the start of the Syrian conflict in March 2011 make little mention of the Caesar Act and the merciless consequences of sanctions. This is par for the course because embargoes do not kill dramatically or publicly like bombs and bullets – and they can even be portrayed, as they are in the present instance, as a non-violent measure designed to help civilians.

    Syria is locked into a toxic stalemate in which the main players are outside powers who consult only their own interests whatever their tear-stained protestations to the contrary. Looked at from a strictly military point of view, Assad, backed by Russia and Iran, has won the war and controls most populated areas. The Kurds, backed by the US, hold a large chunk of northeast Syria, but they have been ethnically cleansed from two enclaves by Turkey. The Turks protect several million Arab civilians opposed to Assad crammed into part of Idlib province close to the Turkish border.

    The US and its allies may denounce Assad but it is a long time since they thought it feasible, or necessarily in their interests, to overthrow him. They fear that if he did fall, Syria might collapse into Libyan-type chaos and be taken over by jihadis. But since they also want to deny Assad, Russia and Iran a complete victory, they are content to see the present grim situation long continue.

    An argument in favor of sanctions is that they would ultimately force Assad to make concessions and bring an end to the war. But they have had precisely the opposite impact according to the UAE, which is likely to play a central role in any negotiations to bring about a permanent peace. Earlier this month, the foreign minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan declared that “to keep the Caesar Act as it is today makes this path [towards resolving the crisis] more difficult”.

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    President Biden does not want to be sucked further into the Syrian morass and is unlikely to take the initiative. Much of the US foreign policy establishment think that the US made a mistake after 9/11 in focusing on wars in the Middle East when it should have been confronting China.

    Allowing Syria to fester while enforcing an economic siege embodied in the Caesar Act means that millions of Syrians are sinking ever deeper into misery and despair. A state of “no peace, no war”, in which there are no final winners and losers, is attractive to foreign powers, but Syria at present is like a rickety house of cards that may collapse at any moment.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 21:40

  • Border Facility Photos Leak Revealing Hundreds Of Children Huddled In "Terrible Conditions"
    Border Facility Photos Leak Revealing Hundreds Of Children Huddled In “Terrible Conditions”

    Photos from inside a US Customs and Border Protection overflow facility have leaked, revealing hundreds of children huddling on the floor of eight ‘pods’ – each of which are supposed to hold 260 people – yet one of which had over 400 unaccompanied male minors crammed together, according to Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), who provided the photos to Axios to raise awareness about the situation.

    The photos, taken over the weekend by someone else, come amid a media embargo by the Biden administration, which has refused to allow press into the facilities to observe and document what’s going on.

    Ahem:

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    Cueller, who toured the Donna, Texas facility but did not take the photos himself, described the setting as “terrible conditions for the children,” who he said need to quickly be moved into the care of the Department of Health and Human Services – which is currently at capacity due to a surge of migrants into the United States following President Biden’s pro-illegal policies.

    More via Axios:

    • Border Patrol agents are “doing the best they can under the circumstances” but are “not equipped to care for kids” and “need help from the administration,” he said.
    • “We have to stop kids and families from making the dangerous trek across Mexico to come to the United States. We have to work with Mexico and Central American countries to have them apply for asylum in their countries.”
    • As of Saturday, there were 10,000 migrants in CBP custody overall. Nearly half were unaccompanied minors — thousands of whom had been waiting for more than 3 days in border patrol facilities, according to government data provided to Axios by another source.

    “I have said repeatedly from the very outset a Border Patrol station is no place for a child,” said DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in a Sunday interview on CNN – discussing the situation he helped to create. “That is why we are working around the clock to move these children out of the Border Patrol facilities into the care and custody of the Department of Health and Human Services that shelters them.”

    Project Veritas, meanwhile, has also obtained exclusive footage from inside the facility.

    How will Biden’s water carriers defend this?

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    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 21:33

  • Dozens Of Chinese-Owned Factories Have Been Torched By Myanmar Protesters
    Dozens Of Chinese-Owned Factories Have Been Torched By Myanmar Protesters

    In yet more sanctions actions out of the White House Monday (following anti-China human rights related sanctions), Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced fresh measures against members of Myanmar’s military for the continuing crackdown on pro-democracy protests after the Feb. 1 coup d’etat led by the army.

    Myanmar’s chief of police, Than Hlaing, and its Bureau of Special Operations commander, Lt. Gen. Aung Soe, along with two army units will be hit with sanctions “for being responsible for or complicit in or having directly or indirectly engaged or attempted to engage in, actions or policies that prohibit, limit, or penalize the exercise of freedom of expression or assembly by people in Burma,” Blinken said, using the official US name for Myanmar. 

    Blinken cited the use of lethal force against peaceful protesters which has included charges that over the past days the above mentioned units spearheaded “the Burmese security forces’ planned, systemic strategies to ramp up the use of lethal force,” according to Blinken’s statement. 

    Chinese-owned factories burned in the industrial area of Hlaingthaya in Yangon last week, via EPA-EFE

    “The United States continues to call on the military regime to release all those unjustly detained; stop its attacks on civil society members, journalists, and labor unionists; halt the brutal killings by its security forces; and return power to the democratically elected government,” Blinken added.

    International reports over the weekend have counted at least 230 people dead as a result of protest unrest and clashes with police – a number which could be far higher amid communications and internet blockages in various parts of the country. Earlier this month security forces were increasingly observed restoring to ‘live fire’ to disperse large demonstrations in major cities.

    Reuters meanwhile has noted the resistance in the streets has grown fiercer: “Demonstrators in Myanmar maintained their dogged opposition to military rule on Sunday despite a rising death toll, with two more people killed as the junta appeared equally determined to resist growing pressure to compromise.”

    The junta is defending its imposition of martial law given an alleged spate of arson attacks on Chinese-owned factories, particularly in the garment production hub of Yangon. At this point dozens of Chinese-owned businesses have been reported either vandalized or torched amid growing anti-China sentiment among the protesters. Beijing is seen as quietly supportive of the military coup despite official condemnations of the unrest from its embassy.

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    Within the past two weeks there’s been well over 30 Chinese factories attacked by mobs of protesters, some of which was met with live ammo used by security forces, resulting in deaths

    The Chinese embassy urged Myanmar’s ruling generals to stop violence and ensure the safety of people and property.

    China’s Global Times newspaper said 32 Chinese-invested factories were “vandalised in vicious attacks” that caused damage worth $37 million and injuries to two Chinese employees.

    This had resulted in one of the worst single days of bloodshed a little over a week ago, which “came in the Yangon suburb of Hlaingthaya where security forces killed at least 37 protesters after arson attacks on Chinese-owned factories, said a doctor in the area who declined to be identified.”

    Many protesters have claimed that security forces are actually behind the fires set to Chinese businesses. They say the military has relied upon ‘agitators’ to taint the popular street protests and bring China closer to its side. Beijing has urged calm while at the same time calling on state forces to protect the Chinese community and its property there.

    Monday’s latest US sanctions are not the first announced punitive measures against members of the national army; however, they are the most extensive, given as they target two entire military units.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 21:20

  • It's All Just Displacement: Freddie deBoer
    It’s All Just Displacement: Freddie deBoer

    This illuminating piece on modern journalism by Freddie deBoer comes highly recommended by the likes of Glenn Greenwald, Michael Tracey, Bari Weiss and others. You can subscribe to Freddie’s substack column here.

    Authored by Freddie deBoer via Substack

    DisplacementDisplacement is a psychological defense mechanism in which a person redirects a negative emotion from its original source to a less threatening recipient. A classic example of the defense is displaced aggression. If a person is angry but cannot direct their anger toward the source without consequences, they might “take out” their anger on a person or thing that poses less of a risk.

    Media Twitter does not hate Substack because it’s pretending to be a platform when it’s a publisher; they don’t hate it because it’s filled with anti-woke white guys; they don’t hate it because of harassment or any such thing. I don’t think they really hate it at all. Substack is a small and ultimately not-very-relevant outpost in a vastly larger industry; they may not like it but it’s not important enough for them to hate it. What do they hate? They hate where their industry is and they hate where they are within their industry. But that’s a big problem that they don’t feel like they can solve. If you feel you can’t get mad at the industry that’s impoverishing you, it’s much easier to get mad at the people who you feel are unjustly succeeding in that industry. Trying to cancel Glenn Greenwald (again) because he criticizes the media harshly? Trying to tarnish Substack’s reputation so that cool, paid-up writer types leave it and the bad types like me get kicked off? That they can maybe do. Confronting their industry’s future with open eyes? Too scary, especially for people who were raised to see success as their birthright and have suddenly found that their degrees and their witheringly dry one-liners do not help them when the rent comes due.

    Things are bad, folks:

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    Life in the “content” industry already sucks. A small handful of people make bank while the vast majority hustle relentlessly just to hold on to the meager pay they already receive. There are staff writers at big-name publications who produce thousands of words every week and who make less than $40,000 a year for their trouble. There are permanent employees of highly prestigious newspapers and magazines who don’t receive health insurance. Venues close all the time. Mourning another huge round of layoffs is a regular bonding experience for people in the industry. Writers have to constantly job hop just to try and grind out an extra $1,500 a year, making their whole lives permanent job interviews where they can’t risk offending their potential bosses and peers. Many of them dream of selling that book to save themselves financially, not seeming to understand that book advances have fallen 40% in 10 years – median figure now $6,080 – and that the odds of actually making back even that meager advance are slim, meaning most authors are making less than minimum wage from their books when you do the math. They have to tweet constantly for the good of their careers, or so they believe, which amounts to hundreds of hours of unpaid work a year. Their publications increasingly strong arm them into churning out pathetic pop-culture ephemera like listicles about the outfits on Wandavision. They live in fear of being the one to lose out when the next layoffs come and the game of media musical chairs spins up once again. They have to pretend to like ghouls like Ezra Klein and Jonah Peretti and make believe that there’s such a thing as “the Daily Beast reputation for excellence.”

    I have always felt bad for them, despite our differences, because of these conditions. And they have a right to be angry. But they don’t have much in the way of self-awareness about where their anger really lies. A newsletter company hosting Bari Weiss is why you can’t pay your student loans? You sure?

    They’ll tell you about the terrible conditions in their industry themselves, when they’re feeling honest. So what are they really mad about? That I’m making a really-just-decent guaranteed wage for just one year? Or that this decent wage is the kind of money many of them dream of making despite the fact that, in their minds, they’ve done everything right and played by all the rules? Is their anger really about a half-dozen guys whose writing you have to actively seek out to see? (If you click the button and put in your email address, you’ll get these newsletters. If you don’t, you won’t. So if you’re a media type who hates my writing, consider just… not clicking that button.) Or do they need someplace to put the rage and resentment that grows inside them as they realize, no, it’s not getting better, this is all I get?

    It’s true that I have, in a very limited way, achieved the new American dream: getting a little bit of VC cash. I’m sorry. But it’s much much less than one half of what Felix Salmon was making in 2017 and again, it’s only for one year.

    You think the writers complaining in that piece I linked to at the top wanted to be here, at this place in their career, after all those years of hustling? You think decades into their media career, the writers who decamped to Substack said to themselves “you know, I’d really like to be in my 40s and having to hope that enough people will pitch in $5 a month so I can pay my mortgage”? No. But the industry didn’t give them what they felt they deserved either. So they displace and project. They can hate Jesse Singal, but Jesse Singal isn’t where this burning anger is coming from. Neither am I. They’re so angry because they bought into a notoriously savage industry at the nadir of its labor conditions and were surprised to find that they’re drifting into middle age without anything resembling financial security. I feel for them as I feel for all people living economically precarious lives, but getting rid of Substack or any of its writers will not do anything to fix their industry or their jobs. They wanted more and they got less and it hurts. This isn’t what they dreamed. That’s what this is really about.

    What makes this niche platform worthy of a week-long media meltdown? They’ll suggest that this is about the political impact of Substack. What political impact? The combined influence of the writers they’re attacking is small. The combined audience of the writers they’re attacking is small. The combined wages of the writers they’re attacking is small. Substack is a tiny company that 99% of Americans have never heard of. The conservative media is immense and well-funded and more equipped to survive economic downturns than the progressive media. And that world is filled with people who actually, openly believe the terrible things we’re falsely accused of believing. They’re the ones endangering vulnerable groups. They come into the homes of a huge swath of the country and spread hateful propaganda. Why on earth would you invest 5 minutes of your anger on me, when Breitbart exists? What rational sense does that make?

    My own deal here is not mysterious. It’s just based on a fact that the blue checks on Twitter have never wanted to accept. I got offered money to write here for the same reason I got offered to write for The New York Times and Harper’s and The Washington Post and The LA Times, the same reason I’ve gotten a half-dozen invitations to pitch since I started here a few weeks ago, the same reason a literary agent sought me out and asked me to write a book, the same reason I sold that book for a decent advance: because I pull traffic. Though I am a social outcast from professional opinion writing, I have a better freelance publishing history than many, many of my critics who are paid-up, obedient members of the media social scene. Why? Because the editors who hired me thought I was a great guy? No. Because I pull traffic. I always have. That’s why you’re reading this on Substack right now.

    I’ve been given opportunities because I’ve proved profitable to media businesses and like all businesses media businesses only care about profit. The important question for my critics should thus be why I’ve been successful in the ideas market when I represent the rejection of many of their values. Since the line between professional and personal relationships has completely collapsed in the industry, media people think that any professional success must represent an endorsement of the writer as a person. (The question they ask about me is often “how did a guy nobody likes get published everywhere,” betraying the assumption that being well-liked should be the only criterion for getting published.) But popularity has nothing to do with me consistently getting work in the industry. I turn writing into clicks and clicks into cash. That’s not complicated.

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    Nor is it complicated how I’ve generated a public reputation. It never seems to occur to them that constantly having Twitter meltdowns about me raised my profile in ways I never could have accomplished without their help. You think Substack would have even heard of me if I only did what I spend most of my writing time doing, producing long ruminative essays about education policy or obscure books or the psychic wounds of 21st century culture? If you’re mad that I’m getting economic opportunity now, why did you play my game over and over again for the past 12 years1?

    I have no idea if I’ll stay at Substack after this year. If the money is still good, I probably will. If it’s not, I probably won’t. If the Twitter hive succeeds in getting a purge going that gets me kicked off the platform, that’s cool too. I’ll just do other things. Whether I am allowed to serve out the length of my contract with Substack will have absolutely no impact on the integrity of the news industry or its finances. So, again: who are you really mad at? Me? What do I have to do with your broken industry? Why are you constantly tweeting about Substack and not the private equity creeps who are destroying your livelihood?

    A really important lesson to learn, in life, is this: your enemies are more honest about you than your friends ever will be. I’ve been telling the blue checks for over a decade that their industry was existentially fucked, that the all-advertising model was broken, that Google and Facebook would inevitably hoover up all the profit, that there are too many affluent kids fresh out of college just looking for a foothold in New York who’ll work for next to nothing and in doing so driving down the wages of everyone else, that their mockery of early subscription programs like Times Select was creating a disastrous industry expectation that asking your readers directly for money was embarrassing. Trump is gone and the news business is cratering. Michael Tracey didn’t make that happen. None of this anger will heal what’s wrong. If you get all of the people you don’t like fired from Substack tomorrow, what will change? How will your life improve? Greenwald will spend more time with his hottie husband and his beloved kids and his 6,000 dogs in his beautiful home in Rio. Glenn will be fine. How do we do the real work of getting you job security and a decent wage?

    Who’s your real enemy? Me? Matt Taibbi? Or your boss, your employer, your industry, your economy, your country? Think it over, really. I have much, much more sympathy for the average writer or journalist than people would think. It’s an important profession and many of them individually, when you peel them off from the pack, are lovely people. I hope all of them get financial stability, including the ones who constantly scream about me online. (Even Noah Blatarsky.) I want media to be healthier than it is, financially and otherwise. I want media workers to have higher pay and better benefits and more job security and powerful unions. In part because if they did they’d be more independent and media desperately needs more independence.

    But how do things get better in that way? Only through real self-criticism (which Twitter makes impossible) and by asking hard questions. Questions like one that has not been credibly confronted a single time in this entire media meltdown: why are so many people subscribing to Substacks? What is the traditional media not providing that they’re seeking elsewhere? Why have half a million people signed up as paying subscribers of various Substack newsletters, if the establishment media is providing the diversity of viewpoints that is an absolute market requirement in a country with a vast diversity of opinions? You can try to make an adult determination about that question, to better understand what media is missing, or you can read this and write some shitty joke tweet while your industry burns to the ground around you. It’s your call.

    Substack might fold tomorrow, but someone would else sell independent media; there’s a market. Substack might kick me and the rest of the unclean off of their platforms tomorrow, but other critics of social justice politics would pop up here; there’s a market. Establishment media’s takeover by this strange brand of academic identity politics might grow even more powerful, if that’s even possible, but dissenters will find a place to sell alternative opinion; there’s a market. What there might not be much of a market for anymore is, well, you – college educated, urban, upwardly striving if not economically improving, woke, ironic, and selling that wokeness and that irony as your only product. Because you flooded the market. Everyone in your entire industry is selling the exact same thing, tired sarcastic jokes and bleating righteousness about injustices they don’t suffer under themselves, and it’s not good in basic economic terms if you’re selling the same thing as everyone else. You add that on to structural problems within your business model and your utter subservience to a Silicon Valley that increasingly hates you, well…. I get why you’re mad. And I get that you don’t like me. But I’m not what you’re mad about. Not really.

    In the span of a decade or so, essentially all professional media not explicitly branded as conservative has been taken over by a school of politics that emerged from humanities departments at elite universities and began colonizing the college educated through social media. Those politics are obscure, they are confusing, they are socially and culturally extreme, they are expressed in a bizarre vocabulary, they are deeply alienating to many, and they are very unpopular by any definition. The vast majority of the country is not woke, including the vast majority of women and people of color. How could it possibly be healthy for the entire media industry to be captured by any single niche political movement, let alone one that nobody likes? Why does no one in media seem willing to have an honest, uncomfortable conversation about the near-total takeover of their industry by a fringe ideology?

    And the bizarre assumption of almost everyone in media seems to have been that they could adopt this brand of extreme niche politics, in mass, as an industry, and treat those politics as a crusade that trumps every other journalistic value, with no professional or economic consequences. They seem to have thought that Americans were just going to swallow it; they seem to have thought they could paint most of the country as vicious bigots and that their audiences would just come along for the ride. They haven’t. In fact Republicans are making great hay of the collapse of the media into pure unapologetic advocacy journalism. Some people are turning to alternative media to find options that are neither reactionary ideologues or self-righteous woke yelling. Can you blame them? Substack didn’t create this dynamic, and neither did I. The exact same media people who are so angry about Substack did, when they abandoned any pretense to serving the entire country and decided that their only job was to advance a political cause that most ordinary people, of any gender or race, find alienating and wrong. So maybe try and look at where your problems actually come from. They’re not going away.

    Now steel yourselves, media people, take a shot of something strong, look yourself in the eye in the mirror, summon you most honest self, and tell me: am I wrong?

    * * *

    This is an aside, but here’s the stats from the median post on this blog so far in terms of total views:

    And here’s the post I wrote to deliberately enflame the anger of media Twitter, prompting a lot of people to say “there goes Freddie again, he’s crazy, he’s embarrassing himself,” etc:

    I suspect the people who keep doing me this favor have understood this dynamic for a long time, but ignoring me (which hurts my interests) gets you 0 likes and retweets from peers and having a fit about me (which helps my interests) gets you many.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 21:00

  • Theranos 2.0? Founders Of 'Poop Testing' Startup Indicted In $60 Million Fraud Scheme
    Theranos 2.0? Founders Of ‘Poop Testing’ Startup Indicted In $60 Million Fraud Scheme

    The founders of a now-bankrupt San Francisco startup that analyzed fecal samples to compare consumers’ gut microbiomes have been indicted on multiple federal charges, including conspiracy to commit securities fraud, health care fraud, and money laundering after allegedly bilking investors and health insurance providers, according to federal prosecutors.

    Zachary Schulz Apte, 36, and Jessica Sunshine Richman, 46, co-founded uBiome in 2012, offering a direct-to-consumer service called “Gut Explorer,” according to SFGate. The service initially cost less than $100.

    The company grew to include “clinical” tests of gut and vaginal microbiomes, which were aimed to be used by medical providers so uBiome could seek up to $3,000 in reimbursements from health insurance companies. The federal indictment states that uBiome sought upwards of $300 million in reimbursement claims from private and public health insurers between 2015 and 2019. The company was ultimately paid more than $35 million for tests that “were not validated and not medically necessary.” -SFGate

    After meeting in 2012 through the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences Garage, a UCSF-affiliated incubator, Apte and Richman founded uBiome and received funding from Silicon Valley investors, including 8VC in San Francisco and Andreessen Horowitz, which hold 22% and 10% stakes in uBiome respectively.

    The pair’s endeavor generated quite the buzz for a time – with Richman even being named “innovator” winner in Goop’s “The Greater goop Awards” as uBiome’s valuation topped $600 million.

    In 2019, right as uBiome began its ‘death spiral,’ Apte and Richman were married (and can’t testify against each other). In May, the FBI raided their offices in San Francisco – leading to the company suspending all testing and putting the pair on administrative leave. Just one month after filing for bankruptcy in September of that year, uBiome went into liquidation and shut down.

    Much like the high-profile collapse of Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos blood-testing business, prosecutors allege Apte and Richman assured investors their medical tests were reliable when, in fact, they weren’t. The couple “painted a false picture of uBiome as a rapidly growing company with a strong track record of reliable revenue through health insurance reimbursements for its tests. UBiome’s purported success in generating revenue, however, was a sham,” the SEC wrote in a complaint.

    Apte annd Richman are also accused of falsifying documents, concealing facts about their billing model, and lying when asked by insurance providers – as well as defrauding investors.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 20:40

  • WeWork Nears Deal With Shaq-Backed SPAC Despite Losing $3.2 Billion Last Year
    WeWork Nears Deal With Shaq-Backed SPAC Despite Losing $3.2 Billion Last Year

    The fact that potential investors were even taking meetings with the WeWork management team is a sign of just how few suitable takeover opportunities remain in a market that has been saturated by SPACs (following a decade-plus post-crisis bull run where rock-bottom interest rates and oodles of free money ensured that VCs and private equity titans like Apollo have already picked the bones). But now the troubled office-space rental company, which has been shouting into the void about a management-led turnaround strategy, has just offered some more details into just how desperate SPAC management is to close a deal.

    Just look at how many SPACs have launched over the past 16 months. And the average deal size has increased since the start of the year..

    …as SPACs increasingly seek to merger with larger targets.

    We first heard that WeWork management was looking to try and hitch a ride on the SPAC boom (incidentally, the news hit around the same time that SoftBank reportedly was considering launching its “Vision Fund 2” as a SPAC) last fall. Then in January, it was reported that the company was in talks with not one, but several, teams of potential suitors.

    Well, fast forward a couple of months, and those eager suitors have apparently gotten a peak at WeWork’s finances, and they’re about as bad as can be expected. According to the FT, the company lost $3.2 billion last year, which ironically was an improvement over the prior (non-COVID-plagued) year 2019. Still, WeWork is pitching for $1 billion in new investment along with the stock-market listing that has long eluded it (as a reminder, the IPO was shelved in 2019 after the company saw its private valuation slide from nearly $50 billion to less than $10 billion in a matter of weeks).

    In one encouraging sign, the improvement in WeWork’s losses during the plague year resulted from the company slashing operating expenses from $2.2 billion to just $49MM. However, we’re not certain how encouraging that number actually is, considering that WeWork would almost certainly need to ramp up spending once clients start returning to its offices. According to the company’s “Project Windmill”, WeWork is hoping to go public at a valuation of $9BN.

    But more interesting than the numbers is the identity of WeWork’s suitor. The FT reports that BowX Acquisition Corp, which raised more than $420MM back in August, is one of the SPACs interested in acquiring WeWork as its target. Basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal is a BowX advisor, one of a multitude of celebrities who have glomed onto the craze. WeWork and BowX hope to obtain the additional $1BN WeWork is hoping to raise by lining up institutional investors (a common maneuver employed by SPACs, most of which recruit institutional capital to supplement the money they have raised from investors).

    While the $9 billion valuation that WeWork is pitching is much reduced from the astronomical figure it succeeded in achieving (thanks largely to SoftBank), some things about WeWork never change. 

    WeWork is once again pitching itself to investors not as a conventional bricks and mortar landlord but as a high-tech platform, as it did in 2019. The documents seen by the FT describe the business as a “worldwide property technology platform” and an “asset light platform for managing and orchestrating flexible space”.

    Still, the FT notes that some investors are skeptical of WeWork and its projections.

    Projections in the documents include a fast rebound in occupancy to 90 per cent – well above WeWork’s pre-pandemic level – by the end of 2022 and adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation of $485m next year.

    One investor pitched on the WeWork deal cast doubt on the company’s projections, which also forecast that revenues would climb from $3.2bn last year to $7bn by 2024. 

    And we don’t blame them. The notion that WeWork’s occupancy rates will top 90% by the end of next year seems unlikely, since freelancers and upstart companies can save more money by simply continuing to work from home.

    But at the end of the day, that probably doesn’t matter many of the people negotiating with WeWork. SPACs have two years to get a deal done, or face the prospect of returning money to investors. Once the money is raised, the SPAC’s sponsors can cash out.

    Which means the most critical factor driving SPAC deal flow is the availability of eager dupes, not the availability of compelling opportunities.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 20:20

  • Japanese Semi Plant Fire To Have "Major Impact" On Already-Bottlenecked Auto Industry
    Japanese Semi Plant Fire To Have “Major Impact” On Already-Bottlenecked Auto Industry

    Semiconductor supply shortages continue to sting the automotive industry globally. 

    On Monday morning a fire at a semiconductor factory in Japan had the entire industry jumpy and was sparking “further concerns over chip supply shortages for the industry,” according to Bloomberg. The fire took place at a clean room at Japanese company Renesas, a major provider of auto chips. 

    Renesas’ CEO, Hidetoshi Shibata, said that “the incident is likely to have a major impact on the car industry”.

    Two-thirds of the affected production lines were making automotive chips, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Journal also wrote that the effect could have wide-ranging reach:

    Mariko Semetko, a credit analyst at Moody’s Japan, said the fire was likely to damp the recovery of global auto production this year, while auto makers said they were still assessing the impact.

    Mr. Shibata said the company was trying to make up for the lost production at other plants but didn’t know whether that was possible. The company estimated the revenue losses at the equivalent of $160 million a month.

    Names like Toyota, Volkswagen and Continental will be on watch heading into the beginning of the week, as they are all customers of Renesas. Bloomberg also reports Monday morning that names like BMW, Daimler and Stellantis, in addition to auto-exposed chipmakers like Infineon, STMicro and Melexis, could all be negatively affected by the fire. 

    We have written about the shortage has wreaked chaos on the auto industry so far in 2021.

    Recall, just days ago we noted that Samsung was the latest to join the chorus of companies stating they were being negatively affected by the shortage. The company said the current crisis is “very serious” and that it “poses a slight problem” for the electronics company heading into the second quarter. The company continues to try and address supply issues, Reuters reported that CEO and mobile chief Koh Dong-jin said at Samsung’s recent annual general meeting.

    In fact, there are also rumors that Samsung is considering skipping its usual Galaxy Note launch this year due to the ongoing chip shortage, according to 9 to 5 Google. Koh is quoted as saying:

    Note series is positioned as a high-end model in our business portfolio. It could be a burden to unveil two flagship models in a year so it might be difficult to release Note model in 2H. The timing of Note model launch can be changed but we seek to release a Note model next year.

    Recently, we also wrote about how difficult it was becoming for U.S. companies to export chipmaking hardware to China due to trade restrictions. We also documented weeks ago how critical Taiwan would be in getting the semiconductor industry back up and running. We noted that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing was rushing to try and build new facilities through the Chinese New Year in order to meet demand. 

    TSMC is one of the biggest suppliers of chips to company like Apple, Google and Qualcomm. As a result of a worldwide shortage in chips that was brought on due to the pandemic, they are now rushing to try and get a new factory in the southern Taiwanese city of Tainan built. Construction the new facility will take place throughout 2021, with completion expected in 2022. 

    Earlier in 2021 we noted that the semi situation had been turning dire and was now being referred to as the “most serious shortage in years”. Qualcomm’s CEO said last month that there were now shortages “across the board”. 

    And it wasn’t just Qualcomm executives speaking out: other industry leaders warned in recent weeks that they are susceptible to the shortages. Apple said recently that its new high end iPhones were on hold due to a shortage of components. NXP Semiconductors has also warned that the problems are no longer just confined to the auto industry. Sony also said last week it may not be able to to fully meet demand for its new gaming console in 2021 due to the shortage. Companies like Lenovo have also been feeling the crunch.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 20:00

  • Propaganda Watch: Dr Fauci Children's Book On The Way
    Propaganda Watch: Dr Fauci Children’s Book On The Way

    Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

    CNN weirdo Brian Stelter announced with Glee Sunday that Dr Anthony Fauci is the subject of a new children’s book titled  “Dr. Fauci: How A Boy From Brooklyn Became America’s Doctor,” prompting many to immediately label it a propaganda campaign.

    Stelter claimed that the book, written by Kate Messner and published by Simon & Schuster, “tells you something about media,” appearing to take credit for the thing.

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    In a follow up written article, Stelter described Fauci as being “immortalized” in the book, with Messner noting “I’m really hopeful that curious kids who read this book — those we’re counting on to solve tomorrow’s scientific challenges — will see themselves in the pages of Dr. Fauci’s story and set their goals just as high.”

    Fauci, who has repeatedly flip flopped and lied about the use of masks and admitted that there is no science behind lockdowns, has been ever present on CNN and every other pro-lockdown news bilge station for the past year.

    The book was reportedly written with Fauci’s input and consultation.

    The book publisher’s website states “Before he was Dr. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci was a curious boy in Brooklyn, delivering prescriptions from his father’s pharmacy on his blue Schwinn bicycle.”

    It continues, “His father and immigrant grandfather taught Anthony to ask questions, consider all the data, and never give up – and Anthony’s ability to stay curious and to communicate with people would serve him his entire life.”

    Many took to social media to express their opinions…

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    And finally…

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    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 19:40

  • Cali Couple Who Paid $560,000 Cash For New Home Can't Get Covid-Squatter To Leave
    Cali Couple Who Paid $560,000 Cash For New Home Can’t Get Covid-Squatter To Leave

    Imagine buying your dream home, arriving at it to move in, and finding out there’s a squatter that won’t leave. 

    That was the case for Tracie and Myles Albert, who recently bought a 4 bedroom home in Riverside, California and found out the hard way that the seller wasn’t quite ready to hand over the keys. 

    More than a year after buying their home on January 31, 2020, they have yet to be able to get inside their property. “It’s just draining, emotionally and financially,” Tracie told Fox 11

    Chris Taylor, the real estate agent who sold the home to the Alberts, said: “He needed $560,000 from the sale of his house in two weeks and he called me on a Sunday, so in traditional real estate there’s no way of doing that unless the buyer’s a cash buyer.”

    He continued: “It’s genuinely unfathomable to me that we live in a state where something like this is even possible. They closed escrow on this home January 31, 2020.”

    Myles Albert said: “It took us scrambling to get everything we had, our life savings put together and a hard money loan on top of it to make that happen. We own the house, outright. That’s our house and it’s all in a contract, written, legal, done. He’s been paid the money in his account. How could we have no rights to go into our home?”

    He continued: “They have this case under a COVID tenant situation, of no evictions when it doesn’t fall under that at all. This transaction went through in January 2020 before any of that, it isn’t a renter who was getting thrown out. It’s the guy who collected all of this money.” 

    Tracie said: “I tried watering the lawn one time and he came out and ripped my sprinkler lines, ripped all the wires. The Palm trees are dying, everything was beautiful and everything is dying.” Law enforcement told her husband: “If you were in Arizona, if you were in Nevada, this wouldn’t be a problem, you would just go take your house back. But in California, like our hands are tied, even though we’re on your side, there’s nothing we can do.” 

    And the Alberts aren’t the only such example of this type of situation. Attorney Dennis Block told Fox: “This year alone, we’ve handled at least 7 maybe 8 cases of this exact type of situation.” 

    “This person is not a tenant, it’s a previous owner who is enjoying the benefits of the money that was transferred to his account but of course doesn’t want to move out of the premises that he no longer owns,” Block concluded.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 19:20

  • Want A Job? Get A Shot!
    Want A Job? Get A Shot!

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

    Mask tyranny reached a new low recently when a family was kicked off a Spirit Airlines flight because their four-year-old autistic son was not wearing a mask. The family was removed from the plane even though the boy’s doctor had decided the boy should be exempted from mask mandates because the boy panics and engages in behavior that could pose a danger to himself when wearing a mask.

    Besides, four-year-olds do not present much risk of spreading or contracting coronavirus. Even if masks did prevent infections among adults, there would be no reason to force children to wear masks.

    Mask mandates have as much to do with healthcare as Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screenings have to do with stopping terrorism. Masks and TSA screenings are “security theater” done to reassure those frightened by government and media propaganda regarding coronavirus and terrorism that the government is protecting them.

    Covid oppression will worsen if vaccine passports become more widely required. Vaccine passports are digital or physical proof a person has taken a coronavirus vaccine. New York is already requiring that individuals produce digital proof of taking a coronavirus vaccine before being admitted to sporting events.

    Imagine if the zealous enforcers of mask mandates had the power to deny you access to public places because you have not “gotten your shot.” Even worse, what if a potential employer had to ensure you were “properly” vaccinated before hiring you? This could come to pass if proponents of mandatory E-Verify have their way.

    E-Verify requires employers to submit personal identifying information — such as a social security numbers and biometric data — to a government database to ensure job applicants have federal permission to hold jobs.

    Currently, E-Verify is only used to assure a job applicant is a citizen or legal resident. However, its use could be expanded to advancing other purposes, such as ensuring a potential new hire has taken all the recommended vaccines.

    E-Verify could even be used to check if a job applicant has ever expressed, or associated with someone who has expressed, “hate speech,” “conspiracy theories,” or “Russian disinformation,” which is code for facts embarrassing to the political class.

    Many employers will be reluctant to hire such an employee for fear their businesses will become the next targets of “cancel culture.” Those who doubt this should consider how many businesses have folded under pressure from the cultural Marxists and fired someone for expressing an “unapproved” thought.

    Politicians and bureaucrats have used overblown fear of coronavirus to justify the largest infringement of individual liberty in modern times. Covid tyranny has been aided by many Americans who are not just willing to sacrifice their liberty for phony security, but who help government take away liberty from their fellow citizens.

    The good news is that, as it becomes increasingly clear that there was no need to shut down the economy, throw millions out of work, subject children to the fraud of “virtual” learning, and force everyone to wear a mask, more people are turning against the politicians and “experts” behind the lockdowns and mandates. Hopefully, these Americans will realize that, in addition to coronavirus lockdowns and mandates, the entire welfare-warfare-fiat money system is built on a foundation of lies.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 19:00

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Today’s News 22nd March 2021

  • If You Like To Sleep, Move To Holland
    If You Like To Sleep, Move To Holland

    Getting 7-9 hours sleep is essential for our physical and mental well-being.

    To celebrate World Sleep Day, Statista’s Niall McCarthy takes a look at the countries which are getting the most sleep on average.

    If you live in the Netherlands or New Zealand, you’ll probably manage to get slightly more than eight hours per night, according to a study published in the journal Science Advances.

    Infographic: Who's Getting The Most Sleep? | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    However, if you live in Japan or Singapore, you’ll probably sleep about a half hour less then eight hours.

    While that might not seem like much, the study claims that even a half hour of less sleep can have a detrimental effect on your health over time.

    The sleeping gap between countries is more than likely due to cultural and social factors.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 02:45

  • Nord Stream 2 Behind Biden's Gratuitous Slander Of Putin
    Nord Stream 2 Behind Biden’s Gratuitous Slander Of Putin

    Via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Relations between the United States and Russia have reached a dangerous watershed following an unprecedented personal insult by American President Joe Biden to Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.

    But note the sequence here. Biden’s insults were then followed by U.S. threats of draconian sanctions to kill the Nord Stream 2 gas project between Russia and Europe. Just who is the killer here?

    The world may be thankful that Russia is being so magnanimous in its response to Biden’s puerile and slanderous sniping. The crisis in bilateral relations provoked by the U.S. president has the potential to escalate, but it is only down to Moscow’s restraint that further deterioration in relations is being checked – for now.

    In an interview with ABC News, aired on Wednesday, Biden was asked if he agreed that Russia’s leader was a “killer”. To which the American president replied in the affirmative, “I do.” He also warned that Russia “would pay a price” over allegations of interfering in the U.S. elections and other supposed malpractices.

    One can safely assume that the Biden administration is hellbent on making relations with Russia even worse as its intelligence agencies “review” over the next few weeks already-made presumptions about Russia’s purported culpability.

    For his part, the Russian president responded calmly and generously, saying that he wished Biden good health. Putin even offered to hold a live conversation with his American counterpart on a range of issues. One might infer that these are oblique references to suspicions about Biden’s mental health and his apparent loss of cognitive powers when speaking in public.

    One other comment by Putin was telling. He said of Biden’s “killer” remark, “it takes one to know one”.

    Joseph Biden’s career as a politician spans nearly half a century, first as a long-time senator, then as vice president in two administrations and now the 46th president of the United States. During that period, Biden has been a key player in facilitating countless U.S. overseas wars and military operations which have resulted in millions of deaths and destruction of whole nations. As a senior senator on the foreign affairs committee, it was Biden who was instrumental in drumming up congressional support for the American war on Iraq beginning in 2003. That war alone – based on lies and fabrications concerning weapons of mass destruction – led to at least one million dead and unleashed terrorism across the Middle East and beyond.

    More recently, just four weeks after his inauguration, Biden ordered airstrikes on Syria on February 26 causing multiple deaths. It was a murderous act of illegal aggression.

    So indeed the American president knows what it is to be a killer. He sees it every time he looks in the mirror.

    The casual arrogance and ignorance of the American political class is astounding. They make accusations against Putin based on flimsy rumors, such as the alleged poisoning of conman Alexei Navalny. And then they have no decency or decorum by bandying about vulgar labels. Meanwhile, the piles of dead bodies lying under American politicians’ feet are mountainous. They have no shame.

    Following the latest outburst from the American president and his intelligence agency groundlessly accusing Russia of interfering in the 2020 election, Moscow has temporarily recalled its ambassador to reassess bilateral relations. It is the first time this has happened in over 20 years. There is no factual or diplomatic precedent for the evident American attempt to provoke a crisis. Not even during the frozen Cold War decades did U.S. leaders stoop to such gross and offensive rhetoric. There seems to be a more general degeneration in Washington’s diplomatic conduct over recent administrations. America no longer has statesmen. Its political ranks are full of hacks and hicks and mumbo-jumbo conspiracists.

    When Biden won the election, he promised to revamp American diplomacy with intelligent statecraft and skillful negotiators. An early positive sign was his prompt contact with Russia to extend the New START treaty governing nuclear weapons. But apart from that move, the Biden administration has sought to undermine bilateral relations with Russia. The prospects of a new detente or reset have been jettisoned. (The same is also apparent regarding U.S. relations with China and Iran.)

    It seems likely that Biden and his team are deliberately provoking a crisis with Russia in order to justify a geopolitical policy of hardening hostility towards Moscow.

    Foremost in this context is the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and the American objective to terminate that project. The day after Biden sent relations with Russia into a downward spiral, his Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that the U.S. would be imposing tough new sanctions on “any entity involved the Nord Stream 2 pipeline”. Blinken stated there was “a whole of government commitment in the United States to stopping” the gas supply project between Russia and Europe.

    It cannot be overstated that the $11 billion pipeline is a huge geopolitical issue. It is front and center to Washington’s global ambitions. The Americans want to kill it in order to sell their own more expensive gas to Europe for decades to come. Washington also views the energy partnership between Russia and Europe as an obstacle to its hegemonic position.

    Germany and other European states have remained steadfast in their support for completing the construction of Nord Stream 2 which is about 95 per cent finished, nearly 1,200 kilometers of pipeline under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany’s coast. When it becomes operational the flow of gas to Germany from Russia will double in volume. Thus it is vital for Germany and Europe’s long-term growth.

    In a desperate bid to thwart the strategic partnership between Russia and Europe, Washington is resorting to ever-more frantic threats of sanctions and other disruptive measures. Biden is playing the personal insult card in a gambit for blowing up bilateral relations with Russia as a way to sabotage Nord Stream 2.

    It’s a pathetic move, one that actually speaks more of America’s historic enfeeblement rather than pretensions of power. Russia would do well to stay calm and let the Americans make fools of themselves.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 03/22/2021 – 02:00

  • China: What To Do About It?
    China: What To Do About It?

    By Gordon G. Chang, via The Gatestone Institute,

    What does China really want?

    Well, China really wants to rule planet Earth. It also wants to possess and rule the near portions of the solar system. No, I am not exaggerating. No nation in history has been this ambitious.

    With regard to our planet, Xi Jinping wants the world to reject the current Westphalian international system, in place since 1648. In its place, he wants China’s imperial-era system, where Chinese emperors believed they not only had the right to rule tianxia, all under heaven, but also the heavens compelled them to do so.

    Xi has been grabbing territory from his neighbors. In just the past few months, the Chinese have been encroaching on India’s Sikkim as well as Nepalese territory.

    With regard to Nepal, let us talk about how China actually moves against its neighbors. In January, Beijing’s propagandists, as they have in the past, bragged about how Chinese scientists were able to come up with the exact measurement of a mountain in Nepal. Not in China, in Nepal.

    Now, the Chinese, and only the Chinese, call this feature Mount Qomolangma. The rest of the world, all of us, know it as Mount Everest.

    What is China doing by bragging about its measurement? It is establishing the basis for a territorial claim to this mountain, which happens to be close to China. They are eventually going to say, “Well, look, we named the place, we measured it, therefore, it’s ours.”

    This is subtle, but that is the way Beijing has been working. Of course, sometimes Beijing is not so indirect. We have also seen in recent months China’s encroachments into India’s Ladakh, high in the Himalayas, and its killing of Indian soldiers.

    Chinese planes have regularly been flying through Taiwan’s air defense identification zone. China’s armed ships have been intruding into Japanese waters in the East China Sea around those uninhabited islets, the Senkakus. Beijing has been trying to take territory from its neighbors. It is acting especially provocatively. We have got to be concerned.

    Amendments to China’s National Defense Law, effective the beginning of this year, take sweeping powers from the State Council, which leads China’s civilian government, and give them to the Communist Party’s Central Military Commission. These powers include the power to mobilize all of society for war.

    Moreover, Xi Jinping himself in January told the troops of the People’s Liberation Army that they must be prepared for conflict “at any second.” Beijing could well start history’s next great conflict.

    Many people will tell you that China is just bluffing, but we know from history that countries that continually talk about war, that continually bluff about it, usually manage to start them. This is the situation in which we find ourselves.

    On the topic of controlling the solar system, China will land a rover, its rover, on Mars in either May or June. Mere exploration for the good of humanity? China’s officials have been talking about the moon and Mars as if they are sovereign Chinese territory — part of the People’s Republic.

    They look at near heavenly bodies the same way they do the South China Sea, something that should be theirs. This means that if they get there, China believes it has the right to exclude other nations.

    Everything they do, whether it is seemingly innocuous, such as measuring a mountain or putting a rover on Mars, is a means of claiming sovereignty, of enlarging the People’s Republic.

    Now, of course, there are, in addition to these acts, China’s militant, hostile, belligerent actions. We see these all the time.

    We all have heard about China’s behavior, but today let’s focus on three things that China is doing relating to genetics.

    • First, China is collecting the world’s DNA.

    • Second, China is genetically engineering the Chinese to become a superhuman race, in other words, eugenics.

    • Third, Chinese researchers are working on pathogens, new pathogens, artificial ones, to create the world’s next pandemic.

    First, China is gobbling up the world’s DNA. So far, it has amassed the world’s largest collection of DNA profiles of humans. It claims about 80 million of them. Of course, it wants more. We need to be concerned about the way China is doing this.

    Chinese hackers, for instance, are going after insurance and healthcare companies to get DNA profiles. We saw this in January 2015, when we learned that China had hacked Anthem, America’s second‑largest insurance company. It got health information on 80 million Americans who were either insured or Anthem employees.

    Beijing is building this massive database also with its Phase 3 trials for its two vaccines, especially in Africa, both north and south of the Sahara. Think of Morocco as well as Nigeria.

    China is also getting DNA by buying American businesses. For instance, China’s BGI Group, the world’s largest genomic sequencing company, collected the largest group of DNA profiles of Americans when it purchased Complete Genomics in 2013. In January, China’s Harbin Pharmaceutical Group passed its last hurdle in purchasing GNC, which has health information of Americans as well.

    Another way China is collecting DNA is by offering low‑cost genetic sequencing services to ancestry companies and also to research laboratories and others. In 2019, there were 23 Chinese or Chinese‑linked companies that were accredited in the US to provide DNA sequencing services.

    We know, of course, that China has had a number of research partnerships and other ventures with American institutions, such as Johns Hopkins.

    If you want to find the largest collection of genetic information of Americans, you do not go to America. You go to Beijing.

    The story here is that we allowed the Chinese to plunder our society for data.

    The second point, eugenics, is downright frightening because biological research in China is heading in very distressing directions.

    Bing Su, a geneticist at the state‑run Kunming Institute of Virology, recently engaged in a number of experiments putting human genes into monkeys, including the MCPH1 gene relating to brain development. That means these monkeys will have intelligence closer to humans than to lower primates.

    Bing Su is not stopping there. His next experiments are going to be taking the SRGAP2C gene, which relates to human intelligence, and the FOXP2 gene, which permits language development, and also putting them into monkeys. It is as if nobody in China has seen the “Planet of the Apes.”.

    In China, there is an unrestrained ambition to experiment in weird ways. For instance, if you want to know what happens when you mix pig and monkey DNA, well, just ask the Chinese. They have been involved in other similar experiments as well.

    This whole subject was brought to the attention of the American public by John Ratcliffe, then director of National Intelligence, when he wrote that China was trying to grow super‑soldiers. Ratcliffe mentioned that China is already conducting experiments on people in the People’s Liberation Army to enhance their abilities, to create, as he called it, “biologically enhanced capabilities.”

    The Communist Party is also experimenting with humans other than soldiers. It was, for instance, a Chinese researcher who was the first, and so far only, person to use gene‑editing tools on human embryos to create live births.

    A Chinese professor, He Jiankui, in Shenzhen in southern China, actually used CRISPR, a gene‑editing tool, to remove the CCR5 gene to create live births of twins in late 2018.

    He said he did this because he wanted to make the twins resistant to HIV, but there are also suggestions he was enhancing the intelligence of the twins. This, of course, evokes the eugenics experiments of the Third Reich to create a “master race.”

    He is not the only person to experiment on human embryos. We are seeing similar experiments across the Chinese research community. Chinese geneticists are now trying to use the CRISPR tool to fundamentally alter humans.

    The Chinese regime does not have ethics or morality. It is not restrained by law. It does not have a sense of restraint. The regime is trying to create the perfect communist. China has the ability and the will to do this, which means that the world has got to prevent this experimentation.

    As for the third topic, pathogens, a little background might help. China uses its doctrine of Comprehensive National Power, CNP, which they got from the Soviet Union. It is an empirical tool to rate the strength of countries. China is relentlessly seeking the Number One CNP ranking.

    China can become number one in two ways. It can enhance its own CNP ranking by becoming stronger, or it can decrease the CNP rankings of other countries. That’s where pathogens come in. This notion of decreasing CNP of others meant that China had no inhibitions about spreading the coronavirus around the world.

    We don’t know whether the pathogen causing COVID‑19 naturally jumped from animals to humans, a zoonotic transfer, or whether it was cooked up in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That has yet to be determined.

    We do know one thing. We know that China’s leader, Xi Jinping, took steps deliberately to spread the pathogen beyond China’s borders. He did that primarily in two ways. First of all, he lied about the contagiousness of the disease. He knew it was highly transmissible human-to-human. He told the world it was not.

    Then he leaned on countries to not impose travel restrictions and quarantines on arrivals from China while he was locking down Wuhan and other portions of China, which meant he thought that these travel restrictions and quarantines were effective in preventing the spread of disease. This means, of course, that he thought he was spreading disease by forcing other countries to take arrivals from China. That shows malicious intent.

    Now, China’s ranking of CNP will increase dramatically, of course, if the next disease leaves the Chinese alone and sickens only foreigners. This is where some particularly distressing information has come to light.

    China’s State Council which, as mentioned, is the civilian government, in May 2019 imposed new rules preventing the transfer of DNA profiles of Chinese out of the country. At the same time, Chinese officials started enforcing existing rules and the new rule more effectively.

    That points to a sinister intention, but we do not really have to speculate because China’s National Defense University, in its 2017 edition of The Science of Military Strategy, actually talked about a new form of biological warfare of “specific ethnic genetic attacks.”

    Bill Gertz of The Washington Times recently quoted an unnamed American official, who said China was working on germ weapons capable of attacking only specific groups. Now, China denies it has the doctrine of “unrestricted warfare.” That term comes from a 1999 book by two Chinese Air Force colonels: Unrestricted Warfare: China’s Master Plan to Destroy America by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui.

    The spreading of the coronavirus is indeed an application of unrestricted warfare. Many analysts have said that biological warfare does not work. I can understand why they say that, but unfortunately we have just seen a disease kill about 2.4 million people as well as hobble societies across the world. [Editor’s note: The toll, since this talk was given, has increased to 2.7 million].

    COVID-19 is the ultimate proof that biological weapons work. If Chinese scientists actually succeed in developing viruses that attack only foreigners, China could end up as the only viable society in the world. This is communist China’s weapon against the world and against the United States as well.

    About two decades ago, Chi Haotian, then China’s defense minister, reportedly gave a secret speech about how China should use germ weapons to exterminate Americans so that the Chinese could then inhabit North America. “Living space.” You have heard this concept, “Lebensraum,” before.

    Also, in October of last year, Dr. Li Yi, a Chinese sociologist, returned to the extermination theme, this time in public. “We are driving America to its death,” Dr. Li approvingly said at a forum.

    Before the Chinese actually succeed in exterminating Americans, we should start thinking about what we can do to block China.

    I’m now going to give you my to‑do list. Many of the items may sound pedestrian, but remember that American policy towards China had been devoid of common sense for decades, especially during the Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations.

    These presidents maintained policies that were the opposite of common sense. I’m afraid it looks as if that is where Biden is heading to. His administration right now is engaged in a top-to-bottom review of China policy, which will probably be finished sometime in April. We do not know how it will turn out.

    Yet we know what Biden has done in his first month as president. He has issued a slew of executive orders dismantling protections the Trump administration built against a militant China.

    Some of Biden’s actions have been merely questionable, but some of them have been downright inexcusable and indefensible. For instance, on January 20 — just hours after taking the oath of office — Biden issued an executive order that repealed President Trump’s executive order of May 1st, 2020, preventing grid operators in the US from buying Chinese equipment.

    This means China is now free to sell sabotaged equipment to the US. This is not just a theoretical concern.

    Every administration looks at the China policies of its predecessors. I’m not saying Biden shouldn’t do that. What he should do is leave President Trump’s protections in place while he engages in that review because he should not leave the United States vulnerable in the interim.

    China’s Communist Party, of course, has not been shy in attacking the United States. We should not be defenseless in the interim.

    Moreover, whatever one thinks of Biden’s executive orders, he has ordered big giveaways to China and gotten nothing in return. In other words, his giveaways have been unilateral, a unilateral taking down of America’s protections.

    There are a few things that we should be doing now to protect ourselves against China’s genetic initiatives.

    Here goes:

    The first thing we should do is require everyone that maintains a computer network in the US, whether they are private or whether they are government, to harden them against espionage. The Chinese are villains, but we have allowed them to be villainous by leaving our networks undefended.

    I am angry at the Chinese for stealing our stuff, but I’m much more angry at a series of presidents who decided to do nothing or do nothing effective. Let us impose a cost on China for stealing US intellectual property. That means we have got to go well beyond the Section 301 tariffs that President Trump imposed in 2018 for the theft of our IP.

    Then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, in his December 3, 2021 Wall Street Journal op‑ed, put the figure of China’s theft at about $500 billion a year. This means the costs we impose are going to have to be greater than that amount if we are going to deter China.

    Second, we should simply prevent China from buying any American company that possesses DNA profiles of Americans or is involved in biotechnology or genetic research. That’s just common sense.

    Third, we should prohibit any Chinese or Chinese‑linked company from providing sequencing services for the DNA of Americans.

    Fourth, we should end all research partnerships with Chinese institutions.

    Fifth, we should withdraw from the biological weapons convention. China is almost certainly violating it at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other locations. The convention has no inspections regime. That means this is a unilateral obligation on our part.

    Sixth, we should get out – again – of the World Health Organization. The WHO was complicit in Xi Jinping’s spread of the disease. The WHO didn’t make a mistake. It absolutely knew what it was doing.

    Senior doctors at the WHO knew that the coronavirus was highly transmissible, yet on two occasions, January 9th and January 14th, 2020, the political leadership of WHO spread China’s false proposition that the disease was not transmissible. I think the WHO is unreformable.

    Seventh, we should impose costs on China for spreading COVID‑19. Recently, we passed that grim milestone of more than 500,000 deaths. This pathogen is not finished with us yet. We have to impose these costs on China to convince Xi Jinping that he cannot spread the next disease beyond his borders.

    The next virus, as mentioned, could leave the Chinese alone and sicken everyone else. It could be a civilization-killer, which means that China could be the only viable society left on earth.

    When I talk about Xi Jinping believing that he should rule the entire world, people say, “Oh, that’s ludicrous,” or, “It’s impossible.”

    No, it’s not ludicrous. It’s not impossible if China is the only functioning society on this planet.

    We are far stronger than China. We can defend ourselves.

    The Chinese unrelentingly attack us, and we do not have the political will to defend ourselves.

    Let me end with one question. What are our children going to think when they realize that we had the means to protect them but chose not to do so?

    *  *  *

    Question: You mentioned that the CCP is collecting DNA. What are they utilizing this knowledge for?

    Chang: There are two things. First of all, they want to be a leader in biotechnology. We know this because biotech was one of the 10 original areas in Xi Jinping’s Made in China 2025 initiative, announced in 2015. That initiative is designed to make China both self‑sufficient and a world leader in the enumerated areas.

    The second thing is, as mentioned, they want to build a biological weapons capability. They have got a dual purpose here ‑‑ to lead biotech and, second, to be able to kill everybody else on the planet.

    Question: What would you tell these American businesses who are eager to open up on China?

    Chang: Business is business. Business will always want to make money. It will go anywhere, do anything. We have seen this, of course, with regard to China, but we also saw it in the run‑up to World War II. IBM, for instance, was providing census‑tabulating machines so that the Third Reich could count Jews.

    They were doing this even after war in Europe started with the bombing of London. We know how bad and how free of morals business can be.

    This is really up to the President of the United States to use his powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 or the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 because he can prohibit businesses from going to China. He can prohibit investment into China’s markets. He can do all of the things we need as a society to do.

    I know this sounds drastic to many people, but China uses all its points of contact with the United States to undermine us. Right now, the FBI and local law enforcement are just overwhelmed by what China is doing.

    We do not have the capability to keep up. Until we can get a handle on this, the president, I believe, has the constitutional responsibility to end these contacts with China, business and otherwise. Yes, it is drastic, but our republic is at stake.

    We know, for instance, that China does not really believe in capitalism. People say — Bill Gates has said this a number of times — that China is more capitalist than the United States. If we look at what China has been doing with regard to Jack Ma and others, we can see that no, they are not capitalists. They want to use capitalists to further their objectives, but they are not capitalists themselves. Until we come to that fundamental understanding, we are at risk.

    Question: What are your thoughts about China hosting the Winter Olympics in 2022?

    Chang: The International Olympic Committee should move the games to a country not tainted with crimes against humanity and other atrocities. Plus, there’s something else the IOC must do. It must ban China’s teams from athletic competition.

    If we go back to 1963, the IOC banned the teams from South Africa because a large portion of the South African population was not permitted to participate in sport. That was because of apartheid.

    We have the same situation in China today where Uyghurs, Tibetans, and others are not permitted to participate in sport. The IOC, I believe, has an obligation to ban China’s teams until the regime stops committing those crimes against humanity, until others can participate in sport just as well as the majority Han athletes can.

    If the IOC does not do both these things, move the games and ban China’s teams from competition, we should boycott the 2022 games. I do not like the boycott idea because this punishes athletes, but ultimately, we have to do this if the IOC doesn’t make the two moves.

    Question: What is the state of play today between Iran and China, especially given that the Iran deal is apparently back on with the US?

    Chang: About eight months ago, we learned Tehran and Beijing signed a 25‑year, $400 billion strategic partnership deal. That, of course, would cover business relations. Also, it is military-linked. A lot of analysts correctly say that this strategic partnership will not end up being as robust as it now appears. Nevertheless, Beijing’s support of Iran will be crucial.

    Indeed, what Iran has been doing in the Middle East, especially in Lebanon, almost certainly has Beijing’s blessing, because Tehran knows China has its back—and will back it with money.

    China, of course, has made sure that its nuclear weapons technology has found its way to the mullahs. It has done that a number of different ways, one of them through the A. Q. Khan black market network run by Pakistan and since rolled up by the United States. It was not rolled up before Pakistan was able to send enrichment technology to the Iranians.

    Also, China has facilitated North Korea’s sale of ballistic missiles and ballistic missile technology to Iran, which gives Iran the ability to deliver nuclear weapons.

    You put all that together and it shows that the relationship between Beijing and Tehran is sinister, and it will continue to grow over time because Iran, right now, needs a backer and it has found it in Beijing.

    Question: We are all frightened, of course, of China’s strengths. What do you see as their weaknesses? Is it their internal oppression? What is happening in Hong Kong?

    Chang: China is making great progress in imposing its system on Hong Kong. It did that with the June 30 imposition of the National Security Law, which has given Beijing the ability to do whatever it wants in the territory, including extraditing people to be prosecuted in China. As people have said, the National Security Law is the end of law in Hong Kong. That’s about right.

    Beijing’s most recent initiatives, if reports are correct, will be to further restrict those people who can sit on the Election Committee, which is composed of 1,200 people who choose the chief executive, the top political officer. Beijing is also going to add, according to rumors, 20 members to the 70-seat Legislative Council.

    As the war correspondent Michael Yon says, what we witnessed in Hong Kong in 2019 especially, was not a protest movement but an insurgency. Yon points out insurgencies rarely die out. They can disappear for a time. They can go into tactical retreat, but they almost always come back.

    That is essentially what exists in Hong Kong right now. This is going to be a long‑term struggle. It is not going to be easy, but we need to have the President of the United States impose costs on China for what it’s doing in Hong Kong. President Trump started imposing costs but did not do enough.

    I hope that Biden, who ran on a campaign of trying to help the people of Hong Kong, will do so.

    With regard to the broader question of China’s weaknesses, it is really a matter of overstretch. Paul Kennedy, the Yale professor, talked about this. It is a good way, a framework, of looking at it because China does not have the money to accomplish all its objectives.

    Beijing spends an enormous amount of its resources on repressing the Chinese people. The government has been moving back to totalitarian controls with its social credit system, surveillance cameras, and Great Firewall. All of this is not cheap.

    Also, the Belt and Road Initiative, which is to connect the world to China, means China is putting a lot of money into infrastructure that the private sector has not wanted to build. Indeed, a number of countries are not paying back China on their loans, which is a drain, certainly, on the Chinese treasury. Yes, China ends up owning infrastructure and assets, but the cost to it is exceedingly high.

    This overcommitment is also evident in China’s rapid expansion of its military, for a purpose that makes people in Asia realize the aggressiveness of China’s regime.

    We can see that Beijing does not really have the resources to accomplish all these outsized ambitions.

    Right now, the Chinese economy may be growing, but it did not grow at the 2.3 percent that Beijing announced for 2020. It is probably just a smidgen over zero, if it is zero. We are seeing a lot of weakness in the Chinese economy, especially in the consumption area, which is a bad sign for Beijing.

    Ultimately, it is a question of how productive their economy can be. It really cannot be that productive as Xi Jinping goes back to more of a state‑dominated system, where state enterprises have a greater role in the economy. They are the least productive part of that economy. The private sector is far more important and far more productive, but it now being deemphasized.

    We are approaching a point where ‑‑ this will be critical ‑‑ where Biden will have to decide whether to run to the rescue of China’s regime. We know that Nixon in 1972, George H.W. Bush in 1989, and Bill Clinton in 1999 rescued Chinese communism. I hope Biden does not do that a fourth time.

    Question: How do you think China will now be acting towards Taiwan?

    Chang: China is especially aggressive with its aerial maneuvers. They have been doing two things. They have been flying through Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, AZID, as mentioned.

    An ADIZ includes international airspace, so China has every right to fly through it. Flying through another country’s air defense identification zone is nonetheless considered to be hostile. China’s been doing that regularly.

    The other thing that China has been doing in the air is flying on Taiwan’s side of the median line. The median line runs straight down the middle of the Taiwan Strait. For decades, there has been an understanding between Beijing and Taipei that Taiwan’s planes stay to the east of that line and Beijing’s planes stay to the west.

    Over the last six months or so, Beijing has been violating that commitment and has been flying on Taiwan’s side of the line.

    The reason why all this is important to us is that on January 23 there was a very large incursion into Taiwan’s air defense zone by nuclear‑capable H‑6K bombers.

    Those bombers then, as part of this incursion, flew a simulated attack against our Theodore Roosevelt strike group, also in the South China Sea at the time. This is extremely dangerous.

    Most people believe that China is not going to invade Taiwan. I agree, with one possible exception I’ll talk about later. Generally, it is not going to invade Taiwan because it does not have the capability to do so.

    All of this bluffing, however, does have consequences. China has been engaging in these hostile air maneuvers. One of these maneuvers could go wrong. A plane could hit the deck. That could create a dynamic that ends up in a conflict.

    That that almost occurred on April 1st, 2001, when a Chinese fighter jet clipped our US Navy EP‑3, an unarmed reconnaissance plane.

    The Bush administration avoided conflict by offering to pay China a ransom, by allowing China to strip the plane, by allowing China to keep our aviators in custody, which was, in my mind, the most disgraceful incident in recent US diplomatic history. This is a stain that George W. Bush will never be able to erase, but put that aside for a moment.

    I did say there was one exception where China might actually engage in aggression against Taiwan. Some of Taiwan’s islands are only two miles off China’s coast, Kinmen and Matsu.

    China could grab one of those islands and then say to the world, “What are you going to do about it?” That is a real possibility. That is what I worry about, but I do not worry about an invasion of the main island of Taiwan. So far, we have been able to deter them.

    The question is whether the Biden administration will act. So far, Biden has been really good on Taiwan. He has been better on Taiwan than anything else with regard to China. At least there is a little bit of comfort here. Nonetheless, this is something that could change day by day and change in a way that leads to the next great war.

    Question: What do you think, in order, are the most serious, what would be your most urgent messages to the new US administration on China?

    Chang: China has done so many awful things that it is really hard to put them in order.

    The most important thing that Biden needs to understand is that China’s regime is not legitimate. We have to understand the fundamental nature of China’s challenge. Last year, China engaged in a series of acts of war against the US.

    They were actively trying to foment violence on American streets, which is more than just subversion. They fomented violence this year in connection with the Capital Hill riots of January 6th. Both before and after that, they were openly urging Americans to engage in acts of insurrection.

    I do not see how you can have a dialogue with a country like that. The first indication is that the Biden team — and they have talked about this in public — they say, “We will impose costs on China for those things which are unacceptable, we will criticize them on others, and we will cooperate where there are common interests.”

    I don’t think we can do that because I do not see that we have common interests with a country that’s trying to overthrow our government. My message is understand the fundamental nature, the hostility, and the maliciousness of China, and remember one other thing.

    That is, China deliberately released the disease that has killed more than 500,000 Americans. That alone means there can be no cooperation with China.

    Question: If indeed China is working with Iran, how do we warn Israel where every second biotech company start‑up looks to a China exit?

    Chang: This is a broader question of US relations with Jerusalem. So far, American presidents have been pretty tolerant of Israeli links with China. I generally believe that the United States ‑‑ and this is not just Israel ‑‑ we need to say this to France, to Germany, to everybody else, that this is a zero‑sum game.

    You either work with the US or we do not consider you to be our friend. I think Israel would choose the right side. I’m not so sure about some of the other countries I mentioned. The point is this is something American presidents have not communicated to our friends, allies, and partners, how we feel about China.

    I say we should no longer support China’s Communist regime. We consider it to be an enemy, and we will act to protect ourselves in an appropriate fashion. Remember, in May 2019 People’s Daily ran a piece that declared a “people’s war” on the US. That is all Biden needs to know.

    Question: “What do they want all that DNA for?”

    Chang: The more DNA you have, the better you will be able to develop, for instance, biotechnology products. The more DNA you have, the easier it will be to figure out how to create the next penicillin or whatever. The more DNA you have, the better you are able and the faster you are able to come out with drugs. Then, of course, there is their biological weapons program: the more DNA they have, the better they can figure out how to create a pathogen that attacks us and leaves them alone. The more you have, the more you can do.

    Question: You mentioned that China saying that the US was not a legitimate state. Could you amplify on that a little bit more?

    Chang: China is committing atrocities. Forget about what it is doing to its own people, the Han. It is committing atrocities in what it calls Xinjiang, what it considers to be the northwest part of its country and what the Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and others consider to be East Turkestan, conquered by Mao in 1950.

    China’s regime has not only been running concentration camps where they have held somewhere between 1.1 and 3.3 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and others, but it has also institutionalized slavery, offering labor to both domestic and foreign companies, — and not just in Xinjiang, but across China, as Uyghurs are being transported in cattle cars to provide labor in factories that look like concentration camps.

    The regime has institutionalized rape, with Han Chinese officials in Uyghur homes, where the male has been sent off to a concentration camp. This is the BBC story of about a few weeks ago, plus other reporting, which is absolutely horrific. Rape is used as a policy of the government to subdue the Uyghurs.

    There has been the violation of Uyghur girls, minors. There has been forced organ harvesting, in all probability. That is the tribunal led by Geoffrey Nice in London. They have put children into basically jails. Because the parents get sent off to “re-education” camps, the children are put into “orphanages” that look like prisons. The list goes on and on.

    We know the Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and others are dying in these facilities. The only thing that separates the People’s Republic of China from the Third Reich is that China has not gone to mass exterminations — yet.

    Its acts meet the definition of “genocide” in the Genocide Convention of 1948. If Biden needs another message, this is not just a policy choice for him. We are a party to that Genocide Convention, which requires signatories to “prevent and punish” acts of genocide.

    Yes, China is committing genocide. Secretary of State Pompeo issued that formal determination on January 19th of this year. Candidate Biden, during the campaign in August of last year, said the Chinese were committing genocide. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, during his confirmation hearings, said China was committing genocide. China’s regime is committing genocide. We have an obligation to do something about it.

    Question: It appears we are dealing — or not dealing with — a Chinese Communist Party that is promoting “a superior race” and “a superior government,” which has, as you say, horrible echoes of the 1930s. How would you suggest the Biden administration deal with it?

    Chang: I would force every US company off Chinese soil. I’d force every Chinese company in the US, every Chinese bank, to leave. I would close every Chinese consulate. There are four remaining consulates. I would strip the embassy staff in Washington down to the ambassador, his family, his secretary, and maybe a few personal guards.

    I would close all the Confucius Institutes on our college campuses. I would toss out every Confucius Classroom in our secondary schools. [Editor’s note: China is rebranding Confucius Institutes “to avoid scrutiny.”]

    The list goes on. I would cut all these contacts with China. As mentioned, they are overwhelming us right now. We cannot deal with it. Until we can deal with it, as a practical matter, we need to cut these contacts.

    China is committing atrocities. We should have nothing to do with it. It’s not a legitimate state. It’s a danger to humanity. China is a threat to humanity.

    We have got to recognize the threat. We have got to defend our society. We have an obligation, if not to ourselves, to our children.

    Question: Another important question: Does the popular DNA testing company 23andMe, where you send in a sample of your DNA for information on your ancestry, have any connection to China?

    Chang: This is really murky, but China has tried to compromise 23andMe, to get a bigger ownership interest in it. I believe, but I am not positive, that some of the 23andMe sequencing is done by Chinese‑linked companies. There is that link there.

    The 23andMe chief executive mentioned recently about China’s attempts to take over her company, and that she successfully resisted.

    Question: A final question. Xi has said that he wants all tariffs lifted to repair the relations with the US. What would you advise the US do?

    Chang: I would increase those additional tariffs, which are at 10% or 25% percent, to 1000% or 5000%. I would prevent China from selling stuff to us. Even if you put aside all the things we talked about, just if you look at this as a trade matter, those Section 301 tariffs were put in place to stop China’s theft of US intellectual property.

    Whatever figure you take, whether it is $125 billion at the low end or $600 billion at the high end, China is stealing our intellectual property. Obviously, what we have been doing so far has not been sufficient to stop them. We cannot do what China wants.

    Wang Yi, the foreign minister, a couple weeks ago ‑‑ and this is a continuation of things that Chinese officials have said for several months – he is saying, “Look, you have to get rid of the tariffs, you have got to do X, you have got to do Y, and you have got to Z in order to create a favorable relationship.” In other words, we have to make a lot of unilateral concessions and then China will think about reciprocating.

    Of course, they never will reciprocate. My sense is if you look at this as just a tariff matter, our tariffs should go to the sky. In other words, no trade until China stops stealing our tech and know-how and IP. When China stops stealing, then we can talk about reducing tariffs.

    You have asked, “What should Biden do?” One of the things Secretary Pompeo said that really unnerved the Chinese was talking about in‑person diplomacy, talking to the Chinese people directly.

    He also mentioned this at his Nixon Center speech in July of last year. Biden needs to do the same thing. Not every solution is military. As a matter of fact, our solutions with China are not military. They really start with talking to the Chinese people.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 03/21/2021 – 23:30

  • War Futurologist Sums Up Combat Robots Will Dominate Modern Battlefield
    War Futurologist Sums Up Combat Robots Will Dominate Modern Battlefield

    We’ve always questioned what wars in the future would be like. To answer that mystery is Yevgeny Kuznetsov, a member of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign Defense Policy, head of Singularity University in Moscow, who told Russian state-owned newspaper RIA Novosti that high-quality combat robotics will dominate the modern battlefield. 

    Already, conflicts over trade, technology, and capital markets continue to worsen between the US and China, the world’s global superpowers. Meanwhile, rising geopolitical tensions between the US and Russia continue to surge under the Biden administration. 

    While the US, China, and Russia, along with other countries, race to modernize their forces with robotics, artificial intelligence, stealth fighters, new main battle tanks, upgraded infantry weapons, and, of course, how could we forget, hypersonic weapons, it appears the US is destined for war. 

    Kuznetsov, also a futurologist, explains while combat robots were only for wealthy countries, technological costs have dramatically dropped, allowing developed countries to obtain advanced weaponry. He said the side with the most advanced robots has a higher probability of winning future battles. 

    “Previously, robots in the army were the lot of wealthy countries such as the United States. Now Turkey and Israel have broken through the barrier and are making aircraft drones a mass product, which, as we have seen from the example of Azerbaijan, make a significant contribution to the outcome of hostilities. War is turning into a competition of economies: whoever has assembled more and better robots is more successful in solving problems on the battlefield, “Kuznetsov said.

    He said the massive integration of unmanned aerial vehicles, sea and ground vehicles “will change the centuries-old perception of the state as a community of people, of which the more, the better since these are both working hands and potential soldiers. Robots break this scheme because they replace people in the workplace and in the army. The model of a state that is strong not by people, but by robots – we are simply not ready for that.” 

    Research analyst with the Center for Naval Analyses’ International Affairs Group, Samuel Bendett, sums up Kuznetsov’s interview with RIA:

    “Future wars are not just going to be battles between robots, but contest between advanced economies capable of manufacturing such robotics in large numbers.” 

    From the cold war to the trade war to the tech war, the US, China, Russia, and many other countries, are increasing military budgets to procure enough combat robots that would hopefully increase their odds at winning future wars. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 03/21/2021 – 23:00

  • Diversity Or The Bigotry Of Low Expectations
    Diversity Or The Bigotry Of Low Expectations

    Authored by Jayant Bhandari via Acting-Man.com,

    Value Traps and Economic Ignorance

    A financial analyst is often, or at least should be, more of a psychologist than a financial expert. There are companies that I knew fifteen years ago that had inherent value a multiple of what their stocks were trading at. Today, there continues to be similar upside, except that upside targets and share prices are lower. What went wrong?

    A problem reaches the far North faster than climate change can melt all the ice. [PT]

    Such companies are often value-traps. A financially astute person might invest in them, hoping that eventually, the market will recognize the value. Unfortunately, some managements do not understand the concept of value-creation or are unfocused, innumerate, or crooked. One must learn early that even in the private sector, top leadership positions do not necessarily end up in the hands of the most competent people.

    I mostly analyze mining companies. An example of a value-trap is a Hong Kong-listed entity, G-Resources, which was a mining company in the past. Today, it has most of its value is in treasuries and cash, worth US$1,500 million. Its market capitalization (at a HK$0.05 share price) is, however, a mere US$200 million. I don’t see any hope of it ever going up to match its inherent value.

    An analyst must screen out the bad apples as quickly as possible. I want to address some areas in which companies actively destroy value.

    Many mining companies, whose focus should be geology and mining engineering, spend too much time worrying about the commodity market. The commodity business is a specialization in its own right, and there is a reason why commodities are called “commodities”: It is hard — perhaps impossible — to project their future prices.

    When mining companies project a future of scarcity, they show a lack of understanding of economics: About the elasticity of demand and supply and how futures and options markets take care of shortages through a complex web of hedging by suppliers and users. The extent to which a specific  commodity can rise in price is limited, because at some point substitution kicks in.

    A typical, but hugely erroneous graph provided by many companies.

    Holier than Thou with ESG

    Over the last couple of years, many companies have implemented ESG programs. And EDI, a recent advent, has gone into hyper-drive. Of course, only the acronyms are quoted, for every “woke” person should know what they mean. ESG stands for Environment, Social, and Government.

    No one cares to explain how ESG is different from the need to follow legitimate laws. It has become a checklist, devoid of the spirit of ethical conduct, a way to earn brownie points by acting holier than thou.

    From a recent presentation of Franco-Nevada – this is something now common across businesses, and is not meant to criticize it specifically.

    ESG policies have institutionalized corruption, with NGOs, which should be working for the welfare of locals, taking fat checks from companies. ESG has encouraged locals to become whiners and has created space for crooked local leaders to emerge, with NGOs as mediators. ESG has become a vicious cycle of entitlements, grievances, corruption and dependence.

    It is not the job of mining companies to do social work, for which they are not trained, skilled or competent. What they do is for marketing, propaganda, and virtue-signaling purposes, forcing their leadership to be hypocritical and spread such conduct downstream. Naïve investors, distant from on-the-ground realities, ultimately support this trend.

    When conducting on-site visits, we analysts used to discuss the propaganda related to ESG. As time has gone by, we are talking less and less about this, for such discussion has come to be seen as politically incorrect. The new generation of analysts, people who have been brought up in the “woke” culture, cannot even see the game being played.

    Condescension via EDI

    EDI stands for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion and is gaining momentum very rapidly. In a recent panel discussion I took part in, analysts were grilling mining companies. The first question a $8 million company faced was from a colored female who wanted to know why their board of directors lacked diversity.

    Small companies simply do not have patience or the necessary leeway to get into virtue-signaling, although the damage that EDI causes to big companies is no less, even if it is hidden.

    Since the time Justin Trudeau became the Prime Minister of Canada, it has become elitist to have top leadership reflecting society’s demographics.

    Why should “minorities” and women be dependent on a specific section of society, which of course, are males of European ethnicity? By implication EDI constitutes evidence that people of color, women, and LGBTQs cannot stand on their own feet and rise in life through their merit. And if this is true, why not accept it?

    EDI is the bigotry of low expectations, much worse than on-the-face racism, where you know at least what the bigotry is about. EDI is extraordinarily condescending toward the so-called under-privileged groups. I find it repulsive if someone thinks I should get an extra push because of my skin color. I wonder why more women, people of color, and LGBTQs are not riswing up against the condescending approach, racism, and sexism inherent in EDI.

    In India, where affirmative policy has a long history, I have no choice but to question how competent someone from the lower caste would be in a position of authority. Would I go to doctor from the lower caste? But similar thinking has to start in the West as EDI continues and grows. Suffering the most will be the competent people among the beneficiaries of EDI.

    The true believers make the hollow concepts of ESG and EDI sound like the end of history.

    When I see too much of ESG/EDI in a company’s presentation, I move on without wasting any more of my time.

    The path of political correctness and virtue-signaling that the West has undertaken always reminds me of South Africa, which at one point in time had First World infrastructure.

    During my first visit to a company in Johannesburg more than a decade ago, I thought I had come to a car-show—the parking lot had some of the most expensive cars in the world. Black Economic Empowerment, their EDI, had enabled blacks to rise in the leadership hierarchy without any need for merit. As time has gone by, South Africa’s infrastructure has fallen apart. Power outages, lack of water supply, crime, potholes on the road, and a general lack of law and order have worsened continuously.

    The Boeing 737 Max airplane suffered two fatal accidents. To what extent were the accidents attributable to design work had been done in low-cost, low work-ethic jurisdictions? Did those in leadership positions discuss the possibility of such risks, or was this deemed too politically incorrect?

    To what extent were forest fires in California or the recent power outages in Texas a result of EDI, where people have been elevated to positions of authority despite a lack of competence? We will never know the specifics, for people in the West no longer say anything that might be seen as bigoted. Those who dare say something get booted out.

    Errors accumulate with no one to challenge them. The ESG/EDI concepts pursued in the West are essentially copying the South African model of social change, which is anti-meritocratic and will destroy institutions and civilization.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 03/21/2021 – 22:30

  • Americans Are Losing Billions Due To Internet Crime
    Americans Are Losing Billions Due To Internet Crime

    The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has released its 2020 Internet Crime Report which found that 2020 was a record year for both victims of internet crime and dollar losses in the United States.

    791,790 complaints were logged by IC3 in the last calendar year with total losses amounting to $4.2 billion. Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes that the most frequent internet crimes recorded in 2020 were phishing, non-payment/non-delivery scams and extortionBusiness Email Compromise schemes were the costliest internet crimes last year with adjusted losses of $1.8 billion.

    Infographic: Americans Are Losing Billions Due To Internet Crime | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    2020 was notable for the emergence of schemes exploiting the Covid-19 pandemic with both individuals and businesses targeted. Some 28,500 complaints were received relating to Covid-19 scams with most of them aimed at the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act). They mainly involved grant fraud, loan fraud, and phishing for Personally Identifiable Information. In many cases, victims did not realize they had been targeted until they attempted to file their own legitimate claims for unemployment insurance benefits.

    Another growing problem throughout the pandemic has been criminals impersonating government representatives over the phone, via email and through social media. Through charades and threats, they managed to gain both money and personal information. Scams have also emerged as the pace of vaccinations accelerated where people have been asked to pay for jabs out of pocket or to provide personal information in exchange for appointments.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 03/21/2021 – 22:00

  • Headed For A Collapsing Debt Bubble
    Headed For A Collapsing Debt Bubble

    Authored by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog,

    A $1.9 trillion stimulus package was recently signed into law in the United States. Can such a stimulus bill, plus packages passed in other countries, really pull the world economy out of the downturn it has been in 2020? I don’t think so.

    The economy runs on energy, far more than it operates on growing debt. Our energy problems don’t appear to be fixable in the near term, such as six months or a year. Instead, the economy seems to be headed for a collapse of its debt bubble. Eventually, we may see a reset of the world financial system leading to fewer interchangeable currencies, far less international trade and falling production of goods and services. Some governments may collapse.

    [1] What Is Debt?

    I understand debt to be an indirect promise for future goods and services. These future goods and services can only be created if there are adequate supplies of the right kinds of energy and other materials, in the right places, to make these future goods and services.

    I think of debt as being a time-shifting device. Indirectly, it is a promise that the economy will be able to provide as many, or more, goods and services in the future compared to what it does at the time the loan is taken out.

    Common sense suggests that it is much easier to repay debt with interest in a growing economy than in a shrinking economy. Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff unexpectedly ran across this phenomenon in their 2008 working paper, This Time Is Different: A Panoramic View of Eight Centuries of Financial Crises. They reported (p. 15), “It is notable that the non-defaulters, by and large, are all hugely successful growth stories.” In other words, their analysis of 800 years of governmental debt showed that default was almost inevitable if a country stopped growing or started shrinking.

    The IMF estimates that the world economy shrank by 3.5% in 2020. There are many areas with even worse indications: Euro Area, -7.2%; United Kingdom, -10.0%; India, -8.0%; Mexico, -8.5%; and South Africa, -7.5%. If these situations cannot be turned around quickly, we should expect to see collapsing debt bubbles. Even the US, which shrank by 3.4%, needs a rapid return to growth if it is to keep its debt bubble inflated.

    [2] The Inter-Relationship Among (a) Growing Debt, (b) Growing Energy Consumption and a (c) Growing Economy

    When we are far from energy limits, growing debt seems to pull the economy along. This is a graphic I put together in 2018, explaining the situation. A small amount of debt is helpful to the system. But, if there gets to be too much debt, both oil prices and interest rates rise, bringing the braking system into action. The bicycle/economy rapidly slows.

    Figure 1. The author’s view of the analogy of a speeding upright bicycle and a speeding economy.

    Just as a two-wheeled bicycle needs to be going fast enough to stay upright, the economy needs to be growing rapidly enough for debt to do what it is intended to do. It takes energy supply to create the goods and services that the economy depends on.

    If oil and other energy products are cheap to produce, their benefit will be widely available. Employers will be able to add more efficient machines, such as bigger tractors. These more efficient machines will act to leverage the human labor of the workers. The economy can grow rapidly, without the use of much debt. Figure 2 shows that the world oil price was $20 per barrel in 2020$, or even less, prior to 1974.

    Figure 2. Oil price in 2020 dollars, based on amounts through 2019 in 2019$ from BP’s 2020 Statistical Review of World Energy, the inflationary adjustment from 2019 to 2020 based on CPI Urban prices from the US Department of Labor and the average spot Brent oil price for 2020 based on EIA information.

    Figure 3 below shows the historical relationship between the growth in US energy consumption (red line) and the dollar increase in US debt growth required to add a dollar increase in GDP (blue line). This chart calculates ratios for five-year periods because ratios for individual years are unstable.

    Figure 3. Comparison of five-year average growth in US energy consumption based on EIA data with five-year average amount of added debt required to add $1 of GDP.

    Based on Figure 3, the US average annual growth in energy consumption (red line) generally fell between 1951 and 2020. The quantity of debt that needed to be added to create an additional $1 dollar of GDP (blue line) has generally been rising.

    According to InvestopediaGross domestic product (GDP) is the total monetary or market value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country’s borders in a specific time period. Notice that there is no mention of debt in this definition. If businesses or governments can find a way to make large amounts of credit available to borrowers who are not very credit worthy, it becomes easy to sell cars, motorcycles or homes to buyers who may never repay that debt. If the economy hits turbulence, these marginal buyers are likely to default, causing a collapse in a debt bubble.

    [3] Analyzing Energy Consumption Growth, Debt Growth and Economic Growth for Broader Groupings of Years

    To get a better idea what is happening with respect to energy growth, debt growth, and GDP growth, I created some broader groupings of years, based primarily on patterns in Figure 2, showing inflation-adjusted oil prices. The following groupings of years were chosen:

    • 1950-1973

    • 1974-1980

    • 1981-2000

    • 2001-2014

    • 2015-2020

    Using these groupings of years, I put together charts in which it is easier to see trends.

    Figure 4. Average annual increase in energy consumption for period shown based on EIA data versus average increase in real (inflation-adjusted) GDP for the period shown based on data of the US Bureau of Economic Analysis.

    Figure 4 shows that for the US, there has been a general downward trend in the annual growth of energy consumption. At same time, real (that is, inflation-adjusted) GDP has been trending downward, but not quite as quickly.

    We would expect that lower energy consumption would lead to lower growth in real GDP because it takes energy of the appropriate kinds to make goods and services. For example, it takes oil to ship most goods. It takes electricity to operate computers and keep the lights on. According to the World Coal Association, large quantities of coal are used in producing cement and steel. These are important for construction, such as is planned in stimulus projects around the world.

    Also, on Figure 4, the period 1981 to 2000 shows an uptick in both energy consumption growth and real GDP growth. This period corresponds to a period of relatively low oil prices (Figure 2). With lower oil prices, businesses found it affordable to add new devices to leverage human labor, making workers more productive. The growing productivity of workers is at least part of what led to the increased growth in real GDP.

    Figure 5. Dollars of additional debt required to add $1 dollar of GDP growth (including inflation), based on data of the US Bureau of Economic Analysis.

    Figure 5, above, is disturbing. It strongly suggests that the US economy (and probably a lot of other economies) has needed to add an increasing amount of debt to add $1 of GDP in recent years. This pattern started long before President Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package in 2021.

    To make matters worse, GDP growth in Figure 5 has not been reduced to remove the impact of inflation. On average, removing the impact of inflation reduces the above GDP growth by about half. In the period 2015 to 2020, it took about $4.35 of additional debt to add one dollar of GDP growth, including inflation. It would take about double that amount, or $8.70 worth of debt, to create $1.00 worth of inflation-adjusted growth. With such a low return on added debt, it seems unlikely that the $1.9 trillion stimulus package will increase the growth of the economy very much.

    [4] Falling interest rates (Figure 6) are a major part of what allowed the rapid growth in debt after 1981 shown in Figure 5.

    Figure 6. 10-Year and 3-Month US Treasury Rates through February 2021, in a chart prepared by the Federal Reserve of St. Louis.

    Clearly, debt is more affordable if the interest rate is lower. For example, auto loans and home mortgages have lower monthly payments if the interest rate is lower. It is also clear that governments need to spend less of their tax revenue on interest rate payments if interest rates are lower. Changes made by US President Ronald Reagan when he took office 1981 also encouraged the use of more debt.

    A major concern with respect to today’s debt bubble is the fact that interest rates are about as low as they can go without going negative. In fact, the interest rate on 10-year Treasury bonds is now 1.72%, which is higher than the February 2021 average rate shown on the chart. As interest rates rise, it becomes more costly to add more debt. As interest rates rise, businesses will be less likely to take on debt in order to expand and hire more workers.

    [5] Interest expense is a major expense of governments, businesses, and homeowners everywhere. Energy costs are another major expense of governments, businesses, and homeowners. It makes sense that falling interest rates can partly hide rising energy prices.

    A trend toward lower interest rates was needed starting in 1981 because the US could no longer produce large amounts of crude oil that were profitable to sell at less than $20 per barrel, in inflation-adjusted prices. Lower interest rates made adding debt more feasible. This added debt could smooth the transition to an economy that was less dependent on oil, now that it was high-priced. The lower interest rates helped all segments of the economy adjust to the new higher cost of oil and other fuels.

    [6] The US experience shows precisely how helpful having a rapidly growing supply of inexpensive to produce oil could be to an economy.

    US oil production, excluding Alaska (blue “remainder” in Figure 7), rose rapidly after 1945 but began to decline not long after hitting a peak in 1970. This growing oil production had temporarily provided a huge boost to the US economy.

    Figure 7. US crude oil production, based on data of the US Energy Information Administration.

    Up until almost 1970, US oil production was rising rapidly. Figure 8 shows that during this period, incomes of both the bottom 90% of workers and the top 10% of workers increased rapidly. Over a period of about 20 years, incomes for both groups grew by about 80%, after adjusting for inflation. On average, workers were about 4% better off each year, with the rapid growth in very inexpensive-to-produce oil, all of which stayed in the US (rather than being exported). US imports of inexpensive-to-produce oil also grew during this period.

    Once oil prices were higher, income growth for both the lower 90% and the top 10% slowed. With the changes made starting in 1981, wage disparities quickly started to grow. There suddenly became a need for new, high-tech approaches that used less oil. But these changes were more helpful to the managers and highly educated workers than the bottom 90% of workers.

    Figure 8. Chart comparing income gains by the top 10% to income gains by the bottom 90% by economist Emmanuel Saez. Based on an analysis of IRS data, published in Forbes.

    [7] Most of the world’s cheap-to-extract oil sources have now been exhausted. Our problem is that the world market cannot get prices to rise high enough for producers to cover all of their expenses, including taxes.

    Based on my analysis, the world price of oil would need to be at least $120 per barrel to cover all of the costs it needs to cover. The costs that need to be covered include more items than an oil company would normally include in its costs estimates. The company needs to develop new fields to compensate for the ones that are being exhausted. It needs to pay interest on its debt. It also needs to pay dividends to its shareholders. In the case of shale producers, the price needs to be high enough that production outside of “sweet spots” can be carried on profitably.

    For oil exporters, it is especially important that the sales price be high enough so that the government of the oil exporting country can collect adequate tax revenue. Otherwise, the exporting country will not be able to maintain food subsidy programs that the population depends on and public works programs that provide jobs.

    [8] The world can add more debt, but it is difficult to see how the debt bubble that is created will really pull the world economy forward rapidly enough to keep the debt bubble from collapsing in the next year or two.

    Many models are based on the assumption that the economy can easily go back to the growth rate it had, prior to COVID-19. There are several reasons why this seems unlikely:

    • Many parts of the world economy weren’t really growing very rapidly prior to the pandemic. For example, shopping malls were doing poorly. Many airlines were in financial difficulty. Private passenger auto sales in China reached a peak in 2017 and have declined every year since.

    • At the low oil prices prior to the pandemic, many oil producers (including the US) would need to reduce their production. The 2019 peak in shale production (shown in Figure 7) may prove to be the peak in US oil production because of low prices.

    • Once people became accustomed to working from home, many of them really do not want to go back to a long commute.

    • It is not clear that the pandemic is really going away, now that we have kept it around this long. New mutations keep appearing. Vaccines aren’t 100% effective.

    • As I showed in Figure 5, adding more debt seems to be a very inefficient way of digging the economy out of a hole. What is really needed is a growing supply of oil that can be produced and sold profitably for less than $20 per barrel. Other types of energy need to be similarly inexpensive.

    I should note that intermittent wind and solar energy is not an adequate substitute for oil. It is not even an adequate substitute for “dispatchable” electricity production. It is simply an energy product that has been sufficiently subsidized that it can often make money for its producers. It also sounds good, if it is referred to as “clean energy.” Unfortunately, its true value is lower than its cost of production.

    [9] What’s Ahead?

    I expect that oil prices will rise a bit, but not enough to raise prices to the level producers require. Interest rates will continue to rise as governments around the world attempt more stimulus. With these higher interest rates and higher oil prices, businesses will do less and less well. This will slow the economy enough that debt defaults become a major problem. Within a few months to a year, the worldwide debt bubble will start to collapse, bringing oil prices down by more than 50%. Stock market prices and prices of buildings of all kinds will fall in inflation-adjusted dollars. Many bonds will prove to be worthless. There will be problems with empty shelves in stores and gasoline stations with no products to sell.

    People will start to see that while debt is a promise for the equivalent of future goods and services, it is not necessarily the case that those who make the promises will be able to stand behind these promises. Paper wealth generally can be expected to lose its value.

    I can imagine a situation, not too many years from now, when countries everywhere will establish new currencies that are not as easily interchangeable with other currencies as today’s currencies are. International trade will dramatically fall. The standard of living of most people will fall precipitously.

    I doubt that the new currencies will be electronic currencies. Keeping the electricity on is a difficult task in economies that increasingly need to rely solely on local resources. Electricity may be out for months at a time after an equipment failure or a storm. Having a currency that depends on electricity alone would be a poor idea.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 03/21/2021 – 21:30

  • Goldman's Clients Are Starting To Sweat The Coming Tax Hikes
    Goldman’s Clients Are Starting To Sweat The Coming Tax Hikes

    One week after Goldman’s clients were focused on capital markets, asking the bank’s chief equity strategist David Kostin if there were any cheap stocks left in a time of sudden bursts of volatility and not so sudden spikes in yields, in the past week they have voiced somewhat more pragmatic concerns, and while they “remain anxiously focused on interest rates and inflation as core PCE rises above 2%” in his latest Weekly Kickstart Kostin writes that “a looming macro issue is the next round of fiscal legislation, which will include corporate and personal tax hikes.

    In other words, having priced in all the good news from Biden’s mega stimulus, investors are finally starting to realize that all those trillions in spending will lead to (much) higher taxes.

    Here, as usual, Goldman tries to downplay the potential hit, writing that while “full implementation of candidate Biden’s tax plan would reduce S&P 500 EPS by 9%…. the eventual impact will depend on the specifics” and Goldman’s current 2022 EPS estimate assumes just a 3% drag from taxes.

    Some more details.

    One week after seemingly putting to rest fears that everything is massively overvalued – spoiler alert, it is…

    … Kostin writes that a looming macro focus for investors is the next round of fiscal legislation:

    The final $1.8 trillion American Rescue Plan ended up close to the $1.9 trillion size of President Biden’s original proposal. Although details of the administration’s next fiscal plan have not yet been released, our economists currently expect a package that will include at least $2 trillion in infrastructure spending and could reach $4 trillion if it also funds health care, education, and child care initiatives.

    The problem is that while the US could and probably should just issue a few more trillion in debt to fund the whole thing, Goldman notes that the next package will be paid for in part by higher tax rates, including on corporate earnings. Sure enough, the tax plan proposed by President Biden in his election campaign would raise the statutory corporate tax rate on domestic income from 21% to 28%, partially reversing the cut from a rate of 35% passed in the Trump tax cuts. The plan would also raise the tax rate on foreign income (also called the “GILTI” tax) and institute a minimum corporate tax rate.

    All of this will hit the corporate bottom line: Goldman estimates the Biden tax plan would reduce 2022 S&P 500 EPS by about 9%, however, the bank’s economists believe Congress will pass a smaller increase: its current $197 EPS estimate assumes the statutory rate rises to 25%, representing a 3% drag on earnings. That said, Kostin concedes that “a hike to a rate above 25% or the passage of other proposals like the GILTI tax hike would represent downside risk to our estimate.” Alternatively, hikes implemented with a phase-in period could spread the earnings hit across multiple years, but as usual investors will price the full impact as soon as it becomes clear.

    How to trade this

    Kostin notes that the relative winners and losers of the next fiscal package will depend on the specific provisions. For example, traditional infrastructure investment would benefit industrial and construction materials companies, while green investment would expand the winners to include renewable energy companies. With regard to corporate tax reform, increases to the domestic statutory rate would primarily affect companies with high domestic business exposure and effective rates close to the statutory rate, which were the primary beneficiaries of the 2017 tax cuts. In sector terms, this includes Financials, Industrials, and Consumer firms. In contrast, proposals like a minimum tax rate on foreign earnings pose the greatest risk to low-tax “growth” sectors like Info Tech and Health Care and would have a much smaller impact on domestic-facing sectors

    In addition to corporate rate hikes, Goldman economists note that higher capital gains taxes to be a key part of the next fiscal package. They predict the capital gains tax rate for top earners will be increased from 20%, although not all the way to the ordinary income rate as proposed by President Biden. And in a potentially ominous outcome for a market that is already redlining on steroids, Kostin warns that “past capital gains tax hikes have corresponded with reduced equity allocations, lower equity prices, and Momentum reversals. The good news is that all of those patterns were short-lived and reversed following the hikes, and Goldman expects that “any selling triggered by capital gains hikes late in 2021 would be similarly short-lived.”

    What about timing

    Goldman economists expect the White House will begin to outline its proposal in April and that legislation will eventually be passed around September.President Biden is scheduled to address Congress next month, when he will likely discuss his plan. Legislation should then be written in May and June, with passage likely ahead of the expiration of the five-year federal highway bill at the end of September. While parts of the infrastructure plan may be passed with bipartisan support, that the majority of the package will eventually pass through reconciliation and rely only on Democratic votes. Ultimately, Goldman’s EPS forecasts assume tax policy changes go into effect starting in 2022, so no retroactive adjustments to 2021.

    And while investors are becoming concerned about taxes in general, Goldman points out that even as equities are pricing in optimism around infrastructure spending, they should little concern about tax hikes.

    A Goldman Infrastructure basket (GSXUINFS) that primarily consists of Construction Materials, Machinery, and Construction & Engineering firms has returned 27% since the Georgia Senate runoff races in January, outperforming the Materials sector by 18% and the Industrials sector by 14%.

    This matches or exceeds the basket’s other periods of outperformance following President Trump’s 2016 election and various infrastructure proposals during his term. Meanwhile, a basket of Renewable Energy stocks has declined by 3% this year but gained 156% last year and has been particularly vulnerable to rising rates in recent weeks. In contrast, after trading closely with prediction market odds during the months ahead of the general election in November 2020, a pair of tax baskets containing the biggest winners and losers from the 2017 tax cuts has reversed and now appears to be pricing little risk of higher tax rates. Finally, screens of stocks facing potential risk from proposals like the GILTI tax hike have broadly performed in line with industry peers in recent months

    That said, Kostin does not rush into specific recos, conceding that a dearth of details makes it hard to model and trade on the potential earnings impact of legislation that hasn’t yet been outlined. Indeed, reform focused on a higher statutory domestic tax rate would have very different implications than a plan focused on a minimum tax. Curiously, Goldman notes that many investors still remain very skeptical that Democrats will hike taxes given the ongoing economic recovery and the recent policy focus on fiscal expansion. Amusingly, Kostin then implicitly suggests that Republicans are likely to retake control of Congress next year: “A repeated pattern of corporate tax reversals each time political control of Washington, D.C., changes hands should also reduce the degree to which investors price the long-term earnings impact of each new tax legislation.

    So between the lack of details and the political practicalities of any tax hike, Goldman concludes that “the market’s current focus on other macro issues like interest rates also makes it hard to justify trading on uncertain potential future tax hikes.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 03/21/2021 – 21:00

  • Trump Returning To Social Media With "His Own Platform" In Several Months: Adviser
    Trump Returning To Social Media With “His Own Platform” In Several Months: Adviser

    Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

    Former President Donald Trump will set up his own social media platform and will return to posting online in two to three months, said his adviser and spokesman, Jason Miller, in a new interview.

    For years, Trump favored Twitter and had amassed nearly 90 million followers before the social media platform suspended him in January. Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, Snapchat, and others also moved to suspend the former president—and at the same time, Trump hasn’t indicated that he would use other social media websites favored by conservatives such as Gab, MeWe, or Parler.

    Miller told Fox News on Sunday he expects Trump will “[return] to social media in two or three months” with “his own platform” that will “completely redefine the game” and attract “tens of millions” of users.

    https://video.foxnews.com/v/embed.js?id=6242421322001&w=466&h=263Watch the latest video at foxnews.com

    Miller, who is Trump’s most prominent spokesman, did not elaborate on details or a possible name for the social media venture.

    Since Twitter suspended his account, the former president has instead opted to release press statements via advisers and email. For the most part, he has released statements endorsing his favored political candidates for the 2022 midterm elections.

    Also in the interview, Miller said that Trump still holds a considerable amount of sway in the Republican Party.

    “He’s already had over 20 senators, over 50 members of Congress call … or make the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago,” he said. “Pay attention to Georgia on Monday,” as there is a “big endorsement coming.”

    In an interview last month, Trump said he is “negotiating with a number of people, and there’s also the other option of building your own [social media] site.” He added, “Because we have more people than anybody. I mean you can literally build your own site.”

    “I really wanted to be somewhat quiet. They wanted me very much on Parler, you know they had a phony report that the man who was in there didn’t—I mean just the opposite, they really wanted me on Parler,” Trump continued.

    The former commander-in-chief speculated that Parler would not be able to handle the amount of traffic he would bring to the website. “Mechanically, they can’t handle” the number of users, Trump noted in the interview.

    The former president provided a lengthy interview last week, saying that he’s not sure whether he will run for president again in 2024.

    “First thing is for us, we have to see what we could do with the House,” Trump said. “I think we have a very good chance at taking back the House. We were going to lose 15-25 seats the last time, [until] I got involved. I worked very hard.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 03/21/2021 – 20:35

  • Owned: A Tale of Two Americas
    Owned: A Tale of Two Americas

    If you’ve been searching for a documentary that breaks down the housing market historically – well, we might have found one on Amazon Prime Video titled “Owned: A Tale of Two Americas.” 

    The 83-minute documentary unearths the complex and often troubling history of house policies in the US in a post–World War II era. It covers a lot of ground, such as the federal government’s housing policies that have, for decades, contribute to current racial/wealthy inequalities. 

    This is a bold attempt to address racial, cultural, socio-economic factors in one way to describe today’s record wealth inequalities

    Here’s a synopsis of the documentary: 

    The United States’ postwar housing policy created the world’s largest middle class. It also set America on two divergent paths — one of imagined wealth, propped up by speculation and endless booms-and-busts, and the other in systematically defunded, segregated communities, where the American dream feels hopelessly out of reach.

    Some ten years after the last housing collapse and well into a perceived upswing, the election of Donald Trump and urban uprisings in places like Baltimore suggest that there’s a far more fundamental problem with housing policy in America. And we haven’t even begun to recover.

    Owned is a incisive look into the dark history behind the US housing economy. Tracking its overtly racist beginnings to its unbridled commoditization, the doc exposes a foundational story few Americans understand as their own

    “Home ownership to me means freedom—strictly. The more and more I evaluate this world, the more and more I understand: when you don’t own anything, you are nothing.” That’s how Greg Butler, a young black house flipper, sums up his view of the American dream.

    In 2008, the US housing market became the epicenter of an unprecedented global economic collapse. In the years since, protests in cities like Baltimore have highlighted the stark racial disparities that define many American cities. The crash of suburbia and urban unrest are not unrelated — they are two sides of the same coin, two divergent paths set in motion by the United States’ post-war housing policy.

    The prevailing narrative is that the migration from American cities that began in the 1950s, often referred to as “white flight,” was caused by the degradation of city centers and the growth of suburbia. But this was neither a matter of preference, nor a natural selfsegregation

    After World War II, the US government sought to provide housing for returning veterans and their families, while enabling them to build wealth through homeownership. Postwar policies spurred a decadeslong construction boom and enabled millions of Americans to buy homes — and they benefited white people exclusively. So racial segregation determined how communities grew. Government policies directly subsidized white America, while denying opportunities to black people and other minorities

    Here’s a statement from Giorgio Angelini, the director of the documentary: 

    This film began for me in graduate school while studying architecture at Rice University. It was in the depths of the 2008 real estate collapse that I began questioning what recovery really looked like.

    In searching for a story, I was awarded a travel grant to photograph the abandoned McMansions that proliferated the mountainous desert landscape of Inland Empire, California. What I ultimately encountered was an environment far more perverse and disturbing than I had initially anticipated. Thousands of square miles, once replete with thriving orange groves, had burnt down to make way for a new commodity—conditioned square footage. But with access to cheap money no longer available, the charred remains of orange groves sat alongside these half-built McMansions. Commodities in limbo—their Tyvek wrap flapping in the wind. It was clear there was a larger story at play.

    It’s been nearly ten years since the crisis began. And for many folks, the perception is that we’ve moved on. We’ve “recovered.” What this documentary project proposes, however, is that recovery is an illusion. We have not fixed the housing economy. And in fact, much of the underlying, endemic problems surrounding housing policy have only been compounded.

    The election of Donald Trump and the uprisings in places like Baltimore are two sides of the same disgruntled coin: a housing policy wildly anachronistic for today’s time. It’s a housing market that disproportionately benefits an increasingly sheltered class of wealth, while keeping the rest of the population in a permanent state of economic anxiety.

    Housing is everything. It dictates where we go to school, our probability to move up socio- economically. It defines who we interact with and how we raise our children. And we have done very little to change the system.

    There has been no recovery. And the sooner we recognize this, the sooner we can hopefully have a real conversation about how we can build a new system. One that helps to rebuild a middle class decimated by globalization. One that extends government support to people of all races. And one that sees home as a right rather than as a commodity.

    Here’s the trailer of Owned: A Tale of Two Americas.

    To watch the full documentary click here

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 03/21/2021 – 20:10

  • Morgan Stanley: This Cycle Will Burn "Hotter And Shorter" So Start Thinking About Rotating Out Of Early-Cycle Winners
    Morgan Stanley: This Cycle Will Burn “Hotter And Shorter” So Start Thinking About Rotating Out Of Early-Cycle Winners

    By Andrew Sheets, Chief Cross-Asset Strategist for Morgan Stanley

    A Shorter Cycle

    Our experience informs our beliefs. The last four US economic expansions have been unusually long, ranked by the NBER as the first, second, third and sixth longest among 34 business cycles over the last 164 years. We think that the current cycle could burn hotter and shorter, with important implications for investment strategy.

    This discussion needs to start with an obvious question: Is this even a ‘new’ cycle? COVID-19 brought the global economy to a sudden stop, while an aggressive policy response drove a rapid recovery. Some investors argue that both were so fast that conditions never ‘reset’ in the way they usually do during recessions.

    All cycles have their quirks. The last three US recessions were adjacent to: 1) The largest equity bubble in history; 2) The largest financial crisis since the Great Depression; and 3) A global pandemic. If you’re looking for a ‘normal’ recession, good luck!

    Surprisingly, as different as these three recessions were, they were all preceded by similar phenomena. All three saw an inverted yield curve within ~6 months before they started. All three followed a Fed hiking cycle and core CPI above 2.4%Y. All three were preceded by high consumer confidence, low unemployment and declining equity market breadth.

    Those are an awful lot of similarities. And they carry through to the recovery. Since the lows of activity in April 2020, ‘normal’ early-cycle investment strategies have worked very well. Corporate default rates have been similar to other recessions when measured on a rolling two-year basis. If it walks like a new cycle and talks like a new cycle, we think that investors should treat it like a new cycle.

    Yet while this cycle has so far followed many ‘normal’ patterns, its evolution could be unique. For several reasons, in the US and globally, this cycle could burn unusually hot.

    • The first is stimulus. The global economy is seeing record levels of fiscal and monetary stimulus at the same time. ‘Unprecedented’ is an overused word in our business, but this cycle qualifies and is unique among other post-recessionary periods.

    • The second is savings. Savings rates stand at historical highs in the US, Europe and China. While the distribution of these savings is uneven, they provide substantial fuel for consumption. Corporate cash balances are also elevated, a buffer against COVID-19 uncertainty that could find its way into spending as confidence returns.

    • Third is the labor market. Our economists note that the majority of recent job losses were in COVID-19-related sectors. If the economy can reopen safely, it seems reasonable that we could see an unusually fast labour normalization as these sectors come back.

    • Finally, there is the future path of policy. Global central banks are signalling a strong commitment to supporting growth and returning inflation to more normal levels. Governments are showing little desire to eventually raise taxes or cut spending. Both stances suggest a hotter cycle, less likely to be restrained by policy tightening than the previous expansions.

    For all these reasons, our economists think that growth and inflation will exceed expectations over the next two years. But just like in the cosmos, what burns hotter may also burn shorter. Unlike the long expansions that defined the last 40 years, this one might look more similar to the late 1940s or 1950s.

    Short cycles can still mean good growth and multi-year expansions. The Roaring Twenties saw recessions in 1920, 1923 and 1926 (and, of course, 1929). The US economy grew at an enviable 4% rate between 1947 and 1960, despite recessions in 1948, 1953, 1957 and 1960. Each expansion lasted at least three years.

    But this does mean that investors need to be more nimble. Different investments work in different parts of the economic cycle. If this cycle burns hotter and shorter, we need to start thinking about rotating out of early-cycle winners.

    Where should we look? US small-cap versus large-cap equities, copper versus gold and corporate credit are all strategies that we’ve liked given historically strong performance following recessions. But all do less well as the cycle extends. My colleague Michael Wilson recently downgraded US small caps (see US Equity Strategy: Weekly Warm-up: The Cycle vs Liquidity; Downgrading Small Caps; Earnings > Multiple, March 15, 2021), an example of how we are looking to exit some early-cycle strategies.

    Sector and regional leadership can also vary significantly as the cycle progresses. Emerging market equities historically do best following a recession, but then lag. Stocks in Europe and Japan have done better as the economy matures.

    Will conditions run too hot? One metric I’m following closely is the US breakeven expectations curve. At the moment, it is reflecting a modest overshoot of inflation over the next 2-5 years…

    … followed by lower levels of inflation thereafter. That would appear to be exactly what the Fed hopes to deliver, wrapped up neatly with a nice little bow.

    As long as that curve remains inverted, the market is signalling that inflationary pressure will be transitory, and there is little need for central banks to sharply change tack. Maybe this is correct. Maybe it is an example of expectations being driven by recent experience. Either way, it’s an important dynamic to watch.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 03/21/2021 – 19:45

  • Venezuela Says Massive Blast Hit Natgas Pipeline In 'Terrorist Attack'
    Venezuela Says Massive Blast Hit Natgas Pipeline In ‘Terrorist Attack’

    A massive explosion rocked a gas pipeline in eastern Venezuela Saturday afternoon, according to a report from state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), seen by Reuters

    The blast occurred at a 36-inch pipeline providing natural gas to the Pigap II gas reinjection plant in northern Monagas. PDVSA had to shutter operations at the facility to extinguish flames and evaluate damages. 

    Oil Minister Tareck El Aissami announced on state television Saturday evening that the incident was considered a “terrorist attack.” He provided no evidence about such claims. 

    “This terrorist action has affected the operations center in El Tejero that serves as a gas injection plant, and, thank God, no casualties are reported from this attack,” El Aissami said.

    Video footage shared on Twitter shows the pipeline’s initial explosion unleashed a massive column of fire into the sky. 

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

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

    El Aissami also said the blast was part of a series of “criminal attacks” with the intent to disrupt PDVSA operations. Again, the oil minister made accusations but did not name any group or country.

    Venezuela has the world’s largest crude oil reserves, but production has been crushed by economic collapse. Its production stands around 550,000 b/d in February, according to the latest S&P Global Platts survey.

    President Nicolas Maduro has repeatedly blamed the US for organizing attacks on energy facilities in the oil-rich country. 

    Two months into the Biden administration, the White House continues to recognize Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido as president of Venezuela, despite Nicolás Maduro clearly being the socialist country’s actual leader.

    It remains to be seen if the pipeline explosion was a “terrorist” attack as Venezuelan officials have yet to present evidence – but there is concern that the Biden administration will continue to carry on former President Trump’s harsh policies against Maduro. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 03/21/2021 – 19:20

  • Trump Rages Over "Huge Cover-Up" At The Border As Biden Starts Releasing Illegals Without Court Date
    Trump Rages Over “Huge Cover-Up” At The Border As Biden Starts Releasing Illegals Without Court Date

    After the Biden administration began blaming the border crisis on former President Trump leaving them with a ‘dismantled’ immigration system, Trump hit back in a Sunday statement claiming that he “proudly handed the Biden Administration the most secure border in history,” adding “All they had to do was keep this smooth-running system on autopilot.”

    “Instead, in the span of just a few weeks, the Biden Administration has turned a national triumph into a national disaster. They are in way over their heads and taking on water fast.

    Trump then turned his attention to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas – who went on several news networks Sunday morning claiming that “the border is closed.” Mayorkas’ performance was “pathetic,” “clueless,” and a “national disgrace.”

    “His self-satisfied presentation – in the middle of a massive crisis he helped engineer – is yet more proof he is incapable of leading DHS. Even someone of Mayorkas’ limited abilities should understand that if you provide Catch-and-Release to the world’s illegal aliens then the whole world will com.”

    Trump then slammed Mayorkas for a “Gag Order on our Nation’s heroic border agents and ICE officers,” which the former president said should be the subject of an immediate congressional investigation.

    “But it’s clear they are engaged in a huge cover-up to hide just how bad things truly are,” Trump continued.

    Trump then suggested that the Biden administration should “immediately complete the wall, which can be done in a matter of weeks,” adding “they never should have stopped it” and are “causing death and human tragedy.”

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

    Trump’s statement came minutes after Fox News reported that Biden’s border agents in the Texas Rio Grande Valley are releasing illegal migrants into the United States without a court date.

    Multiple Border Patrol agents confirmed the new process to Fox News, revealing that they have been directed to use prosecutorial discretion (PD) to forgo the hours-long process of paperwork required to issue an NTA amid the surge of migrants at the border.

    Instead, migrants are registered into the system with biometrical data taken and largely released into the public – in one instance – at a bus station in McAllen, TX. The processing is being done mostly at a temporary outdoor processing site. Border Patrol agents emphasized that this does not apply to unaccompanied children. –Fox News

    A senior source with Customs and Border Protection told Fox News on Saturday that immigration officials are resorting to this type of catch-and-release because the border crisis “has become so dire that BP [Border Patrol] has no choice but to release people nearly immediately after apprehension because there is no space to hold people even to do necessary NTA paperwork.”

    The immediate catch-and-release does not apply to child migrants – 15,500 of which have been sitting in ‘cages’ built by the Obama-Biden administration – many beyond the legally allowed 72-hour limit.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 03/21/2021 – 18:54

  • Dalio Wants You To Swap Treasuries For Chinese Debt
    Dalio Wants You To Swap Treasuries For Chinese Debt

    By Ye Xie, Bloomberg macro commentator and analyst

    Three things we learned last week:

    1. It seems like everyone loves Chinese bonds now.

    China’s bonds have shown incredible stability during the global debt selloff. Yields on 10-year Chinese bonds fell 3 bps over the past month, while the U.S. rates surged 39 bps. Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio noted last week that investors dumping U.S. Treasuries for Chinese bonds is part of a “classic” historical cycle where capital markets of a rising “empire” challenge the existing superpower.

    The current environment where central banks and other international investors hold more than a third of their bond portfolio in U.S. Treasuries and just 6% in Chinese bonds is inconsistent with the relative economic positions of the two countries, according to Dalio.

    “Their overweighted position in U.S. bonds is largely because of the ‘exorbitant privilege’ the U.S. has had being the world’s leading reserve currency, which has allowed the U.S. to overborrow for decades,” Dalio wrote on LinkedIn. “As part of this cycle, there is the emergence of the currency and capital markets of the rising and competing empire. Consistent with this classic cycle there is now a shifting from U.S. bonds to Chinese bonds going on.”

    2. The Alaska meeting is a microcosm of the cycle of competing empires.

    The bickering at the first high-level talks between the U.S. and China since Biden took office underscores the deep divide between the two countries. An optimist might argue that the public squabble may turn out to be a good thing as it resets the expectations and allows both sides to be more pragmatic and realistic about what they can achieve. “Despite the spat, is there a second path other than to learn to co-exist in this fierce power struggle?” said Hu Xijin,chief editor at the Global Times. Climate change, Covid-19, and cybersecurity are among the low-hanging fruits for co-operation, said Gabriel Wildau, a China analyst at Teneo, a consultant firm.

    3. Central banks are starting to diverge.

    Russia, Turkey and Brazil raised interest rates last week to cool inflation. Norway’s central bank expects to start raising rates in the “latter half” of this year, putting it on path to be the first in the rich world to tighten policies. In contrast, the Fed signaled it may keep rates unchanged through 2023, even as it expects inflation to exceed its target. The Bank of Japan widened the range of bond yields it targets to gain flexibility.

    The policy divergence has been the missing ingredient for higher currency volatility. It looks like we are getting some.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 03/21/2021 – 18:30

  • Bitcoin ATMs Are Landing At Gas Stations, Delis And Convenience Stores Near You
    Bitcoin ATMs Are Landing At Gas Stations, Delis And Convenience Stores Near You

    The trend of Bitcoin ATMs has already started in some delis and gas stations in places like Montana, the Carolinas and New York City.

    Companies like CoinFlip and Coin Cloud have installed “thousands” of the ATMs across the country, according to Reuters. Coin Cloud has 1,470 machines around the United States and is aiming for 10,000 by the end of 2021. 

    Quad Coin founder Mark Shoiket said: “I just assumed there was demand and people wanted bitcoin everywhere.” He just recently flew to Montana to find 7 new places to install bitcoin ATMs, including a local vape shop.  

    There’s currently 28,185 bitcoin ATMs in the United States. About 10,000 of those have popped up over the last 5 months, the report notes. Some people use the ATMs because they sometimes feel more comfortable interacting with a physical machine, while others do it for anonymity purposes. Fees can range from 6% up to 20% of a total transaction. 

    There’s now Bitcoin ATMs in every state except Alaska. 

    51 year old Pittsburgh resident Rebecca White said: “When we do our grocery shopping and we have $60 left, I will stop at the bitcoin ATM.”

    Pamela Clegg, director of financial investigations and education at cryptocurrency compliance firm CipherTrace, said: “The growth of the ATM market – it is not even a gentle increase, it is almost a 45% increase. The growth is quite astonishing.”

    But regulators have been watching the pop-up of the machines closely. The New Jersey State Commission of Investigation, for example, recently published a report called “Scams, Suspicious Transactions and Questionable Practices at Cryptocurrency Kiosks.”

    Coin Cloud CEO Chris McAlary said: “We expected the worst as Covid hit, but stimulus payments came out and that helped quite a bit. Some people took stimulus and bought digital currency with it.”

    CoinFlip CEO Daniel Polotsky said: “There are people who don’t have bank accounts or don’t like to use them.”

    Bitcoin Depot, from Atlanta, has also grown its number of ATMs from 500 to more than 1,800 in the past year. Customers are mostly “25-40 years old”. General Bytes, a Bitcoin ATM manufacturer, said that demand “soared” and the company ran out of stock last year.

    They sold 3,000 machines last year. 90% of those machines went to North America, the report says. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 03/21/2021 – 18:00

  • Another Mega Short Squeeze On Deck
    Another Mega Short Squeeze On Deck

    At the end of the first week of March which saw an eruption in violent market turbulence in the aftermath of the sharp spike in bond yields and the catastrophic 7Y auction …

    … we pointed out an observation from Goldman’s Prime Broker desk, which noted that halfway through the week, Goldman traders saw the “largest global short sales since May” with the GS Prime book was net sold yesterday (-0.9 SDs vs. the average daily net flow of the past year), driven by short sales outpacing long buys 1.7 to 1.” In fact, the mid-week puke wasn’t so much selling as short-selling, as “modest net selling (-0.5 SDs) was driven by short sales outpacing long buys 1.5 to 1.”

    This prompted us to predict that what was coming would be a “mega squeeze” in stocks.

    Sure enough just a few days later, on March 10, when stocks did explode higher in the second week of March, Goldman’s Prime Brokerage Service observed that Tuesday’s eruption was the result of “risk unwind in Macro Products vs. large net buying in Single Names” led by TMT and Consumer Disc stocks, with the Goldman Prime book net bought for a fifth straight day in which “trading flows were risk-off with short covers outpacing long sales 4 to 1.”  And just to make sure there is no confusion, Goldman prime said that “yesterday’s de-grossing activity – short covers and long sales combined – was the largest since late January (-2.0 SDs).

    Furthermore, Bloomberg added that short covering in unprofitable tech firms helped the group halt seven straight days of selling and score the third-biggest net buying of the year. In fact, in the first two days of that week, Goldman basket of the most-shorted tech stocks soared 7%, more than double the return of the Russell 3000.

    Commenting on the move, Andrew Brenner, the head of international fixed-income at NatAlliance Securities in New York told Bloomberg that “we see yesterday’s move as short covering without legs.” Ok fine, but tell that to any Nasdaq shorts whose legs – and everything else – was steamrolled in the historic move higher.

    We concluded our post by saying that “with the latest iteration of shorts now out of the picture, it’s time for a new cohort of bears to take their place, and we wouldn’t be surprised if we see renewed weakness in the Nasdaq as a flood of new shorts hammers the tech index only to then suffer another massive squeeze and so on, rinse, repeat.”

    Well, one again that is indeed what happened because while the Nasdaq did move sharply higher for a few days, it closed on Friday precisely at the March 10 short squeeze high as every squeeze higher has been met with a fresh burst of shorting.

    We bring all this up because we now have the latest Goldman Prime data and – drumroll – we appear to be headed for another mega squeeze!

    As Goldman’s hedge fund client-facing desk wrote after the close on Friday, in a reversal of last week’s buying activity, “the GS Prime book saw the largest $ net selling since Dec ‘18 (-2.5 SDs), driven by short sales and long sales (3 to 1).” The bank then reveals that all regions and sectors saw increased shorting on the week with “Single Names/Macro Products were both net sold and made up 70%/30% of the $ net selling. With the exception of Asia which was net bought driven by long buying in Japan, all regions were net sold led by North America and Europe.” Finally, broken down by industry, “10 of 11 global sectors were net sold led by Consumer Disc, Comm Svcs, Info Tech, and Materials, while Financials was the only net bought sector.”

    But what is most notable is that like two weeks ago, Goldman Prime reveals that “the largest net selling in US TMT Mega Caps since Mar ’20 driven by short sales” and the aggregate long/short ratio (MV) in FAAMG dropped -34% week/week on the GS Prime book to 10.41, which is the lowest level since Mar ’20 and in the 19th percentile vs. the past five years.

    One final – and perhaps remarkable observation in light of the juggernaut that FAAMG had been for much of 2020 – the TMT Mega Caps (FAAMGs) collectively now make up 13.5% of the overall US net exposure in Single Names, down from 13.9% at the end of last week and 14.6% at the start of this year, according to GS Prime. The current level is in the 16th percentile vs. the past year and in the 55th percentile vs. the past five years. In short: traders are rapidly rotating away from the best performing sector of 2020.

    Adding insult to injury the latest Goldman Prime data also shows that hedge funds haven’t generated any net alpha since the start of 2020 (!) for one simple reason: while the longs are modestly in the green, it is the collective shorts that keep steamrolling the “2 and 20” space, and every time hedge fund layer on shorts, an initial spike in covering leads to a furious cascade of closing out of bearish positions perhaps as a result of the market’s muscle memory where every attempt to go short has lead to pain and suffering for the bears leading to the lowest marketwide net short in history!

    What does all this mean? Well, as a result of last week’s aggressive attempt to pile on shorts – the most since Dec 2018 when stocks collapsed due to Powell’s final rate hike which was seen as a huge policy mistake – we are once again facing the threat of a massive short squeeze, one exacerbated by the fact that hedge funds are now once again red for the year, as shown by the black line below…

    … making them extremely jittery and likely to close out any potentially devastating shorts at the sign of even the faintest of bullish catalysts. Well, with not one, not two but three appearances by Fed Chair Powell this week, all eager to make up for his latest FOMC fiasco that sent yields to fresh 2021 highs, there will be ample triggers for another face-ripping squeeze in the week ahead, and we are confident that in just a few days we will be once again discussing the latest “mega squeeze” leading to another historic market meltup with the full blessing of the Federal Reserve.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 03/21/2021 – 17:41

  • "White Supremacist Thinking": San Fran School Board VP Under Fire For Allegedly Anti-Asian Tweets
    “White Supremacist Thinking”: San Fran School Board VP Under Fire For Allegedly Anti-Asian Tweets

    Authored by Jonathan Turley,

    We previously discussed the controversial position of Alison Collins, Vice President of the San Francisco school board, in her campaign against meritocracy and effort to shut down the gifted programs at Lowell High School. 

    The Asian community was particularly opposed to Collins’ efforts since Asian students composed 29 percent of the students but 51 percent of the Lowell student body. Now Collins is under fire for prior tweets attacking Asians as promoting “the ‘model minority’ BS” and of using “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’”

    These do not appear recent tweets but their content is obviously insulting for any Asian American. The Yahoo News story included such tweets as accusing “many Asian American Ts, Ss, and Ps” — teachers, students, and parents — of promoting “the ‘model minority’ BS” and of using “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’” It also include a demand to know “[w]here are the vocal Asians speaking up against Trump?” and statements on how Asians are deluding themselves by not speaking out against former president Donald Trump: “Don’t Asian Americans know they are on his list as well?” Collins continued. “Do they think they won’t be deported? profiled? beaten? Being a house n****r is still being a n****r. You’re still considered “the help.”

    While the use of the censored version of the “n word” has led to calls to terminate academics, I do not believe that such objections are fair in this or the prior cases. Indeed, this controversy should not take away from the campaign against meritocracy and the effort to eliminate programs for advanced or gifted students in the public school system. As I have previously discussed, I long been a supporter of public schools.  These advanced programs are needed to maintain a broad, diverse, and vibrant school systems for cities like San Francisco.

    Race politics seems a focus on every level in the school system, even in the regulation of student elections. Likewise, the controversy in San Francisco follows another controversy in Los Angeles where United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) Cecily Myart-Cruz has also criticized “Middle Eastern” parents in joining “white parents” in seeking school re-openings.  The UTLA was criticized after Maryam Qudrat, a mother of Middle Eastern descent, was asked by the UTLA to identify her race after criticizing the union’s opposition to reopening schools despite overwhelming science that it is safe. This effort to racially classify critics of the teachers followed Myart-Cruz attacking critics by referring to their race:

    “Some voices are being allowed to speak louder than others. We have to call out the privilege behind the largely White wealthy parents driving the push for a rushed return. Their experience of this pandemic is not our students’ families’ experiences.”

    The remarks of school board and teacher union officials clearly fuel racial tensions and divisions at at time when the public schools are facing enormous challenges. For Asian families (constituting roughly a third of the families in the San Fran school system), the remarks of Collins are legitimately unsettling as they fight for the educational advancement of their children. It is precisely the opposite of what most of us seek in our public school systems as a synthesis of different cultures and races. While districts like San Francisco prioritized renaming schools in the middle of a pandemic (until recently being forced to suspend the effort), families simply want to maintain an educational system with a focus on academic excellence and advancement.

    As I have previously discussed, many of us still believe in a diverse and thriving public school system. Growing up in Chicago during the massive flight of white families from the public school system, I remained in public schools for much of my early education. My parents organized a group to convince affluent families remain in the system. They feared that, once such families left, the public schools would not only lose diversity but political clout and support. They also wanted their kids to benefit from such diversity. My wife and I also believe in that cause and we have kept our four kids in public schools through to college.  We believe public education plays a key role in our national identity and civics. They shape our next generation of citizens.  My children have benefitted greatly from public schools and the many caring and gifted teachers who have taught them through the years.

    I hope that San Francisco parents of all races can prevail in seeking to refocus the school system on educational advancement. We have too much at stake for our kids and our country if parents allow this type of reckless and insulting rhetoric to lead them to abandon our public school systems.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 03/21/2021 – 17:30

  • Lira Crashes, Turkey CDS Soar As Erdogan Launches Another Epic Crisis
    Lira Crashes, Turkey CDS Soar As Erdogan Launches Another Epic Crisis

    Turkey has become the sovereign equivalent of a Swiss Watch: every 6 months or so Turkey has a brand new crisis, and the latest one arrived late on Friday when just days after the Turkish Central Bank hiked rates by 200bps, double the consensus expectation (a move which we correctly predicted would provoke Erdogan “to replace yet another CBRT governor”), Erdogan indeed announced that CBRT governor Naci Agbal – who was on the job just over 3 months after his November 2020 appointment – would be fired and replaced with some political zealot named Sahap Kavcioglu, whose only claim to fame is believing in the ludicrous and farcical concept of Erdoganomics where lower rates somehow magically lead to lower inflation. He is also the country’s fourth central bank governor in the last two years.

    Sadly for Erdogan (and Turkey’s population) that’s not how the real world works and now that Turkey’s attempt to tighten and contain inflation by cutting rates inflation is about to explode in one of the most important Developing Markets; but what’s worse for international investors – who once again took a gamble on Turkey and lost – is that Erdogan just single-handedly crushed what little credibility the country’s central bank had built up in recent months and in early Asian trading, the Turkish Lira cratered as much as 17%, wiping out 5 months of progress, with the USDTRY soaring as high as 8.42, up some 120 pips its Friday close of 7.2185.

    The currency was quoted at 8.2621 per dollar as of 4pm ET, the weakest since November just before Agbal was appointed in the midst of an aggressive rate hike cycle, one which will now rapidly reverse as the new top central banker cuts rates in response to the country’s soaring inflation.

    Erdogan’s decision to fire Governor Naci Agbal, who had sought to restore the central bank’s credibility, is a blow to investor confidence and raises concern the country will once again embark on a path of rock-bottom rates.

    According to Bloomberg, “the initial backlash exceeded some analysts’ estimates” – but not ours – “and marks a swift reversal of investor enthusiasm toward Turkish markets.” Ironically, headed into today, the lira had been the best carry-trade currency of the year, outperforming every other EM as money managers cheered Agbal’s move to raise interest rates and efforts to bring inflation under control.”

    However, as we also correctly said last Thursday, Agbal, “was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t: on one hand the lira was plunging angering Erdogan, so he had to stabilize it… on the other the only way to do so was by hiking rates, which would anger Erdogan even more.”

    In the end, Agbal’s tightening proved too much for Erdogan to handle, and now comes the real pain.

    “Capital will flow out on Monday and the CBRT has limited resources left to protect the lira,” according to Per Hammarlund, chief EM strategist at SEB AB in Stockholm, referring to the central bank. “A hawkish central-bank governor cannot be replaced by a dovish governor without markets expecting a shift in policy. The circumstances of Agbal’s dismissal coming two days after a rate hike will produce an even sharper shift in investor expectations.

    Let this be (another) lesson to all real money accounts: if you invest in banana republics, be prepared to lose all your money and get nothing more than a banana in return (if you’re lucky).

    Agbal’s replacement, Kavcioglu, pledged on Sunday to use monetary-policy tools effectively to deliver permanent price stability… translation: he will do whatever Erdogan tells him, which considering the Turkish president’s eccentric views on monetary policy means that Turkey may have NIRP soon alongside 100% inflation. And speaking of, any weakness in the lira could add to inflationary pressures building in the economy and erode Turkey’s real rate, currently the highest in emerging markets after Egypt’s.

    Commenting on the chaos in Turkey, Bloomberg chief EM economst Ziad Daoud, said that “the hit to the central bank’s credibility and independence can’t be overstated. Erdogan has battered the institution with interventions that have repeatedly backfired. Financial markets were willing to give Agbal a chance, his successor will find it hard to build that trust again.”

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    “We must conclude, for now, that Kavcioglu will be mandated with reducing and keeping rates as low as possible,” Cristian Maggio, head of emerging markets at TD Securities in London, correctly predicted. “If this hypothesis proves true, not only will we see a looser policy setting in Turkey in the coming months, but we will also likely experience a return to managing policy through unorthodox measures.”

    That’s just part of it: now that one of the largest DMs has lost all central bank credibility, what is a currency crisis can quickly mutated into a full-blown sovereign debt crisis, and the latest blowing out CDS prints confirm this:

    • TURKEY 5Y CDS 410/455 +125

    A reason for the panicked response, one which brings back flashbacks to the Asian debt crisis of 1997…

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    … is that Turkey is now effectively without FX reserves and has virtually no way to short-circuit the current puke. Last year, Turkish banks spent more than $100 billion of the nation’s foreign reserves to support the sinking currency, according to a Goldman report (full report below). That prompted calls by Turkish opposition for a judicial probe into the nation’s official reserves.

    In comparison, always oblivious foreign investors who are confident that central bankers will always save them, purchased a net $4.7 billion worth of Turkish stocks and bonds in the months following Agbal’s appointment. Overseas inflows to Turkey through swaps were about $14 billion during that period, Istanbul-based economist Haluk Burumcekci said. All that money is about to be pulled now amid the sheer chaos.

    Among those who may find themselves on the wrong side of the trade are Japanese retail investors, according to Bloomberg, i.e., Mrs Watanabe. Long positions by individuals in lira-yen stood at 263,585 contracts as of Friday. They’ve climbed about 9% since the start of the year.

    “We will never know how successful Agbal’s approach could have been, but initial signs were positive,” said Emre Akcakmak, a portfolio adviser at East Capital in Dubai, who anticipated challenges to intensify in the near future and a reversal on some of the recent and large hot money inflows in the face of the unexpected decision. “Even when the market stabilizes after a while, investors will have little tolerance, if any, in case the new governor prematurely cuts the rates again,” Akcakmak said.

    Meanwhile, those hoping for guidance from all those who were bullish on the lira, like Goldman with its 6.20 price target, are advised to keep a low profile: as Goldman says in a note published earlier today, “our EM/FX strategy team are putting their forecasts for USD/TRY under review, with significant risks of a near-term discontinuous move weaker in the Lira.”

    That’s a big of an understatement by a bank whose advise just cost its clients massive losses.

    Then again, in a world as insane and upside down as this one, it just may be that Erdogan will have the final laugh, and Turkish inflation will indeed tumble as the CBRT cuts rates as low as possible, perhaps even dipping negative eventually.

    * * *

    Below we have excerpted Goldman’s full note, “Turkey: President Erdogan Appoints Sahap Kavcioglu as New TCMB Governor”

    • Kavcioglu has been appointed as the new Governor with a presidential decisionpublished in the Official Gazette on Friday, March 19.
    • This is the third time a TCMB Governor has been replaced in the last two years, following the removal of Murat Cetinkaya from his post in July 2019 and the removal of Murat Uysal from his post in November 2020.
    • The decision came after a hawkish 200bp policy rate hike by the TCMB on Thursday (March 18). That said, it may be part of a more fundamental repositioning of policy as it follows changes in the senior leadership in the Turkish Statistical Institute and the Sovereign Wealth Fund in the last few weeks. In addition, Turkey’s chief prosecutor launched a lawsuit on Wednesday (March 17), seeking closure of the HDP, one of the three main opposition parties, supported by large parts of the Kurdish population. Turkey pulled out of the IstanbulConvention (The Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and CombatingViolence Against Women and Domestic Violence) with another presidentialdecision also published in the Official Gazette on Friday, March 19.
    • Governor Kavcioglu published a statement today, noting that the TCMB “will continue to use the monetary policy tools effectively in line with its main objective of achieving a permanent fall in inflation” to foster macro economicstability and sustainable growth. The statement also noted that the MPC meetings will be held as previously scheduled. Hence, the next meeting should take place on 15 April.
    • Although significant uncertainty remains around how monetary policy will change following this appointment, we do have some sense of Governor Kavcioglu’s economic views as he has written numerous columns on topics such as interest rates, the Turkish Lira and the use of reserves (see here and here, only available in Turkish). Governor Kavcioglu wrote in his column on February 9that monetary policy should not insist on a high policy rate and that higher rateswill indirectly lead to inflation. Governor Kavcioglu also believes that the TRY has been kept too strong in recent years by offering high rates, undermining economic competitiveness. Given these and similar comments, it is likely that markets will question the TCMB’s forward guidance of keeping the monetary stance tight for a prolonged period, and the TRY may come under pressure. Local banks are already quoting to buy TRY at 7.70-7.80 vs the USD in the retail market over the weekend, up from 7.23 in the spot market on Friday.
    • Given the stated dovish views of Governor Kavcioglu, the risks are now for a much more front-loaded cutting cycle than our forecast of a first rate cut only in Q4. Nevertheless, we think that the potential impact of this decision on central bank credibility and on the currency is likely to limit any dovish move in the near term. More broadly, we think inflation will remain a constraint on how early and fast rate cuts can take place. We expect inflation to fall to just 12.5%yoy by the end of the year, significantly above the TCMB’s estimate of 9.4%yoy. Any premature rate cut would also add to inflationary pressures, in our view.
    • There have been significant capital inflows from mid-November, following the appointment of Naci Agbal. Nonresident inflows into local government debt and equity amounted to US$4.0bn and US$0.7bn, respectively. It is likely that the flows into Lira due to swaps were larger. We do not have a time series on this specifically but a growing off-balance-sheet position of banks against declining TCMB swaps since mid-November suggests that there was an increase in the swaps conducted with nonresidents, around US$6.0bn on our estimates. With this build-up of foreign positioning, attracted by the belief that the TCMB will likely keep rates sufficiently high to stabilize the TRY, a reversal in capital flows going forward appears likely.
    • The build-up in foreign positioning is not the only reason why the market reaction is likely to differ from those when previous governors were replaced. When Murat Uysal was appointed as TCMB Governor in July 2019, gross reserves were higher and a cutting cycle was expected. The market reaction to Naci Agbal’s appointment was positive as he was seen as a technocrat and the President had followed up this appointment decision with a market-friendly speech.
    • Our assessment of the TCMB’s reaction function has been that the TCMB would tighten policy when faced with sufficient pressure, rather than look for non-market solutions. For this reason, our base case last year (when reserves were being depleted at a rapid pace and some market participants were discussing the possibility of non-market measures) was that the TCMB would eventually hike rates and engineer a soft landing.

    • The developments from November until recently seemed to confirm this. Following the removal of Naci Agbal from his post, we  think that the risks to our view that monetary policy (rather than alternative administrative measures) will ultimately respond to market pressures and macroeconomic imbalances have increased.
    • It is likely that pressure on the TRY will pick up. A restart of FX interventions similar to 2020 may be the initial response, but the buffers are comparatively low. While gross reserves stand at US$91.6bn, US$17.0bn are due to swaps with Qatar and China, and US$38.9bn are gold. On our estimates, gross foreign currency reserves are US$35.7bn. Although this is higher than the US$23.4bn at the trough in mid-November, it is still not sizeable enough to sustain continued interventions, in our view. For comparison, the TCMB’s gross reserves fell on average by US$6bn a month from March to September before rates were raised.
    • Our forecasts for the current account in 2021 and the country’s external financing needs do not differ significantly from what we were forecasting for 2020 in Q1-20.We forecast a current account deficit of US$28bn for this year(TCMB survey: US$25bn). The current account deficit did ultimately widen significantly more than we had initially thought in 2020 to US$37bn, mostly due to rising gold imports, and a repeat of that scenario cannot be excluded.
    • Other measures the authorities may consider if the TRY comes under pressure are (1)finding sources of non-market funding, (2) administrative measures or (3) once again raising policy rates. Given the stated dovish views of the new Governor and the context in which he has been appointed, the market is likely to be sceptical of the likelihood of rate hikes. Nevertheless, it may once again come up as a possibility if the TRY comes under significant pressure.
    • With markets less likely to fund the Turkish current account deficit, and in the absence of other official flows, we think that a rapid adjustment in the current account may be necessary and the risks of a hard landing have increased. Under this scenario, we see downside risks to our growth forecast +5.5%yoy in 2021 and upside risks to our already above-consensus end-year inflation forecast of 12.5%yoy.
    • Our EM/FX strategy team are putting their forecasts for USD/TRY under review, with significant risks of a near-term discontinuous move weaker in the Lira.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 03/21/2021 – 17:15

  • Ram Truck Production Delayed Amid Global Chip Shortage
    Ram Truck Production Delayed Amid Global Chip Shortage

    Stellantis, the world’s fourth-largest automaker, announced Saturday production of its Ram Classic pickup trucks in Saltillo, Mexico, and Warren, Michigan, will be affected for “a number of weeks” due to a worsening global semiconductor shortage, reported Reuters

    Assembly plants in Saltillo and Warren will build and hold the Ram 1500 Classic trucks for final assembly until semiconductor components become available. 

    A Stellantis spokeswoman told Reuters the issue could take “a number of weeks” to resolve, declining to share the actual number of trucks affected by the chip shortage. 

    “We continue working closely with our suppliers to mitigate the manufacturing impacts caused by the various supply chain issues facing our industry,” a statement read, quoted by Bloomberg

    The global shortage in semiconductors forced Ford Motor Company on Thursday to build its top-selling F-150 trucks and Edge SUVs without certain semiconductor components and hold the vehicles until the chips arrive. 

    Production woes for Ford don’t stop there. Ford canceled three production shifts through Friday at a Kentucky plant that produces Ford Escape and Lincoln Corsair crossovers. This coming week, Ford expects to limit production of the Ford Fiesta car made in Germany.  

    On Friday, Toyota Motor Corp. suspended operations at a plant in the Czech Republic for two weeks due to chip shortages. 

    Carmakers have repeatedly warned about shortages developing worldwide. 

    A report from Goldman Sachs summarizes recent media reports on supply chain disruptions. 

    The semiconductor shortage appears to be “very widespread” and could begin to drag on global auto production. Goldman economist Jan Hatzius notes that many consumer goods – from headphones to sofas to roller skates – have also faced supply challenges this year.

    Goldman’s conclusion to the worldwide supply-chain turmoil is that it may not alleviate until 2022. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 03/21/2021 – 17:00

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Today’s News 21st March 2021

  • Brandon Smith: Is The Illegal-Immigration Crisis All About New COVID Lockdowns?
    Brandon Smith: Is The Illegal-Immigration Crisis All About New COVID Lockdowns?

    Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

    In multiple articles I have published recently I outlined why an attempt at a new national covid lockdown in the US is inevitable. In my article ‘The Real Reasons Why Millions Of Americans Will Defy Covid Mandates And Vaccines’, I examined new polling numbers which show that a vast portion of the US population is refusing to comply with medical controls. The bottom line is this: Covid is a non-threat to 99.7% of the public, and the citizenry is getting wise to this fact.

    However, there are certain people that NEED the pandemic lockdowns to continue regardless of what the public wants.

    The Biden Administration and its globalist handlers have BIG plans for the next few years, and all of it relies on pandemic fears and totalitarian restrictions.

    The “Great Reset”, as Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum calls it, is never going to happen unless global populations are locked down and placed under control. Unconstitutional pieces of legislation that undermine or destroy the 2nd Amendment, like HR 127, will be impossible to enact if Americans are organized and unified to resist. Carbon taxation and “shared economy” policies will never be allowed to touch ground. Conservative Americans and many moderates will stamp out such measures like cockroaches within their own states. Law enforcement agencies in most areas would have no interest in being used as cannon fodder to enforce them.

    The only option the globalists have at this stage is to barrel forward with the pandemic narrative despite the fact that Covid has turned out to be a hollow issue with a death rate of 0.26% outside of nursing home patients. At least half the country is ready to revolt over the mandates, and almost half the country is refusing to take the vaccines or accept medical passports. That is millions of people that are laughing in the face of the Reset agenda.

    So, the question for the thwarted globalists is this: How do they turn their conservative enemies into unwitting allies? What is a 4th Generation warfare solution to their problem? How do they get a larger number of conservatives to support their own enslavement through the lockdown mandates?

    Well, one method would be to cause a convincing distraction that compels conservatives to embrace the notion of the lockdowns as an acceptable sacrifice in exchange for dealing with a potentially more dangerous problem.

    The crisis of mass illegal immigration is turning into a growing national debate right now. I suspect we haven’t even begun to see the consequences yet, and I also suspect that there is a plot hidden within these events.

    But let’s look at the surface arguments first…

    Obviously, most conservatives are going to view a huge influx of illegals into the US as a means for Democrats to secure elections for decades to come. I’m sure most people reading this article are aware of the “Cloward Piven Strategy”, and I won’t delve into it too much here except to say that I get it, and I realize it’s a problem; it’s just not the biggest problem that conservatives should be worried about right now.

    Yes, this exact program of social dilution was used in Europe only a few years ago, and to be clear, this is not a problem of “race”, it is a problem of culture and ideology. Muslim culture and Sharia law, for example, are for the most part incompatible with Western society. Forcefully mixing the two is a recipe for disaster as we have seen already in the EU. When Muslims immigrate LEGALLY and individually assimilate into Western culture instead of trying to import their own culture by attrition, things work. Otherwise things do not work. This is reality.

    By extension, mass illegal migration without assimilation of people from Central and South America into the US will also lead to disaster. These migrants are coming from predominantly socialist countries that have failed systems (that’s why these people are leaving and coming to the US). But, illegals tend to bring their socialist politics with them. They have no experience living within a culture that treats freedom as inherent and inalienable and are often motivated by access to government programs and handouts.

    This is why we have borders in the first place – to protect our society from intrusion and co-option by another society or group of people with incompatible values. Despite what leftists and some false libertarians might claim, without borders, freedom dies.

    Conservatives easily understand this simple concept, but leftists just don’t get it. They live in a Marxist fantasy land where Utopia is right around the corner and open borders are a magical tool for peace and prosperity. They also hate conservatives and that pesky Bill of Rights that we defend so much. They think inviting an army of potential socialists into the country will help to marginalize us and make us disappear. They’ll even brag about it openly on occasion.

    So, it’s not surprising that whenever a giant caravan of illegals starts marching towards the southern border, conservatives rally in opposition. We might even put more energy into this issue than we do for gun rights.

    Here is the problem…

    The migrant crisis is suddenly receiving heavy attention from the mainstream media after being ignored for months. Why is that? It feels as if there was a complete blackout on this issue, and now, the floodgates have opened and the media coverage is growing. With the amount of protection Biden has been lavished with by the MSM so far, their sudden critical position on his border policies has me suspicious. Since when do leftist corporate journalists care about the border?

    Well, reports of a possible “surge in covid” due to mass illegal migrations into America might explain everything.

    Think of it this way – The establishment and Biden need some kind of rationale for a new covid lockdown. I continue to predict that Biden will try to institute a Federal lockdown mandate similar to the Level 4 lockdowns used in parts of Europe, Australia and New Zealand. They know that there is too much conservative opposition and that they will not be able to get red states to comply. But, what if conservatives were made to think that the border would be more heavily guarded and illegal immigrants rounded up if they supported a new lockdown policy?

    What if conservatives were tricked into supporting covid lockdowns as a means to control illegal immigration?

    The solution should be obvious: Biden should be enforcing border protocols and laws WITHOUT needing covid lockdowns. But, he’s not going to do that. What he’s going to do is keep the border as porous as possible, do little to stem the tide of immigrant caravans until the situation devolves into chaos, and then announce that a “new wave” of covid infections has been brought to the US by the caravans.

    Again, covid is a non-threat to 99.7% of the population outside of nursing homes, but what about a “covid mutation”? Brazil has been conveniently reporting such a mutation that is supposedly “more dangerous” than the original covid virus.

    As this variant spreads, whether or not it presents any actual danger, Biden will then announce a national lockdown including a hard lockdown on the southern border. The question is, will some conservatives be more inclined to back off of their opposition to the mandates if it means illegal immigration will be stopped?

    This is essentially a protection racket. In other words, Biden will refuse to protect the border until we comply with the pandemic restrictions, just as he and the establishment will continue to push for restricted freedoms until ALL Americans submit to vaccinations and medical passports.

    However, there is another way…

    Counties on the southern border can take over the job of securing the region and refuse to allow illegal migrants to pass. If the border patrol is understaffed or is being hobbled by the federal government, then the locals can take control and do the job that Biden refuses to do. Furthermore, if the problem persists and the federal government seeks to interfere in local efforts to secure the border, then it may be time to create new borders. It may be time to do that anyway.

    Conservatives and moderates have almost nothing in common with the political left anymore; conservatives want freedom of speech, the right to self defense, the right to honest and accurate information, self reliance, economic freedom, secure borders and small government. Leftists support mass censorship, disarmament, business shutdowns, lockdown mandates, open borders, the big government nanny state, centralization and tyranny. Perhaps it is time we separate and build the societies we want, and well away from each other.

    Let’s see which system thrives and which one collapses. Let’s see which system people want to join and which system people want to escape.

    My point is, at no time should conservatives feel compelled to accept covid lockdowns or other totalitarian measures just to get border protections from the federal government in return. And, I probably don’t need to say this, but don’t buy into the covid mutation narrative. The pandemic is a failed part of the Reset agenda, nothing more. The elites are trying to pick up the pieces and turn garbage into gold. As long as conservatives and liberty minded people refuse to comply, their plans will crumble. And, if the border needs to be secured and the federal government refuses to do their job, then we should take control and make the border safe ourselves.

    *  *  *

    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
    Sun, 03/21/2021 – 00:00

  • If You Move To These Cities, The American Dream Is Still Achievable
    If You Move To These Cities, The American Dream Is Still Achievable

    Owning a piece of ‘The American Dream’ – if all that means to you is buying a house – has become out of reach for many (if not most Amercians) and the situation is getting worse.

    The serial-bubble-blowing Federal Reserve is making the same mistake it made during the mid-2000s and late 1990s by allowing untethered monetary policy to inflate housing prices to unaffordable levels.

    In many parts of the country, housing prices have outpaced household incomes. 

    A combination of factors during the pandemic resulted in surging home prices. First, the Fed slammed mortgage rates to record lows, and the socio-economic collapse of metro areas created an exodus to suburbia. The combination of the two has inflated overall US home prices. 

    Using data from job search site Zippia, this graphic below reveals the most and least affordable cities to purchase a home. 

    Head of content at Zippia, Kathy Morris, wrote that “the American dream of homeownership is still possible for the average worker.” She lists the top ten most affordable areas to live in: 

    1. Detroit, Michigan

    2. Akron, Ohio

    3. Toledo, Ohio

    4. Fort Wayne, Indiana

    5. Fishers, Indiana

    6. Pearland, Texas

    7. Cedar Rapids, Iowa

    8. Lee’s Summit, Missouri

    9. Cleveland, Ohio

    10. Grand Prairie, Texas

    To develop the list, Morris used the average home cost, monthly mortgage, and the minimum salary to determine which area is most affordable for working-class folks. She recommended that no more than 28% of gross (i.e., before tax) monthly income go toward mortgage payments. The sweet spot of home affordability was areas where people paid less than 28% of their incomes towards their mortgage. However, she said,

    “We did not take into account PMI, taxes, down payment size, or home insurance, since those differ greatly based on individual circumstances and loan type.”

    .. and being a dream, the bottom 90% of Americans need to be asleep to believe in it, or they will either wind up renting for life or own an unaffordable home and be house poor. Morris lists the ten least affordable cities for homeownership:

    1. Los Angeles, California

    2. San Francisco, California

    3. Honolulu, Hawaii

    4. New York City, New York

    5. Oakland, California

    6. Long Beach, California

    7. Miami, Florida

    8. Huntington Beach, California

    9. Anaheim, California

    10. San Jose, California

    How times have changed over the course of the past couple of decades as taking part in The American Dream now means you must move in Detroit – not exactly an all inspiring metro area. 

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    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/20/2021 – 23:30

  • The Never-Ending Battle Between Leviathan And Liberty
    The Never-Ending Battle Between Leviathan And Liberty

    Authored by James Bovard via The Mises Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

    The notion that Americans will always be free is part of the catechism that is force-fed to public school students. For hundreds of years, philosophers, politicians, and reformers have touted a law of history that assures the ultimate triumph of freedom. “Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The urge for freedom will eventually come,” Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

    But few political follies are more hazardous than presuming that one’s liberties are forever safe. None of the arguments on why liberty is inevitable can explain why it has not yet arrived. Most of the human race existed with little or no freedom for 95+ percent of recorded history. If liberty is God’s gift to humanity, then why were most people who ever lived on Earth denied this divine bequest?

    Many efforts at limiting state power have failed almost immediately. In the thirteenth century, oppressed English nobles revolted and sought to bind their kings in perpetuity. King John signed the Magna Carta in 1215, petulantly accepting a limit to his prerogative to pillage everything in his domain. While the Magna Carta is celebrated nowadays as the dawn of a new age, it failed to even bind the king who signed the document. The ink on his signature was barely dry before King John brought in foreign forces and proceeded to slaughter the barons who forced his signature. King John died just after his vengeance commenced, providing a respite for Englishmen. In the final realm, the Magna Carta was simply a political pledge that was honored only insofar as private courage and weaponry compelled sovereigns to limit their abuses.

    History is a chronology of nations pillaged by reckless regimes. English kings recited coronation oaths that limited their power. Such oaths were as binding as a congressional candidate’s campaign promises. Rampaging kings sometimes converted smouldering discontent into a raging fire of resistance. Historian Thomas Macaulay summarized England’s path to its Glorious Revolution of 1688: “Oppression speedily did what philosophy and eloquence … failed to do.” King James II was ousted in 1688 and Parliament speedily enacted laws to curb all subsequent monarchs.

    The United States was the first government to be created with strict limitations on its power, enshrined in the Constitution. As James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” The Founders included numerous checks and balances in the Constitution to restrain political ambition. But they were never so naïve as to presume that a parchment barrier would keep American liberty safe in perpetuity.

    Within the first decade of the nation’s existence, Congress and President John Adams enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts, which destroyed freedom of the press and speech. Thomas Jefferson responded by writing a resolution in 1799 that warned, “Free government is founded in jealousy, not confidence…. In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” Senator John Taylor, in his 1821 book Tyranny Unmasked, scoffed at presuming “our good theoretical system of government is a sufficient security against actual tyranny.”

    Those “chains of the Constitution” have often been illusory or merely a placebo phantasm for government victims. Politicians perennially invoke the Constitution to prove that citizens have no reason to fear the government. When the House of Representatives considered the PATRIOT Act in October 2001, Representative James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) assured fellow members of Congress that “the bill does not do anything to take away the freedoms of innocent citizens. Of course we all recognize that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution prevents the government from conducting unreasonable searches and seizures, and that is why this legislation does not change the United States Constitution or the rights guaranteed to citizens of this country.” Sensenbrenner talked as if that the mere existence of the Bill of Rights shackled Congress. This is akin to claiming that because automobiles have brakes, drivers can never exceed the speed limit. The PATRIOT Act unleashed a constitutional crime wave, as the Bush administration suspended habeas corpus and conducted waves of secret arrests, unleashed the FBI to conduct hundreds of thousands of warrantless searches, and entitled the National Security Agency to vacuum up Americans’ emails and other personal data.

    American presidents take an oath of office solemnly swearing to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” But this has long been an empty ritual, akin to Roman emperors making public sacrifices to pagan gods they knew did not exist. Fealty to the Constitution has evaporated in part because philosophical trends have long favored absolute power.

    Intellectual servility has been perennially profitable and there has never been a shortage of writers exalting supreme rulers. Writing in 1651, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes labeled the state as Leviathan, “our mortal God.” Leviathan signifies a government whose power is unbounded, with a right to dictate almost anything and everything to the people under its sway. While Hobbes was reviled in the first century after his book was published, his ideas later became fashionable as academics rushed to echo his derision of “tyrannophobia.” Hobbes declared that it is forever prohibited for subjects in “any way to speak evil of their sovereign” regardless of how badly they are abused. Hobbes offered “suicide pact sovereignty”: to recognize a government’s existence is to automatically concede the government’s right to destroy everything in its domain.

    Hobbes profoundly influenced subsequent political philosophers, including German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, who trumpeted the doctrine that history is the actualization of freedom. But Hegel was not using “freedom” in the sense that the Founding Fathers did. Instead, Hegel declared, “The State in-and-for-itself is the ethical whole, the actualization of freedom.” Hegel also proclaimed that “[t]he State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth” and derided the notion of freedom as individual choice as “uneducated superficiality.” Hegel’s slavish version of freedom was difficult to distinguish from Hobbes’ s totalitarian vision of sovereignty.

    Hegel had a profound influence on communism (via Marx), fascism, and on the most popular philosopher in Washington in recent decades. Francis Fukuyama, a State Department functionary, hailed Hegel as the supreme “philosopher of freedom.” In 1989, Fukuyama proclaimed the “unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism” and boasted that “we in the liberal West occupy the final summit of the historical edifice.” He announced “the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

    Fukuyama’s “law of history” supposedly proved that government was no longer a threat to freedom. By making political power appear innocuous, Fukuyama became an instant hero inside the Beltway. Fukuyama’s “end of history” revelation was zealously embraced by the political-media establishment. Fukuyama provided a law of history that supposedly negated all the warnings from history about political power.

    Fukuyama’s doctrine “liberated” presidents in the name of freedom. In his 2002 National Security Strategy, President George W. Bush echoed Fukuyama’s view: “The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.” At a 2002 Republican fundraiser dinner, Bush declared: “We will do whatever it takes to make the homeland secure and to make freedom reign across the world.” In his 2005 inaugural address, Bush whooped, “We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom.” Bush used “freedom bosh” to sanctify his wars, torture regime, and militaristic threats against any foreign regime that disobeyed Washington.

    Why would history stop after either liberty or democracy is achieved? The experience of many countries has been one person, one vote, one time.” Faith in democracy as a perpetual guarantor of freedom is tricky to reconcile with the collapse of more than thirty democracies around the globe in recent years. Few of the democracies that have survived have fastidiously respected citizens’ rights.

    Some libertarians are confident that, despite post–9/11 debacles, liberty will inevitably triumph in the end. But why would freedom be safer in the future than now? Because of a law of history that was never enacted by God, a convocation of cardinals, or even the Arkansas state legislature?

    Presuming that America or any other nation is destined to be free lulls people against potential oppressors. Author Robert Anton Wilson observed, “Every national border in Europe marks the place where two gangs of bandits got too exhausted to kill each other any more and signed a treaty.” Similarly, the current extent of government power marks the boundary of political onslaughts into the private domain of liberty.

    There will be no perpetual truce along this border, because political marauders will continually create new pretexts to invade citizens’ lives. The private domain relies primarily on voluntary agreements, independence, and peaceful coexistence. The political domain relies on command and control, subjugation, and threats and penalties.

    One of the greatest perils to the private domain is the notion that Leviathan is more legitimate than liberty. Downplaying government coercion is the key to this propaganda coup. For most of the American media, compelling submission to political commands is a nonissue, equivalent of the sun rising in the east each morning.

    At the time when political power began soaring, in the 1930s, American political thinking systematically disregarded the danger from government. In the 1940s, as Professor David Ciepley observed, “the State was dropped from American social science, as part of the reaction to the rise of totalitarianism. All traces of state autonomy, now understood as ‘state coercion,’ were expunged from the image of American democracy.” Ciepley explained that “the emergence of Hitler and Stalin as the ultimate social engineers led American political scientists to … fall silent about all such activities in the American governmental system. If totalitarianism means elite social engineering, then American democracy must mean popular control.” Democracy became the purported champion of freedom, because people were taught that democracies were inherently nonoppressive. But as Senator John Taylor warned two centuries ago, “Self-government is flattered to destroy self-government.”

    For many people, liberty is an abstraction until government agents ravage their lives. A lucid recognition of the coercive nature of Leviathan is vital for the defense of freedom. Leviathan’s abuses and atrocities must be weaponized to awaken as many people as possible to the perils they face.

    “Legitimacy” spawns a political fog that obscures people’s recognition of their own victimhood. Lenin reputedly said that the capitalists would sell communists the rope with which the capitalists were hanged. Similarly, Leviathan perennially provides ample gunpowder for detonating its legitimacy. Leviathan without legitimacy is simply a regime that must rely on brute force to compel submission to its decrees. At some point, the brute force becomes too great for regime lackeys to cover up.

    Once legitimacy is lost, governments can collapse like overheated soufflés. For instance, East Bloc regimes imploded much faster than almost anyone expected. Prior to 1989, Soviet leaders believed that cosmetic reforms would keep people subdued despite a failing economic system. CIA analysts predicted that 100+ million people in East Europe would remain docile and downtrodden for decades longer. But proliferating protests in several nations spurred the Hungarian government to permit a breach in the Iron Curtain along the Austrian border in May 1989. That breach quickly spurred a flood of humanity rushing to escape communism, taking with them the tattered remnants of regimes’ legitimacy. Six months later, the Berlin Wall was breached and governments fell like dominos. On Christmas Day, Romanian soldiers celebrated by lining their dictator and his wife up in front of a stone wall and executing them.

    Most contemporary governments have more popular support than Soviet Bloc regimes received in the 1980s. But sustained abuses can be an acid drip that eventually topples any government regardless of its purported mandate. More Americans believe in witches, ghosts, and astrology nowadays than trust the federal government. In the covid-19 era, America is degenerating into a cage keeper democracy, where voters merely select the politicians who place them under house arrest.

    Expecting liberty to permanently triumph would require rulers to miraculously become selfless if not self-sacrificing. But, as Hayek warned in his essay “Why the Worst Get on Top,” power is a magnet for the dregs of humanity. Faith in the state will continue reviving as long as some people feel entitled to domineer other people. Political action pays a higher premium on deceit than almost any other human activity and thus will remain perilous to everything decent. “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” as our forefathers recognized in the nineteenth century.

    To presume that liberty is inevitable is to absolve oneself from fighting oppression. As soon as people drop the reins on government, politicians will leash the people. Rather than hoping for an “end of history” triumph, people must battle forever to defend their rights. As long as individuals continue to defy oppressors, the seeds of resistance will produce bountiful harvests of freedom in better times.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/20/2021 – 23:00

  • Meet "Digit," A Humanoid Robot Testing Package Delivery From Curb To Doorstep
    Meet “Digit,” A Humanoid Robot Testing Package Delivery From Curb To Doorstep

    The virus pandemic has accelerated the push by some companies to develop driverless automobiles for deliveries. But there’s a common problem developing among many of these robot-delivery vehicles. How do packages go from the delivery vehicle to the customer’s doorstep?

    Some have proposed drones, while others, such as Oregon-based Agility robotics, have proposed a bi-pedal robot deployed from the rear of a robot-delivery van that will walk the package to a customer’s doorstep without the risk of face-to-face interaction.

    Agility intends to solve not the last-mile delivery problem but the last-foot delivery issues from robot-van to customer’s doorstep. 

    The goal of the robot, dubbed “Digit,” is to reach complicated areas where traditional robots would have issues traversing, such as stairs, tight spaces, and other complex terrains.  

    Agility Robotics founder Jonathan Hurst told local news station KOBI that Digit “can lift a 40-pound package.” He said, “the robot catches itself when it falls and reorient to get back up.”

    Hurst outlined the most significant problem in last-mile deliveries: 

    “Once you’ve got an autonomous vehicle that does a lot of it on the road. But now you’re stuck at the curb, right? And in order to really provide that service that people want, you need to then get from the curb to the doorstep. And that’s where we solve this problem.”

    Agility has sold two prototype robots to Ford Motor Company, who experimented with the bi-pedal robot launched from the rear of an autonomous delivery van to take a package from the vehicle to the customer’s doorstep. 

    “So many jobs that are basically robot jobs, they’re the dull, dirty, dangerous kinds of things that are injury prone and incredibly repetitive,” Hurst said. “That’s how you can then really increase the value of the jobs that the people get to do.”

    KOBI interviews Hurst and gets a first-hand view of the robot. 

    While autonomous delivery vehicles and Digit could one day lower last-mile delivery costs for companies – the combination of the two may result in a surge of technological unemployment

    … and to be frank, Digit is creepier than Boston Dynamics’ Spot

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/20/2021 – 22:30

  • "A Threat To American Democracy" – Federal Judge Alleges Democrats Control Almost All Major News Outlets
    “A Threat To American Democracy” – Federal Judge Alleges Democrats Control Almost All Major News Outlets

    Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

    A federal judge this week said that the Democrat Party is close to controlling the press as he detailed what he described as shocking bias against Republicans.

    D.C. Circuit Court Judge Laurence Silberman outlined his opposition to the Supreme Court’s key decision in 1964 in New York Times v. Sullivan, which has since protected many media outlets from lawsuits.

    Silberman, a Reagan appointee, wrote that the ruling is “a threat to American Democracy” and must be overturned.

    The increased power of the press is so dangerous today because we are very close to one-party control of these institutions. Our court was once concerned about the institutional consolidation of the press leading to a ‘bland and homogenous’ marketplace of ideas. It turns out that ideological consolidation of the press (helped along by economic consolidation) is the far greater threat,” he continued.

    “Although the bias against the Republican Party—not just controversial individuals—is rather shocking today, this is not new; it is a long-term, secular trend going back at least to the ’70s. (I do not mean to defend or criticize the behavior of any particular politician).

    Two of the three most influential papers (at least historically), The New York Times and The Washington Post, are virtually Democratic Party broadsheets. And the news section of The Wall Street Journal leans in the same direction. The orientation of these three papers is followed by The Associated Press and most large papers across the country (such as the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and Boston Globe).

    Nearly all television—network and cable—is a Democratic Party trumpet. Even the government-supported National Public Radio follows along,” he added.

    The news outlets mentioned didn’t return requests for comment.

    The judge also expressed concern about the influence that Big Tech wields over how news is distributed, referencing how Twitter limited the spread of a New York Post article about President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden.

    Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey later told lawmakers that what happened was a mistake.

    Silberman added that there are few notable exceptions to the outlets he mentioned: Fox News, the New York Post, and the Journal’s editorial page.

    “It should be sobering for those concerned about news bias that these institutions are controlled by a single man and his son. Will a lone holdout remain in what is otherwise a frighteningly orthodox media culture? After all, there are serious efforts to muzzle Fox News. And although upstart (mainly online) conservative networks have emerged in recent years, their visibility has been decidedly curtailed by Social Media, either by direct bans or content-based censorship,” he wrote.

    The uniformity of news bias has a political impact, the judge continued, pointing to author Tim Groseclose’s 2011 book: “Left Turn.”

    The George Mason University professor said in his book that he found the way outlets report more favorably on Democrats aids the party’s candidates by 8 to 10 percent in a typical election.

    Silberman was writing a partial dissent in the case of Liberian government officials Christiana Tah and Randolph McClain versus Global Witness Publishing, an organization that investigates human rights abuses.

    “It should be borne in mind that the first step taken by any potential authoritarian or dictatorial regime is to gain control of communications, particularly the delivery of news. It is fair to conclude, therefore, that one-party control of the press and media is a threat to a viable democracy. It may even give rise to countervailing extremism,” Silberman concluded.

    “The First Amendment guarantees a free press to foster a vibrant trade in ideas. But a biased press can distort the marketplace. And when the media has proven its willingness—if not eagerness—to so distort, it is a profound mistake to stand by unjustified legal rules that serve only to enhance the press’ power.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/20/2021 – 22:00

  • Blame Millennials For The Dramatic Surge In Cord-Cutting
    Blame Millennials For The Dramatic Surge In Cord-Cutting

    Cord-cutting is not a new problem, but new data from a Pew Research Center survey shows an accelerating trend among millennials abandoning cable and satellite providers. 

    The survey of more than 1,500 US adults from Jan. 25 to Feb. 8, 2021, found cable and satellite users among all US adults have plunged from 76% in 2015 to 56% last month. About 71% of respondents said they don’t subscribe to cable or satellite because video content is abundant online. In comparison, 69% said cable or satellite costs are too high, and 45% of them don’t watch enough TV to justify to costs of cable or satellite. 

    The acceleration of cord-cutting is rapidly transforming how content is viewed. The coronavirus pandemic exacerbated the trend as many gravitated towards popular streaming services like Netflix and Hulu have gained popularity. 

    Among respondents who don’t have cable or satellite, 61% said they had cable or satellite service in the past, while 39% said they never subscribed. 

    Pew finds, “27% of U.S. adults are “cord cutters” and 17% have never had a cable or satellite subscription.” 

    The survey reveals demographic trends among cord-cutters. What’s notable in the chart below is that the share of 18 to 29-year-olds subscribing to cable or satellite has plunged from 65% in 2015 to 34% as of last month. Meanwhile, baby boomers are perfectly contempt with cable or satellite with a minimal decline over the previous six years. 

    “Not only do young adults stand out for not using cable or satellite TV, they are also much more likely than their elders to have never gotten TV at home via cable or satellite – and to say they don’t subscribe because they can find the content they want online,” said Pew

    What should be shocking for cable or satellite companies is that 61% of those who are ages 18 to 29 have never been a subscriber – with 91% of them indicating there’s enough content online to watch – 57% say cable or satellite services are too expensive – and 53% of them say they don’t watch enough TV. 

    The evidence continues to mount that younger generations are not just abandoning cable or satellite, but many have never been subscribers. It remains to be seen what the cable-TV industry has up its sleeves to attract millennial subscribers.   

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/20/2021 – 21:30

  • America's Upside-Down Economy Just Took Another Bizarre Turn
    America’s Upside-Down Economy Just Took Another Bizarre Turn

    Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

    Is this a good economy or a bad economy?  Well, that all depends on who you are talking to. 

    For most Americans, economic conditions have been absolutely horrible ever since the COVID pandemic first arrived.  More than 100,000 businesses have permanently shut down, approximately 10 million Americans are in danger of being evicted from their homes, and weekly unemployment claims have been above the old record set in the early 1980s every single week for nearly an entire year.  Meanwhile, the absolutely insane polices that the Federal Reserve and our politicians in Washington have been pursuing have made the wealthy far wealthier than ever before.  In early 2020, M1 was sitting at about 4 trillion dollars, and now it is up to 18 trillion dollars.  Much of that money has ended up in the pockets of the ultra-wealthy, and now they are spending it is some pretty odd ways.

    For example, NFT art is one of the latest crazes.  You can’t hang NFT art on your wall, but that isn’t stopping people from paying ridiculous amounts of money for it.  In fact, things have gotten so crazy that one film director has decided to sell audio clips of himself farting as NFTs…

    A Brooklyn-based film director is simultaneously mocking and attempting to profit off the cryptocurrency craze for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) by selling a year’s worth of fart audio clips recorded in quarantine.

    “If people are selling digital art and GIFs, why not sell farts?” Alex Ramírez-Mallis, 36, told The Post of his dank addition to the blockchain-based NFT market.

    You would have to be absolutely nuts to purchase such a thing, but apparently someone has already purchased one clip for 85 dollars

    Individual fart recordings are also available for 0.05 Ethereum, or about $85 a pop. The gassy group has so far sold one, to an anonymous buyer.

    “If the value increases, they could have an extremely valuable fart on their hands,” he said.

    Pizza Hut has decided that they want to get in on the NFT craze as well.

    In Canada, the company originally listen an NFT of a pizza slice for 18 cents, but it ended up selling for $8,824

    Pizza Hut Canada has announced it is releasing “1 Byte Favourites,” aka digital images of pizza, as non-fungible tokens. “Pizza Hut believes no world should exist without pizza, especially their pan pizza. That’s why they wanted to make sure it was enshrined in the digital universe,” they said in a release. Each week the company will release a new image of a pizza slice, each of a different recipe, for purchase on Rarible. The first-ever “slice” was listed for $0.0001 ETH (a cryptocurrency the equivalent of 18 cents), but wound up being sold for $8,824.

    This is madness, and it is also a grave insult to all of those that are deeply suffering out there.

    Could it be possible that we are rapidly approaching our own “let them eat cake” moment?

    As the ultra-wealthy continue to throw their money around in absurd ways, most people are just struggling to get by from month to month.  On Thursday, we learned that another 770,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week…

    Figures released Thursday by the Labor Department show that 770,000 Americans filed first-time jobless claims in the week ended March 13, higher than the 700,000 forecast by Refinitiv economists.

    Weekly jobless claims have remained stubbornly high for months, hovering around four times the typical pre-crisis level, although it’s well below the peak of almost 7 million that was reached when stay-at-home orders were first issued a year ago in March.

    After all this time, the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits each week is still about four times higher than pre-pandemic levels.

    And we just learned that retail sales fell pretty dramatically during the month of February

    Americans shopped less in February, leading retail sales to fall 3% on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday.

    It was a much steeper drop than the 0.5% decline economists had predicted, according to Refinitiv.

    Bad weather across many states were part of the reason sales declined last month.

    When things go badly, they love to blame the weather.

    Of course the new stimulus checks that Americans are now receiving should help to boost retail sales temporarily.

    But at this point there are no plans to cut checks every month, and any short-term assistance will only briefly alleviate the long-term suffering that so many Americans are enduring.

    We are currently in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and a lot more pain is on the horizon.

    Even though I write about this stuff on a daily basis, I was surprised to learn that the results of a recent survey show that finances have now become the number one source of stress for the American people…

    WalletHub’s new Coronavirus Money Survey also reveals that the nation’s focus is now shifting from the virus to finances. The survey of over 750 Americans in March 2021 finds money is now the biggest stressor around the country.

    Three in 10 respondents say money is their greatest concern this year, a 15-percent increase over last year. COVID-19 is still the top stressor for 28 percent of Americans. As coronavirus safety measures fade however, researchers find people are getting back to worrying about how to make ends meet.

    If you don’t know how you are going to pay the bills this month, that can be a source of stress that never leaves you day or night.

    Those that have gone through this sort of emotional torment know exactly what I am talking about.

    So when the ultra-wealthy throw their money away on “farting art” or “Pizza Hut art”, that is like rubbing dirt in the faces of tens of millions of Americans that are desperately trying to figure out some way to survive from month to month.

    The ultra-wealthy can continue to flaunt their wealth, but already we are seeing the rise of the “Robinhood mentality” that so many have warned about.

    When things get bad enough, the poor will start venturing into rich neighborhoods, and they won’t be there for a social visit.

    We still have relative stability for this brief moment, but it won’t last very long at all.

    *  *  *

    Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/20/2021 – 21:00

  • If Bitcoin Didn't Exist, We'd Have To Invent It Right Now
    If Bitcoin Didn’t Exist, We’d Have To Invent It Right Now

    Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

    The conventional take on Bitcoin and crypto-currencies in general from the mainstream skeptics is that it’s some sort of speculative bubble. The recent mania in NFTs seemingly adds credence to this argument. However, the NFT craze, as unfathomable as it is, even to somebody like myself, has precedents that show it doesn’t invalidate the crypto thesis.

    Coming up in the domain and DNS business, I’ve seen this movie before. I’ve also made the point back in the 2017 crypto cycle that the Tulipmania analogy for Bitcoin was a bad one for many reasons, and that it was a more accurate comparison to the domain name aftermarket of the 2000’s era. When companies and speculators were paying millions of dollars for strings of words from the dictionary with “.com” appended to them, that was a speculative mania and it was akin to Tulipmania. And from our vantage point in the present we can draw the comparison to NFTs.

    But when the .com aftermarket fizzled, the entire internet kept right on plugging along using DNS as the carrier tone, and domain names for endpoints. That didn’t change and to this day, without DNS you’ve basically  got nothing.  It’s part of the internet plumbing (yes, there are multiple projects seeking to supplant DNS via blockchain, separate convo for another day).

    The overall point is, a seemingly speculative mania can erupt out of a relatively new protocol, be it the long defunct hedge fund that rang the bell at the top by purchasing “fund.com” for $10M USD, or an NFT selling today for $69M USD, and that doesn’t make the underlying protocol from which it sprang forth a speculative bubble (we discussed this along with attention markets and BAT on the latest AxisOfEasy Salon #40).

    But if everything from NFTs to stonks to real estate and gold and cryptos are all hitting fresh all-time-highs, it seems to be that the obvious pattern here isn’t necessarily that “Everything is in a Bubble” as much as that the numéraire is collapsing.

    Most people reading these kinds of articles know that bonds are a dead man walking and M2 money supply is going up everywhere. I was going to pull in charts from multiple places (my home country of Canada’s is below). JapanEurozoneChina, there’s no point, they all look the same, everything looks like this:

    And if you zoom in on the last year, the Pandemic Year that will bisect modern history into The Beforetimes and The New Normal, they all look like this:

    The Pandemic panic and the monetary response to it pulled forward what I’ve been calling The Great Bifurcation by decades.

    That acceleration and its intensity is a big reason why everything that can be construed as an asset in the world is going like this:

    We aren’t in a hyperinflation yet. Policy makers are still trying to pretend inflation is undershooting and they’re still trying like hell to ignite it. As Charles Hugh Smith noted recently, money velocity is plummeting, even as M2 is blasting off (hold that thought).

    When you read about historical hyperinflationary episodes, you will find that what invariably happens is that capital flight occurs in all directions and people end up using some sort of “notgelt”. From Jens O. Parsson’s “Dying of Money”

    “The seas of marks which had been stored up… flooded forth and fought to buy into other investments, foreign currencies, tangible goods, almost anything but marks

    Germany’s money printing industry could not turn out enough trillions to keep up. States, towns, and companies got into the act by issuing their own “emergency money” (Notgeld). Barter became prevalent. Still money grew scarcer while prices continued to soar.”

    “Notgeld” could be a peculiar word. It might connote “not money”, “geld” or “gelt” being the German for money. If the money is worthless, people would want what isn’t that. However that’s because we’re thinking in English.  “Not money” in German would probably be nichtgeld. Notgeld actually does mean “emergency money”.

    In Zimbabwe it was prepaid cellphone cards. In 90’s Yugoslavia things came somewhat full circle and everybody flocked to Deutsche Marks.

    One time at easyDNS (in 2019), we found a customer who kept pre-funding his account with us and had enough of a balance in there to prepay his single website out to 2085. When I asked him what the hell he was doing, it turned out he was an Argentine trying to  protect his savings through one of their incessant currency collapses. He was using us as a bank.

    In all previous hyperinflations people just needed to get out of their local currencies and they’d come up with all manner of ways to do it. But when hyperinflation goes global, across all currencies in all nations, then what do you go into?

    Bitcoin in particular and crypto currencies in general are this coming hyper-inflationary event’s “Notgeld”.

    The recent institutional move into Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies is a reaction against systemic, global financial repression. What the naysayers like Peter Schiff and Nouriel Roubani don’t get about where we are in history is this:

    If Bitcoin didn’t exist, we would have to invent it, right now.

    Fortunately Bitcoin and the other crypto-currencies do exist, and they’ve enjoyed a spectacular debut onto the world stage and into monetary history.

    Fortunately proof-of-concept has already occurred and countless FUD cycles surmounted.

    Fortunately the decentralized crypto ecosystems are ready for prime time, exactly when humanity needs it the most. Necessity really was the mother of invention.

    In my Crypto Capitalist Manifesto (30 pages), which is one of the documents subscribers receive after they sign up to my new Crypto Capitalist Letter, I lay out some scenarios which show the theoretical effect of an exodus from bonds and cash on the price of bitcoin, I’ll extract a couple below:

    This one estimates the lift to the Bitcoin price in nominal terms based on capturing a fraction of a fraction of a secular exodus from the nearly $20 Trillion USD in negative yield bonds. If half of the capital fled negative yielding debt and of that, 10% moved into Bitcoin, it would push it up over $100K (extrapolating in linear terms of the price is where it is today when this happens).

    There’s at least another $100 Trillion USD in nominally positive yield bonds, but mostly negative real returns that would also be good candidates for re-allocation. The second table tries to model Bitcoin capturing a fraction of a fraction of that as well. If there was a 25% exodus out of bonds and Bitcoin caught 10% of that, that alone would put Bitcoin up over $6 Trillion. Other alternative assets like other cryptos, and gold and silver and real estate would all experience similar lifts.

    Of course those are all linear extrapolations based on the current price. In the manifesto I model out a bit more, such as Bitcoin capturing more of the exodus out of bonds as it accelerates. There would also be a generalized acceleration of the Bitcoin price once the market participants became increasingly aware of this dynamic.

    In other words, this is what I think is happening, metaphorically….

    The Crypto Capitalist Letter will (hopefully) be in the tradition of The Privateer, but with a tactical focus on investing in crypto stocks.

    Given what has happened to asset prices and crypto in response to just an inkling of inflation, imagine if Charles Hugh Smith is right, looking at the collapse in money velocity occurring now, that this is one final deflationary “tide receding” before the inflationary tsunami hits. Then what happens to the price of Bitcoin, cryptos and gold?

    *  *  *

    To receive future posts in your mailbox join the Bombthrower mailing list or follow me on Twitter. We had to push the launch of The Crypto Capitalist Letter into the week of March 22nd, get on the invite list here for when that goes live.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/20/2021 – 20:45

  • Defiant US Soldiers Openly Questioning Why BLM Riots Weren't Treated Like Capitol 'Insurrection'
    Defiant US Soldiers Openly Questioning Why BLM Riots Weren’t Treated Like Capitol ‘Insurrection’

    Soldiers “from every echelon” of the US military have been openly questioning why last year’s violent BLM and Antifa riots weren’t treated like the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a comparison which has flown sideways up the ass of the military’s top enlisted leader, Chief Master Sergeant Ramón “CZ” Colón-López.

    In a Thursday briefing at the Pentagon, Colón-López (CZ) told reporters that some troops have asked “How come you’re not looking at the situation that was going on in Seattle prior to that? [Jan. 6 riot]”

    This is coming from every echelon that we’re talking to,” CZ added.

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

    According to Military.com, CZ told reporters that he is “concerned about the way that some people are looking at the current environment.”

    Colón-López said the confusion some younger troops have expressed shows why the training sessions on extremism are needed.

    Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered the stand-down Feb. 5 and gave units across the military 60 days to discuss extremism in the ranks with troops.

    The military’s policies are clear, he said: Troops are not to advocate for, or participate in, supremacist, extremist or criminal gang doctrine, ideology or causes. –Military.com

    Others are wondering why leadership’s view is so disproportionate.

    CZ claims that the military ‘remains an apolitical organization,’ and that it doesn’t matter if extremist groups are far left or right, adding “both are off limits.”

    “If it’s an organization that is actually imposing harm, threat, destruction, criminal activity and so on, then we don’t condone that behavior,” he said, adding “We’re focusing on letting people know exactly what the oath tells us to do when it comes to obeying lawful orders, remaining apolitical and basically being good stewards of society.”

    But as the training sessions took place, some themes emerged that worried leaders.

    Those conducting the sessions wanted “to make sure that military members understand the difference between Seattle and [the Jan. 6 riot in] Washington, D.C.,” Colón-López said. “But some of our younger members are confused about this, so that’s what we need to go ahead and talk to them about and educate them on, to make sure that they know exactly what they can and cannot do.” –Military.com

    According to CZ, ‘younger troops need to be educated’ on the difference between the broad (Marxist-organized) BLM and Antifa movement and extremists within said movements.

    Meanwhile on Saturday… it begins again:

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

    Nothing to see here – just a group waving a communist flag that wants to disband the country’s law enforcement and usher in a state of lawlessness. Totally different from the January 6 ‘insurrection.’ 

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

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/20/2021 – 20:30

  • The Great Donkification
    The Great Donkification

    Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,

    “Right here, boys!  Right here!  Get your cake, pie, dill pickles, and ice cream!  Eat all you can!  Be a glutton!  Stuff yourselves!  It’s all free, boys!  It’s all free!  Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry!”

    – Pleasure Island voiceover, Walt Disney’s Pinocchio (1940)

    Welcome To Pleasure Island!

    Did you get your stimmy check, yet?  If so, what are you going to do with it?

    Are you going to park it in your savings account, pay down debt, and pay off a few bills?  Are you going to buy Chinese ‘stonks’, cryptocurrencies, and digital NFT art?

    What about a new iPhone, fancy dinners, or a plane ticket to Cabo?  How about a new living room rug, a wood pellet grill, or a 75-inch flat screen TV with a sound bar?

    The collective answer to these questions is the difference between deflation, asset price inflation, and consumer price inflation.

    Billionaire folk hero Warren Buffett says you should use your stimmy check to “pay off credit card debt.”  His rationale is sound enough:

    “If I owed any money at 18 percent, the first thing I’d do with any money I had would be to pay it off.  You can’t go through life borrowing money at those rates and be better off.”

    Yet paying off credit card debt is the last thing Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell wants you to do with your stimmy check.  Because paying off debt is deflationary – it contracts the money supply.

    Powell wants inflation of both consumer prices and asset prices.  He wants prices to rise, and the dollar to fall, so that long-term public and private debt burdens are slowly inflated away.  He also wants the stock market to maintain a permanently high plateau; the retirements of millions of Baby Boomers are banking on this.

    Congress wants you to believe stimmy check money is free.  They want you to stuff yourself.  Be a glutton.  Eat all you can.  And vote for big government.

    Welcome to Pleasure Island!  By law, in the year 2021, free money – like free education, free food, and free drugs – is a human right.  Just don’t ask about the stealth inflation tax or the other dire consequences…

    Nation Of Donkeys

    “If we play our cards right, we’ll be on easy street!  Or my name isn’t Honest John!”

    – J. Worthington Foulfellow, aka Honest John, Pinocchio (1940)

    One option is to take your stimmy check money and go ‘all in’ on moonshots.  If you gamble on the right ‘stonk’, cryptocurrency, SPAC, or digital NFT art, you could quickly 10x or even 100x your money.  If you play your cards right, like Honest John says, you’ll be on easy street.

    Without question, there’s something irresistibly magical and intoxicating about the promise of free money.  For it promises life without labor…and life without limits.  Moreover, once a nation has taken a trip to Pleasure Island there’s no going back.  Free money, you see, is so delicious that too much is never enough.

    But beware.  Pleasure Island is a trap.  Those who stay too long succumb to a deadly curse.  If you recall from Pinocchio, after making complete jackasses of themselves on Pleasure Island, and behaving like destructive animals, the curse turns the boys into donkeys.

    First they grow donkey ears, then a tail, and their head turns furry with donkey hair.  After that, their laughing becomes braying, their hands and feet become hooves, and they lose the ability to talk.  Finally, they go on all fours.

    But wait, it gets worse!  The donkeys are then rounded up, stripped of their clothes, thrown in crates, and taken back to the mainland via ferry where they are sold into hard labor in salt mines.

    The point is two decades of extreme monetary intervention and several rounds of fiscal stimulus have turned America into a nation of donkeys.  We’ve been cursed.  So, too, Europe, China, Japan, and practically all other countries have also been curse by similar money printing experiments.

    What’s more, the stated intent of the American Rescue Plan Act is a lie.  The bill has little to do with rescue from the COVID-19 pandemic.  But it has everything to do with being a giant giveaway…

    • Pension fund bailouts ($86 billion).

    • State, local, and tribal governments bailouts ($350 billion).

    • Transportation provisions ($62.9 billion), including a new $2 billion gravy train for Amtrak.

    • Agriculture relief ($10.4 billion).

    • Cybersecurity funding ($3.67 billion).

    • Rental assistance ($21.6 billion).

    • Homeowner assistance ($10 billion).

    • Funding for colleges and universities ($40 billion).

    • Extensions to expanded unemployment benefits and stimmy checks (too much to tally).

    • And much, Much, More…

    Hee-haw?  HEE-HAW!

    The Great Donkification

    “Go too far.  Stay too long.  Can’t get back.”

    – Words of an old preacher

    The U.S. national debt has now eclipsed $28 trillion.  The budget deficit for the 2021 fiscal year will likely run up to nearly $3 trillion – possibly more.  Hence, it will be financed with printing press money…that is credit created from thin air by the Federal Reserve and loaned to the Treasury.

    Hee-haw?  HEE-HAW!

    Moreover, after two decades of extreme monetary intervention and several rounds of stimmy checks the economy has been led to dependency.  Institutions, individuals, and businesses have been donkified.  There’s no going back.  What remains is a terrible choice…

    Voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion and a crisis now.  Or further credit expansion and the final and total catastrophe of the dollar system later.

    Hee-haw?  HEE-HAW!

    This week the Fed doubled down – again – on the great donkification…and total catastrophe of the dollar system later.  On Wednesday, the Fed issued its FOMC statement.

    In the spirit of Jack and Jenny Assery, the Fed will hold the federal funds rate near zero until at least 2023.  The Fed will also continue to create credit from thin air to buy $80 billion per month of Treasuries and $40 billion per month of mortgage backed securities (MBS).

    Hee-haw?  HEE-HAW!

    But what’s this?  Are the stubborn donkeys now inhibiting Powell’s grand plans?

    On Thursday, as if to spite Powell, the yield on the 10-Year Treasury note topped 1.75 percent.  By our estimation, this puts us now about 30-basis points to disaster.  In anticipation, the NASDAQ dropped over 400 points.

    Hee-haw?  HEE-HAW!

    Such is the curse of the great donkification.  To break it, there’ll be hell to pay.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/20/2021 – 20:00

  • Gross Profits For House Flippers Hits Record As Fed Turbocharges Real Estate Bubble 
    Gross Profits For House Flippers Hits Record As Fed Turbocharges Real Estate Bubble 

    The housing boom unleashed by the Federal Reserve during the virus pandemic was built on historically low mortgage rates, low inventory, city-dwellers moving to rural areas, and remote-work phenomenon. Housing prices in all 20 major US cities have been rising at the fastest pace since 2014. A red hot market has lured house flippers who are pocketing record profits.  

    Research firm Attom Data Solutions’ latest note specifies homes flipped in 2020 generated a gross profit of $66,300 nationwide (the difference between the median sales price and the median amount initially paid by investors). 2020’s gross profits were up 6.6% from a year earlier and were at the highest levels since the housing boom in 2005. 

    Even with a red hot real estate market, flippers find they have to pay up for homes, which is compressing their return on investment, averaging 40.5% in 2020 compared with 41.5% in 2019. Average home prices across the 20 cities rose a stunning 10% year-over-year in December, its fastest acceleration since 2014.

    On top of soaring home prices, flippers found out everything from lumber to copper prices increased build costs and squeezed margins. The National Association of Home Builders recently said soaring lumber prices added an extra $24k in costs to builders for the average home in 2020. 

    Even though margins are compressing, profits on flips remain strong, as second-tier regional banks are handing out fix-and-flip loans at increasing paces. Small banks, many of which most people have never heard of, such as Cutter Hill Capital, Builders Capital, and Temple View Capital, have seen a surge in loan originations for flipper loans. The average annual rate on a fix-and-flip loan is around 7.09%, about twice the level on a 30-year mortgage. These loans are short-term and are often measured in months than years – making them appealing for banks and other institutions attempting to obtain yield. 

    John Piazza, a contractor, based in Wilmington, Delaware, said he’s never seen business like this in four decades. 

    “Banks are just throwing money at you,” Piazza said.

    There’s an issue of speculation in the real estate market. As we’ve previously outlined, home prices are rising faster than personal incomes – the last time this happened was in the mid-2000s. We all know what happened next. 

    Last month, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said the current state of the housing market is downright unsustainable and that the market is likely to calm down in the near term.

    As for now, flippers are profiting off city dwellers who are fleeing urban pandemic life and looking to purchase homes in the suburbs. 

    However, fears are mounting the housing boom is not just overheating but there could be a cooldown as 30-year mortgage rates jump and are no longer under 3%

    Flippers expect the housing boom to continue this year as families still leave cities for bigger homes in suburbia or rural communities. AlphaFlow estimates that flippers could sell $75 billion worth of homes over each of the next two years, compared with the $56 billion average each year for the next three years. 

    But not everyone is convinced the flipper paradise will continue. Curt Altig, CEO of Seattle-based lender Builders Capital, said low inventory is not producing enough opportunities for finding underpriced homes to fix up. He said more flippers are chasing fewer transactions. 

    Maybe if forbearance programs for mortgages end, more opportunities will arrive for flippers, which would add supply to the housing market and reverse prices. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/20/2021 – 19:30

  • Taliban Warns Of "Reaction" If US Stays In Afghanistan Beyond May 1st
    Taliban Warns Of “Reaction” If US Stays In Afghanistan Beyond May 1st

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

    The Taliban warned the US on Friday that there would be a “reaction” if President Biden failed to withdraw from Afghanistan by the May 1st deadline set by the US-Taliban peace deal signed in Doha last year. The comments were made from Moscow, where the warring sides met to discuss the peace process.

    “They should go,” said Suhail Shaheen, a member of the Taliban’s negotiation team. He warned if the US stayed beyond May 1st, it would be a violation of the Doha agreement. “After that, it will be a kind of violation of the agreement. That violation would not be from our side… Their violation will have a reaction,” Shaheen said.

    Via Anadolu Agency

    Shaheen also called for “expedited” peace negotiations. “It is important that the negotiations should be expedited because it will help us to achieve a permanent ceasefire and countrywide peace and this is our goal,” He said. “As we talked with Afghan politicians, they also insisted that the process should be expedited.”

    Shaheen’s comments come after a report from NBC News said President Biden is considering staying in Afghanistan in November. Sources told NBC that Biden was pushing back against the Pentagon’s efforts to stay in Afghanistan but was convinced to consider extending the withdrawal deadline to November, although no decisions have yet been made.

    Any deadline extension would have to be agreed with the Taliban, or the group would again target US troops, something Shaheen’s warning makes clear. February 8th marked the first full year that no US troops died in combat in Afghanistan since the war began.

    While the Taliban held up its commitment not to attack the US troops, US airstrikes still occasionally target the group. A US military spokesman announced on Wednesday that the US bombed Taliban targets this week.

    Zalmay Khalilzad, the US special envoy for the Afghan peace process, attended Afghanistan talks in Moscow on Thursday. Russia has been hosting Afghanistan summits for years now, but the US is usually not involved. The US, Russia, China, and Pakistan released a joint statement calling for a political settlement.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/20/2021 – 19:00

  • One Year Ago: 'Gather In Crowds', 'Masks Are Useless', 'Only A Few Percent Are Vulnerable'
    One Year Ago: ‘Gather In Crowds’, ‘Masks Are Useless’, ‘Only A Few Percent Are Vulnerable’

    Amid the always-fearmongering, always-pessimistic, always-more-control-demanded, (and almost always wrong) daily headlines from Dr. Fauci, Former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb dared to speak optimistically about the way forward on Friday:

    We now know that the vaccines dramatically reduce your chance of both contracting COVID and becoming symptomatic to the point where you are going to have a bad outcome; we also know it reduces asymptomatic disease and reduces transmission… we are seeing that in the data.

    The Pfizer board member does hedge a little by suggesting those who are high risk should still take precautions.

    By many measures, March was supposed to be a “difficult month” but as the vaccine campaign continues uninterrupted, April and May will “look much more clear.”

    “…people can be more liberal… people will be taking off their masks because we are going to see prevalence decline around the country and people who’ve been vaccinated can go out with more confidence.”

    Then Gottlieb dropped some serious truth bombs (which were mysteriously edited out of CNBC’s clip above) saying that within a few weeks, it could be “obvious” that masks may be safely removed, and even more significantly, following CDC’s flip-flopping and confusing rules this week on distancing in schools:

    This six-foot distancing requirement has probably been the single costliest mitigation tactic that we’ve employed in response to COVID… and it really wasn’t based on clear science… we should have readjucated this much earlier.

    Watch this 70 seconds and consider the source – this is not some ‘white supremacist, disinformation-spreading, alt-right blogger’, this is the former FDA Commissioner who many mainstream media outlets have listened to verbatim through the crisis.

    But, but, but, what about Fauci’s “science”?

    This shocking revelation comes just days after Senator Rand Paul destroyed Dr. Fauci’s so-called “science”-based reasons for various restrictions – from mask-wearing to social-distancing – as ‘useless political theater’.

    Interestingly, Gottlieb said “both [Paul and Fauci] made valid points,” but specifically said that “Senator Paul was right, we need to see light at the end of the tunnel and have guidance that prescribes an environment where people can start doing things again.”

    Amid the now-politicized divide between nanny-state-obeyers and science-denying-extremists (there is no middle ground anymore), it would appear the entirely opposite-think statements, declarations, and proclamations made by officials one year ago have been almost entirely ‘memory-holed’.

    As Sharyl Attkisson points out in an extensively researched note, around this time last year:

    • Vaccine propagandist Dr. Peter Hotez made the case against travel bans

    • Dr. Anthony Fauci said there was no reason to walk around wearing masks

    • New York City’s Health Commissioner urged people to go to crowded places and busy restaurants

    • Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) encouraged people to get out and be around others in San Francisco’s Chinatown

    And one year ago, the World Health Organization gave what many scientist called confusing guidance on wearing masks for Covid-19. 

    World Health Organization, March 19, 2020: “Wearing medical masks when not indicated may result in unnecessary costs and procurement burdens and create a false sense of security that can lead to the neglect of other essential measures, such as hand hygiene practices. Further, using a mask incorrectly may hamper its effectiveness in reducing the risk of transmission.”

    It was just ten days after Dr. Anthony Fauci stated, on March 8, “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.”

    Dr. Fauci also, notoriously, testified to Congress that coronavirus was ten times deadlier than flu about the same time he published a scientific paper that said something quite different: Covid’s lethality was akin to a bad flu season. 

    President Trump’s ban on travel from China had been installed January 31 when there had only been a few confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the U.S. 

    Here’s a look back at some of the most notable statements made by public officials from January through March 31, 2020. 

    Some of the comments, guidance, and reflections proved accurate in the long run; some did not. Some seem to have long been forgotten or deposited down the selective memory hole.

    Nothing to fear, It’s a ‘bad flu’, ‘masks, schmasks’…

    Dr. Anthony Fauci, White House Coronavirus Task Force, Jan. 21, 2020: This is not a major threat to the people in the United States and it is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about.”

    Dr. Fauci, in sworn testimony to Congress, March 11, 2020: ’Coronavirus ten times more lethal than flu.’ but Dr. Fauci in the New England Journal of Medicine, March 26, 2020: “…the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%)…”

    Dr. Oxiris Barbot, New York City health commissioner, Jan. 27, 2020: People who had recently traveled from Wuhan were not being urged to self-quarantine or avoid large public gatherings.” “There is no reason not to take the subway, not to take the bus, not to go out to your favorite restaurant, and certainly not to miss the parade next Sunday.”

    and

    “As we gear up to celebrate the #LunarNewYear [Chinatown parade] in NYC, I want to assure New Yorkers that there is no reason for anyone to change their holiday plans, avoid the subway, or certain parts of the city because of #coronavirus…We are here today to urge all New Yorkers to continue to live their lives as usual.”

    and

    “…theres no risk at this point in time…about having it be transmitted in casual contact, right?” “The risk to New Yorkers for Coronavirus is low, and our preparedness as a city is very high.”

    LA Times, Soumya Karlamangla, Jan. 31, 2020: For Americans, flu remains a bigger threat than coronavirus. “…unlike the coronavirus, which so far hasnt led to any deaths in the U.S., influenza has killed approximately 10,000 Americans since October, according to federal data released Friday.” “…a much deadlier killer already stalking the United States has been largely overshadowed: the flu.”

    Rep. Nancy Pelosi, House Speaker, Feb. 24, 2020: Urged people to visit San Franciscos Chinatown. “Thats what were trying to do today is to say everything is fine here. Come because precautions have been taken. The city is on top of the situation.”

    New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio, March 2, 2020: “…Im encouraging New Yorkers to go on with your lives + get out on the town despite Coronavirus…” 

    Cuomo, March 23, 2020: Many people will get the virus, but few will be truly endangered. Hold both of those facts in your hands: Many will get it, up to 80 percent may get it, but few are truly endangered and we know who they are.”

    Dr. Anthony Fauci, National Institutes of Health and White House Task Force, March 8, 2020: “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.”

    Read more hypocritical insanity here…

    So what changed? Why did all these officials suddenly flip to fearmongering the deadliest of deadly things imaginable (that leaves 99.7% of those ‘infected’ unharmed)?

    It couldn’t be politics, surely?

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/20/2021 – 18:30

  • What FBI Stats Really Reveal About Asian Hate Crimes
    What FBI Stats Really Reveal About Asian Hate Crimes

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    FBI crime statistics debunk the media’s narrative that white people represent the biggest violent crime threat to Asians, with figures showing whites significantly underrepresented in crime stats compared to their per capita population.

    Since the killing of six Asian women who worked in massage parlors in Atlanta, the media has amplified the false narrative that “white supremacy” is to blame.

    They hyped this explanation despite the fact that the attack had nothing whatsoever to do with race and despite two white women also being killed during the shooting.

    Despite admitting the attack had no racial motive, CNN still blamed it on “white nationalism and domestic extremism” in an article titled ‘White supremacy and hate are haunting Asian Americans’.

    However, official crime stats show that white people are significantly underrepresented in terms of the violent crime threat they pose to Asians.

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

    As the Washington Examiner highlights, citing FBI statistics, whereas whites comprise 62% of the population, they committed 24% of crimes against Asians in 2018.

    In comparison, blacks, who comprise 13% of the population, committed 27.5% of all violent crimes against Asian Americans in 2018.

    So clearly, white people do not represent the biggest crime threat to Asian Americans.

    The figures once again underscore how the media has contrived another hysterical moral panic in order to bolster what can no longer be seen as anything other than institutional racism and hatred towards white people.

    *  *  *

    In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. I need you to sign up for my free newsletter here. Support my sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown. Also, I urgently need your financial support here.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/20/2021 – 18:00

  • Bargain-Hunting Millennials Jump At Cheaper San Francisco Rents 
    Bargain-Hunting Millennials Jump At Cheaper San Francisco Rents 

    After a year-long exodus of residents, San Francisco begins to see people returning as the economy gradually reopens. The folks who are moving back are taking advantage of deeply discounted rents and high concessions offered by landlords desperate for new tenants. 

    The return of people to the metro area should not be viewed as recovery as deep economic scarring, caused mainly by government public health orders, has resulted in the decimation of small and medium-sized enterprises. Also, remote-work turbocharged the exodus from the metro area as many people moved to suburbia or out of state. The result is soaring vacancies putting downward pressure on rents as landlords have lost pricing power. 

    “It’s going to take years for the average landlord’s revenue to get back to pre-Covid levels,” said John Pawlowski, an analyst at real estate data and research firm Green Street, who Bloomberg quoted. The rapid decline in rents has made higher-end apartment buildings in the city more affordable for broke millennials.  

    Rents at San Francisco buildings owned by Essex Property Trust Inc plunged 17% during the pandemic. The company offers record concessions, such as three months of free rent and a preloaded debit card with $2k. 

    A similar trend is happening in Manhattan, where folks capitalize on cheaper rents and record concessions, resulting in a surge of new leases in early 2021. 

    The pandemic has transformed both San Francisco and Manhattan into ghost towns, but recently some life has returned, though nothing like the boom times of the pre-COVID era. 

    Data from the Cleveland Fed revealed San Francisco suffered the most significant outflow of people from last year than any other US metro area. In October, the entire downtown area of the city, once vibrant with business and tourism, transformed into a ghost town, mainly due to some of the country’s strictest public health orders, closing restaurants, cafes, bars, nightclubs, among other attractions. 

    According to Apartment List data, rents in San Francisco sank 27% during the pandemic to an average of around $2,000 per month. In early 2021, there appears to be some stabilization. 

    Source: Bloomberg 

    “It’s a turning point,” said Igor Popov, the chief economist at Apartment List. “People are moving back in, but we’re not jumping back to pre-Covid rents because the group occupying those units are different and have different price points.”

    People like Lindsay Albert, a director of programming for an arts organization in San Francisco, left the city last April because her living situation with other people made her uncomfortable during the pandemic. 

    Source: Bloomberg 

    Albert is now living in a one-bedroom apartment in the inner Richmond district for $2,000. She said the rent is $1,000 less than what she was looking at one year ago. 

    “I feel like I’ve won the lottery,” she said as the apartment complex showered her with amenities. “I’m 34 years old and I haven’t ever been able to live alone,” she added.

    Source: Bloomberg 

    Miles Garber, vice president of research with real estate marketing company Polaris Pacific in San Francisco, said, “while things have improved recently, there’s still a long way to go.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/20/2021 – 17:30

  • House Democrats Propose 4,350 Earmarks A Year Costing $13 Billion
    House Democrats Propose 4,350 Earmarks A Year Costing $13 Billion

    Submitted By Adam Andrzejewski of Forbes,

    Congressional earmarks are back. The Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives will allow up to $13 billion in earmarks on House appropriations bills, 10 per member, for a total of up to 4,350 earmarks for fiscal year 2022.

    House Republicans released a statement arguing that earmarks are a pathway to congressional corruption. One member of the caucus, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), argued that earmarks are “little more than legislative bribery.”

    The late Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) frequently called earmarks “the gateway drug” to corruption and overspending, and spearheaded the 2011 ban.

    Even President Barack Obama, in his 2011 State of the Union speech, said he would veto any bill containing earmarks, saying “… the American people deserve to know that special interests aren’t larding up legislation with pet projects, both parties in Congress should know this: If a bill comes to my desk with earmarks inside, I will veto it. I will veto it.”

    At the height of earmarking in 2005, Congress passed 15,000 Congressional earmarks, at a cost of $29 billion, according to The Heritage Foundation. And from the earmark largess flowed corruption, convictions, and waste.

    One notorious 2005 earmark, Sen. Ted Stevens’ (R-AK) Alaskan “Bridge to Nowhere,” cost an estimated $80 million to connect Ketchikan, Alaska, with Gravina Island, home to 50 people.

    Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-CA) went to jail after he tearfully confessed conspiring to pass out earmarks and pocketing $2.4 million in bribes, including a Rolls-Royce, a yacht and a 19th-century Louis-Philippe commode. (President Trump gave Cunningham a conditional pardon in Trump’s final days in the White House.)

    In 2005, former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) used a $207 million federal transportation earmark to construct the “Prairie Parkway” near some newly purchased farmland, which his trust proceeded to sell a few months later for a multi-million dollar profit.

    That same year, lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his associates were convicted for bribing legislators with gifts and campaign contributions for votes on earmarked funding.

    Over the years, other earmarks drew scrutiny and scorn: a $3.4 million earmark for turtle tunnels under a Florida highway, a $50 million earmark for an indoor rain forest in Iowa, $1 million for a Woodstock Museum in New York, $500,000 for a North Carolina teapot museum, and $273,000 to study Goth culture in Missouri, among others.

    Rep. DeLauro says the COVID-19 crisis has forced the House to return to funding the much-maligned pork projects, otherwise known as earmarks: “Members want Congress to help their communities, particularly now as the pandemic exposed so many inequalities and needs,” she said in a statement released by the House Appropriations Committee.

    The House started a moratorium on earmarks in 2011, but now Members are coining a new term to refer to earmark spending, pork projects, and “Member-directed spending.”

    Rep. DeLauros’ announcement introduced the new euphemism: “Community Project Funding.”

    “Community Project Funding will allow Members to put their deep, first-hand understanding of the needs of their communities to work to help the people we represent,” she said.

    The newly renamed earmarks will come with a small-sounding set-aside: “no more than 1 percent of discretionary spending,” Rep. DeLauro announced.

    Of course, one percent is not so small when Congress designated $1.298 trillion in discretionary spending for FY2021. Setting aside one percent for House appropriation earmarks in fiscal year 2022 would mean earmarks (or, ahem, “community project funding”) could equal $12.98 billion or more.

    There’s no telling what amount the Senate might add, and reports are they’re still negotiating on how and if to bring earmarks back. It’s also worth noting this appropriations committee policy will not count toward to transportation and infrastructure bills or those in future emergency spending bills.

    But many current members of Congress ran on the promise they would fight exactly the kind of pork barrel spending House Democrats are trying to resurrect.

    In one 2014 campaign ad, then-candidate Joni Ernst, now a Republican U.S. Senator from Iowa, talked about castrating hogs on her childhood farm and concluded, “So when I get to Washington, I’ll know how to cut pork …because Washington’s full of big spenders… Let’s make ’em squeal.”

    If noise from Washington’s Republican lobbyists is any indication, it’s likely Ernst will soon be fighting her own party. One former senate staffer, Mark Strand, recently argued that earmarks “can lead to healing.” Strand’s old boss, former Senator Jim Talent (R-MO), was a proponent and frequent user of earmarks.

    Senator Ernst and her waste-fighting colleagues argue otherwise: “There’s good reason why earmarks are referred to as pork: They stink, and they’re messy. With the national debt headed toward $30 trillion, the last thing Congress needs to be focused on is finding other ways to waste money.”

    Earmarks cross party lines—but not in a good way. Politicians from both sides of the aisle love directing taxpayer funds, and we’ll be seeing much more pork from the House in the coming years.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/20/2021 – 17:00

  • Biden Border Crisis: ICE Secures Hotel Rooms For Migrants; Admin Plans Flying Illegals To Canadian Border
    Biden Border Crisis: ICE Secures Hotel Rooms For Migrants; Admin Plans Flying Illegals To Canadian Border

    Biden’s migrant crisis along the southern US border has reached epic proportions.

    As we reported on Thursday, not long after Biden said he would “reverse Trump’s immigration policies” and vowed to give illegal aliens “a pathway to citizenship”, the ensuing chaos at the border has resulted in over 13,000 unaccompanied migrant children detained in federal custody (a third of whom have been sitting in the same ‘cages’ built by the Obama-Biden administration) and 3,000 of whom have been held beyond the 72-hour legal limit. In a desperate attempt to ease the crisis, Biden did a complete U-turn and told migrants to stop coming, after begging Mexico’s president to help stem the flood of illegal migrants

    According to the New York Times, after Biden halted construction on the border wall (leaving gaping holes at construction sites), stopped turning away children, and proposed a pathway to citizenship, the surge in migrants – i.e., future democrat voters – has overwhelmed the Biden administration’s ability to process them. Faced with a crisis of his own making, Biden reportedly asked Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador ‘whether more could be done to help solve the problem.’

    Biden and AMLO even discussed the possibility of the United States sending Mexico some of its surplus vaccine supply, a senior Mexican official told the Times, which notes that “Mexico has publicly asked the Biden administration to send it doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has not been approved for use in the United States.”

    According to Mexican officials, efforts to secure vaccines are separate from immigration talks, but they have acknowledged that a shipment of doses would “help” relations.

    “Both governments cooperate on the basis of an orderly, safe and regular migration system,” said Roberto Velasco, director general for the North America region at Mexico’s foreign ministry, though he added that there is no quid pro quo for the vaccines.

    In other words, not only did Biden’s reckless promises to accept all immigrants backfire spectacularly, he is now is forced to beg and bribe Mexico with promises of a vaccine that nobody wants to prevent the migrant crisis that he started from getting even worse.

    But perhaps because the president lacks faith in his own diplomatic skills (justifiably so as demonstrated by last week’s catastrophic US-China summit), on Friday the Biden administration was reportedly considering flying migrants who illegally cross the US-Mexico border to near the US-Canada border for processing as a way to ease pressure on overwhelmed facilities in Texas, the WaPo reported.

    The tactic is under consideration amid an unprecedented surge in border crossings resulting from Biden’s policies and reform legislation that would create a path to citizenship for most illegal immigrants.

    Some data: the number of migrant family members caught crossing the southwest border more than doubled between January and February — rising from 7,000 to nearly 19,000, according to the most recently released agency data. And while border officials continue to use a Trump-era order to quickly return many families to Mexico. But Mexico has limited capacity to take in migrant families and won’t accept some with young children, according to administration officials. In total, the CBP reports that there was a record for February 100K “land encounters” along the border in February.

    42% of families were expelled to Mexico last month — down from 64% in January and 91% in October, according to the data. More than 13,000 family members who crossed the U.S. border illegally have been allowed into the country since the start of January, many released into border communities.

    In any case, in a move that is sure to delight Canada, Department of Homeland Security officials told the Washington Post that the administration is considering air lifts to the northern border due to large numbers of unaccompanied children and families crossing in the south. Officials told the Washington Post that on Friday morning 1,000 people who were either unaccompanied minors or in family units crossed the Rio Grande into Texas, and that another 1,000 still were awaiting processing from Thursday night.

    But wait, there’s more.

    In an apparent backup plan, Axios reports that the Biden administration has awarded an $86 million contract for hotel rooms near the border to hold around 1,200 migrant family members who cross the U.S.-Mexico border on behalf of ICE.

    The contract through Endeavors, a Texas-based nonprofit, is for six months but could be extended and expanded. The hotels will be near border areas, including in Arizona and Texas.

    ICE, which oversees the custody of migrant adults and families who cross the border illegally after they are apprehended by border patrol agents, is already transforming its family detention facilities into rapid-processing centers with the goal of releasing families within 72 hours. 

    While immigration agencies have used hotels in the past, unlike border patrol stations, they but do not have to follow the same safety protocols that official government detention spaces do, and as such could result in fresh covid “superspreader” events amid news that many of the migrants have covid. This is happening just as many predict that the US will be able to emerge from the covid pandemic within months, and for the conspiratorialy minded this latest development would provide the government with just the right catalyst to spark a new covid wave… which would naturally transform into trillions more of Universal Basic Income stimmy checks down the line, just as big government wants it.

    Finally, some have asked whether it would not be more practical, not to mention more patriotic to spend millions on hotel rooms for the 60,000 homeless American veterans, than the thousands of illegal immigrants who are only here because of the admin’s latest Plaxico.

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    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/20/2021 – 16:55

  • It's Official: All Foreign Travelers Barred From Attending Tokyo Games
    It’s Official: All Foreign Travelers Barred From Attending Tokyo Games

    As was forewarned and expected, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and local organizers of the Tokyo Olympics have reached a final decision on the admittance of foreign spectators to the games, ruling that outside travelers will be barred from attending the summer games

    “In order to give clarity to ticket holders living overseas and to enable them to adjust their travel plans at this stage, the parties on the Japanese side have come to the conclusion that they will not be able to enter into Japan at the time of the Olympic and Paralympic Games,” the Tokyo organizing committee announced in a statement Saturday.

    The government of Japan had a little under two weeks ago put additional pressure on the organizing committee to prevent foreign spectator attendance, saying that in response to public fears over a ‘super-spreader’ scenario due to an influx of hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of people, it will move to ban them from entering the country.  

    Getty Images

    This ‘final verdict’ on the matter similarly echoed the Japanese government’s stance that a “safe” and secure games must be held with the Japanese public in mind. The committee said the foreign spectator entry ban will “further contribute to ensure safe and secure Games for all participants and the Japanese public.” 

    Reuters this month cited the latest surveys revealing rising fear and anxiety among locals that the games would lead to a surge in the coronavirus pandemic, citing Japanese newspapers:

    Most Japanese people do not want international visitors to attend the Games amid fears that a large influx could spark a resurgence of infections, a Yomiuri newspaper poll showed.

    The survey showed 77% of respondents were against allowing foreign fans to attend, versus 18% in favor.

    Some 48% said they were against allowing any spectators into venues and 45% were in favor.

    It’s further been confirmed that even the opening torch ceremony will be conducted without fans or spectators in the stadium. 

    Earlier this month the recently installed president of the Japanese committee Seiko Hashimoto forewarned that the health and medical situation in Japan would have to be “perfect” to hold the games without threat to athletes or the Japanese population – strongly hinting that this wouldn’t be possible with an influx of foreign travelers. 

    “We would really like people from around the world to come to a full stadium, but unless we are prepared to accept them and the medical situation in Japan is perfect, it will cause a great deal of trouble also to visitors from overseas,” Hashimoto said. The games kick off Friday, July 23.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/20/2021 – 16:30

  • Father Arrested After Continuing To Call His Child "She" Following Court-Ordered Gender-Transition Treatments
    Father Arrested After Continuing To Call His Child “She” Following Court-Ordered Gender-Transition Treatments

    Authored by Jonathan Turley,

    There is an extraordinary case out of British Columbia where a father referenced as CD was arrested after he continued to refer to his biological 14-year-old daughter (known as AB) as “she” and his “daughter” after he transitioned to a male gender.  The Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada ordered that the child receive testosterone injections without obtaining parental consent. CD opposed the transition as the parent but he was overruled after physicians at BC Children’s Hospital who decided the girl should receive testosterone injections. The father continued to defy gag orders, including a bar on his trying to persuade with his own child to wait before making such a change.

    We have previously discussed how such pronoun disputes (called “misgendering“) lead to criminal investigation in other countries like Great Britain.

    The Canadian courts withheld the father’s name but he has since gone public in interview and has a GoFundMe site under his real name.

    Previously, in a 2019 decision, Justice Gregory Bowden rejected the parent’s view as largely immaterial:

    In view of the established law regarding the right of a mature minor to consent to medical treatment and the assessments of a number of physicians that A.B.has capacity to consent as well as the evidence of his health care providers that the proposed treatment is in A.B.’s best interests, there is no serious question to be tried.

    At the second stage of the RJR test, the inquiry is whether the litigant who seeks the interlocutory injunction would, unless the injunction is granted, suffer irreparable harm. A.B.’s father has not demonstrated that a refusal to grant the injunction would adversely affect or irreparably harm him.

    After that decision, there was a gag order put into place that barred the father from even trying to convince his son to change his mind:

    “[1] AB, a 14 year old transgender boy, applies for a protection order to restrain his father, CD, from publishing, speaking or giving interviews about this case or about AB’s personal and medical information.

    “a) CD shall be restrained from: i. attempting to persuade AB to abandon treatment for gender dysphoria; ii. addressing AB by his birth name; and iii. referring to AB as a girl or with female pronouns whether to AB directly or to third parties;

    “b) CD shall not directly, or indirectly through an agent or third party, publish or share information or documentation relating to AB’s sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, mental or physical health, medical status or therapies.”

    The evening of the Bowden’s decision, CD spoke to the Federalist and said “because she is a girl. Her DNA will not change through all these experiments that they do.” He added:

    “I had a perfectly healthy child a year ago, and that perfectly healthy child has been altered and destroyed for absolutely no good reason. She can never go back to being a girl in the healthy body that she should have had. She’s going to forever have a lower voice. She’ll forever have to shave because of facial hair. She won’t be able to have children… Sometimes I just want to scream so that other parents and people will… jump in, understand what’s going on. There’s a child—and not only mine, but in my case, my child out there having her life ruined.”

    That led to a conviction of the father for “family violence” in April 2019. Furthermore, Judge Francesca Marzari even issued an order authorizing Clark’s arrest “without warrant” by any police officer who might catch him referring to his daughter “as a girl or with female pronouns.”

    Later YouTube interviews with the father were removed.  In addressing one of those interviews, Justice Michael Tammen of the British Columbia Supreme Court even ordered that Laura-Lynn  Thompson to pull her interview and, when she did not, he sent police to her house.

    The decisions reject any substantive weight given parental rights. I have long opposed an absolutist position against parental rights in areas like abortion with minors. The use of criminal penalties against this father only magnify those concerns.

    I personally disagree with the father in the use of the pronoun if his son has made this choice. I would yield to the child’s preference. However, the question is whether the state should play such a coercive and intrusive role in a family. 

    Ordering a parent not to speak to his child about the issue or arresting him for referring to the child’s biological gender raises very serious parental and free speech rights in my view.   I realize that many experts believe that opposing such gender transition is abusive and harmful. I do not discount that view. However, that is a position best left to persuasive rather than coercive means. We can debate this question and many can oppose the use of such pronouns as abusive. 

    Yet, arresting a parent for continuing to oppose such a transition or referring to the wrong pronoun is chilling. There is an utter disregard of the countervailing interests and rights of parents in these decisions.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 03/20/2021 – 16:00

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Today’s News 20th March 2021

  • Why HR1 Threatens Election Integrity
    Why HR1 Threatens Election Integrity

    Authored by Justin Riemer via RealClearPolitics.com,

    Much ink has been spilled warning of the ramifications should Democrats pass their election “reform” package, HR1 — and for good reason, given how the bill would upend our nation’s electoral system.

    Democrats claim HR1 is aimed at maximizing voter participation and ending corruption in our election systems, but the truth is that the legislation would do neither. Instead, it will only serve to open up our states’ elections to fraud and public mistrust at a time when we need to bolster voter confidence.

    Let’s look at just a few of the many areas where HR1 would nationalize elections and cancel out state integrity and confidence-building measures.

    First, the measure voids dozens of longstanding state voting procedures, many of which are relatively non-controversial and serve to give voters confidence in the accuracy and integrity of our elections process. HR1 would invalidate photo ID requirements — such as those in Indiana — that the Supreme Court have found constitutional and important confidence builders. These laws are popular with large majorities of Americans, and despite critics’ fearmongering they have not negatively impacted voter participation.

    HR1 would also force states to allow ballot harvesting, a practice where third parties, usually political operatives, collect and return marked mail ballots. Laws restricting harvesting, which are also popular, deter fraud because they preserve a marked-ballot chain of custody and prevent coercion and undue influence on the elderly and other voters. Yet Democrats want to override these laws and normalize harvesting.  

    Just last week we saw additional criminal charges against candidates in an all-mail city council election in Paterson, N.J., for vote fraud related to harvesting and tampering with ballots. The fraud was so pervasive that a local judge voided the election and ordered a new one. There was also the infamous congressional race in North Carolina in 2018, when the election had to be thrown out because of fraud initiated through ballot harvesting. The good news is that ballot harvesting bans help prevent and detect these exact types of crimes. But if Congress nationalizes ballot harvesting through HR1, these stories may go from being cautionary tales to the new norm.

    To date, the Republican National Committee has been successful in beating the Democrats in court challenges to harvesting bans and has been vocal about the need for bans. And they are not inherently partisan since many states, both blue and red, either prohibit harvesting or severely restrict it. Now, after losing in the courts, Democrats seek to impose the practice from Washington, D.C., with the arrogant belief that they know better than state legislatures about the election integrity measures their states require.

    HR1 will also further restrict states from cleaning up their voter rolls. Under current federal law, a state must stop programs that remove ineligible voters from the rolls within 90 days before a federal election. This blackout period already significantly limits a state’s ability to remove voters who may have moved away,  died, or are otherwise ineligible to vote because it applies to periods before both primaries and general elections. The Democrats propose expanding that blackout period for many programs to six months before any federal election. Not only will this prevent states from cleaning up their rolls in a federal election year, it will expand that period for many states into the off years.

    Voter roll maintenance not only enhances election integrity by ensuring only eligible voters can cast ballots, it also promotes access by ensuring voters are properly registered when they do go to vote, thus preventing lines and provisional ballots that may not count. No wonder both parties have historically agreed on the importance of voter registration list upkeep. HR1’s restrictions make Democrats’ intentions clear: They have abandoned any pretense that they still care about this issue that was once welcomed as reasonable and routine. 

    Cynics say that Republicans oppose this legislation because we want to restrict people from voting. This could not be further from the truth. The reality is that we want all eligible voters to be able to vote and vote easily — but voters must also have confidence that our elections systems have safeguards to prevent fraud and ensure accuracy. Previous federal election legislation such as the NVRA and HAVA made some attempt to balance the interests of voter integrity and access. But HR1 eliminates any pretense altogether by invaliding states’ reasonable ID requirements, mandating ballot harvesting, and enacting obstacles to critical voter roll maintenance.

    The American people do not want a Washington takeover of their elections at the hands of congressional Democrats. They want election transparency and confidence in their future elections restored. These motives are exactly what the RNC will continue to fight for, both in the lead-up to the critical midterms and ahead of all elections to come.

    *  *  *

    Justin Riemer is the chief counsel of the Republican National Committee.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 03/19/2021 – 23:40

  • DARPA Wants Jetpack Soldiers On Modern Battlefield
    DARPA Wants Jetpack Soldiers On Modern Battlefield

    Jet suits are commonly associated with science fiction movies or shows, but high-tech miniature turbine engines have quickly advanced this new type of mobility to become a reality. 

    Now Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is searching for an Iron Man-style jet suit as per its new solicitation on website Sam.Gov (System for Award Management). DARPA is calling on private industry to deliver jet suits or “Portable Personal Air Mobility System.” 

    DARPA requests, “these platforms could serve a variety of military missions, enabling cost-effective mission utility and agility in areas such as personnel logistics [and] urban augmented combat.” Some requirements include a range of at least 3.1 miles, can take off anywhere, and assembly in under ten minutes. “Systems may be air deployed to allow for [infiltration] to hostile territory, or ground deployed to allow for greater off-road mobility,” DARPA wrote.

    Jet suits have already been well-established technology in the last five years. 

    British jet suit company, Gravity Industries, unveiled its “flying” medic jet suit in October. The company showed how first responders could use the flying suit, powered by multiple kerosene-fuelled micro gas turbines, to respond to emergency incidents in rugged terrain quickly. Here’s a clip of a mock rescue: 

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    The Royal Navy has also been testing a real-life version of Marvel’s Tony Stark jet suit. The service may use the jet suits “to rapidly swarm and board ships,” according to the U.S. Naval Institute. 

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    California-based JetPack Aviation is working on a version of the jet suit that could carry soldiers 200 miles an hour, for up to 10 minutes. 

    The request also states: “When deployed, the platform will be designed with simplified operations in mind, so that someone unfamiliar with the platform could be educated in its safe and effective use with relatively little training.”

    Jet suits are on their way to the modern battlefield and perhaps could be in civilian use before the military. 

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 03/19/2021 – 23:20

  • Digital Trails: How The FBI Is Identifying, Tracking, & Rounding-Up Dissidents
    Digital Trails: How The FBI Is Identifying, Tracking, & Rounding-Up Dissidents

    Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “Americans deserve the freedom to choose a life without surveillance and the government regulation that would make that possible. While we continue to believe the sentiment, we fear it may soon be obsolete or irrelevant. We deserve that freedom, but the window to achieve it narrows a little more each day. If we don’t act now, with great urgency, it may very well close for good.”

    – Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson, New York Times

    Databit by databit, we are building our own electronic concentration camps.

    With every new smart piece of smart technology we acquire, every new app we download, every new photo or post we share online, we are making it that much easier for the government and its corporate partners to identify, track and eventually round us up.

    Saint or sinner, it doesn’t matter because we’re all being swept up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals.

    This is what it means to live in a suspect society.

    The government’s efforts to round up those who took part in the Capitol riots shows exactly how vulnerable we all are to the menace of a surveillance state that aspires to a God-like awareness of our lives.

    Relying on selfies, social media posts, location data, geotagged photos, facial recognition, surveillance cameras and crowdsourcing, government agents are compiling a massive data trove on anyone and everyone who may have been anywhere in the vicinity of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

    The amount of digital information is staggering: 15,000 hours of surveillance and body-worn camera footage; 1,600 electronic devices; 270,000 digital media tips; at least 140,000 photos and videos; and about 100,000 location pings for thousands of smartphones.

    And that’s just what we know.

    More than 300 individuals from 40 states have already been charged and another 280 arrested in connection with the events of January 6. As many as 500 others are still being hunted by government agents.

    Also included in this data roundup are individuals who may have had nothing to do with the riots but whose cell phone location data identified them as being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

    Forget about being innocent until proven guilty.

    In a suspect society such as ours, the burden of proof has been flipped: now, you start off guilty and have to prove your innocence.

    For instance, you didn’t even have to be involved in the Capitol riots to qualify for a visit from the FBI: investigators have reportedly been tracking—and questioning—anyone whose cell phones connected to wi-fi or pinged cell phone towers near the Capitol. One man, who had gone out for a walk with his daughters only to end up stranded near the Capitol crowds, actually had FBI agents show up at his door days later. Using Google Maps, agents were able to pinpoint exactly where they were standing and for how long.

    All of the many creepy, calculating, invasive investigative and surveillance tools the government has acquired over the years are on full display right now in the FBI’s ongoing efforts to bring the rioters to “justice.”

    FBI agents are matching photos with drivers’ license pictures; tracking movements by way of license plate toll readers; and zooming in on physical identifying marks such as moles, scars and tattoos, as well as brands, logos and symbols on clothing and backpacks. They’re poring over hours of security and body camera footage; scouring social media posts; triangulating data from cellphone towers and WiFi signals; layering facial recognition software on top of that; and then cross-referencing footage with public social media posts.

    It’s not just the FBI on the hunt, however.

    They’ve enlisted the help of volunteer posses of private citizens, such as Deep State Dogs, to collaborate on the grunt work. As Dinah Voyles Pulver reports, once Deep State Dogs locates a person and confirms their identity, they put a package together with the person’s name, address, phone number and several images and send it to the FBI.

    According to USA Todaythe FBI is relying on the American public and volunteer cybersleuths to help bolster its cases.

    This takes See Something, Say Something snitching programs to a whole new level.

    The lesson to be learned: Big Brother, Big Sister and all of their friends are watching you.

    They see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

    Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

    Simply liking or sharing this article on Facebook, retweeting it on Twitter, or merely reading it or any other articles related to government wrongdoing, surveillance, police misconduct or civil liberties might be enough to get you categorized as a particular kind of person with particular kinds of interests that reflect a particular kind of mindset that might just lead you to engage in a particular kinds of activities and, therefore, puts you in the crosshairs of a government investigation as a potential troublemaker a.k.a. domestic extremist.

    Chances are, as the Washington Post reports, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.

    In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.

    The government has the know-how.

    It took days, if not hours or minutes, for the FBI to begin the process of identifying, tracking and rounding up those suspected of being part of the Capitol riots.

    Imagine how quickly government agents could target and round up any segment of society they wanted to based on the digital trails and digital footprints we leave behind.

    Of course, the government has been hard at work for years acquiring these totalitarian powers.

    Long before the January 6 riots, the FBI was busily amassing the surveillance tools necessary to monitor social media posts, track and identify individuals using cell phone signals and facial recognition technology, and round up “suspects” who may be of interest to the government for one reason or another.

    As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.

    All it needs is the data, which more than 90% of young adults and 65% of American adults are happy to provide.

    When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

    As for the Fourth Amendment and its prohibitions on warrantless searches and invasions of privacy without probable cause, those safeguards have been rendered all but useless by legislative end-runs, judicial justifications, and corporate collusions.

    We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers.

    Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior.

    This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, social media posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

    For example, police have been using Stingray devices mounted on their cruisers to intercept cell phone calls and text messages without court-issued search warrants. Doppler radar devices, which can detect human breathing and movement within a home, are already being employed by the police to deliver arrest warrants.

    License plate readers, yet another law enforcement spying device made possible through funding by the Department of Homeland Security, can record up to 1800 license plates per minute. Moreover, these surveillance cameras can also photograph those inside a moving car. Reports indicate that the Drug Enforcement Administration has been using the cameras in conjunction with facial recognition software to build a “vehicle surveillance database” of the nation’s cars, drivers and passengers.

    Sidewalk and “public space” cameras, sold to gullible communities as a sure-fire means of fighting crime, is yet another DHS program that is blanketing small and large towns alike with government-funded and monitored surveillance cameras. It’s all part of a public-private partnership that gives government officials access to all manner of surveillance cameras, on sidewalks, on buildings, on buses, even those installed on private property.

    Couple these surveillance cameras with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology and you have the makings of “pre-crime” cameras, which scan your mannerisms, compare you to pre-set parameters for “normal” behavior, and alert the police if you trigger any computerized alarms as being “suspicious.”

    State and federal law enforcement agencies are pushing to expand their biometric and DNA databases by requiring that anyone accused of a misdemeanor have their DNA collected and catalogued. However, technology is already available that allows the government to collect biometrics such as fingerprints from a distance, without a person’s cooperation or knowledge. One system can actually scan and identify a fingerprint from nearly 20 feet away.

    Developers are hard at work on a radar gun that can actually show if you or someone in your car is texting. Another technology being developed, dubbed a “textalyzer” device, would allow police to determine whether someone was driving while distracted. Refusing to submit one’s phone to testing could result in a suspended or revoked driver’s license.

    It’s a sure bet that anything the government welcomes (and funds) too enthusiastically is bound to be a Trojan horse full of nasty, invasive surprises.

    Case in point: police body cameras. Hailed as the easy fix solution to police abuses, these body cameras—made possible by funding from the Department of Justice—turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras. Of course, if you try to request access to that footage, you’ll find yourself being led a merry and costly chase through miles of red tape, bureaucratic footmen and unhelpful courts.

    The “internet of things” refers to the growing number of “smart” appliances and electronic devices now connected to the internet and capable of interacting with each other and being controlled remotely. These range from thermostats and coffee makers to cars and TVs. Of course, there’s a price to pay for such easy control and access. That price amounts to relinquishing ultimate control of and access to your home to the government and its corporate partners. For example, while Samsung’s Smart TVs are capable of “listening” to what you say, thereby allowing users to control the TV using voice commands, it also records everything you say and relays it to a third party, e.g., the government.

    Then again, the government doesn’t really need to spy on you using your smart TV when the FBI can remotely activate the microphone on your cellphone and record your conversations. The FBI can also do the same thing to laptop computers without the owner knowing any better.

    Drones, which are taking to the skies en masse, are the converging point for all of the weapons and technology already available to law enforcement agencies. In fact, drones can listen in on your phone calls, see through the walls of your home, scan your biometrics, photograph you and track your movements, and even corral you with sophisticated weaponry.

    All of these technologies add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence, especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.

    These digital trails are everywhere.

    As investigative journalists Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson explain, “This data—collected by smartphone apps and then fed into a dizzyingly complex digital advertising ecosystem … provided an intimate record of people whether they were visiting drug treatment centers, strip clubs, casinos, abortion clinics or places of worship.

    In such a surveillance ecosystem, we’re all suspects and databits to be tracked, catalogued and targeted.

    As Warzel and Thompson warn:

    “To think that the information will be used against individuals only if they’ve broken the law is naïve; such data is collected and remains vulnerable to use and abuse whether people gather in support of an insurrection or they justly protest police violence… This collection will only grow more sophisticated… It gets easier by the day… it does not discriminate. It harvests from the phones of MAGA rioters, police officers, lawmakers and passers-by. There is no evidence, from the past or current day, that the power this data collection offers will be used only to good ends. There is no evidence that if we allow it to continue to happen, the country will be safer or fairer.”

    As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is the creepy, calculating yet diabolical genius of the American police state: the very technology we hailed as revolutionary and liberating has become our prison, jailer, probation officer, Big Brother and Father Knows Best all rolled into one.

    There is no gray area any longer.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 03/19/2021 – 23:00

  • NASA Tests "World's Most Powerful Rocket" Ahead Of 2024 Moon Mission
    NASA Tests “World’s Most Powerful Rocket” Ahead Of 2024 Moon Mission

    NASA’s Artemis program to land the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024 has been a widely spoken about topic in recent months. The space agency is collaborating with commercial and international partners to make the lunar mission possible. 

    On Thursday afternoon, NASA completed the testing firing of deep space rockets made by Boeing/Aerojet. For eight minutes, four main engines remained ignited. This follows a failed test in January. 

    NASA tweeted a video of the ground-based rocket engine test, saying, “Ready to see the world’s most powerful rocket come alive?”

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    The four engines will be the core stage of the Space Launch System or SLS rocket, a Space Shuttle-derived super heavy-lift expendable launch vehicle that will propel astronauts to the Moon in the coming years. 

    “With this critical test finally finished — and assuming everything went well — NASA can now send the rocket segment to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center to prepare it for launch,” said AP

    Officials declined to tell AP if the first SLS launch will occur this year or next, but timelines suggest the rocket could launch an empty Orion capsule to the Moon sometime this year or next. Then by 2022, a crewed test flight is expected, with the crewed lunar mission in 2024. 

    Credit goes to the Trump administration, who pushed very hard to land astronauts on the Moon by 2024. The Biden administration has yet to fiddle with timelines. 

    NASA Acting Administrator Steve Jurczyk said it would take a few months to accurately gauge when the crewed mission to the lunar surface occurs.  

    Boeing is the prime contractor on the SLS project. Aerojet Rocketdyne builds the rocket and engines. 

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 03/19/2021 – 22:40

  • Syrian Oil Minister Reveals US Has 'Pirated' $92 Billion In Crude
    Syrian Oil Minister Reveals US Has ‘Pirated’ $92 Billion In Crude

    Via AlMasdarNews.com,

    The Syrian Minister of Oil and Mineral Resources, Bassam Tohme, said on Thursday, that the total losses in the direct and indirect oil sector in Syria have exceeded $92 billion (USD).

    The Syrian minister said in statements to the state-owned Al-Ikhbariya TV channel (and subsequently translated in Iranian state media), that the areas under the control of the US and their allied forces contain more than 90% of the oil reserves of Syria.

    He stated that “the Americans and their followers act as pirates in targeting the Syrian oil wealth and the ships of supplies to it.”

    Tohme said that the US was deliberately preventing the Syrian government from benefitting from the oil reserves inside the country.

    The oil minister added that the Syrian waters are “qualified in terms of oil reserves, but what distinguishes exploration contracts is that they are expensive and are long term,” pointing out that “there is a promising oil future in those waters, and the matter needs calm and stable logistical conditions.”

    The US military and their allies from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) currently control the Al-Umar Oil Fields, the largest oil fields in Syria, which they captured from the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL/IS/Daesh) during the eastern Euphrates campaign.

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    Making matters worse, Syria is currently witnessing a gas crisis, following a new spike in prices for Octane 90 and Octane 95.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 03/19/2021 – 22:20

  • Researchers Believe It's Possible To Become Immortal 
    Researchers Believe It’s Possible To Become Immortal 

    Might future humans resurrect the dead? 

    Well, Russian researchers Alexey Turchin and Maxim Chernyakov, who belong to the transhumanism movement, wrote a paper explaining the “roadmap to immortality” that involves superintelligent AI systems powered by Dyson spheres as the primary technology might someday make resurrection possible. 

    Turchin and Chernyakov wrote, “there no evidence of an afterlife. But there’s also no proof that medical death is the end of subjective experience, or that death is irreversible, or immortality impossible.”

    The paper, which Popular Mechanics first reported, is titled “Classification of Approaches to Technological Resurrection,” which offers a roadmap to immortality. 

    “Death seems to be a permanent event, but there is no actual proof of its irreversibility,” the authors write. And “while no method is currently possible, many…may become feasible with future technological development.”

    Turchin and Chernyakov examine both conventional and future technologies of making humanity immortal, from cryogenics to uploading brains onto the cloud then transplanted into clone bodies. They said “strong AI” will be the most critical technology to download the brain’s contents, but that technology could years away. 

    “The development of AI is going rather fast, but we are still far away from being able to ‘download’ a human into a computer,” Turchin told Russia Beyond. “If we want to do it with a good probability of success, then count on [the year] 2600, to be sure.”

    The authors said the power supply behind the AI would be so powerful that it would need a “Dyson spheres,” a megastructure of solar panels that encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power output. 

    The paper describes life as a “continued stream of subjective experiences” and death as an end of that stream. Immortality, to the researchers, is a “life stream without end,” and resurrection is the “continuation of that same stream of experiences after an arbitrarily long gap.”

    Digital immortality is inevitable…

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 03/19/2021 – 22:00

  • The Anatomy Of The Scam
    The Anatomy Of The Scam

    Authored by Quintus Curtius via Fortress of The Mind,

    There has been a big surge in online scammery and con artistry in the past two years. Economic hardship and desperation have been contributing causes, but this kind of activity has been with us since the dawn of time. And con games will always be with us, because they are rooted in the timeless and predictable ingredients of human nature.

    My purpose in this article is to provide a rudimentary outline of the basic features that I believe most, if not all, scams and con jobs share. I have worked as a criminal defense lawyer for over twenty years, and have seen a few scenarios that have helped me compile this information. I have also benefitted from observing scam artists in action on Twitter and in other electronic arenas. I have also learned much from watching the “infomercial” hucksters of the 1990s, such as Don Lapre, Kevin Trudeau, and many others. Readers looking for demonstrations of these ideas in action may profit from watching several movies of David Mamet, who seems to have an interest in con games. One of Mr. Mamet’s mainstay actors was the late magician Ricky Jay; and my understanding is that Mr. Jay, as a scholar of the magician’s art, provided a great deal of insight into the psychological bases of con games in the Mamet films House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner.

    All con jobs follow a sequence of identifiable stages. The mark (the “pidgeon”) must be led through a series of steps that “soften him up” and make him more pliable to suggestion.  We must remember that all con games play on two elements: greed and ignorance. Other emotions can be used, such as pity or guilt, but greed and ignorance are the mainstays. Greed, meaning the mark’s desire to gain easy money; and ignorance, in that the mark will be led into unfamiliar waters, where he can be more easily parted with his money. Young or old, rich or poor, all human beings are vulnerable to cons. Never believe you are exempt. I have seen highly educated people fall victim to them, as well as the humblest laborer.  Here are the basic stages of the traditional scam…

    The Picture. A successful frame-up has to begin with an image that the scammer is selling. He wants to show you just how successful he is. He wants to overwhelm you with cars, money, hotels, exotic locales, and, of course, women. The reason for this is very simple: he must establish himself as someone who has “made it big.” The message conveyed to the mark is a simple one: “Look how rich and great I am.  You can be just like me if you do what I recommend.”

    It does not matter whether The Picture is true. It is important to remember this. The scammer may indeed be very rich. Some scammers rent their luxury cars and lifestyles; some scammers lie about their lifestyle completely and without shame. But some scammers actually are rich. Remember: some con artists really do have what they say they have. You may find this a paradox, but it is not. There really are rich people who love to scam others. Their motivations may be darker than the purely financial impulses of lesser scammers. They are not so much interested in squeezing money out of marks; what they are after is power, validation, and an affirmation of their own superiority.  We are dealing with psychological factors here, friends: some people are just sadistic, and love to “lord it” over others.

    In establishing The Picture, some con artists can get very aggressive. They will demand you acknowledge their “superiority.” They will yell. They will castigate. They will berate. They will try to shame you with bullying tactics. They will try to question your manhood, your character, your intelligence. All of this is part of the well-staged con. The goal is to throw you off balance, to make you question your judgment or value system.

    The Secret. This is a critical part of the scam. All successful cons must have an enticing secret involved. What it amounts to is this. The secret involves some “special knowledge.” The scammer will communicate to you, in one way or another, that he has special knowledge of some trade, industry, or whatever. He will play on your desire to make a quick buck. He will play on your desire to cut corners and find shortcuts.I have a secret, and if you listen to me, you can be just as rich as I am.” This is the essence of The Secret.

    In the days of cold-calling stock brokers, there was a certain scam that I was once told about.  A crook would send two batches of letters to two groups of people. One batch would say, “You should buy stock X because it’s going up.” Another batch would say, “You should sell stock X because it’s going down.” Of course, one batch would be a correct “prediction.” To the people who received the correct prediction, the scammer would then send another two groups of letters, following the same principle as before: one batch recommending a buy, the other recommending a sell. Over time, and as the sample group narrowed, eventually a very small group of people would have received “correct predictions” multiple times. The marks would get excited, thinking that the broker knew some special secret. The scammer would then say, “I’ve been right in every prediction I’ve made. You should invest with me.” The pitch was often irresistible.  Of course, the marks would not know that the scammer was not a wizard; he just used mathematics and probability to his advantage.

    The Huddle. This refers to the stage where the scammer draws the “pigeon” deeper into his world.  Have you ever seen players on a field huddled together, sharing the details of their next play? That’s what this refers to. The mark will be asked to join a team, a group, an email list, a special clique that will share all the coveted “insider knowledge,” playing back to the “I have a secret” pitch. Isolation is a very effective technique for convincing someone to do something he does not really want to do.

    The Directive. Once the psychological groundwork has been laid out as described above, the pigeon will be softened up for the big pitch. Now comes The Directive. The mark is told what to do with his money: what to buy, what to invest in, or what to put his confidence in. The reason why confidence games are called confidence games is because the mark is giving his confidence to the scammer. A frequently used technique here is called the “pigeon drop,” in which the mark is enticed to put up a small amount of money based on the hope that he will receive an even greater payout in the future.  This is also the basis for one of the oldest and most effective of cons, the so-called “Spanish Prisoner.” In the Spanish Prisoner con, the mark is enticed by both the prospect of a beautiful woman, and a large sum of money. All he has to do is leave a deposit of money under terms of strict secrecy. Of course, the scammer then vanishes with the money.

    Do not underestimate the effectiveness of scams and cons. Good scammers are sociopaths. They can be extremely convincing. You may not even know you have been taken, even after losing your money. Once you underestimate them, you become that much more vulnerable.  As I said earlier, extremely intelligent people can fall for them, because they operate at the most basic level of human need:  the desire to be secure, wealthy, handsome, or beautiful.  The only effective defenses against scams are: (1) a true understanding that nothing in this world is for free, and there is not such thing as easy money; and (2) success takes a long time.  Along these lines, I would recommend readers revisit my previous comments on investing.

    Scammers are not genial rascals. They are manipulative, depraved people who find satisfaction in preying on others. Understand what is going on around you. If something doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t. There is no such thing as a quick buck. That was true in 5000 B.C., and it is true today.

    Quintus Curtius is author of several books, which can be found here.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 03/19/2021 – 21:40

  • Turkey In Turmoil Again: Erdogan Fires Second Central Bank Chief In 4 Months, Sparking Foreign Capital Panic
    Turkey In Turmoil Again: Erdogan Fires Second Central Bank Chief In 4 Months, Sparking Foreign Capital Panic

    On Thursday, moments after the Central Bank of Turkey unexpectedly hiked rates by a whopping 200bps – double the consensus expectation – to 19% from 17%, the highest rate since the country’s panicked scramble to contain the collapse of the Turkish lira during the economic turmoil of 2018, we said that “unfortunately for Turkey – whose economy will now grind to yet another halt –  it had no choice: inflation had accelerated for a fifth month in February as oil rallied and the impact of last year’s lira weakness lingered, while capital outflows soared. The upward trend fueled expectations the central bank would try to rein in prices by raising interest rates… but nobody had expected a 200 bps rate hike.”

    Also in our kneejerk response to the rate hike decision, we said that the relatively new CBRT head, Agbal, “was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t: on one hand the lira was plunging angering Erdogan, so he had to stabilize it… on the other the only way to do so was by hiking rates, which would anger Erdogan even more.

    We also quoted from the CBRT’s decision, noting that the bank has decided “to implement a front-loaded and strong additional monetary tightening,” explicitly stating that this “statement is guaranteed to enrage Turkey’s dictator.”

    Bottom line: Erdogan would be furious either way.

    Finally, we quoted SocGen EM strategist Phoenix Kalen who tried to justify the rate hike with some lofty sleight of logic by saying that “in a challenging context of domestic business and political pressure against further interest rate hikes, the CBRT has stepped up to the plate and delivered a resounding home run to underline its commitment to an inflation-targeting framework.” Kalen then said that the move “will go a long way toward bolstering both retail and foreign investor confidence that the CBRT under Governor Agbal will stay engaged in addressing deterioration in inflation expectations.”

    While we were impressed with Kalen’s attempt to make 5-D chess out of what was basically total chaos, our take was far more cynical

    Maybe… or maybe it will just force Erdogan to replace yet another CBRT governor.

    Two days later, our cynical view proved correct again, because shortly after midnight on Saturday, and just two days after the larger than expected rate hike, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan fired the country’s third central bank governor in less than two years and replaced him with a fan of lowering interest rates.

    Naci Agbal, Turkey’s former finance minister who was appointed central bank chief last November, was fired by Erdogan and was replaced with Sahap Kavcioglu, according to a decree published after midnight on Saturday in the Official Gazette. Agbal’s abrupt termination is a clear retaliation by Erodgan for last week’s unexpectedly big rate hike, one which does not fit within the absurd confines of “Erdoganomics” whereby lower rates are somehow needed to fight inflation.

    And while Erdoganomics appeared to have ended some time in late 2020 when shortly after Agbal’s appointment, Erdogan’s son-in-law Berat Albayrak – then finance minister – also unexpectedly quit in a move that encouraged battered foreign investors to redeploy capital into the capital-starved Turkey as monetary orthodoxy appeared to be making a comeback, it is now clear that this was just one giant fakeout, and that Erdogan was merely biding his time before he pulled the rug from under a new cohort of offshore investors who are about to suffer devastating losses on their Turkish exposure.

    Agbal took the job as Turkey’s top banker last November after weeks of declines in the lira and raised the benchmark one-week repo rate by a cumulative 875 basis points since, boosting the central bank’s damaged credibility among investors.

    Meanwhile, Erdogan, the man behind the eponymous bizarro monetary policy which posits that high interest rates cause inflation, was oddly silent during the latest rate hike episode even though he had for years frequently chastised the central bank when he thought it was keeping borrowing costs too high.

    Well, we now know that the Turkish despot was – like a dormant volcano – merely building up his anger and frustrations, and finally exploded early on Saturday morning in a move that will decimate any leftover trust in Turkey.

    Erdogan’s latest pick for central bank head is Sahap  Kavcioglu, a professor of banking at Marmara University in Istanbul and a columnist at the pro-government Yeni Safak newspaper. The paper attacked Agbal’s latest interest-rate increase on its front page on Friday…

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    … saying the decision “turned a deaf ear” to Turkey’s 83 million people, would hurt economic growth and primarily benefits “London-based owners of hot money.”

    As Turkey’s correspondent for the Middle East Eye, Ragip Soylu, further notes, last month Kavcioglu said that:

    • CBRT shouldn’t insist on its high interest rate policy
    • Many countries with domestic/foreign problems have negative real interest rates so could Turkey
    • Rate hikes indirectly creates inflation

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    As Bloomberg further notes, in a column on Feb. 9, Kavcioglu said it was “saddening” to see Turkish columnists, bankers and business organizations seeking stability in high interest rates at a time when other countries had negative interest rates.

    “The central bank shouldn’t insist on high interest rates,” he wrote. “When interest rates in the world are close to zero, raising interest rates here won’t solve our economic problems. To the contrary, it’ll deepen them in the period ahead.”

    He also seconded Erdogan’s unorthodox theory on the relationship between interest rates and inflation, saying that raising interest rates would “indirectly open the way to increasing inflation.” And while most central bankers are idiots, one thing that is relatively accurate is that raising interest rates does generally control excessive inflation.

    But wait, it gets worse: Kavcioglu, who’s also a former lawmaker for the ruling Ak Party, defended reserve policies executed from 2018 to 2020, when Turkey began spending its foreign-currency reserves to try and prop up the lira in times of volatility. The use of the central bank’s foreign-exchange coffers then helped to rein in inflation, interest rates and the exchange rate, he said.

    In other words, the new head of the CBRT is not only an ideological carbon copy of Erdogan (which explains his ascent to the monetary throne), but is a firm believer in Erdoganomics. Which means that last week’s rate hike will be prompted reversed, perhaps as soon as Sunday, leading to yet another episode of “Turkey in Turmoil”, and all out current account panic as foreigners pull all their money from Turkey now that the country has lost any last trace of credibility and collapses into an Erdogan singularity, a process which will most likely culminate with economic collapse, domestic conflict and/or civil war.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 03/19/2021 – 21:32

  • People Are Snapping Up Virtual Land Like Hotcakes — And Now There's A Fund
    People Are Snapping Up Virtual Land Like Hotcakes — And Now There’s A Fund

    Whether you’re shaking your fist like an old man with kids on his lawn, or a true believer in Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) looking to make millions, there’s a booming ‘virtual reality’ real-estate market where people are buying and selling parcels of ‘land’ across several online “metaverses” – where people are building virtual hotels, stores, and other properties in the hopes of increasing their value.

    Janine Yorio’s avatar inside Decentraland Source: Jawwad Khan/Republic

    And if you’re an accredited investor willing to drop at least $25,000 – and you’re invited – there’s a fund for those who want to get in on the NFT real estate market.

    Republic Real Estate – which buys distressed condos in the real world, is launching the virtual land fund next week. Founder Janine Yorio, head of Republic, says “Real-world real estate is very uncertain now,” adding “Housing prices are at an all-time high. Meanwhile, offices are empty, hotels are empty. This feels insulated from a lot of those real-world risks.”

    Bloomberg unpacks:

    Plots sell daily in online worlds such as Decentraland, a virtual place with its own economy, currency and social events calendar, accessible to anyone with a web browser. And values for such assets are multiplying.

    This year through March 15, the average price paid per parcel in Decentraland was $2,703 — more than triple what it was in 2020, according to NonFungible.com, which tracks the sales. Land prices quadrupled in the metaverse called Cryptovoxels, from $821 a parcel last year to $3,895 in the first two and half months of 2021.

    Republic, meanwhile, has purchased over 30 parcels across four metaverses, and is in talks with a real-world hospitality brand to co-develop a hotel and bar on one of those sites. We assume you have to mix your own drinks. According to Yorio, the lodging firm would collaborate on the virtual hotel design – paying Republic to develop it. The goal is to become a well-regarded watering hole, which then draws other retailers and developers to snap up nearby parcels.

    We assure you, this is real. This week, contemporary artist Krista Kim recently sold an NFT-minted digital house, called “Mars House,” for 288 ether – valued at more than $500,000 based on Friday’s trading price.

    “Right now, a lot of the [NFT] art that’s currently available on platforms, it’s a very limited parameter of how you can present the art,” said Kim in a Wednesday CNBC interview. “It’s presented, basically, as a digital file, a beautiful drawing or video on your screen, but my intention was to look beyond that.”

    “For me, I actually foresee that we will be living in an augmented reality lifestyle within a very short period,” Kim added, saying it could happen in “a couple years.”

    A view of Mars House, a 3D NFT creation from Krista Kim Studios that was recently sold.

    The new owner of Mars House will be able to upload the property to various metaverses.

    In February, meanwhile, eight lots of virtual real estate sold for a combined $1.5 million on gaming platform Axie Infinity, according to NonFungible.

    “There is obviously some fear-of-missing-out phenomenon behind this,” says NonFungible COO, Gauther Zuppinger, in an email to Bloomberg. “The best, rarest places are almost all purchased. The secondary market shows that the first buyers sell their assets for way more than the initial price.”

    Each land parcel is a non-fungible token, or NFT — a unique asset that can’t be forged or replicated, just like physical land in the real world.

    The value of online real estate rises as more people buy digital art or other collectibles and need a place to showcase them, according to Zuppinger. Many artists and designers also are turning to the virtual world to host what they create, as consumers spend more time there, Yorio said.

    And now, there’s a functional market in which prices have more than quadrupled in a matter of months for well-trafficked space.

    “Buying land today in virtual worlds may end up feeling a lot like buying land in Manhattan in the 1750s,” says Yorio. “There is massive growth ahead, and now is the time to get in on the ground floor.

    Now might be a great time to read Neuromancer, Ghost in the Shell or watch Lawnmower Man if you’re uninitiated, as it seems we may be headed in that direction.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 03/19/2021 – 21:20

  • The Puppet Masters: Is There Really A Deep State?
    The Puppet Masters: Is There Really A Deep State?

    Authored by Philip Giraldi via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    The danger posed by the Deep State is that it wields immense power but is unelected and unaccountable…

    As a former intelligence officer, I find it amusing to read articles in the mainstream media that blithely report how the latest international outrages are undoubtedly the work of CIA and the rest of the U.S. government’s national security alphabet soup. The recurring claim that the CIA is somehow running the world by virtue of a vast conspiracy that includes the secret intelligence agencies of a number of countries, using blackmail and other inducements to corrupt vulnerable politicians and opinion makers, has entered into the DNA of journalists worldwide, frequently without any evidence that the current crop of spies is capable to doing anything more complicated than getting out of bed in the morning.

    One problem with the theory about total global dominance through espionage is the sheer logistics of it all. Directing political and economic developments in two hundred nations simultaneously must require a lot of space and a large staff. Is there a huge office hidden in Langley? Or the Pentagon? Or in the White House West Wing itself? Or is it in one of the secure facilities that have been popping up like mushrooms just off of the Dulles Toll Road in Herndon Virginia?

    To provide evidence that intelligence agencies extend their tentacles just about everywhere, the other claim that is nearly always made is that all former spooks are part of the conspiracy, as once you learn the secret handshake to join CIA, NSA or the FBI you never stop being “one of them.” Well, that might be true in some cases but the majority of former spooks are quite happy to be “former,” and one might also observe that many voices in the anti-war movement, such as it is, come from intelligence, law enforcement or military backgrounds. Of course, the conspiracy theorists will explain that away by claiming that it is a conspiracy within a conspiracy, making the dissidents little better than double agents or gatekeepers who are put in place to make sure that the opposition doesn’t become too effective.

    Given the fact that how the so-called American “Deep State” actually gets together and plots is unknown, one would have to concede that it is an organization without much structure, unlike the original Turkish Deep State (Derin Devlet), which coined the phrase, that actually met and had centralized planning. I would suggest that the problem is one of definitions and it also helps to know how the national security state is structured and what its legitimate mission is. The CIA, for example, employs about 20,000 people, nearly all of whom work in various divisions that collect information (spying), analysis, technology and also are divided into staffs that work transnationally on issues like terrorism, narcotics, and nuclear proliferation. The overwhelming majority of those employees have political views and vote but there is a consensus that what their work entails is apolitical. The actual politics of how policy comes out the other end is confined to a very small group at the top, some of whom are themselves political appointees.

    To be sure, one can and probably should oppose the policies of regime change that the Agency is engaged in worldwide but there is one important consideration that has to be understood. Those policies are set by the country’s civilian leadership (president, secretary of state and national security council) and they are imposed on CIA by its own political leadership. The Agency does not hold referenda among its employees to determine which foreign policy option is preferable any more than soldiers in the 101st Airborne are consulted when they receive orders to deploy.

    Nearly all current and former intelligence officers that I know are, in fact, opposed to the politics of U.S. global dominance that have been pretty much in place since 9/11, most particularly as evidenced by the continued conflict with Russia, the ramping up of aggression with China, and the regime change policies relating to Syria, Iran and Venezuela. Those officers often consider the invasions and exercise of “maximum pressure” to have been failures. Those policies were supported by truculent language, sanctions and displays of military readiness by the Trump Administration but it now appears clear that they will all be continued in one form or another under President Joe Biden, likely to include even more aggression against Russia through proxies in Ukraine and Georgia.

    The officers engaged in such operations also observe that regime change has basically come out of the closet since 2001. George W. Bush announced that there was a “new sheriff in town” and the gloves would be coming off. Things that the intelligence agencies used to do are now done right out in the open, using military resources against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria while the biggest change of all, in Ukraine in 2014, was largely engineered by Victoria Nuland at the State Department. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was also active in Russia supporting opposition parties until the Kremlin forced them to leave the country.

    So, it is fair to say that the Deep State is not a function of either the CIA or the FBI, but at the same time the involvement of John Brennan, James Clapper and James Comey in the plot to destroy Donald Trump is disturbing, as the three men headed the Agency, the Office of National Intelligence and Bureau. They appear to have played critical leadership roles in carrying out this conspiracy and they may not have operated on their own. Almost certainly what they may have done would have been either explicitly or implicitly authorized by the former President of the United States, Barack Obama, and others in his national security team.

    It is now known that President Barack Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan created a secret interagency Trump Task Force in early 2016. Rather than working against genuine foreign threats, this Task Force played a critical role in creating and feeding the meme that Donald Trump was a tool of the Russians and a puppet of President Vladimir Putin, a claim that still surfaces regularly to this day. Working with Clapper, Brennan fabricated the narrative that “Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.” Brennan and Clapper promoted that tale even though they knew very well that Russia and the United States have carried out a broad array of covert actions against each other, including information operations, for the past seventy years, but they pretended that what happened in 2016 was qualitatively and substantively different even though the “evidence” produced to support that claim is weak to nonexistent.

    I would, nevertheless, argue that their behavior, though it exploited intelligence resources, was not intrinsic to the organizations that they led, that the three of them were part and parcel of the real Deep State, which consists of a consensus view on running the country that is held by nearly all of the elements that together make up the American Establishment, with its political power focused in Washington and its financial center in New York City. It should come as no surprise that those government officials who are complicit in the process are often personally rewarded with highly paid sinecure jobs in financial services, which they know nothing about, when they “retire.”

    The danger posed by the Deep State, or, if you choose, the Establishment, is that it wields immense power but is unelected and unaccountable. Even though it does not actually meet in secret, it does operate through relationships that are not transparent and as the media is part of it, there is little chance that its activity will be exposed. One notes that while the Deep State is mentioned frequently in the national media there has been little effort to identify its components and how it operates.

    Viewed in that fashion, the argument that there exists a cohesive group of power brokers who really run the country and are even able to coopt those who are ostensibly dedicated to keeping the country safe becomes much more plausible without denigrating the many honest people who are employed by the national security agencies.

    The Deep State conspirators don’t have to meet to plot as they all understand very well what has to be done to maintain their supremacy.

    That is the real danger.

    The Biden Administration will surely demonstrate over the next several months that the Deep State is still with us and more powerful than ever as it operates both inside and outside the government itself.

    And the real danger comes from the Democrats now in charge, who are if anything more given to playing with consensus politics that involve phony threats than were the Republicans.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 03/19/2021 – 21:00

  • SecDef Austin Warns North Korea: US "Ready To Fight Tonight"
    SecDef Austin Warns North Korea: US “Ready To Fight Tonight”

    In an unusually blunt threat and warning even for the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said that US forces are ready to “fight tonight” in comments aimed at North Korea after an angry Pyongyang denounced the resumption of joint military exercises between the US and South Korea. 

    Our force remains ready to fight tonight, and we continue to make progress toward the eventual transition of wartime Operational Control to a [Republic of Korea]-commanded, future Combined Forces Command,” Austin said on Thursday.

    Via ABC News

    He issued the words from Seoul at the tail end of his Asia trip this week alongside Secretary of State Antony Blinken and South Korean leaders. Secretary Blinken had continued his denuclearization of the peninsula message, saying, “We are committed to the denuclearization of North Korea, reducing the broader threat the DPRK poses to the United States and our allies, and improving the lives of all Koreans, including the people of North Korea who continue to suffer widespread and systematic abuses at the hands of their repressive government.”

    Pyongyang on Thursday slammed what DPRK first vice foreign minister Choe Son Hui called a “lunatic” and “hostile” policy. The senior North Korean diplomat said of the question of denuclearization talks that there will be no contact with Washington “unless the US rolls back its hostile policy towards the DPRK.”

    She said further:

    “Therefore, we will disregard such an attempt of the US in the future, too.” The “new regime” in the US, she added, had only put forward a “lunatic theory of ‘threat from north Korea’ and groundless rhetoric about ‘complete denuclearisation'”.

    The Biden administration has reportedly been attempting to reach out to the North via various diplomatic channels since mid-February, but to no avail. 

    Via AP

    Meanwhile the resumption of joint military exercises with the South, which had been on pause for a year with the ostensible reason given being the coronavirus pandemic, certainly won’t help thaw the ongoing tensions anytime soon.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 03/19/2021 – 20:40

  • The 'Great Reset' – Animal Farm Version
    The ‘Great Reset’ – Animal Farm Version

    Authored by Brad Lena via AmericanThinker.com,

    Currently, transnational globalists are pushing for a “Great Reset.”  It helps to understand what’s coming at us if you remember that the globalist’s mindset is akin to a zookeeper’s.  Currently, the zookeepers have their animals safely confined, but there remains a modicum of hope that the animals can liberate themselves.

    First some context.  History is replete with ideologies that seek to save people either from themselves or a foreign contagion.  Until recently, this impulse, as the 20th century shows, has taken the form of political ideologies.

    For those espousing Marxism, the ideology sought to cleanse a people from the errors and machinations of the past.  When the new ideas prevailed, even if only briefly, the alleged salvation from historical, social, and economic maladies required a reset of just about everything.  More often than not, the reset was accompanied by a sea of blood and violence.  The objects of salvation (the people) often died or ended up in the same circumstances or were worse off.

    I’m referring to communism, fascism, and National Socialism.

    Some will say, what about capitalism?  Whatever the ills of capitalism, it behooves one to consider the alternatives offered during the 20th century.  Some have said history is just one damn thing after another.  Others say history is the same damn thing after another.

    In any case, the intellectuals of modernity (see Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society) decided that people left to their own devices will get in the way of humanity’s salvation.  Their solution is global governance that will closely manage all human activity.  Saving humanity is yesterday’s solution.  Saving Planet Earth from humanity is the ticket.  Enter the zookeeper.

    In a zoo, the animals are confined.  Their diet, reproduction, interaction with other species, consumption of resources, etc. are carefully managed, depending on the zookeeper’s management goals. 

     When the kept animals’ illness, infirmity, or age becomes a liability, they are eliminated.

    In the 21st century, COVID has given the intellectuals and their political and media lackeys the ability to turn modern life into a giant zoo.  Whatever the coronavirus’s root cause, the ruling elite have passionately embraced its usefulness as a tool to reorder societies and economies across the globe.

    I may be wrong, but I do not recall a time when the world’s governments acted in such remarkable uniformity.  The virus-instigated collapse of the extant infrastructure (i.e., jobs, income, mobility, access, distribution, manufacturing, agriculture, etc.) has been blindingly swift.  The obvious question — “When will things return to normal?” — is regularly answered by the authorities: they won’t.  

    The ruling class intends to give the “new normal,” AKA “the reset,” its best shot.

    The future the ruling class contemplates is one in which “rights” and privileges will be granted only to those people who comply.  Global mobility has plummeted, enforced confinement is mandated, jobs have vanished, goods are becoming scarcer, surveillance is omnipresent, and noncompliance is punished.  We will be told that this is all for the greater good.  The elite have turned the world into a zoo, with themselves as keepers and the rest of us as the animals that must be trained or destroyed.

    The power to command and control human activity is off the charts.  The impulse toward totalitarian rule is as old as dirt.  Those with the power to attempt it have always done whatever it takes.  The good news is that the animals in this new zoo are the most innovative, creative, adaptive, and resilient creatures on the planet.  There’s still a chance they can bust out of the joint.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 03/19/2021 – 20:20

  • BofA: The Uber-Dovish Fed Backfired And Vigilantes Are Now Bullying Powell Into YCC – Three Ways To Trade This
    BofA: The Uber-Dovish Fed Backfired And Vigilantes Are Now Bullying Powell Into YCC – Three Ways To Trade This

    Anyone expecting a major bank to discuss a deflationary scenario will have to wait for at least a year; they certainly won’t get it here.

    In his latest Flow Show report, BofA CIO Michael Hartnett first looks at the biggest driver behind the ongoing reflationary wave, and writes that globally delivered covid vaccines (400 million) are already far outpacing covid cases (122 million)…

    … which is why clients are even talking about a vaccine “glut” by the autumn offsetting the spring shortage in Europe and Emerging Markets, and the resulting disorderly bond yield rise is negative for Q2 economic growth.

    Then there is the elephant in the room: the unprecedented fiscal excess unleashed by most DM countries and the US in particular. Having earlier touched on the Fed’s “Catch 21”, namely the soaring US budget & current account deficits, which will surpass $4TN in ’21, and $2TN in ’22 (with forecasts excluding a potential $1.5-2tn in additional infrastructure spend)… 

    … Hartnett notes that issuance YTD is Treasuries $861bn, IG/HY bonds $514bn, stocks $178bn (incl SPACs), all on pace for record highs, so bond & equity supply is annualizing a record $7.6TN. Also note that US Treasury issuance ($4.45tn) this year will easily exceed the GDP of Germany, so it’s “little wonder 30-year UST off to 2nd worst start in past 100 years.”

    The combination of the “end of covid” as noted in the latest BofA Fund Manager Survey, now that runaway inflation and taper tantrums are both bigger risks than the vaccine rollout…

    … with the relentless flood of fiscal stimulus leads Hartnett to make the stunning conclusion that “we are in midst of strongest macro data of our lives” as the boom phase currently is set to dominate the upcoming bust for a long time:

    Philly Fed survey manufacturing highest since Mar’73; Philly & NY price surveys show inflation pressures early March; US small businesses reporting ‘jobs hard to fill’ highest in 50 years; US house prices +19%, China exports up +60% Y/Y; Baltic shipping rates +95% YTD;

    And yet despite this record economic overheating, one where inflation is already out of control as  supply chains are broken and shortages of most goods are prevalent

    … the Fed is convinced that this inferno of soaring prices will be transitory, and has remained uber-dovish, promising on Wednesday not to hike rates though 2023. However, according to Hartnett, this “uber-dovish Fed posture has backfired”, with the bond vigilantes “moving quickly to bully US central bank into Yield Curve Control” which the BofA CIO says is likely once the yield on the 5Y surpasses 1¼%.

    Meanwhile EM’s are already tightening to curb runaway inflation (Brazil & Turkey just hiked this week) resulting in 8 global rate hikes YTD (vs 5 cuts); And not just EMs – Norway was the 1st DM central bank to signal hike, and no matter how deep in the sand the Fed, ECB and BOE stick their heads, global financial conditions are starting to tighten – just look at spreads, vol and so on…

    Which brings us to three views from Hartnett: a short-term, a medium-term and a longer term:

    1) Short-term: Cyclicals have soared in anticipation of boom & “Goldilocks” plays e.g. tech, credit & EM on back foot; immediate risk is disorderly yield jump hurts cyclicals. Indeed, the oil price plunge may have been the first sign of potential regime shift to higher yields – lower growth. Here Hartnett says to watch HYG <$84…

    …  BKX <115, SOX <2800, and notes that the basket of rate sensitive assets (LQD, HYG, EEM, IAI, KRE, VBK, XHB, SOXX ) has started to roll. BofA's advice: utilities & staples are good defensive hedges.

    2. Medium-term: Ominously, the BofA CIO predicts low/volatile asset returns in ’21 driven by 3P’s of peak Positioning, Profits, Policy in H1, and 3R’s of rising Rates, Regulation, Redistribution in H2. His advice how to trade the medium-term: own volatility.

    3. Longer-term: 2020 marked the secular low point for inflation and interest rates; 40-year bull market in bonds is officially over…

    … with the following long-term asset allocation implications: bullish real assets, commodities, volatility, small cap, value & EAFE/EM stocks, bearish bonds, US dollar, large cap growth.

    To Hartnett’s reco we would just throw in bitcoin. Why? Because in the “longer-term” central banks will launch digital currencies to reflate at any cost even if it means the loss of the reserve currency to terminally debase fiat, and force billions into the parallel monetary system that is crypto. Incidentally, it was Hartnett who earlier today explained why bitcoin is 2021’s safe haven (read “The Fed’s “Catch 21”: BofA Explains Why Bitcoin Is 2021’s Safe Haven“). And yes, those who were long bitcoin heading into this year. are blowing out all other asset classes as Hartnett himself shows with his latest “Scores of the Doors: bitcoin 99.9%, oil 23.3%, global stocks 4.0%, US$ 2.1%, cash 0.0%, HY bonds -0.2%, IG bonds -4.8%, government bonds -5.2%, gold -8.9% YTD.”

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 03/19/2021 – 20:00

  • "It's Pretty Windy Outside" – White House Blames 'Climate' For Biden's Biff On Air Force One Steps
    “It’s Pretty Windy Outside” – White House Blames ‘Climate’ For Biden’s Biff On Air Force One Steps

    Update (1245ET): Phew! A White House official has confirmed that President Biden, after stumbling aboard Air Force One on his way to Georgia, “is fine.”

    Additionally, Steven Nelson reports that White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre seems to blame the wind for President Biden’s fall. She told reporters aboard Air Force One:

    It’s pretty windy outside. It’s very windy. I almost fell coming up the steps myself. He is doing 100 percent.”

    May we humbly suggest this addition?

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

    We hear they are free to install under Medicare-for-All.

    Elijah Schaffer made the following poignant comment:

    “The saddest part about Biden overall is that it isn’t actually funny watching him physically deteriorate on TV, It’s sad for him/his family, detrimental to our country, & makes us a laughing stock to the world, We are seen as weak because under a Biden administration we are

    But in the interest of balance, can we please stop being mean to the president.

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

    *  *  *

    How is President Biden supposed to negotiate with China when he can’t even negotiate a set of stairs?

    After a brief tour through the South where he stopped in Georgia to meet with leaders of the Asian-American community in the wake of this week’s deadly shooting at a spa and massage parlor in Atlanta, Biden and his entourage returned to Air Force One.

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

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

    From another angle:

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

    The clip immediately went viral after finding its way to Twitter, as online wits joked about the timing (coinciding with the conclusion of a US-China summit where China’s aggressive posture made headlines).

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

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

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

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

    We know who is to blame for the fall of course…

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

    Think that’s an exaggeration? Here’s CNN in 2017…

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

    It’s not exactly a vote of confidence, coming just hours after he mistakenly referred to his Veep as “President” Harris. Fortunately, an aide to the president confirmed that he was “doing fine” after the spill.

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

    Oh and just one more thing. Remember when Biden mocked Trump’s ramp walk at West Point…

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

    We’ll give the final word to Don Jr who, as usual, sums up the farce perfectly: “I remember the press bashing Trump for touching the rail once. Biden falls repeatedly but I’m sure he’s the picture of health. No wonder all our enemies are pouncing simultaneously and mocking him publicly. “

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 03/19/2021 – 19:45

  • FBI Director Says Atlanta Massage Parlor Murder Spree "Does Not Appear To Be Racially Motivated"
    FBI Director Says Atlanta Massage Parlor Murder Spree “Does Not Appear To Be Racially Motivated”

    Having successfully summited the stairs into Air Force One this afternoon, President Biden (and his administration full of desperate virtue-signaling panderers) are currently in Atlanta, Georgia, to speak with leaders of the Asian communities there, after a shooting spree targeting three massage parlors.

    The attack was horrific leaving eight people dead (six of whom were of Asian descent) because our society doesn’t value human life.

    Rather unsurprisingly, this was immediately turned into a race issue.

    The man pulling the trigger was white, and therefore, this must be a race-related hate crime committed by a white supremacist.

    (If this were race-related, one would expect all eight victims to be of the same race? Or was that part of his cunning plan to throw off investigators to his real racist motives?)

    The problem is, as much as the left wants it to be, it wasn’t ‘race’ that caused the man to commit these crimes.

    Specifically, as we previously noted, the man arrested for the murders reportedly said he committed the crime spree because “it’s a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.” 

    He admitted that he has a “sex addiction” and frequently used these “massage parlors” to feed his sex habit. Six of the eight victims were of Asian descent.

    Of course, that wasn’t good enough and “investigations” into his motives continued…

    But, in an interview with NPR last night, FBI Director Wray came clean:

    “So obviously, it’s a heartbreaking incident, and it hits particularly close to home for me since I consider Atlanta home…

    The FBI is supporting state and local law enforcement, specifically APD, the Atlanta Police Department, and the [Cherokee County] Sheriff’s Office. So we’re actively involved but in a support role.”

    Director Wray continued saying:

    “And while the motive remains still under investigation at the moment, it does not appear that the motive was racially motivated.”

    Listen to the full interview here:

    Now, perhaps, the Biden administration will step up support for disadvantaged women? Or attempt to clamp down on the sex-trafficking epidemic (cough, border control, cough) that forces so many women into these desperate situations… instead of amplifying the “white supremacy” card, which the left and their compliant media are always so quick to use, exacerbating societal divides.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 03/19/2021 – 19:40

  • 'That Stinks!': Brooklyn Art Director Sells Audio Of A Fart As An NFT For $85
    ‘That Stinks!’: Brooklyn Art Director Sells Audio Of A Fart As An NFT For $85

    We’re not exactly sure if the non-fungible token craze has peaked, but this has got to be a surefire sign that we’re close.

    NYC man sells fart for $85, cashing in on NFT craze,” was the exact headline the NY Post ran with on Thursday of this week whilst reporting on a Brooklyn-based art director in the midst of selling “a year’s worth of fart audio clips” as non-fungible tokens. 

    The artist, Alex Ramirez-Mallis, asked the Post: “If people are selling digital art and GIFs, why not sell farts?”

    In fact, he is selling a whole year of them. He has launched an NFT called “One Calendar Year of Recorded Farts,” which he started at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020. He got the idea when him and his friends were sharing audio of farts via WhatsApp, the report notes. 

    And on the one year anniversary of his quarantine, he compiled the respective recordings into what the Post called a 52 minute “master collection” audio file. He is selling individual fart recordings for 0.05 Ether, or about $85 each. So far, one has sold. 

    He also seems to acknowledge the absurdity of the NFT craze. “If the value increases, they could have an extremely valuable fart on their hands,” Ramirez-Mallis commented. “The NFT craze is absurd — this idea of putting a value on something inherently intangible. These NFTs aren’t even farts, they’re just digital alphanumeric strings that represent ownership.” 

    “I’m hoping these NFT farts can at once critique [the absurdity], make people laugh and make me rich,” he said. Ah, yes, the American dream. Getting rich selling audio of your farts for a currency that wasn’t even around 10 years ago.

    He continued: “In many ways, this is a bubble, but it’s also been around forever. Buying and selling art purely as a commodity to store value in has been around for centuries, and NFTs are just a digital way of representing that transactional nature of art.” 

    “The art is just an avatar for value. There’s that old saying, ‘Why don’t they just frame the money?’, and this is really the embodiment of that.”

    The “artist’s” friend Grayson Earle commented: “By purchasing an NFT, you become part of the in-crowd of a technological novelty that masquerades as revolutionary but operates in the same tired old way of the existing art market.”

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 03/19/2021 – 19:20

  • Aaugh! A Brief List Of Official Russia Claims That Proved To Be Bogus: Taibbi
    Aaugh! A Brief List Of Official Russia Claims That Proved To Be Bogus: Taibbi

    Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News.

    The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has released a much-hyped, much-cited new report on “Foreign Threats to the 2020 Elections.” The key conclusion:

    We assess that Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, [and] undermining public confidence in the electoral process…

    The report added Ukrainian legislator Andrey Derkach, described as having “ties” to “Russia’s intelligence services,” and Konstantin Kilimnik, a “Russian influence agent” (whatever that means), used “prominent U.S. persons” and “media conduits” to “launder their narratives” to American audiences. The “narratives” included “misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden” (note they didn’t use the word “false”). They added a small caveat at the end: “Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.”

    As Glenn Greenwald already pointed out, the “launder their narratives” passage was wolfed down by our intelligence services’ own “media conduits” here at home, and regurgitated as proof that the “Hunter Biden laptop story came from the Kremlin,” even though the report didn’t mention the laptop story at all. Exactly one prominent reporter, Chris Hayes, had the decency to admit this after advancing the claim initially.

    With regard to the broader assessment: how many times are we going to do this? We’ve spent the last five years watching as anonymous officials make major Russia-related claims, only to have those evidence-free claims fizzle.

    From the much-ballyhooed “changed RNC platform” story (Robert Mueller found no evidence the changed Republican platform was “undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia”), to the notion that Julian Assange was engaged in a conspiracy with the Russians (Mueller found no evidence for this either), to Michael Cohen’s alleged secret meetings in Prague with Russian conspirators (“not true,” the FBI flatly concluded) to the story that Trump directed Cohen to lie to Congress (“not accurate,” said Mueller), to wild stories about Paul Manafort meeting Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy, to a “bombshell” tale about Trump foreknowledge of Wikileaks releases that blew up in CNN’s face in spectacular fashion, reporters for years chased unsubstantiated claims instead of waiting to see what they were based upon.

    The latest report’s chief conclusions are assessments about Derkach and Kilimnik, information that the whole world knew before this report was released. Hell, even Rudy Giuliani, whose meeting with Derkach is supposedly the big scandal here, admitted there was a “50/50 chance” the guy was a Russian spy. Kilimnik meanwhile has now been characterized as having “ties” to Russian intelligence (Mueller), as a “Russian intelligence officer” (Senate Intelligence Committee), and is now back to being a mere “influence agent.” If he is Russian intelligence, then John McCain’s International Republican Institute (where Kilimnik worked), as well as embassies in Kiev and Moscow (where Kilimnik regularly gave information, according to the New York Times), have a lot of explaining to do.

    No matter what, the clear aim of this report is to cast certain stories about Joe or Hunter Biden as misinformation, when the evidence more likely shows that material like the Hunter Biden emails is real, just delivered from a disreputable source. That makes such stories just like, say, the Joe Biden-Petro Poroshenko tapes, which were also pushed by Derkach and reported on uncontroversially by major media outlets like the Washington Post, before it became fashionable to denounce outlets reporting such leaks as Russian “proxies” and “conduits.”

    I never thought the Hunter Biden laptop story was anywhere near as big of a deal as the efforts by platforms like Facebook and Twitter to block access to it, which seemed a historic and dangerous precedent. This new effort to cast the reporting of “allegations against President Biden” as participation in a foreign intelligence campaign is nearly as ominous. Even worse is the degree to which press figures are devouring the message. Will any bother to point out the huge quantity of recent official takes on the Russia story that went pear-shaped? A very, very brief sample:

    1. All 17 U.S. intelligence agencies backed an assessment that cyberattacks in 2016 came from the “highest levels of the Kremlin.” That was later corrected in congressional testimony to four (it was actually three):

    1. The Trump organization was communicating with Russia via a mysterious server tied to Russia’s Alfa Bank. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz noted the FBI concluded “by early February 2017 that there were no such links,” yet stories pegged to anonymous intel officials persisted for years after that.

    2. Russia “hacked a Vermont utility,” according to U.S. officials! Except, the next day:

    3. Four “current and former American officials,” citing a “trove of information the FBI is sifting through,” said the Trump campaign had “repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials.” Months later:

    1. A “senior U.S. government official” characterized the ex-spy who claimed Russia had been cultivating Donald Trump for at least five years, and could “blackmail him,” was “a credible source with a proven record of providing reliable, sensitive, and important information to the US government.” But Christopher Steele was subsequently dismissed as an FBI source for his “completely untrustworthy” decision to talk to the media, and Horowitz not only discovered that both the FBI and the CIA (who dismissed his reports as “internet rumor”) had many reservations about his credibility, but that his famed “blackmail” claims about pee and prostitutes had been made in “jest,” over “beers.”

    1. Former Trump adviser Carter Page was a “catalyst” for the FBI investigation into connections between Donald Trump and Russia, according to “current and former law enforcement and counterintelligence officials.” Similarly, the New York Times cited court documents in describing George Papadopoulos: “Trump Campaign Adviser Met With Russian to Discuss ‘Dirt’ on Clinton.”

      But Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe testified that as early as August of 2016, Page became the focus of secret surveillance because Papadopoulos had been deemed a dead end. This scarcely reported detail only rendered the entire predicate for the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation absurd:

    1. Jeff Sessions did not disclose contacts with a Russian ambassador in a security clearance form, Justice Department sources told multiple outlets, in what became a major, front-page scandal. Except it came out later he didn’t have to make those disclosures, and as for the contacts themselves? “Brief, public, and non-substantive,” said Robert Mueller.

    1. “Senior FBI and national intelligence officials” told the White House and major news outlets that releasing the name of an “informant” in the Trump-Russia investigation could “risk lives,” one of many such stories (we heard similar warnings before the release of the name of Christopher Steele, his source Igor Danchenko, the “exfiltrated spy” Oleg Smolenkov, the “anonymous” New York Times editorialist, the Ukraine “whistleblower,” and others). The “informant” Haspel warned about, Stefan Halper, turned out to have been a professor outed by name as an intelligence source in the New York Times all the way back in 1983:

    1. Current and former intelligence officers” told the New York Times that CIA director Gina Haspel showed Donald Trump pictures of British children sickened, as well as ducks killed, by a Russian assassination in England using the deadly nerve agent Novichok. It turns out there were no such sick children or dead ducks, and Haspel didn’t show such pictures, an error the Times chalked up to lack of research time:

    1. According to “officials briefed on the matter,” New York Times reported, and the Washington Post “confirmed,” that “a Russian military spy unit offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants to attack coalition forces in Afghanistan.” Two months later, an on-the-record military official was less certain:

    One could go on and on with this list, from the bogus claims about Maria Butina that ended up as Times headlines (“Suspected Secret Agent Used Sex in Covert Plan”), to overhype of the Cambridge Analytica story (which turned out to have nothing to do with Brexit), to the bass-ackwards denunciations of the so-called “Nunes memo” (validated almost entirely by Horowitz), and on, and on.

    Does this mean the Russians don’t meddle? Of course not. But we have to learn to separate real stories about foreign intelligence operations with posturing used to target domestic actors while suppressing criticism of domestic politicians. It’s only happened about a hundred times in the last five years — maybe it’s time to start asking for proof in these episodes?

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 03/19/2021 – 19:00

  • 'Nothing Can Help Them' – Trials Begin For Canadians Accused Of Spying In China
    ‘Nothing Can Help Them’ – Trials Begin For Canadians Accused Of Spying In China

    A long-awaited show trial for one of two Canadians accused of espionage in China started Friday, as family members of the men say they are prepared for the worst, according to media reports. According to Bloomberg, a hearing was held at a local court in Dandong city (situated in the northeastern province of Liaoning) in the trial of Michael Spavor on allegations of spying. Spavor ran a business organizing tours of North Korea for mostly western clients before he was picked up by Chinese law enforcement back in late 2018.

    Trials for both men are set to begin Friday (for Spavor) and Monday (for Michael Kovrig, a former Canadian diplomat who has also been accused of spying). The two Canadians have been detained since December 2018 and were charged in June last year with spying. In a Thursday statement, Marc Garneau, Canada’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, said the country’s embassy in Beijing “has been notified that court hearings for Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig are scheduled to take place on March 19 and March 22, respectively.”

    Kovrig, a former Canadian diplomat who worked for the International Crisis Group at the time of his arrest, has been accused of “stealing sensitive information and intelligence through contacts in China since 2017.” Spavor has been accused of providing intelligence to Kovrig. It’s not clear whether the two men knew each other prior to their arrests.

    Chinese officials haven’t shared any of the “evidence” they have gathered against the two men, or information detailing their alleged crimes, though they insist that “the facts are clear and evidence is solid.”

    Both men were arrested shortly after Canadian authorities arrested Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou after she stepped off a plane in Vancouver. Wanzhou, the daughter of Huawei’s founder, a high-profile figure in China, was arrested at the behest of US authorities, who sought her extradition to the US to face charges that she violated US sanctions against Iran.

    The arrests were widely seen as political retribution against Ottawa for cooperating with the US. However, while Meng has been allowed out on bail (she’s currently under house arrest in her opulent home) while she awaits the results of her extradition proceedings – which are still ongoing – both men have been detained in Chinese prisons, will little contact with their families or the outside world.

    Family members and contacts of the two Canadian men have described them being held in poor conditions, and denied outside contact. Almost all in-person consular visits to foreign prisoners in China have been paused since last year due to the coronavirus pandemic. Since then, diplomats have only been allowed to speak to the men via phone.

    Teng Biao, a lawyer who practiced human rights law in China for 10 years, and now lives in exile in New Jersey, told Canada’s the Toronto Star that the two men have almost no chance of being found innocent. They will face a “show trial” driven by political considerations, before being handed potentially lengthy prison sentences, to be served in China.

    “In this kind of politically sensitive case the judges, the court, are not able to make the final decision,” Teng said. “We can say in these kinds of cases the court is only a political tool of the Chinese Communist Party.”

    Criminal trials in China are generally very short, often lasting only a day or two, said Teng, and won’t be open to the public.

    After Kovrig and Spavor were charged with espionage last year, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau denounced the “political” nature of their case, saying their detention was a “decision made by the Chinese government and we deplore it.” However, Beijing has held strong, continuing to insist that the charges against the men are legitimate, while denying Trudeau’s claims that the CCP is persecuting Canadian nationals for political purposes.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 03/19/2021 – 18:40

  • Buchanan: Do We Not Have Enough Enemies?
    Buchanan: Do We Not Have Enough Enemies?

    Authored by Pat Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

    Asked bluntly by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos if he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin is “a killer,” Joe Biden answered, “Uh, I do.”

    Biden added that he once told Putin to his face that he had “no soul.”

    Biden also indicated that new sanctions would be imposed on Russia for the poisoning of dissident Alexei Navalny and for meddling in the 2020 U.S. election to allegedly help Donald Trump. Russia also faces U.S. sanctions for building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline under the Baltic to deliver natural gas to Germany.

    With its president being called a “killer” by the U.S. president, Russia called Ambassador Anatoly Antonov home “for consultations.” In other times, such an exchange would bring the two nations to the brink of war.

    What is Biden doing? Do we not have enough enemies? Does he not have enough problems on his plate?

    The May 1 deadline for full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, negotiated a year ago with the Taliban, is just six weeks off. Do we stay and soldier on or depart? No decision has been announced.

    If we stay, our forces in Afghanistan could, again, come under fire. If we leave, the Kabul regime could be shaken to its foundation and fall.

    Leaving would be an admission that the U.S. failed, and the war is lost.

    After the recent U.S.-South Korea military exercises, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s sister issued this threat to the Biden administration:

    “We take this opportunity to warn the new U.S. administration trying hard to give off powdered smell in our land (that) if it wants to sleep in peace for the coming four years, it had better refrain from causing a stink at its first step.”

    There is talk of new North Korean tests of missiles and nuclear weapons.

    Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in Tokyo this week that the U.S. goal remains “the complete denuclearization of North Korea” But Presidents Bush II, Obama and Trump all failed to achieve that goal.

    With national elections in June, the clock is also running on the Tehran regime that negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal. Does Biden intend to sign on again, as he indicated in the campaign he would, or walk away?

    Biden also faces a new crisis of his own making. His “compassionate” policy on illegal immigration has been rewarded with scores of thousands of children, teenagers and families crossing our Southern border to be granted temporary residence while their cases await hearings.

    With the border disintegrating, one would think the Biden administration would not be looking around for other crises.

    Yet, in Tokyo, on the eve of his meeting with the Chinese in Anchorage, Blinken was playing the hawk:

    “China uses coercion and aggression to systematically erode autonomy in Hong Kong, undercut democracy in Taiwan, abuse human rights in Xinjiang and Tibet, and assert maritime claims in the South China Sea that violate international law. … We will push back if necessary when China uses coercion or aggression to get its way.”

    China has enacted a new law that authorizes its coast guard to use force to defend Chinese sovereignty. And among China’s claims to sovereign control are the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, claimed and controlled by Japan.

    Blinken has warned the U.S. will fight to keep the Senkakus Japanese.

    While in Tokyo, Blinken also denounced the generals’ coup in Myanmar, accusing Myanmar’s army of “attempting to overturn the results of a democratic election and … brutally repressing peaceful protesters.”

    Former national security adviser to President Trump John Bolton has listed other areas where China is engaged in “unacceptable behavior.”

    “A by-no-means-comprehensive list of Beijing’s transgressions that require U.S. attention would include: meddling, blatant and subtle, with U.S. public opinion; building military bases in the disputed South China Sea; menacing Taiwan, Vietnam and India; increasing strategic nuclear forces and egregious global cyberwarfare; empowering North Korea’s nuclear weapons program; concealing the origins of covid-19; stealing intellectual property and forcing technology transfers; and genocide against Uyghurs and the repression of Hong Kong.”

    Perhaps the Anchorage talks can be extended to get all the items on Bolton’s agenda fully addressed.

    Again, does not America have enough on her plate already?

    Our national debt is now larger than our national economy. COVID-19 has killed half a million of us and is killing 1,000 a day more. We have a broken and bleeding Southern border being overrun with no end in sight.

    Politically, our nation is divided as deeply as it was on the eve of the Civil War. We are caught up in a culture war, at the root of which is an irreconcilable conflict over whether America is a good and great country, perhaps the greatest — or a nation of whose history and founding we ought to be eternally ashamed.

    If time is on America’s side in our cold wars with Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, is not the wiser policy to maneuver to avoid any new hot wars?

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 03/19/2021 – 18:20

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Today’s News 19th March 2021

  • Mapping The World's Youngest And Oldest Countries
    Mapping The World’s Youngest And Oldest Countries

    Country age demographics are determined by two key factors: fertility and mortality.

    Throughout history, it was typical to see both birth and death rates at higher levels. But today, as Visual Capitalist’s Avery Koop details below, in most parts of the world, women are having fewer children, and innovations in healthcare and technology mean we are all living longer. The average person today lives to 72.6 years old, while the rate of births per woman has fallen to 2.5.

    These trends have drastically altered the demographics of mature economies, resulting in a much older population. In many developing countries, however, births still outweigh deaths, resulting in populations that skew younger.

    This visualization uses data from the World Bank to examine the countries with the highest shares of old and young people.

    The Fountain of Youth

    By 2030, the United Nations estimates there will be 1.3 billion people on the planet between the ages of 15-24. Proving to be a fountain of youth globally, the continent of Africa boasts the top 10 countries with the largest shares of young people in the world.

    Somalia, Zambia, and the DRC are just a few to crack the top 10 list. The youngest country in the world is Niger, where almost 50% of the population is below the age of 15.

    Here’s a full list of global countries, sorted by percentage of population under 15 years old:

    Young countries have significant opportunities ahead of them. A younger population means a larger upcoming workforce and more opportunities for innovation and economic growth.

    While domestic markets in Africa grow in terms of labor supply, innovation, and potential consumers, there are also challenges that arise in these countries. Corruption, political instability and unemployment, particularly in Africa, are all potential barriers to prosperity for the continent’s Gen Z population.

    Populations Skewing Older

    The world’s oldest country is Japan, where 28% of the population is older than 65. However, it’s an anomaly – the rest of the oldest countries in the top 10 are all in Europe.

    Globally, it’s the 65+ age group that is growing the fastest. According to the same UN estimates, it is predicted that by 2050 that one in six people will be over 65 years old.

    Here’s a full list of global countries, sorted by percentage of population over 65 years old:

    Fewer births, and a resulting older population, is a trend attributed to the changing lifestyles of women. For example, Japan’s fertility rate has fallen to less than 1.5 children per woman due to modern access to contraceptives and the prioritization of work over marriage and family life.

    However, fewer young people also means a smaller workforce on the horizon and a shrinking domestic market. There is also a rising social cost of caring for the elderly, as longer lifespans have resulted in a higher prevalence of chronic diseases and an increasing inability to care for oneself. This can result in an increased tax burden on the diminishing younger, working population.

    Another Perspective on the Data

    Looking at the data from the opposite angle also reveals information about our world. Here’s a look at the countries with the lowest proportions of younger or older people.

    Hong Kong and Singapore have some of the lowest fertility rates in the world (1.1), so it’s no surprise to see low numbers of children in their demographic data.

    In a country like the United Arab Emirates, the majority of the population is made up of foreign workers, so the number of people in the 65+ age group is extremely low. In the coming decades though, the situation is expected to shift dramatically with one in every five Emiratis residing that age group by 2050.

    The Big Picture

    While each country has its own unique demographic make up, one thing is clear. As education and wealth levels rise around the world, fertility rates are dropping almost everywhere.

    The trend of long life expectancies and fewer births is likely to continue, but young outliers will remain and they present immense economic potential.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 03/19/2021 – 02:45

  • Is Turkey Pursuing Nuclear Weapons Or Not?
    Is Turkey Pursuing Nuclear Weapons Or Not?

    Authored by ThomasSt exclusively for SouthFront,

    It is very likely that some analysts will answer in the negative to the above question.

    Their negative answer is mainly based on the following:

    1. Turkey is a NATO member, and there are 50 US B-61 nuclear bombs stored on its territory, at Incirlik Air Base.

    2. Turkey is a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and has ratified the Treaty on the Complete Prohibition of Nuclear Testing.

    Photo Source: fas.org

    However, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is “very close” to nuclear Pakistan, which likes to share nuclear technology. Turkish environmentalists also point to the paradox that Erdogan’s nuclear program is wasteful and largely unnecessary.

    At the same time, there are four very important indications, which may lead us to the conclusion that Turkey is advancing day and night its ultimate goal of becoming a nuclear power. These are:

    President Erdogan openly says he wants the bomb.

    In the autumn of 2019, Turkey complained to the UN General Assembly that the NPT prohibits countries like Turkey from developing nuclear weapons, but is unaware that other states have. He went on to say that nuclear weapons are a huge source of strength for Israel.

    Earlier, he told members of the Justice and Development Party that “some countries have nuclear warheads, not one or two, but they tell us we can’t have them. I cannot accept that.”

    Turkey’s Nuclear Energy Program does not make its energy independent.

    Under the plan, along the Turkish Mediterranean coast, the Russians are building four large civilian nuclear reactors at the Akkuyu nuclear facility. Erdogan hopes the Russians will complete the first reactor by 2023, in time for the centennial celebration of modern Turkey foundation. Ankara says it needs nuclear energy to reduce its dependence on gas imports from unreliable partners – Russia and Iran – and to meet electricity demand. This demand has grown at the highest rate of all OECD countries since 2005.

    The following is an indication of Turkey’s energy demand:

    • Turkey’s daily electricity consumption rose 16% to record 908,395 megawatt-hours (MWh) in early July, according to official data from the Turkish Electricity Transmission Company (TEIAŞ).

    • The majority of production came from natural gas units at 216,331 MWh. Hydroelectric power stations and imported coal followed with 199,943 MWh and 188,980 MWh, respectively.

    • President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey has nearly tripled its installed capacity from about 31,000 MW to more than 91,000 MW by 2020.

    • The country has an annual increase in installed capacity of more than 6% among the OECD countries.

    • Turkey ranks first among all OECD countries with this increase in production capacity, according to Energy and Natural Resources Minister Fatih Dönmez.

    • In the first five months of 2020, Turkey increased electricity production from domestic and renewable sources to 66%. The country ranks second in Europe in the production of electricity based on renewable resources.

    Launch of construction of the third block of Akkuyu. Photo Source: Sputnik

    Nevertheless, the Akkuyu nuclear plant does not make Turkey any less dependent on external powers. Russia will own and operate the facility and, in fact, the Akkuyu plant is not a so good investment.

    While ROSATOM, Russia’s state-owned nuclear power plant, “pays the bill” for the first reactor, it will not do the same for the other three Akkuyu reactors. Despite many years of searching for private investors, no one was found for this project. To complete Akkuyu, the Turkish government will have to finance it through foreign investment which are constantly decreasing or through public debt.

    If President Erdogan had seen the energy market, he would have known that gas and renewable energy were hitting nuclear power. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, Turkey imported gas for a fragment of the price of electricity of the Akkuyu plant – an unprofitable price of 12.35 cents per kilowatt hour.

    But Erdogan wants both. He also wants the natural gas, which he is trying to steal from Cyprus-Greece-Libya with the well-known accusations and completely illegal actions, such as the completely non-existent Turkish-Libyan pact, but also the foolish things he guesses in relation to International Law, that islands do not have an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). He also wants nuclear weapons, since an objective observer must wonder why the country’s poor economies did not weaken Erdogan’s nuclear ambitions.

    Acquiring more gas will allow Turkey to meet its electricity demand today, as it stands, 10% of Turkish electricity comes from solar and wind energy sources. One of Turkey’s leading universities recently stated that these sources could cover 30% of Turkey’s electricity demand by 2026, given the appropriate investment.

    The coverage of nuclear energy for the acquisition of nuclear weapons.

    What is particularly worrying is that Turkey could use nuclear energy as a cover for the supply of technology and material related to the construction of nuclear weapons. The transfer of technology is already taking place.

    Since the Akkuyu project began, Turkish engineering students have become the second largest national nuclear science team in Russia. Let’s see something similar. As Russia builds an Iranian civilian power plant in Bushehr, side deals have led to the transfer of equipment and the exchange of scientists who helped Iran acquire its nuclear weapons program.

    Many experts argue that the case of Turkey is not the same as that of Iran, as the former has signed an additional protocol agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency, opening the country to closer inspections than Iran to prevent military nuclear of fissile materials into weapons.

    However, we must point out that fuel is not the only problem, as UN inspectors cannot go into detail about “monitoring intangible technology and dual-use transport” that is critical to the development of nuclear weapons.

    Close cooperation between Turkey and Pakistan.

    Erdogan is militarily cooperating with a nuclear-armed Pakistan, a country not close to the Turkish border. For decades, Turkish-Pakistani relations have been warm but superficial.

    ANKARA, TURKEY – JANUARY 04: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (R) shakes hands with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan (L) as they pose for a photo following their joint press conference at the Presidential Complex in Ankara, Turkey on January 04, 2019. ( Halil Sağırkaya – Anadolu Agency )

    Since 2018, Erdogan has significantly strengthened these ties. Last year, he addressed a joint session of the Pakistani parliament for the fourth time, passionately supporting Pakistan’s position in the Kashmir dispute. Not only has Erdogan suddenly become keenly interested in Kashmir, but he is providing the Pakistani military with sophisticated weapons.

    Just two years ago, Turkey won its largest defense contract ever, a multi-billion dollar contract to build four large naval vessels for the Pakistan Navy. In addition, a Turkish company is building Pakistan’s largest domestic warship in Karachi.

    Turkey is also upgrading Pakistani Agosta 90B Class submarines, selling T129 attack helicopters and maintenance and modernization of the PAF’s F-16s. Overall, only China is Pakistan’s largest military supplier.

    Erdogan’s current influence in Islamabad exceeds that of North Korea, Iran and Libya, which have received nuclear aid from Pakistan.

    The Turkish plan.

    Turkey thirsts for energy. Its moves regarding the Cyprus-Greek and Libyan EEZ are aimed at embezzling the gas and oil it needs in order to meet its energy needs and its goal to become a major regional power.

    The acquisition of nuclear weapons is one of its goals and it is trying to achieve it day and night under the tolerance-weakness of the previous Trump administration, the always opportunistic Putin and the weak military and politically reluctant EU.

    The future of Greek-Turkish relations is one-way and leads to war, since the interests of Turkey, as I mentioned above, demand illegal actions on Greek and Cyprus’ EEZs and the natural gas and oil fields that are within it.

    The purpose of the exploratory contacts on the part of Turkey is to give it the time it needs to secure its backs militarily from Greece and in fact with the intervention of the EU, while claiming that it can gain through dialogue.

    At the same time, it will deploy a large part of its naval forces and a significant part of its air force in Libya in order to equip its air and naval base there, making it a protectorate and exploiting its oil and gas, but also conducting research for possible offshore deposits, within the Libyan and Greek EEZ, implementing the completely unacceptable Turkish-Libyan memorandum.

    One hopes that the US-EU will block Turkey’s path to acquiring nuclear weapons and the rest of its plans that were mentioned above.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 03/19/2021 – 02:00

  • The Inside Story Of How Pentagon Leaders Sabotaged Trump's Afghan Withdrawal
    The Inside Story Of How Pentagon Leaders Sabotaged Trump’s Afghan Withdrawal

    Authored by Gareth Porter via TheGrayZone.com,

    In an exclusive interview with The Grayzone Col. Douglas Macgregor, a former senior advisor to the Acting Secretary of Defense, revealed that President Donald Trump shocked the US military only days after the election last November by signing a presidential order calling for the withdrawal of all remaining US troops from Afghanistan by the end of the year.

    As Macgregor explained to The Grayzone, the order to withdraw was met with intense pressure from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark M. Milley, which caused the president to capitulate. Trump agreed to withdraw only half of the 5,000 remaining troops in the country. Neither Trump’s order nor the pressure from the JCS Chairman was reported by the national media at the time.

    The president’s surrender represented the Pentagon’s latest victory in a year-long campaign to sabotage the US-Taliban peace agreement signed in February 2020. Military and DOD leaders thus extended the disastrous and unpopular 20-year US war in Afghanistan into the administration of President Joseph Biden. 

    A peace agreement the Pentagon was determined to subvert

    The subversion of the peace agreement with the Taliban initiated by the US military leadership in Washington and Afghanistan began almost as soon as Trump’s personal envoy Zalmay Khalilzad negotiated a tentative deal in November 2019. The campaign to undermine presidential authority was actively supported by then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper.

    In February 2020, under heavy pressure to amend the agreement, Trump ordered Khalilzad to deliver the Taliban an ultimatum: agree to a full ceasefire as a prelude to a broader peace deal, including peace negotiations with the Afghan government, or the deal was off. The Taliban refused the immediate ceasefire with Kabul, however, offering instead a “reduction in violence” for seven days to establish a conducive atmosphere for implementing the peace agreement that had already been fleshed out in detail. It then gave the US its own ultimatum: if the US refused the offer, its negotiators would walk away from the table.

    To salvage the deal, Khalilzad agreed to the Taliban proposal for a one-week “reduction of violence” by both sides. The adversaries reached further understandings on what such a “reduction in violence” would mean: the Taliban agreed there would be no attacks on population centers and Afghan stationary military targets, but reserved the right to attack government convoys if they exploited the reduction to seize control of new areas.

    The US-Taliban peace agreement signed on February 29 called for a withdrawal of US troops from the country in two stages. First, the US agreed to reduce its troop levels to 8600 within 4.5 months and remove forces from five military bases ahead of a final withdrawal that would take place in May 2021. Second, the US and its allies pledged to “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Afghanistan or intervening in its domestic affairs.”

    The Taliban promised in turn that it would “not allow any of its members, other individuals or groups, including al-Qaeda, to use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.”

    Those two commitments obliged US and Taliban forces not to attack each other. The agreement also specified that the Taliban would enter into “intra-Afghan negotiations on March 10, 2020, after the two Afghan parties were to have exchanged prisoners.”

    They also required the Taliban to keep al-Qaeda personnel out of Afghanistan – a pledge the Taliban Military Commission appeared to implement last month when it issued an order to all commanders forbidding them from “bringing foreign nationals into their ranks or giving them shelter.”

    But the pact did not provide for the immediate ceasefire between Taliban and Afghan government forces which the U.S. military and Pentagon demanded. Instead “a permanent and comprehensive ceasefire” was to be negotiated between the two Afghan parties.

    With startling swiftness and determination, Pentagon officials and military leadership exploited the open-ended terms of the ceasefire to derail the implementation of the agreement.

    Secretary of Defense Esper claimed the peace deal allowed the US military to defend Afghan forces, blatantly contradicting the agreement’s text. He then pledged to come to the defense of the Afghan government if the Taliban began mounting attacks on its forces, setting the stage for American violations on the ground.

    Esper’s promise of continued US military support, made public in Congressional testimony days later, gave the Afghan government a clear incentive to refuse any concessions to the Taliban. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani promptly refused to go ahead with a promised prisoner exchange until formal negotiations with the Taliban had begun.

    The Taliban responded by initiating a series of attacks on government troops at checkpoints in contested areas. The US military command in Afghanistan responded with an airstrike against Taliban forces engaged in one of those operations in Helmand province. US officials said privately that the airstrike was “a message to the Taliban” to continue what they described as the “reduction in violence commitment they had agreed…”

    The combination of Esper’s assurance to the Afghan government and the US airstrike showed the hand of the Pentagon and military leadership. It was clear they had no intention of passively accepting a deal to withdraw the remaining US personnel from Afghanistan, and would do whatever they could to unravel it.

    Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, the commander of the Central Command, further highlighted the Pentagon’s opposition to the deal when he declared in congressional testimony that troop withdrawals would be determined by “conditions on the ground.” In other words, it was up to the judgment of military commanders, rather than the terms of the agreement, to determine when US troops would be withdrawn.

    Shaping a false narrative on the agreement

    The military’s plan to sabotage the agreement hinged on creating the false impression that the Taliban had reneged on its commitments. This ruse was advanced mostly publicly by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Esper.

    In an interview with CBS News, Pompeo mentioned “a detailed set of commitments that the Taliban have made about the levels of violence that can occur…” But that was a deliberate obfuscation. Though the Taliban had agreed to the seven-day “reduction in violence,” it did not apply to the peace agreement signed on February 29, 2020.

    On March 2, Esper told reporters, “This is a conditions-based agreement…. We’re watching the Taliban’s actions closely to assess whether they are upholding their commitments.” That same day, US commander in Afghanistan Gen. Scott Miller stated through a spokesman on Twitter, “The United States has been very clear about our expectations — the violence must remain low.”

    Once again, the Pentagon and the US command were dictating conditions to the Taliban outside the actual written terms of the peace agreement.

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

    The Pentagon and military command’s ploy was advanced through a story leaked to the New York Times and published on March 8. Below the headline, “A Secret Accord With the Taliban: When and How the US Would Leave Afghanistan,” the story referred to two “secret annexes” to deceptively suggest that the agreements reached with the Taliban were not fully reflected in the publicly available text.

    The Times’ ploy recalled the national hysteria the paper triggered last summer when it legitimized an Afghan intelligence fraud by publishing a series of lengthy articles claiming Russia had paid Taliban fighters bounties for dead American service members. Indeed, the “secret annexes” story was simply the latest political deception deployed by the Pentagon to torpedo plans for a US withdrawal.

    Despite the article’s assertion that the two documents “lay out the specific understandings between the United States and the Taliban,” the only specific reference in the story to any such understanding mentioned “commitments from the Taliban not to attack American forces during a withdrawal.” However, that explicit commitment was missing from the actual terms of the published accord.

    As the Times acknowledged in its article, when Esper and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley appeared before the House Armed Services Committee just three days before the agreement was signed, both were asked about any “side deals with the Taliban.” Neither said they were aware of any unpublished agreements. Pompeo, who also denied the existence of any “side deals” with the Taliban, referred to them as “military implementation documents.”

    The evidence clearly indicated that the so-called “secret annexes” were, in fact, internal US documents on US policy related to the agreement.

    In April 2020, the Taliban accused the United States of flagrantly violating the deal, citing 50 attacks by US and Afghan forces between March 9 and April 10, including 33 drone attacks and 8 night raids by Special Operations forces. By the summer, as the Taliban stepped up attacks on government checkpoints in areas bordering territory under their control, US forces in Afghanistan and the Defense Department informed the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) that the orders to Afghan government forces allowed them to preemptively strike Taliban positions.

    The war thus returned to the situation that prevailed before the agreement was signed and the peace deal was effectively shattered.

    Meanwhile, the US military continued to accuse the Taliban of failing to adhere to the agreement. In July, the US government-run Voice of America reported that McKenzie had “told VOA the Taliban has not kept up their commitments agreed to in the U.S.-Taliban peace deal, leading to one of the ‘most violent’ periods of the war in Afghanistan.”

    Reversing a presidential order for withdrawal

    Following Trump’s defeat in the November 2020 presidential election, and after fashioning the strategy to sabotage the Afghan peace agreement, Esper, McKenzie and Miller agreed on a memorandum from the “chain of command” warning Trump against further withdrawal from Afghanistan until “conditions” had been met. These terms included a “reduction in violence” and “progress at the negotiating table.”

    Trump reacted to the memo with outrage, swiftly firing Esper on November 9. He replaced him with Christopher Miller, the former head of the US counter-terrorism center who agreed with Trump on withdrawal from Afghanistan.

    That same day, Trump asked Col. Douglas Macgregor to serve as Miller’s “senior adviser.” Macgregor was an outspoken advocate of withdrawal from Afghanistan and a harsh critic of other US wars in the Middle East, from Iraq to Syria. During a January 2020 interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News, Macgregor blasted Pentagon leadership for its failure to find a path out of Afghanistan.

    Once inside the Pentagon, Macgregor immediately took on the task of enabling a rapid and complete withdrawal from Afghanistan. Just how close Trump came to withdrawing all US troops before leaving office had not been reported until now. Macgregor recounted the episode to The Grayzone.

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

    According to Macgregor, he met Miller on November 10 and told him that a pullout from Afghanistan could only be accomplished by a formal presidential order. Later that day, Macgregor dictated the language of such an order to the White House by phone.

    The draft order stated that all uniformed military personnel would be withdrawn from Afghanistan no later than December 31, 2020. Macgregor told the staffer to get a National Security Presidential Memorandum from the White House files to ensure that it was published in the correct format.

    Macgregor’s White House contact informed him in the morning of November 11 that Trump had read the memorandum and immediately signed it. On November 12, however, he learned that Trump had met with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, national security adviser Robert O’Brien and Acting Secretary Miller. Trump was told that the orders he placed in the memorandum could not be executed, according to Macgregor’s White House contact.

    Milley argued that a withdrawal would harm the chances of negotiating a final peace settlement and that continued US presence in Afghanistan had “bipartisan support,” Macgregor was informed. Later that night, Macgregor learned that Trump had agreed to withdraw only half the total, 2500 troops. Trump had once again given in to military pressure, as he did repeatedly on Syria.

    The maneuvering by the Pentagon to obstruct the Trump administration’s initiative to end an extremely unpopular war in Afghanistan was just one example in a long-established pattern of undermining presidential authority over matters of war and peace.

    When he was Vice-President, Joe Biden witnessed firsthand the pressures the Pentagon brass imposed on Barack Obama to escalate the war in Afghanistan. With the peace agreement’s May 1 deadline for final US withdrawal just weeks away, Biden is certain to face another round of maximum pressure to keep US troops in the quagmire of Afghanistan, supposedly as “leverage” on the Taliban.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 03/19/2021 – 00:00

  • These Are The Most And Least Expensive Cities For American Homebuyers
    These Are The Most And Least Expensive Cities For American Homebuyers

    With interest rates expected to remain low for the foreseeable future (as Fed Chairman Jerome Powell re-affirmed Wednesday), and millions of people adjusting to the prospect of working from home permanently, Americans are eager to compare various housing markets, as ‘Zoom Towns’ pop up across the US, and prospective homebuyers reassess where they might consider settling down.

    In a recent study, AdvisorSmith used census data to create a weighted average housing price for each city, then adjusted it to relative to average local incomes to determine which cities are the most “affordable” in the US, or as AdvisorSmith explains: “This factor for each city provides insight into the ability of home buyers to earn income that will allow them to afford their homes.”

    Using data from more than 590 metropolitan statistical areas, AdvisorSmith ranked cities by affordability, then separated them by home size.

    They segmented the cities into small (population less than 100,000), midsize (population 100,000 to 350,000), and large (population above 350,000) cities to provide a comparison of cities with more similar characteristics.

    In addition to the most affordable cities, they also found the least affordable cities, and segmented those by size.

    Unsurprisingly, many of the most “affordable” cities were situated in the Midwest. Notably, Flint, Mich., which is still recovering from a deadly water crisis, was one of the highest on the list of most affordable.

    Meanwhile, California dominated the rankings for least-affordable cities.

    This raises some interesting questions, like: could the work-from-home boom help revive old rust-belt cities? As more businesses inform employees of their plans, it’s a trend that will be closely watched.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 03/18/2021 – 23:40

  • Making Sense Of China's Two Sessions
    Making Sense Of China’s Two Sessions

    By Raphie Hayat of Rabobank

    Summary:

    • The Two Sessions meetings in China have recently concluded and the outline of the 14th Five Year Plan has been approved. 

    • The overarching aim of China’s plans, in our view, is self-reliance.

    • Essentially, China wants to become less dependent on other countries, while keeping countries dependent on China (using its huge domestic market as leverage).

    • China sees that its previous credit and investment driven growth model is cracking and that the external environment is getting more hostile.

    • Technological advancement is viewed as a sort of master key that will unlock the door to sustained economic growth, as well as the door to being less dependent on foreign technologies in strategic areas, such as semiconductor production.

    • Unlocking both doors might prove to be quite challenging, however, as (i) achieving technological advancement is easier said than done and (ii) China’s policies to achieve economic growth that is less credit-driven and more technology-driven, while also reducing debt and maintaining financial and domestic stability, has inherent trade-offs.

    • China’s attempt to have it all could ultimately backfire, forcing the country to return to some of its old growth model, with even higher debt levels as a result.

    • When push comes to shove, we believe China will sacrifice growth for resilience and deleveraging for domestic stability.

    The Two Sessions conclude

    China’s annual Two Sessions meetings, during which the government budget and an outline of China’s 14th Five Year Plan (FYP) was approved, concluded on 12 March. In this report, we catch our readers up on what the main short and long-term goals of China are, whether we believe it will be able to achieve them and what practical ramifications this might have.

    The outline of the FYP indicates that China’s has a clear desire to become more self-reliant, in areas ranging from food to technology, albeit with a focus on the latter. It has defined various targets to increase spending on R&D and basic research. In addition, key manufacturing areas and technologies in which China wants to excel have been identified.

    Economic growth remains important, but high economic growth does not seem to be as important as it once was. An indication of this reduced importance is the observation that there is no explicit GDP growth target for the coming five years (although there is one for this year, namely “more than 6%”).

    Financial stability and reducing public and private debt have become more prominent goals, and monetary and fiscal stimulus look set to be scaled back somewhat. However, scaling back stimulus may not rhyme with maintaining financial stability. China’s corporate and real estate sector are very indebted, so there is a significant risk in our view of tightening too much, thereby initiating a debt crisis. Although this is not our base case, Chinese policy makers may have to tread a fine line.

    Reducing public debt also contrasts with China’s plans of investing in key manufacturing areas and “frontline technologies”, or its social plans. Of course, part of that is included in the fiscal budget, but given the modesty of the targeted budget (3.2% of GDP) we think the risk of exceeding it is high, especially since achieving the level of excellence required in the key technological areas is no easy feat. China has not been able to pull that off in, for example, semiconductors despite years of R&D expenditures of more than 2% of GDP. In addition, China’s plans to increase efficiency and productivity while also increasing domestic manufacturing in strategic areas will likely prove contradictory. Also, China ambitions to reduce CO2 output will likely contrast with economic growth in provinces dependent on coal production. Finally, China’s stance on sovereignty issues (Hong Kong and Taiwan) will not help China’s desire to maintaining cordial international trade relations.

    In short, like any other economy, China faces a number of trade-offs, although we believe some of these tangents can become quite pressing. In the next chapters, we delve more deeply into various aspects of China’s economy and how they relate to its short and long-term plans.

    Government debt

    The coronavirus has not let China off the hook in terms of increasing debt. Despite the headlines about China’s modest fiscal stimulus during the corona crisis, government debt in China has increased pretty much in line with the G10 since 2020 (figure 1), from 53% of GDP to 65% in 2020. To an extent, this could be because government stimulus was not branded as specific stimulus to fight the economic effects of the coronavirus while it likely was used for that purpose.

    Together with public, household, non-financial corporate and financial corporate debt, that brings China’s total debt load to 335% of GDP in 2020, up from 301% in 2019 (figure 2). Thus, China, just like other major economies in the world, is walking away from the corona crisis with a sizable increase in its debt-load, which was already high in comparison to other countries to start with.

    That means China’s economy is more vulnerable to downturns in future. For the government it also means that fewer of its revenues can be used to finance social expenditures and investments as the share of revenues taken up by interest payments has increased as well.

    Interest costs are not a big part of the government’s revenue, but they have doubled in the past five years, from 1.8% in 2015 to 4% in 2020, even though the yield on 10 year Chinese government bonds was (om average) higher in 2015 than in 2020 (3.4% vs 2.9%). Admittedly, this is not necessarily a big problem for China. However, the problem will more likely grow than it will shrink, unless Chinese government bond yields or debt decline over the coming years.

    Another important implication here is that the Chinese government might choose to finance public expenditure more via channels that are not officially counted as public debt, such as Local Government Financing Vehicles (see the next chapter for a discussion). The consequence could be that China’s meets its official fiscal deficit target of 3.2% of GDP, while its actual fiscal deficit (and with it public debt) might still increase.

    Moreover, foreign investors have significantly increased their purchases of Chinese government and corporate bonds in recent years. Although it is still modest in overall terms (15% of GDP), one can argue that it does make it more vulnerable to any swings in global market sentiment.

    Corporate debt

    The biggest contributor to China’s overall debt load is corporate debt. Corporate debt has jumped from an already staggering 149% of GDP in 2019 to 165% in 2020 (figure 6). Moreover, corporate defaults are on the rise. Chinese corporate bond defaults have almost doubled between January 2019 and February 2021, from 1.1% of their outstanding par value to 2%3.

    Unsurprisingly, the spread between AAA and BBB corporate bonds has risen as well and now stands at 14.9%, the highest level since our data goes back (figure 7). So clearly, financial markets are expecting more defaults for weakly rated corporates in China, a development we previously highlighted here.

    Rising default risks for the corporate sector have important implications for government debt as well. The distinction between corporate and government debt in China is much less clear cut than in most developed countries.

    Specifically, part of corporate debt could be considered public debt if implicit government guarantees are included. A big part of local government financing for example, is done via so called Local Government Financing Vehicles (LGFVs). LGFVs are used to issue bonds by local governments to finance specific projects (such as a real estate or infrastructure project). LGFVs are not counted as public debt, but are believed to have a strong implicit government backing, and as such should be counted as public debt according to the IMF.

    That means China’s public debt is potentially much higher (92% of GDP according the IMF) than the official figure. However, we note China’s the overall debt figure does not change despite the reclassification because overall debt figures (such as those compiled by the Institute of International Finance, IIF) include corporate as well as government debt. IIF currently includes LGFV financing as corporate debt, while the IMF counts it as government debt. Although financial markets know, to a certain extent, that China’s government debt might be higher than official figures suggest, an official reclassification of corporate debt as government debt could have implications for China’s perceived sovereign risk.

    More generally, China’s high overall debt load makes its corporates as well its government more vulnerable to economic shocks, government finances become less flexible as a larger part of the governments revenues are used for debt service. Moreover, the taxes that will have to be raised in the future to repay the government debt create inefficiencies (welfare losses).

    Finally, since capital is limited, government borrowing can crowd out private borrowing (they both compete for the same limited amount of capital), this can leave firms investing less. Given that private investments are more likely to be in productive assets than government investments, this would hurt productivity and economic growth. For the interested reader, here is an overview of studies that show how high debt levels negatively affect economic growth.

    Real estate

    Against the backdrop of high debt levels, the real estate sector warrants a special mention because of its importance to the Chinese economy. China’s top banking regulator (Guo Shuqing) has openly stated that he is worried about risk of a bubble in the Chinese property market. Moreover, the Work Report presented during the Two Sessions mentions that China wants to “keep the prices of land and housing as well as market expectations stable”. So it is clear that the government wants to do so something about excessive house price rises in China.

    However, reigning in house price rises without sparking a debt crisis will be a very delicate balance act. There is a decent chance that the government might be forced to ease constraints again further down the line. Because the real estate market in China is (i) very debt laden (figure 8) and (ii) very important for the Chinese economy. To corroborate the latter:

    • About 30% of bank loans are to the real estate sector (figure 9).

    • 11% of the disposable income of Urban residents is generated through property income

    • Real estate accounts for 70% of the wealth for Chinese people, according to some estimates.

    • Construction and Real Estate services are about 15% of the economy, which is higher than in many developed countries (the Eurozone average is 11.5% according to Eurostat). This is likely an underestimation given that large parts of the manufacturing sector (for example cement and steel production) are also closely related to the real estate sector.

    • Almost one in five people in China (18%) work in construction or real estate.

    Unusual house price rises tend to be followed by banking crises (Reinhardt and Rogoff, 2008) and two of China’s biggest real estate companies, Evergrande and China Fortune Land Development, have already ran into trouble with repaying high debt loads. The potential for such type of debt repayment problems to destabilize China’s economy should not be underestimated. Although a real estate crisis in China is not our base case assumption, we do see it as a major source of risk in the medium to long term future.

    With that in mind, we think a decline in the real estate sector is not something the Chinese government can or is willing to afford. Easing house price pressures without sparking a debt crisis in the real estate sector (and via that for the whole economy) will be one of the most delicate balancing acts China will have to do, and as such we think it will likely have to peddle back from this goal.

    Monetary policy

    Monetary policy in China looks set to tighten. Beijing’s target to let credit (Total Social Financing, TSF) grow in line with the economy is a clear indication of that. TSF growth is normally well above GDP growth (figure 10).

    We think monetary tightening will take place via targeted policies for specific sectors. For example restricted lending to the real estate sector. We have seen a glimpse of this in 2020, when the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission announced limits on property loans for Chinese banks in December last year. The regulator, for example, has capped this to 32.5% for mortgages and 40% to overall real estate for large commercial banks.

    We believe it is less likely that the PBoC will tighten via its interest rate toolkit given China’s higher debt load and since the PBoC has not used that instrument aggressively after the outbreak of the coronavirus. After an initial cut in the 1 and 5 year Loan Prime Rate (the benchmark rate against which new loans and floating rate loans are priced), the PBoC has not stimulated the economy via its interest rate tools, despite occasional spikes in interbank rates (figure 11).

    In any case, the risk of tightening too much, is very high, especially as it poses a great risk to the overheated and debt laden real estate sector in China (see chapter Real Estate). If reduced liquidity leads to unforeseen effects in China’s real estate or banking sector, the PBoC might have to reverse course and loosen monetary policy again. The outcomes would be that China’s debt load increases even further.

    Productivity and long term growth

    An ambitious, albeit implied, growth rate

    China’s 2021 growth target of “more than 6%” has been widely covered in the press, but it one of the less ambitious targets on the bigger scale of things. What is more interesting is that there is no explicitly defined growth target in the 14th Five Year Plan for the medium to long term future. That said, there seems to be an implicit one. President Xi Jingping has previously indicated that China’s GDP per capita will double by 2035. A doubling of the current real GDP per capita (CNY 65K) by 2035 implies an annual compounded growth rate of 4.7% (figure 12). We think that is optimistic, and we will explain why below.

    Raising productivity

    China’s economic growth has historically been driven to a large extent by capital deepening (adding more capital per worker), as exemplified by its large investment-to-GDP ratio (43% in 2019). In fact, as figure 13 shows, more than half of the economic growth of China has been driven by capital deepening, while a smaller (and declining) percentage (c. 40%) has been due to Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth. A big part of this was due to urbanisation. Much of urbanisation, however, has run its course, 61% of Chinese now live in cities, while this was 39% in 2002 (figure 14). And although there is potential for this to continue (the G7 average urbanization rate is 81%), the actual increase of people moving to cities might not be as high as it has been before. A part of China’s urbanization efforts will simply be a reclassification of migrant workers that live and work in urban areas but are not counted as being part of the urban population.

    More capital deepening will not likely add as much growth as it used to. Standard economic textbooks teach us that capital deepening improves labour productivity (since the capital per worker increases) but does generally not add to technological progress (so no growth in TFP).

    To keep using macroeconomic textbook terms, capital-deepening leads to a move on the production function of a country, not of the production function. For the latter, TFP has to increase, which in practice means either human capital or IT-capital has to increase. Figure 13 shows that China’s contribution from human and IT-capital have been much smaller and as a result, its TFP has steadily declined over the years.

    In order to increase TFP, therefore, China needs to invest more in IT-capital and human capital. Beijing’s focus seems to be more on IT-capital, given its R&D spending targets (see Table 1 in the Appendix). However, R&D investments take time to translate into innovations and simply spending more on R&D does not necessarily increase innovations (and thus technological progress). We have seen an example of the latter in China’s recent past in terms of TFP improvement.

    Figure 15 shows that R&D investments in China have already been quite decent in the past 10 years, compared to the OECD average. That has helped China move up the Global Innovation Index to the top 14th spot in 2020 (35 in 2013). However, despite years of relatively high R&D investments and efforts to innovate, TFP growth has still declined over the past 10 years (figure 16). This demonstrates that turning R&D and innovation efforts into actual TFP growth is easier said than done. One explanation for this issue is that the absorption of technology in an economy depends on institutional quality, a feature on which China does not score particularly high.

    Moreover, at least part of China’s technological progress until now has relied on mandatory technology transfers from foreign firms. This, however, looks set to become increasingly difficult for China given the recent tensions with for example the US, Australia and Japan. Even in the recent (CAI) investment deal with Europe, which we discussed here, there are provisions regarding this subject.

    Beijing’s plans to raise productivity focus relatively little on improving human capital, which arguably has the bigger potential to improve TFP. Human capital has contributed very little to economic growth in China, as we showed in figure 13.

    Education is key, but the government seems to be targeting quantity over quality here with an emphasis on years of education (11.3 years per person, see Table 1 in the Appendix), without combining this with improving the quality of schools. The latter is essential. Chinese children do well on PISA test scores, but that mainly reflects urban children in the richer cities, not the poor ones in rural areas. The children of rural migrants are not allowed to go to such schools since they are a public service to which people without Hukou have no access.

    We should also note that economic growth will not likely come from an increase in China’s labour force either. China’s population is projected to decline from 2030 onwards (figure 17) and its participation rate (the percentage of the working-age population that wants or has a job) is already relatively high (Figure 18).

    All in all, we think China will struggle to increase TFP growth, despite increased R&D investments. China has not been able to turn around its structural decline in TFP in the past years and its emphasis on physical rather than human capital suggests it may be missing out on low hanging fruit. Moreover, China’s strategy of increased self-reliance (which implies producing more goods domestically, especially in the technology sector) will likely hurt rather than help productivity, since it implies less trade and FDI, key factors that are known to benefit TFP growth. This is a good example where some of its goals become contradictory.

    SOE reform

    Another one is SOE reform. Beijing plans to maintain an important role for SOEs in its economy stating that it wants to “enhance the strength, quality, and size of SOEs”. There have been efforts to increase efficiency and reduce debt among SOEs. However, until now that has been done mostly through mergers rather than bankruptcies, which has led to fewer but larger SOEs, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Chinese SOEs are indeed notoriously inefficient, almost a quarter of them are loss-making (figure 19). Still, inviting more efficiency might prove tougher than Beijing imagines, for two main reasons.

    First, if further consolidation of SOEs were to occur via bankruptcies it could have a big impact on employment in China. About 14% of the Chinese urban labour force works for SOEs (figure 20) and SOEs make up about 20% of GDP. Given this difficulty, it seems likely that SOEs will continue to be drag on TFP given their weak productivity. Any consolidation, we think, will happen in non-strategic areas, so outside high-tech, biotech and the key manufacturing and technology areas targeted in the 14th Five Year Plan (see the last chapter for which these are).

    Second, one of the ways Beijing wants to improve efficiency is by increasing the share of private ownership in SOEs. However, having partial private ownership in an SOE (say 20%) does not mean you can influence decision-making. The decision-making still often rests with the SOE. That implies that market discipline (and thus efficiency gains) might not be as big as Beijing imagines.

    Geopolitics

    As we already touched upon in the previous paragraph, tensions between the China and the US and between China and India, Australia and Japan are here to stay. The US, from its side, is not backing down, despite its new leadership. Together with these other three countries it has formed a strategic alliance (the Quad) specifically to act as a counterweight to China.

    Beijing realizes very well that even if the US’ stance on China (or at least its way of communicating) changes every four years, the US structurally now sees China as a strategic rival and its population’s views toward China are becoming increasingly negative, as they have in other countries as well (figure 21). That corroborates what we have previously argued; being tough on China is one of the few things both Democrats and Republicans agree on, and US presidents will be mindful of that. Thus, the US will continue to keep pressure on China.

    Beijing is also well aware that China’s external environment is getting more hostile and unpredictable and it does not want to wait and see what the result of that environment will be. Becoming less dependent on the external environment in strategic areas is China’s answer to that problem. Indeed, one of the ideas behind its Dual Circulation strategy is that China wants to be less dependent on other countries, while keeping countries dependent on China (using its big domestic market as leverage). That strategy, by the way, has inherent-trade-offs as well since it implies more domestic consumption, which will likely require higher wages. Those could hurt China’s competitiveness, leading to lower exports.

    Beijing is likely to maintain its stance on Hong Kong. The Work Report, for example, mentions that China will “guard against and deter external forces’ interference in the affairs of Hong Kong and Macau”. Another example is that the Chinese government has recently passed a law that reduces the share of democratically elected lawmakers in Hong Kong. In essence, this means China has a growing direct influence on Hong Kong’s politics.

    Taiwan is likely to remain of key strategic importance to the mainland as well. The Work Report released during the Two Sessions mentions that China “will remain highly vigilant against and resolutely deter any separatist activity seeking Taiwan Independence”. Taiwan has become especially important because one of the three leading global semiconductor firms (TSCMC) is based there. Given the extreme concentration of top-of-the-line semi-conductor manufacturers, this sector (and Taiwan with it) will likely be caught between China and US tensions.

    More generally, China will not likely become less assertive globally. It plans to increase its military budget by 6.8% to 1.355 CNY trillion.

    Green ambitions

    As a final issue we would like to highlight that China’s target is to achieve a greener economy, but that it comes with higher costs. Especially the target to generate 20% of its energy from non-fossil fuels by 2025 could hurt GDP growth in regions that are dependent on coal production. Most notable are Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi and Xinjian, which together account for 78% of China’s coal production (Figure 22). The economies of these provinces could be hit hard if coal production goes down substantially. Indeed, that might be the reason that the green energy target for the coming year is not that ambitious.

    After all, the target of 18% CO2 emission per unit of GDP is the same as the target of the previous Five Year Plan, and according to some calculations imply that CO2 emissions will actually increase by 1% per year until 2025. The more likely avenue through which China will try to cut its carbon footprint is reduced support for fossil fuel related projects in other countries, as it has done recently in Bangladesh. The question this raises is whether China can maintain its assertion of being at the forefront of global leadership in turning around climate change. Or would it be one of the first goals to be ditched at the expense of higher economic growth if needed?

    What will this mean in practice?

    China’s plans for the coming five to fifteen years are ambitious. We have argued in this report that some of these plans will be difficult to achieve and some contain inherent trade-offs. In our view, China cannot have its cake and eat it too. It will have to make some tough choices along the way and, if pressed, renege on some of its stated plans. That obviously has implications for businesses operating in China or for those who are otherwise dependent on its economy.

    First of all from a broad economic perspective. Despite high economic growth in the short term, the years of high growth in China are over, as are the years of high and consistent rises in house prices. That has implications for investors and firms dependent on the real estate sector. Debt levels in general will not likely decline in China, rather we believe there is a good chance that they will increase further, which implies higher credit risk, all else equal. Meanwhile, China seems to have shifted back from focussing on services to manufacturing, implied by its emphasis on eight key manufacturing areas (see Table 1 in the Appendix for a list). That could go against growth in the services sector and, as such, may also be at odds with its goal of nurturing domestic consumption. But also on a more detailed level will China’s plans and the issues that come with it have implications:

    • Although China is actually saying that it is opening up its economy and its financial system, how this operates in practice is something that still needs to be demonstrated. Foreign firms trying to access the Chinese market in key strategic areas might still find it difficult to gain a foothold, unless they are willing to share their knowledge with local parties.

    • In any case, multinational corporations might find themselves caught between geopolitical tensions between China and the US, Australia and Japan. The semiconductor industry specifically might be targeted because of such tensions as well.

    • There are upsides for Chinese firms operating in the manufacturing and technology areas Beijing has identified as key. Firms operating in these areas (e.g. semiconductors, electrics cars, 5G, AI and biotechnology) will likely benefit from one form of government support or another.

    • For fintech firms and e-commerce giants, there could be major downsides. The government’s recent crackdown on large internet companies suggest Beijing is serious about breaking the monopolies of internet giants in China. There is a another contradiction here with Beijing’s wish to raise the digital part of economy to 10% of GDP. The digital economy is dominated by a handful of big players. Tmall (owned by Alibaba), JD.com and Pinduodo for example, control 89% of retail e-commerce sales in China. If broken up, it remains to be seen how quickly they will be replaced by smaller firms. Moreover, aggressively cracking down on big internet companies could destabilize financial markets in China, which are also dominated (in terms of market capitalization) by the same firms.

    • Finally, China’s demand for coal might not decrease as much as news headlines suggest.

    As a final takeaway, we note that China’s implicit long-term growth goal remains ambitious (see the chart below with our medium and long-term growth projections) and that several policy goals contain inherent trade-offs. Achieving a reduction debt and maintaining financial and domestic stability could be at odds with its aim to become more technology-driven. When push comes to shove, we believe China will sacrifice growth for resilience and deleveraging for domestic stability.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 03/18/2021 – 23:20

  • Hundreds In Taiwan Change Name To "Salmon" As Restaurant Promotion Spirals Out Of Control
    Hundreds In Taiwan Change Name To “Salmon” As Restaurant Promotion Spirals Out Of Control

    As senior diplomats from Beijing and Washington meet in Alaska, the Taiwanese government is issuing an advisory urging its citizens to stop changing their names to “Salmon” after a sushi chain’s promotion reaffirmed just how far people will go for free stuff.

    It all started when Japanese sushi chain Sushiro launched a promotion offering a free meal to customers with names that included the traditional Chinese character for salmon “guiyu”. Customers with names that sounded similar to the word could also enjoy a meal for half price.

    The offer sparked what the local media characterized as “salmon madness”, per WaPo.

    Dory Wang, a Sushiro marketing manager, said about 200 customers with the name “Salmon” on their identity card had visited one of the chain’s restaurants on Wednesday, adding that the response of seafood-loving Taiwanese had exceeded expectations. “We appreciated those who are willing to change their names for our sushi,” Wang said.

    “Five people requested a name change today and another six yesterday,” said Ou Minxin, an official at a local household registration office in Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s second-largest city. “We have seen changed names such as ‘Hotness Salmon,’ ‘Dip Wasabi and Eat Salmon,’ and ‘Can’t Help but Want to Eat Free Salmon.'” Ou said most of them changed their names back after having a meal. “It has indeed added to our workload, but it is quite interesting,” he said.

    One resident decided to add 36 characters to his name, including seafood-themed emojis for “crab” and “lobster.”

    However, for the young people who changed their name for the promotion with the expectation of changing it back, the government has issued a reminder that Taiwanese citizens are only allowed to change their names three times during their lifetimes.

    But there’s a catch – and some diners may have bitten off more than they can chew.

    Taiwan’s Ministry of the Interior posted a reminder on Facebook that a person can only change their name three times in a lifetime, explaining that two of those will be wasted if a person changed their name to “Salmon” and back.

    But some young people insist they have no regrets, and say they are planning to keep their “salmon” names as a sign of their adventurousness and creativity. One 19-year-old student said he changed his given name to “Salmon” and invited users to join him for a meal, with eight slots on offer. He said the name represents his courage to do “whatever he wants,” and hasn’t decided whether to change his name back yet.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 03/18/2021 – 23:00

  • Murders And Shootings Skyrocketed In Portland After George Floyd's Death & The Defunding Of Police
    Murders And Shootings Skyrocketed In Portland After George Floyd’s Death & The Defunding Of Police

    Authored by Jeff Reynolds via PJMedia.com,

    A staggering number of murders and shootings took place in Portland, Oregon, after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis touched off violent riots across America. Many of the most violent riots occurred in Portland, and with police resources stretched thin, lawlessness increased exponentially across the city. The correlation could not be more clear—after Floyd’s death, the “defund the police” movement sprung up under misplaced motivations of social justice, and many people died unnecessarily. Floyd’s death, over Memorial Day weekend in 2020, created a clear demarcation after which murders and shootings skyrocketed in Portland.

    Crime policy expert Sean Kennedy, a fellow at Maryland Public Policy Institute, crunched the numbers, based on Portland Police Bureau stats and media reports:

    • Since June 2020, there has been a 255% increase in murder in Portland through February 2021;

    • Shootings up 173% – by 551;

    • Shootings increased 126% in 2020, and Year to Date have increased 93%.

    The numbers are truly alarming. From January through April 2020, there were a total of three murders in Portland. Just in January and February 2021, we’ve already seen 20 murders. For the period of June 2020 through February 2021, 71 murders have occurred in Portland. That’s a staggering 255% increase over the same period one year prior.

    Shooting statistics tell another grim tale. In the period of June 2020 through February 2021, 870 shootings occurred in Portland. For the same period one year prior, Portland saw 319 shootings. That’s a 173% increase.

    This is a crisis that the city of Portland and Multnomah County are not taking seriously.

    Kennedy notes that 53 people were murdered through the end of 2020, after Floyd’s death and the subsequent push to defund the police. He told PJ Media, after compiling the numbers:

    The lawlessness that Portland experienced this summer directly contributed to the subsequent and dramatic increase in violence—especially homicides. Portland’s political leaders, including Mayor Wheeler and Multnomah County DA Mike Schmidt’s contempt for law and order, disempowered and demoralized the police. The result is chaos and death. Over 50 Portlanders did not have to die but for the rhetoric and actions of local officials caving to the mob and attacking the police.

    Law enforcement sources in Portland have repeatedly reported that they cannot respond to all violent crimes when the dual forces of defunding the police force and responding to nightly riots handcuff them. This crisis in police response times was highlighted in September when a home intruder locked a single father out of his home and held his 12-year old son hostage. The father called 911 and did not receive a response for over an hour and a half:

    Henry Kirim had ducked out of his Southeast Portland apartment to search his car for a missing bank card when a strange man rushed into his ground-floor unit, closed the door and locked it.

    Kirim’s 12-year-old son remained inside.

    Kirim fumbled for his house key, thankful he had it on the same ring as his car key, and raced to open his apartment door.

    “I was so scared,” he said.

    The next 10 minutes unfolded in a blur on Aug. 22. The stranger grabbed a kitchen knife. Kirim’s petrified son managed to dart out of the apartment. Kirim followed and started yelling for neighbors to help. When the man eventually fled, several residents gave chase and cornered him nearby.

    It took police more than 90 minutes to arrive. Just before an officer finally appeared, the suspect ran off. More than a half-dozen calls had come into 911 over the course of the bizarre ordeal. But that apparently didn’t speed the response.

    Maybe that has spurred Mayor Wheeler into action. He asked for a partial restoration of police funding last week, to the tune of $2 million:

    The mayor of Portland, Oregon, announced Thursday he would seek $2 million in one-time funding for police, other agencies and outreach programs to try to stem rampant gun violence in the city.

    The move by Mayor Ted Wheeler represents an about-face after city leaders in June voted to cut nearly $16 million from the police budget, reductions that included the elimination of a gun violence reduction unit. The cuts came amid racial justice protests following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

    It remains uncertain if the activists on the city council, such as Jo Ann Hardesty, will go along with the plan to try to rein in the violence in Portland.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 03/18/2021 – 22:40

  • Starbucks Founder Says China "Is An Adversary Not An Enemy" & US "Must Find A Way To Cooperate"
    Starbucks Founder Says China “Is An Adversary Not An Enemy” & US “Must Find A Way To Cooperate”

    Former Starbucks CEO and one-time Independent presidential wannabe Howard Schultz made an appearance at Bloomberg’s Equality Summit on Thursday to try and remind President Biden – whose administration has maintained many, but not all, of the tough on China policies adopted by his predecessor – that the US and China must cooperate.

    In a seemingly contradictory quote, Schultz told his audience that China is “an adversary but not an enemy” and that America and the Chinese “must figure out a way to cooperate.”

    Schultz added: with the “rhetoric of the last four years” being unhelpful to finding common ground, if relations aren’t improved, “there will be significant problems,” he said, though he is “confident that we will find a way to cooperate to benefit the rest of world”.

    “I have great respect for the Chinese people and the relationships we have built as a company there,” Schultz said. “China is not going to conform to everything America wants in the same context that America is not going to conform to everything China wants.”

    Switching topics to economic inequality, an issue that Starbucks has long claimed to lead on, regarding domestic US issues, Schultz said the “underbelly” of inequality in American society can be seen in broadband Internet access, which he said is lacking in more than half of low-income households.

    “That alone demonstrates the significant divide in America,” Schultz proclaimed.

    But to improve racial harmony, “we need to do better at teaching sensitivity and compassion,” he said. “We have to have a society with respect and dignity for all”. And finally, Schultz turned his attention to small business owners, whom he said have been among the hardest-hit during the pandemic.

    A “large majority” of those affected “have been Black- and brown- owned businesses” which threatens the “social fabric in neighborhoods and communities”.

    Whatever you might think of Schultz and his virtue-signaling, it’s important to remember that China has played an increasingly critical role to Starbucks’ bottom line over the last year (while he no longer runs the company, he’s still the founder, and a board member). Even though Chinese consumers haven’t taken to coffee like American executives had hoped (who can forget the demise of Starbucks’ domestic competitor Luckin Coffee?), Starbucks’ stores comprised a larger portion of its international revenue in 2020. What’s more, Starbucks’ stores in China were largely open for most of last year, unlike the company’s stores in the US.

    With senior diplomats from the US and China meeting in Alaska today and tomorrow, expect to hear more of this from American captains of industry as we head into the weekend.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 03/18/2021 – 22:20

  • Dan Bongino To Fill Rush Limbaugh's Airtime In Major Markets
    Dan Bongino To Fill Rush Limbaugh’s Airtime In Major Markets

    Conservative pundit Dan Bongino will take over the late Rush Limbaugh’s coveted three-hour airtime slot across several major markets, according to Cumulus Media Inc’s Westwood One.

    Following Limbaugh’s death last month, most stations have been filling the void by playing reruns of old episodes. Limbaugh, the most listened to radio host in the United States, reached over 20 million monthly listeners across over 650 affiliates, according to the Wall Street Journal.

    Bongino, a former Secret Service agent and NYPD officer who has his own popular podcast, has become a rising star in conservative media. He will fill the three-hour slot in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, while most other stations will continue to air old tapes of the show.

    Mr. Bongino lost three Congressional races—two in Maryland and one in Florida—running as a Republican, but his success in punditry has exploded. A vocal supporter of conservative candidates who once declared, “my entire life right now is about owning the libs,” his views often echo Mr. Limbaugh’s. He is also a man of many media: He has written several bestselling books, appeared regularly on Fox News, and commands a Facebook page with more than four million highly engaged followers.

    The move by Westwood One, which syndicated Mr. Limbaugh’s show across about 30 stations, signals that the revered and controversial host’s void may be filled piecemeal, instead of by a single successor. The radio network didn’t specify exactly how many stations Mr. Bongino’s show would appear on. Already some individual markets have chosen local hosts to take over the airwaves. –Wall Street Journal

    In other markets, different hosts such as right-wing Evangelical commentator Erick Erickson has taken over Limbaugh’s slot, while Jacksonville’s WOKV has given the slot to radio host Mark Kaye. In Baltimore, radio and podcast host Derek Hunter has taken over the slot.

    While iHeartMedia admits that “No one can replace Rush Limbaugh,” the company’s Premiere Networks have continued to air a hybrid of Rush reruns on topics currently being discussed, using guest hosts in between clips. So far it’s attracted roughly 75% to 80% of Rush’s regular audience, according to a person familiar with the matter.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 03/18/2021 – 22:00

  • New Document Exposes How This Company Tracks Car Locations In Real-Time
    New Document Exposes How This Company Tracks Car Locations In Real-Time

    According to a document obtained by Motherboard, a tiny surveillance contractor based in Charleston, South Carolina, can locate and track newer model cars in any country. This data is being packaged up into a new service and pitched to the US government as a powerful surveillance technology.

    “Ulysses can provide our clients with the ability to remotely geo-locate vehicles in nearly every country except for North Korea and Cuba on a near real-time basis,” the document written by The Ulysses Group, reads. “Currently, we can access over 15 billion vehicle locations around the world every month,” the document adds.

    In new automobiles, intelligent sensors transmit an array of data (even including location) to the automaker or third parties. Aggregator companies then take this data and integrate them into packages based on the needs of their clients. 

    “Vehicle telematics is data transmitted from the vehicle to the automaker or OEM through embedded communications systems in the car,” the Ulysses document continues. “Among the thousands of other data points, vehicle location data is transmitted on a constant and near real-time basis while the vehicle is operating.”

    The document suggests Ulysses’ tracking service could be used for military surveillance operations: 

    “We believe that this one attribute will dramatically enhance military intelligence and operational capabilities, as well as reduce the costs and risk footprint of ISR [intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance] assets currently used to search for and acquire mobile targets of interest.” 

     “Whether you want to geo-locate one vehicle or 25.000.000 as shown here. Currently, we can access over 15 billion vehicle locations around the world every month,” the document concludes. 

    Motherboard sent the document to Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon). Wyden spokesperson Keith Chu responded in an email statement:

    “Far too little is known about how private information is being bought and sold. Senator Wyden is conducting an ongoing investigation into the sale of personal data, particularly via data brokers, to put some sunlight on this shady industry. Our office is continuing to perform oversight into where data brokers are acquiring Americans’ information, and who they’re selling it to.”

    Motherboard noted Ulysses previously worked with US Special Operations Command on a different piece of technology to “analyze how peer and near-peer competitor countries were making economic and financial investments in Africa and Central and South America.” 

    President of The Ulysses Group, Andrew Lewis, told Motherboard in an email that “any proprietary promotional material we may have produced is aspirational and developed based on publicly available information about modern telematics equipment.”

    “We do not have any contracts with the government or any of its agencies related to our work in the field and we have never received any funding whatsoever from the government related to telematics,” Lewis added.

    Here’s the full document: 

    While the document does not specify how the surveillance firm procures its data, the luxuries of owning a modern car tied to the “internet of things” appear to have their downfalls as car companies or third parties, or even the government can track these vehicles in real-time. 

    In a world where COVID has accelerated the surveillance state, many people are wondering how to escape the Orwellian grid of surveillance and social control, well, first, own a car with limited technology embedded within – also we offer some simple steps to disappear from the surveillance matrix. 

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 03/18/2021 – 21:40

  • What Is The Shipping Container Shortage Telling Us About The Economy?
    What Is The Shipping Container Shortage Telling Us About The Economy?

    Via SchiffGold.com,

    As Peter Schiff pointed out during a recent interview with NTD News, America has never done worse on trade. He called it a sign that we don’t have a recovering economy. In fact, we have a phony economy in danger of collapse.

    The annual trade deficit for goods came in at an all-time high in January, increasing $3.4 billion to a record $221.1 billion. In another sign of the massive trade imbalance, there is a shortage of shipping containers to bring things into the US.

    In a nutshell, the Federal Reserve is printing money and the US government is giving it to unemployed people who aren’t producing anything. As Peter pointed out, “They’re buying the stuff that people in other countries are employed making.”

    So, it’s the productivity of the rest of the world that Americans are living off of, and the trade deficit evidences that and shows you that our whole economy, our whole recovery, is a fraud.”

    Economic research assistant Weimin Chen says stresses on the world’s shipping infrastructure uncover additional clues about the economic outlook in the US.

    The following article by Weimin Chen was originally published by the Austrian Economics Center and reprinted by the Mises Wire.

    Despite the record unemployment rate, widespread hardship to businesses, strains on the healthcare system, political turmoil, and general disruption to daily life in 2020, US consumers have managed to ramp up their habit of buying things. Demand for physical goods replaced some of the previous demand for in-person service-related experiences and much of that demand was met with a surge of imports from China as domestic production slowed down due to lockdown measures. Up until recently, global supply chains managed to find their footing and could meet demand, but news has emerged that reveals stresses on the world’s shipping infrastructure and uncovers clues about the economic outlook.

    Container Shortage and Chinese Exports

    Global logistical networks recently began to suffer from a shortage of shipping containers as demand has suddenly risen. Freight rates from China to the US have jumped by 300%. The container situation has become so extreme that hundreds of thousands of containers have been sent off empty from US ports, mostly to China as exporters demand empty containers with increasing urgency. An estimated 177,938 containers, were rejected from loading US export items at the ports of Los Angeles and New York/New Jersey alone and then sent across the Pacific.

    The recent imbalance of shipping containers illustrates the latest state of affairs surrounding the US and Chinese economies. As exports of consumer goods from Asia eclipse exports of mostly commodity and raw materials from the US—in this case, even blocking US agricultural exports from having shipping containers to reach foreign markets—the trade deficit between the two countries may become more important to these highly competitive economies.

    When Trade Deficits Matter

    The Austrian perspective on the US trade deficit has long been that given the continued relative productivity of the US economy, foreign desires to invest in the US, and demand for the dollar abroad, the trade deficit is a ‘pseudo-problem.’ The US competitive advantage vis-à-vis other countries in recent decades has made running a trade deficit highly probable and even favorable for Americans as they enjoy the consumption of cheaper imports.

    Thus far, the parties involved have been satisfied with this arrangement as US consumers bring in goods at favorable prices and producers receive a reliably stable world reserve currency: the US dollar. However, the underlying conditions particular to the US economy in relation to China may be changing. There are two aspects of the US-China trade deficit that merit attention. The first is the effect of net consumption by the US coupled with dovish monetary and fiscal policies whereas the second is what China plans to do with US dollars accumulated through exports.

    On the US side of the equation, easy money from the central bank coupled with fiscal stimulus extended to consumers has juiced buying activity as the lockdowns have forced people to stay home and spend. It’s no wonder that shipping containers are rushing to get back to China. With the US taking big hits to production and foreign investment in 2020, along with explosive increases in the money supply, critical questions arise regarding the nature of this trade deficit and how long the status quo can continue as the country pushes the boundaries of its exorbitant privilege. Indeed, the health of the dollar itself as it relates to trade deficits would be an indicator to watch in coming years.

    In running a trade surplus with the US, China has traditionally exchanged its US dollars for US Treasuries to add to its balance sheet and to maintain its export advantage. In recent years, however, China has reduced its holdings in Treasuries. This trend has also coincided with massive spending on the part of China in the last decade on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure and trade corridor project which involves 71 countries across Eurasia and Africa that encompass two-thirds of the global population and one-third of world GDP.

    Given the continued global dollar demand, it would be shrewd for China to use accumulated dollars to acquire foreign assets and invest in projects that have the potential to generate future income. The trade war with the US in recent years has driven China to deepen its flow of trade toward surpluses with other emerging markets and forge strategic global relations.

    As containers carry goods from China to the US and rush to return empty to bring more, the moment provides a glimpse into a potentially precarious arrangement between the two countries. While the US presently consumes itself into debt and liabilities, China has leveraged its productive surpluses from this relationship into increasingly influential assets that may strengthen its position and further challenge the US, and perhaps even the dollar itself.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 03/18/2021 – 21:20

  • Samsung Joins Chorus Of Companies Stung By Semi Shortage
    Samsung Joins Chorus Of Companies Stung By Semi Shortage

    By now, the world knows we are in the midst of a massive semiconductor shortage.

    We have written about how this has wreaked chaos on the auto industry and we have also noted how industry giants like Taiwan Semiconductor are making vast infrastructure investments to try and solve the current shortage and prevent it from happening again in the future. 

    Now, Samsung is the latest to confirm what we already know: that the current crisis is “very serious” and that it “poses a slight problem” for the electronics company heading into the second quarter. The company continues to try and address supply issues, Reuters reported that CEO and mobile chief Koh Dong-jin said at Samsung’s recent annual general meeting.

    In fact, there are also rumors that Samsung is considering skipping its usual Galaxy Note launch this year due to the ongoing chip shortage, according to 9 to 5 Google. Koh is quoted as saying:

    Note series is positioned as a high-end model in our business portfolio. It could be a burden to unveil two flagship models in a year so it might be difficult to release Note model in 2H. The timing of Note model launch can be changed but we seek to release a Note model next year.

    “Right now, it’s unclear if this would also affect Samsung’s other planned releases for 2021,” 9 to 5 Google adds. And regardless of whether or not Samsung does decide to delay its hardware, the point has already been made: the chip shortage remains dire for the time being, is having a profound effect on some of the world’s largest companies, and shows no signs of respite just yet. 

    Most recently, we wrote about how difficult it was becoming for U.S. companies to export chipmaking hardware to China due to trade restrictions. We also documented weeks ago how critical Taiwan would be in getting the semiconductor industry back up and running. We noted that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing was rushing to try and build new facilities through the Chinese New Year in order to meet demand. 

    TSMC is one of the biggest suppliers of chips to company like Apple, Google and Qualcomm. As a result of a worldwide shortage in chips that was brought on due to the pandemic, they are now rushing to try and get a new factory in the southern Taiwanese city of Tainan built. Construction the new facility will take place throughout 2021, with completion expected in 2022. 

    Earlier in 2021 we noted that the semi situation had been turning dire and was now being referred to as the “most serious shortage in years”. Qualcomm’s CEO said last month that there were now shortages “across the board”. 

    And it wasn’t just Qualcomm executives speaking out: other industry leaders warned in recent weeks that they are susceptible to the shortages. Apple said recently that its new high end iPhones were on hold due to a shortage of components. NXP Semiconductors has also warned that the problems are no longer just confined to the auto industry. Sony also said last week it may not be able to to fully meet demand for its new gaming console in 2021 due to the shortage. Companies like Lenovo have also been feeling the crunch.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 03/18/2021 – 21:00

  • "My University Said No To Cancel Culture And It Was the Right Call"
    “My University Said No To Cancel Culture And It Was the Right Call”

    By Daniel Samet, is a Ph.D. student in History at the University of Texas at Austin, submitted by the National Interest,

    Renaming schools, disinviting speakers, and canceling professors is all the rage on campus these days. At the University of Texas at Austin (UT), it seemed only a matter of time before our allegedly racist school song would be the next casualty of this woke crusade.

    An uplifting number written in 1903, “The Eyes of Texas,” is traditionally sung at Longhorn football games and other events. But following last summer’s social justice protests, many called for it to be expunged due to supposed associations with slavery. The pressure from students, faculty members, and the media on the UT administration was immense.    

    This time, though, sanity prevailed. According to a just-released report by The Eyes of Texas History Committee, archival research found no evidence of racism in the song’s intent. Its lyrics do not long for slavery. Nor were they inspired by something Robert E. Lee may have said. The message of the song is accountability, not racism. Though acknowledging that “The Eyes of Texas” was born at a time of racial prejudice, the committee noted in its key takeaways that “The History of the Song Reflects the History of America” and “Facts and Historical Context Matter.”   

    President Jay Hartzell agrees. In a March 9 email to the UT community announcing the report’s release, he said that the song will be kept in its current form while rejecting two of the arguments often trotted out in support of cancel culture. First, Hartzell challenged the uniformly negative view of American history peddled with growing regularity on college campuses. “But while the American story is imperfect, I believe it is positive overall,” he wrote. Second, Hartzell defended free speech, arguing that “no one should shout down those who wish to continue in the tradition of singing.”  

    Those statements would not have raised any eyebrows just a short while ago. Yet they are most controversial now. To assert that America’s past is commendable rather than contemptible runs counter to the woke narrative that now dominates academia. Liberal orthodoxy, which counsels reform, not revolution, as the remedy for America’s problems, has been cast aside for a progressive offshoot that sees in this country only irredeemable wrongs to be extirpated. The new dogma also equates speech one doesn’t like with violence.        

    In this illiberal climate, releasing the report took courage. The committee members, which include students, alumni, faculty, and staff, are mostly, if not entirely, on the Left. But they did not let ideological prejudgments blind them to the historical record. For being upfront about the evidence they deserve great credit.     

    Hartzell also deserves credit for deciding the song will stay. That won’t win him any plaudits with our woke betters in faculty lounges, newsrooms, or left-wing Twitter feeds. Yet it will win the respect of those who hope there is still a small measure of common sense left on campuses that seem to produce everything but it.

    At a time when our elite institutions capitulate left, right, and center to cancel-crazed mobs, it is encouraging to see that at least one still has backbone. May others follow UT’s example.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 03/18/2021 – 20:40

  • Prison Guards Across Country Refusing COVID Vaccine Despite Outbreaks
    Prison Guards Across Country Refusing COVID Vaccine Despite Outbreaks

    Correctional officers across the country are shunning the COVID-19 vaccine over fears of both short-term and long-term side effects of the most rapidly-developed immunization in US history.

    Kareen Troitino stands outside the Federal Corrections Institution, Friday, March 12, 2021, in Miami. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)

    According to an investigation by the Associated Press and the Marshall Project, while over 106,000 prison employees across 29 systems have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, many won’t take it – joining countless health care workers, nursing home employees and police officers who refuse to become vaccinated despite regular exposure to the public.

    Prisons are coronavirus hot spots, so when staff move between the prisons and their home communities after work, they create a pathway for the virus to spread. More than 388,000 incarcerated people and 105,000 staff members have contracted the coronavirus over the last year. In states like Michigan, Kansas and Arizona, that’s meant 1 in 3 staff members have been infected. In Maine, the state with the lowest infection rate, 1 in 20 staff members tested positive for COVID-19. Nationwide, those infections proved fatal for 2,474 prisoners and at least 193 staff members. –AP via Komo News

    In one Florida federal prison, FCI Miami, “fewer than half of the facility’s 240 employees have been fully vaccinated as of March 11,” according to corrections officer union president Kareen Troitino, who said that many of the workers who refused were concerned over the vaccine’s efficacy and side effects.

    In January, Troitino and FCI Miami warden Sylvester Jenkins invited employees to join them in getting vaccinated “in an act of solidarity,” writing “Even though we recognize and respect that this motion is not mandatory; nevertheless, with the intent of promoting staff safety, we encourage all staff to join us.”

    Just 25 employees signed up despite the facility having had two major COVID-19 outbreaks; one last July, when 400 prisoners out of 852 were suspected of having the disease, and a second wave in December which struck approximately 100 people housed in the prison’s minimum-security camp.

    The trend is nationwide:

    In Massachusetts, more than half the people employed by the Department of Correction declined to be immunized. A statewide survey in California showed that half of all correction employees will wait to be vaccinated. In Rhode Island, prison staff have refused the vaccine at higher rates than the incarcerated, according to medical director Dr. Justin Berk. And in Iowa, early polling among employees showed a little more than half the staff said they’d get vaccinated.

    As states have begun COVID-19 inoculations at prisons across the country, corrections employees are refusing vaccines at alarming rates, causing some public health experts to worry about the prospect of controlling the pandemic both inside and outside. Infection rates in prisons are more than three times as high as in the general public. Prison staff helped accelerate outbreaks by refusing to wear masks, downplaying people’s symptoms, and haphazardly enforcing social distancing and hygiene protocols in confined, poorly ventilated spaces ripe for viral spread. -AP

    “Everybody is on edge” says Troitino, who’s worried that so many correctional officers and prisoners haven’t been vaccinated – adding that officers are “constantly shuttling sick and elderly prisoners to the hospital,” leaving a skeleton crew to operate the facility.

    Explanations for why prison employees are refusing the jab essentially revolve around ‘right wing misinformation’ and ‘debunked conspiracy theories,’ according to the report.

    Or, perhaps they’re leery of taking what is essentially still an experimental vaccine for a disease which kills mostly old, obese, and medically compromised people, and which doesn’t prevent one from contracting or transmitting it.

    Read the rest of the report here.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 03/18/2021 – 20:20

  • The Ghislaine Maxwell Case And The Ongoing(?) Investigations Of Epstein's Co-Conspirators
    The Ghislaine Maxwell Case And The Ongoing(?) Investigations Of Epstein’s Co-Conspirators

    Authored by Techno Fog via The Reactionary

    Background

    Ghislaine Maxwell remains in jail, awaiting trial for charges including (1) conspiracy to entice/transport minors to engage in illegal sexual acts; (2) transportation of a minor to engage in illegal sex acts; and (3) perjury. She doesn’t yet have a trial date and sits (or, as Maxwell would say, suffers) in jail as the the case continues.

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    Maxwell is currently fighting this war on multiple fronts. The first has to do with dismissal. As we previously reported, she is trying to get the charges dropped. One of her best arguments (read her motion to dismiss on Scribd) is that the Epstein plea deal precludes her prosecution:

    The US has responded to this motion to dismiss. Per a March 16, 2021 letter to the court from Maxwell’s attorneys, it appears that the government’s motions and supporting exhibits are currently under seal.

    Second, Maxwell seeks more evidence. Here is where it gets interesting.

    On February 4, 2021, Maxwell filed her memorandum in support of her motion for a bill of particulars and pretrial disclosures. (Full document is available here.) In layman’s terms, this means she wants the immediate disclosure of exculpatory and impeachment material; a government witness/evidence list; and more general information of the alleged charges.

    Interestingly, Maxwell alleges the government still “has not disclosed” the identities of the victims. Maxwell was arrested on July 2, 2020. This puts her at 8 months from the date of arrest to the filing of the motion where she didn’t have this information.

    She further claims that she has been provided “almost no information” about the details of the her criminal conduct.

    What else wasn’t produced to Maxwell? The dates the criminal conduct occurred.

    Maxwell’s also seeks FBI 302 summaries of witness interviews. At least one interview is alleged to contain (details redacted) “exculpatory” material that must be produced to the defense.

    Accompanying the motion was a List of Particulars, which requests information on 29 different topics. You can read the List of Particulars here.

    More to Come: Motions (and Exhibits?) to be Unsealed

    In the next few weeks we expect the unsealing of the government’s response to Maxwell’s motion to dismiss and their response to her request for more information on her charges and accusers. We should also be seeing the following motions from Maxwell – which includes the issues of dismissal, breach of the Epstein non-prosecution agreement, and her request for more documents and information relating to her charges – put on the public docket. (We’ll provide updates as soon as the court provides public access.)

    Also pending: Maxwell’s third try to get out on bail.

    In July 2020, the court concluded she was a serious flight risk. On December 28, 2020, Maxwell proposed to the court a more significant bail package, which included armed guards and a $28.5 million bond. This was again denied, with the court noting Maxwell “plainly poses a risk of flight.” In February 2021, Maxwell proposed two additional conditions to her prior bail package: (1) renunciation of her French and British citizenship; and (2) placement of some of her and her husband’s assets in a new account overseen by an asset monitor. The court has yet to rule on Maxwell’s latest bail proposal.

    Finally, one important question is still unanswered. Will any more of Epstein’s co-conspirator’s be prosecuted?

    We can understand (but can’t fully answer) this question by looking to Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement.

    This agreement, or plea deal, was unique. Not just because it was favorable and done in secret and kept secret from his victims and the public, but because it released Epstein’s known and unknown co-conspirators. From the non-prosecution agreement:

    [T]he United States also agrees that it will not institute any criminal charges against any potential co-conspirators of Epstein, including but not limited to Sarah Kellen, Adriana Ross, Lesley Groff, or Nadia Marcinkova.

    Last August, the government informed the court that their investigation into Epstein’s possible co-conspirators “remains active” and was before the grand jury.

    The identity of Epstein’s unknown co-conspirators has always been intriguing. He ran in powerful circles. One name that always comes up is Bill Clinton. This summer, unsealed records from Maxwell’s civil case implicated Bill Clinton being around “2 young girls” at Epstein’s island.

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    This allegation was denied by Bill Clinton’s spokesman.

    I’m pretty certain that Maxwell’s lawyers know much more than we do. Maxwell’s February 2021 motion to dismiss also included this redacted passage that identifies the unnamed “co-conspirators.”

    To close, and to address our final question – “Will any more of Epstein’s co-conspirator’s be prosecuted?” – we suspect that passage above might have the answer. With the DOJ’s potentially ongoing investigation of the co-conspirators, and pursuant to DOJ policy, don’t expect the passage to be unredacted anytime soon.

    Your support makes this possible. You can contribute- and help offset our expenses of obtaining court records and transcripts – by sharing and subscribing.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 03/18/2021 – 20:00

  • "Don't Lecture Us": Alaska Summit Opens With Dueling Barbs & Epic Anti-US Tirade
    “Don’t Lecture Us”: Alaska Summit Opens With Dueling Barbs & Epic Anti-US Tirade

    As predicted things are icier than ever by the end of day one of the Alaska summit in which for the first time in the Biden administration high-level in-person talks were held between China and the US, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, as well as State Councilor Wang Yi. By the close tomorrow it promises to border on comic shitshow levels given the public haranguing that’s already taken place.

    US national security adviser Jake Sullivan reportedly began the talks by telling his Chinese counterparts that “We do not seek conflict, but we welcome stiff competition, and we will always stand up for our principles, for our people, and for our friends” — noting that on the agenda for the summit is China’s crackdowns in Xinjiang province, Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as state-sponsored cyber attacks and “economic coercion” of allies. “Each of these actions threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability,” Sullivan underscored. He added that the “alternative” is a winner-take-all world that would be inevitably more “violent and unstable”. 

    As many commentators have been pointing out given the increased obviousness, there’s no daylight whatsoever between Trump’s prior China policies so heavily criticized by the Democrats and the hard-line on Beijing now clearly being pursued by Biden. For example, Bloomberg writes, “Coming into the meeting, it was increasingly clear that despite Biden’s criticism of former President Donald Trump, he’s unlikely to make major changes to his predecessor’s hard-line approach to China. On human rights in Xinjiang , on Hong Kong’s and even on tariffs, Trump-era policies remain in place.”

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    Chinese Communist Party foreign affairs chief Yang Jiechi wasn’t impressed, going on an epic tirade filled with a litany of American “abuses” meant to answer every one of Washington’s recent criticisms of Beijing and then some. He ran with Blinken and Sullivan’s “human rights” theme and turned it around, seeking to call out Washington ‘hypocrisy’ on every point, even down to treatment of Black Americans (which presumably was Yang’s intended parallel to ethnic Uighurs).

    Here’s a recap of his introductory remarks:

    …Yang hit back, accusing the United States of using its military might and financial supremacy to pressure countries and of abusing national security to threaten the future of international trade.

    He said Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan were all inseparable parts of Chinese territory and China firmly opposed US interference in its internal affairs.

    Yang said human rights in the United States were at a low point with Black Americans being “slaughtered” and added that the United States should handle its own affairs and China its own.

    Yang said it was necessary to abandon a “Cold War mentality,” and confrontation and added:

    “The way we see the relationship with the United States is as President Xi Jinping has said, that is we hope to see no confrontation, no conflict, mutual respect and win-win cooperation with the United States.”

    So there was at least a brief positive included by the end of his intro. Yang had further fired back at Washington’s charges that in reality “the US is the champion of cyberattacks”.

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    And as predicted it was the Biden administration’s last minute sanctions a mere hours before the Chinese delegation was due to touch down in Anchorage which ensured there would be sparks from the very start. Wednesday evening new sanctions were slapped on 24 Chinese and Hong Kong officials over the anti-democratic crackdown and election overhaul of last week. State Councilor Wang Yi had lashed out in remarks from Alaska saying the new sanctions are “not the way to welcome guests”

    Unfazed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken batted down the litany of Chinese counter-complaints, quipping that US-China talks “should be filled with lecture”. Yang, however, asserted that the United States “doesn’t speak to China from a position of strength” while also somewhat dramatically positing that it’s “impossible to strangle the Chinese people”.

    Ultimately, no one expected too much to come out of these talks, with China’s ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai earlier posting a statement to the web saying as much: “Naturally, we don’t expect one round of dialogue will resolve all the issues between China and the U.S. and we don’t hold overly high hopes,” according to the Chinese embassy in Washington’s website.

    “My wish is that this can be a start and that the two sides can begin a dialogue process that is candid, constructive and realistic,” Cui said. “If we can achieve that, I think this exchange will be successful.”

    But at this point on day-one… “constructive” is looking like it already went out the window.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 03/18/2021 – 19:39

  • Greenwald: Journalists, Illustrating How They Operate, Spread A Significant Lie All Over Twitter
    Greenwald: Journalists, Illustrating How They Operate, Spread A Significant Lie All Over Twitter

    Authored by Glenn Greenwald via greenwald.substack.com

    Hunter Biden (L) and then-Vice President Joe Biden speak on stage at Organization of American States on April 12, 2016 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Teresa Kroeger/Getty Images for World Food Program USA)

    Journalists with the largest and most influential media outlets disseminated an outright and quite significant lie on Tuesday to hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, on Twitter. While some of them were shamed into acknowledging the falsity of their claim, many refused to, causing it to continue to spread up until this very moment. It is well worth examining how they function because this is how they deceive the public again and again, and it is why public trust in their pronouncements has justifiably plummeted.

    The lie they told involved claims of Russian involvement in the procurement of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, The New York Post obtained that laptop and published a series of articles about the Biden family’s business dealings in Ukraine, China and elsewhere. In response, Twitter banned the posting of any links to that reporting and locked The Post out of its Twitter account for close to two weeks, while Facebook, through a long-time Democratic operative, announced that it would algorithmically suppress the reporting.

    The excuse used by those social media companies for censoring this reporting was the same invoked by media outlets to justify their refusal to report the contents of these documents: namely, that the materials were “Russian disinformation.” That claim of “Russian disinformation” was concocted by a group of several dozen former CIA officials and other operatives of the intelligence community devoted to defeating Trump. Immediately after The Post published its first story about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine that traded on his influence with his father, these career spies and propagandists, led by Obama CIA Director and serial liar John Brennan, published a letter asserting that the appearance of these Biden documents “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

    News outlets uncritically hyped this claim as fact even though these security state operatives themselves admitted: “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails…are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” Even though this claim came from trained liars who, with uncharacteristic candor, acknowledged that they did not “have evidence” for their claim, media outlets uncritically ratified this assertion.

    This was a topic I discussed extensively in October when I announced my resignation from The Intercept after senior editors — for the first time in seven years — violated the contractual prohibition on editorial interference in my journalism by demanding I significantly alter my reporting about these documents by removing the sections that reflected negatively on Biden. What I found particularly galling about their pretense that they have such high-level and rigorous editorial standards — standards they claimed, for the first time ever, that my article failed to meet — was that a mere week prior to their censorship of my article, they published an article by a different journalist which, at a media outlet we created with the explicit purpose of treating government claims with skepticism, instead treated the CIA’s claims of “Russian disinformation” as fact. Even worse, when they quoted the CIA’s letter, they omitted the part where even those intelligence agents acknowledged that they had no evidence for their assertion. From The Intercept on October 21:

    Their latest falsehood once again involves Biden, Ukraine, and a laptop mysteriously discovered in a computer repair shop and passed to the New York Post, thanks to Trump crony Rudy Giuliani….. The U.S. intelligence community had previously warned the White House that Giuliani has been the target of a Russian intelligence operation to disseminate disinformation about Biden, and the FBI has been investigating whether the strange story about the Biden laptop is part of a Russian disinformation campaign. This week, a group of former intelligence officials issued a letter saying that the Giuliani laptop story has the classic trademarks of Russian disinformation.

    Oh my, marvel at those extremely rigorous editorial standards: regurgitating serious accusations from ex-CIA operatives without bothering to note that they were unaccompanied by evidence and that even those agents admitted they had none. But, as they usually do these days, The Intercept had plenty of company in the corporate media.

    That those materials were “Russian disinformation” became so reflexively accepted by the U.S. media that it became the principal excuse to ignore and even censor the reporting, and it also helpfully handed the Biden campaign an easy excuse to avoid answering any questions about what the documents revealed. “I think we need to be very, very clear that what he’s doing here is amplifying Russian misinformation,” said Biden Deputy Campaign Manager Kate Bedingfield when asked about the prospect that Trump would raise the Biden emails at the debate. From the CIA’s lips to the mouths of corporate journalists into the hands of the Biden campaign.

    As the U.S. media disseminated this “disinformation” tale, nobody — including the Bidens — has ever claimed let alone demonstrated that a single document was anything other than genuine — something that would be exceedingly easy to do if the documents were fraudulent. “The Biden team has rejected some of the claims made in the NY Post articles, but has not disputed the authenticity of the [laptop] files upon which they were based,” acknowledged The New York Times. Ample evidence corroborates that the documents are genuine.

    As for the claims of Russian involvement in the laptop story, there was never any evidence for it: none. The CIA operatives who invented that storyline acknowledged that. The week that tale emerged, The New York Times reported that “no concrete evidence has emerged that the laptop contains Russian disinformation” and the paper said even the FBI has “acknowledged that it had not found any Russian disinformation on the laptop.” The Washington Post published an op-ed by Russia fanatic Thomas Rid who candidly pronounced: “We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren’t.” And the only time the U.S. Government has ever spoken on this question was when the Director of National Intelligence stated: “Hunter Biden’s laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.”

    These documents raised important questions about the presidential frontrunner’s knowledge of or participation in his family members’ attempt to profit off of their association with him, questions implicating his integrity, ethics and honesty. Yet those documents were suppressed by a gigantic fraud, perpetrated by the CIA and their media allies, which claimed that the documents were forged and that they came from Russia.


    That is the critical context for the lie spread yesterday by numerous mainstream journalists. On Tuesday morning, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declassified a short 12-page report entitled “Foreign Threats to the U.S. 2020 Elections.”

    It reviewed the actions of numerous countries with regard to the 2020 election. The intelligence community claimed — without presenting any evidence whatsoever — that “Russian President Putin authorized…influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the U.S.” The New York Times’ largely credulous article about this report contained this admission, one you would think (or, rather, hope) would matter to journalists: “The declassified report did not explain how the intelligence community had reached its conclusions about Russian operations during the 2020 election.”

    Despite that glaring omission, media outlets predictably treated the evidence-free assertions from the security state as fact. “Vladimir Putin did it again,” trumpeted Mother Jones’ David Corn without an iota of skepticism. CNN’s Marshall Cohen actually said this:

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    Think about that: to a CNN reporter, evidence-free assertions from the U.S. security state are tantamount to “confirmation.” That they really do think this way is nothing short of chilling. But that is the standard liberal media posture of harboring reverence for the U.S. intelligence community and treating its every utterance as Truth without the need for any corroborating evidence. It is one of their defining attributes.

    But in this case, many of them went far beyond mere regurgitation of CIA claims. Well beyond it: here, they fabricated a claim that report also demonstrated that the Hunter Biden laptop materials were — as they claimed before the election — engineered by Russia. In reality, the report did not even mention the Hunter Biden laptop materials or allude to it, let alone claim that it was produced by the Kremlin, let alone supply evidence that it constituted “Russian disinformation.” But no matter: numerous journalists united to spread the false claim far and wide that the report confirmed this storyline.

    The first journalist to publish the falsehood was Patrick Tucker, an editor at the journal Defense One. The tweet quickly went viral as liberals clicked “retweet” and “like” so fast that at least several of them likely suffered digital cartilage damage or at least a mild sprain:

    The claim that this report corroborated Russian involvement in the Hunter laptop story picked up significant steam when MSNBC host Chris Hayes endorsed it to his 2.3 million followers:

    From there, the claim was further spread by Hayes’ NBC News colleague Ben Collins, who — ironically — works in what the network calls the “disinformation unit,” combatting the spread of disinformation (by which Collins means tattling on 4Chan teenagers and Facebook boomers, while never challenging the lies of real power centers such as those from the intelligence community; those lies are ones he amplifies):

    With this MSNBC host and the NBC disinformation agent on board, it was off to the races. Journalists from across the corporate media sphere spread this lie over and over. Here was CNN’s Asha Rangappa:

    Perhaps the most embarrassing example was from S.V. Daté, the White House correspondent of HuffPost which, just last week, had dozens of its reporters laid off perhaps because, while they have numerous talented reporters, this is the sort of thing they routinely do, causing them to lose trust among the public. Daté did not just repeat the lie but used it to mock those who actually did the reporting on these documents (note that the section he underlined in red says nothing about the Hunter Biden documents, nor does it say anything about Russia other than it “amplified” various news stories):

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    As this false claim went massively viral, conservative journalists — and only they — began vocally objecting that the report made no mention whatsoever of the Hunter Biden laptop, let alone supplied proof for this claim. That is because, with a few noble exceptions (such as The Washington Post’s media critic Erik Wemple), liberal journalists at corporate outlets will eagerly endorse but never denounce or correct each other’s falsehoods. For that reason, if you confine yourself to the liberal corporate media bubble, and refuse to follow conservative journalists as well, you will be propagandized and deceived.

    Hayes, to his credit, was one of the only journalists who helped spread this falsehood and then quickly retracted it. He first acknowledged that, upon reading the report, it did not appear that it actually made any reference to the Hunter laptop, and then announced he would delete his original tweet, conceding that the original claim was false. Note how the original false claims go mega-viral, while the tweets which subsequently acknowledge their falsity are seen by very few people:

    With one of his earliest boosters having jumped ship, Tucker himself, the originator of this lie, first began backtracking while vowing he would never delete the tweet, only to then relent and delete it, acknowledging its falsity. Again compare the meager audience that learns of the backtracking and acknowledgment of falsity compared to the huge number exposed to the original false claim:

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    Thanks to multiple journalists with large platforms spreading Tucker’s original false tweet, it received thousands upon thousands of likes and re-tweets. So, too, did the tweets of other journalists promoting that false claim, such as the one from HuffPost’s White House Correspondent, and this one from one of David Brock’s goons specifically claiming that the security state’s evidence-free report somehow proves that my pre-election reporting on it was wrong. Yet Tucker’s announcement that he was deleting his tweet on the ground that the report does not make “explicit reference to the Hunter Biden laptop story” has a grand total of three retweets.

    Indeed, other than Hayes, it is difficult to find a journalist who acknowledged that what they spread was a lie. Both CNN’s Rangappa and NBC News’ Collins simply allowed the tweet to quietly disappear from their timeline when Tucker finally deleted his, saying nothing to the thousands or tens of thousands of people they misled. Meanwhile, the tweet from HuffPost’s Daté is still up a full twenty-four hours after the key journalists who spread this have acknowledged it was false.


    Do you see how they behave? Take a look. Prior to the election, out of desperation to ensure that Biden won, they censored and maligned this reporting by mindlessly endorsing an assertion from life-long CIA operatives that never had any evidence: ignore these documents; they are Russian disinformation. They not only invoked that claim to justify ignoring the story but also to successfully agitate for its censorship by Twitter and Facebook. So they spent weeks spreading an utter lie in order to help the candidate that they favored win the election. Remember, these are journalists doing that.

    Then, yesterday, the intelligence community issued a report that does not even purport to contain any evidence: just assertions. And they all jumped to treat it as gospel: no questioning of it, no skepticism, no demands to see evidence for it, not even any notation that no evidence was provided. They just instantly enshrined claims from the CIA and NSA as Truth. How can you possibly be a journalist with even minimal knowledge of what these agencies do and look in the mirror as you do this?

    But so much worse, in this case, they just outright lied about what the report said — just fabricated assertions that the report did not even allude to, in order to declare their lies from last October to be vindicated. Even if this report had asserted that the Hunter Biden laptop materials were manufactured by the Kremlin, that would prove nothing. Evidence-free assertions from the U.S. intelligence community merit skepticism, not blind faith — especially from people calling themselves journalists.

    But the report did not even claim that. And when some of them realized this, they did virtually nothing to rectify the severe disinformation they had spent the day spreading. These are the people who claim to be so profoundly opposed to conspiracy theories and devoted to combating “disinformation”; as usual, they are the ones who spread disinformation most recklessly and frequently.

    The fact that the false tweet from HuffPost’s White House correspondent is still up is quite revealing, given that that outlet just had to lay off a significant portion of its staff. As newly arrived Substack writer Michael Tracey wrote in his first article on this platform (headlined: “Why Journalists Hate Substack”), journalists are very good at lamenting when their outlets are forced to lay off journalists but very poor at examining whether the content their outlet is producing may be part of why it is failing:

    So when you see another round of layoffs, followed by another round of exasperated Twitter lamentation about how horrible the industry is, you have to wonder if these rituals ultimately function as an excuse for journalists to forgo any kind of real self-examination. For instance, why it is that the media organizations they inhabit always seem to be in a constant state of free-fall? Sure, there are economic factors at play that the journalists themselves cannot control. But it would seem to behoove these journalists to maybe spend a little bit less time complaining in the abstract about the depredations of “the industry”—as though they are its hapless, beleaguered casualties—and a little bit more time analyzing whether they have contributed to the indisputable reality that huge cross-sections of the public distrust and despise the media.

    There are multiple potential explanations for this dynamic worth considering. Maybe it’s the tedious hyper-partisanship and weirdly outdated content aggregation tactics that much of the online media still employs. Maybe it’s the constant five-alarm-fire tone and incessant hyping of overblown threats that was characteristic of the Trump years. Maybe it’s some combination of all these and more—but you won’t see many axed journalists offering up any kind of critical introspection, because when the layoffs arrive it can never have anything to do with their own ideological myopia or other shortcomings.

    Indeed, when anyone, including journalists, loses their job, it is lamentable. But when one witnesses behavior like what these journalists did yesterday, the only confounding part of the collapse of this part of the media industry is that it is not happening even more quickly and severely.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 03/18/2021 – 19:20

  • These US Cities Have The Most (And Fewest) Homes For Sale
    These US Cities Have The Most (And Fewest) Homes For Sale

    2020 was a wild year for the American real-estate market. Markets like NYC and San Francisco, which had formerly been among the hottest in the world, saw valuations crater as millions fled to the suburbs, or otherwise left urban markets, seeking space and solitude during a pandemic that made people anxious about their neighbors.

    An initial halt in transactions during the first week or two of the lockdown last March gave way to a frenzied market, as stimulus money and the Fed’s decision to slash rates to zero while increasing its purchases of MBS and Treasury bonds drove prices higher in smaller cities and towns across the country.

    But despite strong demand from buyers, the market hasn’t seen supply keep pace. The ripple effect of the pandemic has made many would-be sellers wary. This decline in inventories just as demand appears to peak is helping to drive prices even higher.

    In a study, the Inspection Support Network has published a study of which metropolitan markets have the most homes for sale.

    Another symptom of this dynamic is that homes sell faster, often within days of hitting the market.

    Unsurprisingly given the never-ending development boom in the Sunshine State, Florida has more available inventory than any other state in the union. That will come in handy as tax hikes in deep-blue states send more snowbirds scurrying for the sunny weather and low tax rates.

    In fact, many of the metropolitan areas with the most homes for sale are spread across Florida, and elsewhere in the Southeastern US. Panama City, a popular spring-break destination, ranked No. 1 on ISN’s list of small metros with the most and least homes for sale.

    Naples, situated on Florida’s southern Gulf Coast, ranked No. 1 for medium-sized cities.

     

    Miami and Atlanta topped the list for large metros, followed by

    • NYC
    • Las Vegas
    • Jacksonville
    • Houston
    • San Antonio
    • Orlando
    • Virginia Beach
    • Tampa

    With all this inventory, states like South Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Las Vegas and Florida are beckoning to Midwesterners and New Englanders who are tired of high taxes and lingering COVID restrictions.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 03/18/2021 – 19:00

  • A "Vicious, Brutal Day": Four Traders Respond To Today's Market Chaos
    A “Vicious, Brutal Day”: Four Traders Respond To Today’s Market Chaos

    It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

    One day after Powell basically told markets that the Fed will not get in the way of the biggest asset bubble every blown for the next two years, stocks initially opened higher near all time highs only to drift all day as hapless traders watched as the SPX shed 1.5% – its worst drop in three weeks and the Nasdaq 100 fell 3.1%, erasing its gain for the year. 

    This, as SpotGamma writes, was a very atypical high gamma day, and as we have repeatedly cautioned, the negative gamma QQQ trade and weakness in tech is really dragging the S&P.

    Making matters worse, tomorrow’s quad-witch will only lead to an even more volatile market: on one hand, the S&P was on the zero gamma threshold which still implies a 3900-3950 pin is in play, but the larger issue is that due to the QQQs closing in negative gamma territory again, the Nasdaq is “poised for a lot of volatility tomorrow due to that large negative gamma position. Because tech is such a large piece of the S&P there is a lot of overlap here and we need to mentally “blend” these crosscurrents” according to SpotGamma.

    Finally, as shown in spotgamma’s QQQ vanna chart below, the “slope” of hedging is quite high, which suggests that dealers have a lot to sell if markets drop, and a lot to buy back if markets rip.

    Today’s bloodbath wasn’t contained to stocks however, and the violent drop came as bond yields rose – leading to even more risk parity pain – while oil prices plunged on concern about the impact of European lockdowns on demand. In short, as Bloomberg summarizes, it was a “brutal day”:

    So as traders prepare for what may be another painful quad-witching, one where the amount of expirations will be lower than usual…

    but where liquidity will be dismal…

    … here is what four of them are saying, courtesy of Bloomberg:

    Larry Weiss, head of equity trading at Instinet LLC in New York:

    It’s a bit of everything, rotation continues out of the crowded tech sector and small caps giving up some recent gains. Ahead of major index rebalance activity tomorrow, volumes are a bit light, exacerbating the moves. Oil is a factor, and inflation fears — despite the Fed Chair’s calls for rate stability through 2023 — remain a concern.

    Adam Phillips, director of portfolio strategy at EP Wealth Advisors:

    This appears to be a delayed response to yesterday’s FOMC meeting. Jay Powell has made it clear that investors are on their own for now when it comes to higher yields, so even if bonds appear oversold, yields may still have further to go. That being said, the pressure on the Fed will only grow as economic data strengthens in the months ahead.

    Chris Grisanti, chief equity strategist at MAI Capital Management:

    The market is voting right now that we are out of tech and into cyclical, energy and financials.The viciousness and the rapidity of it surprises me but the direction of it doesn’t. It really did seem to grow on itself today. Bonds yields just kind of leaped. Inflation is spooking the market. Companies that would do well with higher rates are clearly out-performing. Powell is saying, take me at face value, we’re going to keep rates low — that’s terrific for economic growth but it scares the bond vigilantes that there will be too much and it will turn into inflation.

    Mike Bailey, director of research at FBB Capital Partners:

    It’s as simple as yields up, growth bad. We’re seeing a pattern where an uncomfortable spike in the 10-year Treasury reminds equity investors that their tech stocks are trading well above average, with cyclicals looking more attractive. This spurt in Treasury yields will settle down and equity investors will come back to tech and growth, but it may take a few trading days.

    Finally, for those who missed it, here is our preview of Quad-Witch: Here Are The Stocks With The Biggest Call And Put Gamma Imbalance

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 03/18/2021 – 18:40

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Today’s News 18th March 2021

  • EU To Sanction China For First Time in 3 Decades Over Uighur 'Genocide'
    EU To Sanction China For First Time in 3 Decades Over Uighur ‘Genocide’

    US pressure and spiraling relations with Beijing, lately focused heavily on human rights-related complaints and the crackdown particularly on China’s ethnic Muslim community which the Trump administration had previously dubbed “genocide”, are now for the first time manifesting in a very definitive way in Europe. 

    “The European Union agreed on Wednesday to blacklist Chinese officials for human rights abuses, two diplomats said, the first sanctions against Beijing since an EU arms embargo in 1989 following the Tiananmen Square crackdown,” Reuters reports.

    These first EU sanctions in over three decades stem from widespread reports of ‘systematic’ human rights abuses in the northwest Xinjiang region, where millions of Muslim Uighurs are said to be confined to Communist ‘reeducation’ and labor camps.

    Via AP

    It’s to include travel bans and asset freezes on at least four Chinese individuals and one entity, Reuters notes; however, the names aren’t expected to be made public until formal approval by EU foreign ministers on March 22.

    EU diplomats have confirmed the sanctions preparations to Reuters, which writes further:

    The 1989 EU arms embargo on China, its second-largest trade partner, is still in place.

    “Restrictive measures against serious human rights violations and abuses adopted,” one EU diplomat said.

    Shortly after the report, the Chinese mission to the EU posted a statement expressing anger over the move, calling it “confrontational”. 

    “Sanctions are confrontational,” the Twitter statement said. “We want dialogue, not confrontation. We ask the EU side to think twice. If some insist on confrontation, we will not back down, as we have no options other than fulfilling our responsibilities to the people.”

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    Canada meanwhile has been most vocal and out front on the Uighur issue, with many MPs attempting to urge EU countries and others to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

    This dramatic proposal to sit out the games as a human rights “message” to China has been met with coolness in Europe. Thus this sanctions measure appears an attempt at ‘doing something’ but without going as far as some Canadian and British lawmakers are pushing for.

    All of this further comes as EU officials are refusing China’s invitations to investigate the Uighur camps first hand: “China denies any human rights abuses in Xinjiang and says its camps provide vocational training and are needed to fight extremism,” Reuters writes. 

    “Beijing has on numerous occasions invited EU ambassadors to Xinjiang but envoys say they cannot visit under the strict conditions and monitoring set by Chinese authorities.”

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 03/18/2021 – 02:45

  • Israel Is Back With Airstrikes As Turkey Scrambles To Salvage Some Oil In Syria
    Israel Is Back With Airstrikes As Turkey Scrambles To Salvage Some Oil In Syria

    Submitted by SouthFront

    As has become customary in recent weeks, after the relative success of the Axis of Resistance on battlefields across the Middle East, Israel delivered a reminder of its interest in Syria. On March 16th, Damascus’ air defense repelled a missile barrage, which was heading towards targets surrounding the Syrian capital.

    A statement by the Syrian Arab Army said that the missiles had been launched from the direction of the occupied Golan Heights and targeted undisclosed positions around Damascus. Most of the missiles were reportedly intercepted and no casualties were observed. There was minimal damage.

    Strikes such as these are commonplace and happen somewhat regularly, especially now in 2021, when Tel Aviv considers its interests under even more threat than usual due to the Biden Administration’s relative passivity towards Iran.

    The Israeli strike was not the only attack on Damascus in recent days. On March 15th, Syrian security forces foiled a terrorist attack intended to target unspecified areas in Damascus. As a result, three terrorists were killed and three were arrested. All six were wearing explosive belts.

    Separately, in what is likely a positive development for Damascus, Russian forces moved into an oil field and gas field in the northeast Raqqah governorate.

    Russian military reinforcements alongside units from the Russian-backed Fifth Armored Division arrived at al-Thawra oil facility which produces around 2,000 bpd.

    Earlier, on March 12th, Russian forces entered the Toueinane gas field, also in the same area.

    This is a small, but notable shift highlighting a change in the balance of power in northern Syria. Since Russia is allied with Damascus, prior to that most of Syria’s oil went to the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces or various Turkish proxies.  Most of the oil still goes out of Syria, but this is a movement in another direction.

    In addition, Russia’s Defense Ministry said that Turkish forces are carry out military movements and acts in Raqqa countryside in violation of a Memorandum of Understanding that Ankara signed with Moscow.

    According to a statement, the Russian side is extremely worried about transporting military equipment affiliated to the Turkish armed forces and establishing fortifications and support points in the suburbs of Ain Issa.

    This is an attempt at a Turkish response to recent shelling by the Syrian Arab Army in the area surrounding Aleppo, and other positions where Turkish proxies operate. Ankara can’t afford to lose access to all of its cheap oil, and as such needs to provide some semblance of resistance before losing access to it.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 03/18/2021 – 02:00

  • Daniel Ellsberg Talks About Whistleblowing, The Pervasiveness Of Official Lies, And The Dangers Of The Espionage Act
    Daniel Ellsberg Talks About Whistleblowing, The Pervasiveness Of Official Lies, And The Dangers Of The Espionage Act

    Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

    “On Tuesday morning, August 4th, 1964,” writes Daniel Ellsberg in Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, “a courier came in my out office with an urgent cable for my boss. He had been running.”

    A former Marine with a PhD from Harvard in Decision Theory, Ellsberg had joined the Pentagon as special assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton, who himself was perhaps the closest advisor to Secretary Robert McNamara. Ellsberg, in other words, was the right hand of the right hand, of the man who would become known as the chief architect of the Vietnam War.

    Ellsberg’s first day on August 4th, 1964 proved to be a historic one. His boss McNaughton was down the hall with McNamara, so the panting courier handed Ellsberg the note and left. He opened it and found it was from Captain John J. Herrick, the commodore of a two-destroyer flotilla in the Gulf of Tonkin, off North Vietnam in the South China sea. Officially, the United States was not yet engaged in full-fledged military operations in Indochina.

    Daniel Ellsberg: “We could be East Germany in weeks, in a month. Huge concentration camps and so forth…”

    Herrick said he was under attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats, and had opened fire in return. He was 60 miles from the coast, in international waters. The sonar operators on the Destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy, Maddox said, each heard torpedoes in the water. Ten minutes later, the courier returned with a new note. “Am under continuous torpedo attack,” he wrote, about an encounter that was taking place in total darkness.

    For some time after, cables came in quick succession, as Ellsberg guessed Herrick was dictating from the bridge in between trying to maneuver his ships. “Torpedoes missed. Another fired at us,” read one. “Four torpedoes in water,” read a second. “Five torpedoes in water… Have successfully avoided at least six torpedoes…” According to Herrick, at least one attacking boat had been sunk. The action went on for two long hours, before suddenly the stream of messages cut short.

    “Then, suddenly, an hour later,” Ellberg wrote, “a message arrived that took back, not quite all of it, but enough to put the rest of it in question.” The courier came in running again, handing him a cable with the highest clearance and urgency [emphasis mine]:

    Review of action makes any reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather effects on radar and overeager sonar men may have accounted for many reports. No actual visual sightings by Maddox. Suggest complete evaluation before any further action taken…

    It was a little after 2 p.m., Washington time. Ellsberg was dumbfounded by the latest communications. “In my mind, these messages erased the impact of the two-hour-long live drama that we had been following. This new information was a cold bath.”

    Herrick later sent another cable: “Details of action present a confusing picture, although certain original ambush bona fide.” Ellsberg was now unsure of how Herrick was so sure, given that he hadn’t seen anything and was acknowledging, among other things, that one sonar man was hearing his own ship’s propeller. “It seemed almost certain there had been no attack,” Ellsberg wrote, certain the proper course was to wait to see what actually happened before acting.

    Things didn’t go that way. Senior military officials scrambled to put together an immediate retaliatory airstrike. President Lyndon Johnson was so anxious not only to strike back, but to brief the public about doing it, that he asked the Pentagon’s permission to go on TV with details before the planes even reached Vietnam.

    LBJ was on the air by 11:37 p.m. that night, telling the American people that “hostile vessels attacking two U.S. destroyers with torpedoes” constituted “open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America.” McNamara gave subsequent pressers in which he described “unprovoked” attacks of U.S. vessels on “routine patrols” in “international waters.” They described the evidence for Vietnamese aggression as “unequivocal.”

    By the end of Ellsberg’s first day, he knew every single one of these claims was a lie. The two destroyers were on a special mission, penetrating deep into North Vietnamese waters and engaging in sabotage raids. In top-secret testimony to congress in the two days after the August 4th incident, McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk told congressional leaders the U.S. had nothing to do with the raids, which were entirely South Vietnamese operations.

    Ellsberg soon learned this was a lie, too, that the personnel on the ships had been chosen by the CIA and that the operations were run jointly by the agency and the Navy. “Each of these assertions,” Ellsberg would later write, “was false.” You can still go back and look to see how these lies were reported with complete credulity and never corrected:

    Ellsberg became famous years later for shepherding to the public a wealth of secret documents about the ugly history of failure, brutality, and ignorance in the Vietnam War, collectively known as the Pentagon Papers. He is America’s most famous whistleblower, a figure who single-handedly triggered a major constitutional crisis when the government of Richard Nixon tried to block publication of his material.

    However, Ellsberg has remained an important figure in American culture and politics precisely because so little has changed since the events of the fifties, sixties, and seventies he described in such vivid detail.

    In the Useful Idiots interview below, Ellsberg points out the similarities between Vietnam and our current policies in various countries around the world. He says our leaders are worried about “regime change in Washington,” which they believe would occur if they left other countries’ oil in the ground, or “stopped killing Afghans.”

    More than anything, however, Ellsberg is an expert on the role of secrecy in American life. Both in his books and in his interview with Useful Idiots, he describes military and executive branch officials who don’t even figure “truth” as a variable in their calculations, since it’s irrelevant to what they tell the world.

    He arrived in Washington believing the commonly held notion that nothing in the capital stays secret for long. Soon he learned that it’s actually quite easy to keep secrets. Ellsberg described a vicious cycle, in which leaders lie pervasively, then learn to have so much contempt for the public that swallows those lies, that they feel justified in lying more.

    “My awareness of how easily Congress, the public, and journalists were fooled and misled contributed to a lack of respect for them,” he wrote. “That, in turn, made it easier to accept practices of deception,” and “their resulting ignorance made it all the more obvious that they must leave these problems to us.”

    Ellsberg is adamant that our military and intelligence services don’t learn from even the bloodiest failures. However, when asked in the Useful Idiots if they’d at least learned something in a negative sense — like how to deal with whistleblowers and shut off pictures of war deaths — he concurred, explaining that he himself had been used as propaganda.

    “It is now accepted that somebody can be a good whistleblower, and that’s Daniel Ellsberg,” he says, “in contrast with Chelsea Manning and Ed Snowden. The appreciation that I’ve been getting since 2010, I can date very simply to the need to denigrate Chelsea Manning.”

    He went on to describe a New Yorker piece written by Malcolm Gladwell that ripped Ed Snowden in comparison to him, Ellsberg, among other things quoting an analyst who wondered if Snowden “may have been the dupe of a foreign-intelligence service.” Ellsberg wrote a letter to the New Yorker calling the contrast ridiculous, and, he tells us, “They never published it.”

    Overall, Ellsberg’s takes on nuclear safety, the implications of the use of the Espionage Act in the Julian Assange case, and continued misuse of secrecy and hyper-aggressive foreign policy in places like Afghanistan and Syria, still resonate. The most powerful part of his interview regarded the power of the secret state in modern America.

    “They know where we are, they know our names, they know from our iPhones if we’re on our way to the grocery store or not,” he said. “We could be East Germany in weeks. In a month.”

    The last portion of the Useful Idiots episode:

    Excerpt from the interview:

    Matt Taibbi: What you saw in Vietnam is similar to what people saw in Iraq, and then Afghanistan. What’s the mentality that continues to think that these same kinds of policies will work, and why can’t they get out of that mentality?

    Ellsberg: You have to ask, who is it who actually bears the cost of these and who doesn’t? Any of these wars were not bad for the people making weapons, and it’s not only them. It’s the banks that finance them and it’s the congresspeople who benefit, as I keep saying, from the donations and the jobs and so forth. They did fine…

    Are we actually going to get out of Afghanistan? It’s scheduled, by Trump of all people, for May. Okay, that’s very close. Is that going to happen? Let’s see. Certainly not for sure… If we don’t get out now, there is no reason why it will look different two years from now, five years from now, 10 years from now. We’ll still be killing Afghans and losing very few Americans, because it’s all in the air and some special forces going to unarmed villages and whatnot. So very few American casualties, air power, a lot of things. The American public can live with that for a long time. They have lived for 20 years with that. Could be another 20 years.

    Katie Halper: Can you talk about the role of the media in America’s aggressive foreign policy?

    Ellsberg: With the Gulf of Tonkin, the Times did not say, “Here’s what we said at the time.” The Times did not go back and say, “Here’s who lied to us. Here’s how we were lied to. Here’s how gullible we were. Here’s the pattern of deception.” No, that would blame themselves. They didn’t need that, so they didn’t do it…

    In short, I think nations and institutions, we talk about why don’t they learn, learning is not what they do, because learning involves seeing prior errors that you haven’t met. Errors are an occasion for blame, for losing jobs, for being criticized, and they don’t do that.

    Matt Taibbi: Well, sometimes they learn in a negative way though, don’t they? Do you ever think that the way they dealt with Snowden, and to a lesser extent Julian Assange and some other whistleblowers, was about making sure that there was never going to be a Daniel Ellsberg again who would live on and be a hero in the public consciousness?

    Ellsberg: I misspoke when I say they don’t do any learning… Definitely, they do learn.

    Katie Halper: They don’t become more moral, though.

    Ellsberg: It’s not as though they learn how to meet human values or improve human welfare in the world. That’s not what they’re into… But in terms of how can we get away with it better, they do learn….

    They’ve learned to wield the Espionage Act, to criminalize whistleblowing much more than before. You said they didn’t want any more Ellsbergs. Well, obviously, they did get Chelsea Manning, they did get Snowden. Chelsea was 39 years after the Pentagon Papers. The Pentagon Papers did have an effect, as you say, on people’s understanding of the war. It didn’t end the war, but it did affect people’s attitudes. And really, it kept us out of more Vietnams for a couple of decades…

    The NSA did not do surveillance on American citizens without a warrant for about 25 years or so after, so that was a change. But then 9/11 comes along, and it’s Constitution be damned. Since then, this is 20 years ago, we’ve had total surveillance of everybody, totally unconstitutionally.

    It’s created a situation where we’re not a police state, but we could be a police state almost from one day to the next, if they act on all the information they have now about people who give them any trouble or people who protest. They know where we are, they know our names, they know from our iPhones if we’re on our way to the grocery store or not. But they haven’t acted on that to put people in camps yet. They could do it.

    We could be East Germany in weeks, in a month. Huge concentration camps and so forth.

    Matt Taibbi: Why aren’t more journalists worried about the use of the Espionage Act in the Julian Assange case?

    Ellsberg: Because they have never been tried before. This is a first, so they thought they were immune… I’ve been saying for 40 years now, 50 years, I’ve been saying to journalists and judges, the wording of that law applies to you as well as your sources…

    It is now accepted that somebody can be a good whistleblower, and that’s Daniel Ellsberg, in contrast to Chelsea Manning and Ed Snowden. The appreciation I’ve been getting since 2010, I can date very simply to the need to denigrate Chelsea Manning… This contrast is used all the time. So I’m appreciated in order to say, “Ah, but there were bad whistleblowers like Snowden or Assange.” And a lot of people do that.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 23:40

  • Tinder Will Soon Allow Users To Run Background Checks On Would-Be Dates
    Tinder Will Soon Allow Users To Run Background Checks On Would-Be Dates

    Online dating is on the verge of becoming a whole lot safer. Tinder, along with its parent company Match Group, partnered with a non-profit background check platform, called Garbo, to help customers determine if their blind date is hiding a criminal record. 

    “Match Group will begin testing and building out capabilities for Garbo on Tinder in the coming months,” according to a news release. Once Garbo is integrated on Tinder, other Match Group brands (Match, OkCupid, Hinge, PlentyOfFish, OurTime, among others) will follow. 

    When it comes to Tinder and Hinge, and other online dating apps, very little is known about the other person before the blind date. Garbo transforms online dating experience to become a safer environment. 

    “For far too long, women and marginalized groups in all corners of the world have faced many barriers to resources and safety,” said Tracey Breeden, Head of Safety and Social Advocacy for Match Group.

    “We recognize corporations can play a key role in helping remove those barriers with technology and true collaboration rooted in action. In partnership with Match Group, Garbo’s thoughtful and groundbreaking consumer background check will enable and empower users with information, helping create equitable pathways to safer connections and online communities across tech.”

    Once Tinder fully integrates Garbo, users can check public records and reports of violence or abuse before the first date. 

    “Before Garbo, abusers were able to hide behind expensive, hard-to-find public records and reports of their violence; now that’s much harder,” Garbo CEO Kathryn Kosmides said. “Being able to reach historically underserved populations is fundamental to Garbo’s mission and the partnership with Match will help us connect with these communities.”

    The move by Match comes as Tinder murders have been reported over the years. Here are some recent news stories: 

    Rethinking safety appears to be Match’s biggest push this year across all dating platforms. It would not surprise us if COVID health passports were also an additional option for Tinder dates. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 23:20

  • Iran's Defense Ministry Warns Citizens To Prepare For Nuclear & Chemical Attacks
    Iran’s Defense Ministry Warns Citizens To Prepare For Nuclear & Chemical Attacks

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

    On Tuesday, Iran’s defense minister said the country must be prepared to face nuclear, chemical, and biological attacks.

    “We should be prepared to defend our nation against all threats and whatever the enemy may one day use as an offensive tool, including chemical, nuclear and biological weapons,” said Gen. Amir Hatami, according to Iran’s Fars News Agency.

    Hatami made his comments on the 33rd anniversary of a chemical weapons attack by Saddam Hussein on Iraqi Kurds in Halabja, Iraq. During the Iran-Iraq war that raged from 1980 to 1988, Hussein frequently used chemical weapons against Iran, sometimes with US support.

    Declassified CIA documents revealed that in 1988, the US shared intelligence with Hussein to show the location of Iranian troops, knowing he would use lethal gas against them.

    The documents revealed the US had firm evidence Hussein was using chemical weapons as early as 1983. 

    The US and other Western countries provided Hussein with materials to make chemical weapons at the time. A 1994 congressional inquiry found that US companies shipped anthrax and dozens of other biological agents that could be used to make chemical weapons to Iraq during the war. 

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    Besides Iran’s history of being targeted by chemical weapons, Iran is also constantly threatened by Israel, the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East.

    While Israel frequently takes covert action against Iran, Israeli officials have been hinting at a larger attack on Tehran’s civilian nuclear program if the US returns to the Iran nuclear deal.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 23:00

  • America's Small Businesses On Gov't Life Support As Debt Apocalypse Can Kicked
    America’s Small Businesses On Gov’t Life Support As Debt Apocalypse Can Kicked

    No matter if it’s Republicans under former President Trump or Democrats under President Biden, the one commonality between these two political parties is that they are in massive support of government relief programs and lender forbearance programs to keep small and medium-sized enterprises from defaulting on their debt as revenue collapsed during the virus pandemic. 

    Washington, DC-based think tank Urban Institute analyzed data from commercial data and analytics firm Dun & Bradstreet of one million businesses between September 2019 and January 2021 to examine trends before and after the federal government closed the economy to mitigate the virus spread. What they found was despite small businesses sustaining massive revenue declines, many of them remained in solid credit standings. 

    Among small firms nationwide, past-due payments or debts owed by them as a share of each firm’s total trade activity increased nationwide, from 17.7% in February 2020 to 18.3% in January 2021. The most significant jump in past-due payments was in San Francisco, where they increased from 13.5% in February 2020 to 17.8% in January 2021. New York City had delinquencies rise quicker than the national average, from 25.1% in February 2020 to 27.6% in January 2021.

    San Francisco

    New York 

    Many small businesses were transformed into zombie companies, kept alive by the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and other stimulus programs. These businesses have slashed costs and payrolls; landlords and creditors have allowed them flexibility in rent payments or servicing debts. 

    “It’s a good sign that small businesses are maintaining strong credit and increasing their cash on hand, but their ultimate standing will depend on future supports and the pace of the economic recovery,” said Urban Institute. At the moment, some ten million jobs are missing from the economy since the virus pandemic began. Small businesses are the lifeblood of the economy, accounting for more than 50% of all jobs. 

    The combined result of PPP support, cost reductions, and forbearances has favored some small businesses whose cash holdings are significantly higher. 

    “Shrinking payroll, reducing physical space, and other accommodations are painful for small businesses and may constrain their ability to grow,” said Urban Institute. “It’s also unclear what will happen when creditors cease to offer flexibility for businesses on repayment of their built-up amounts owed.”

    When government relief programs and forbearances expire (maybe not until later this year considering Biden’s new stimulus program) – there comes a time when small businesses are taken off life support and will face the consequences of servicing debt and paying rent in an economy that is entirely dependent on massive fiscal packages. 

    Despite the relatively strong credit metrics, small businesses are on government life support – any removal of the support will create a fiscal cliff. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 22:40

  • Would You Buy An Automobile Designed By A Woke Engineer?
    Would You Buy An Automobile Designed By A Woke Engineer?

    Authored by Robert Bridge via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the leftwing cancel cult now running amok through the unguarded halls of academia is that highly intelligent people, with absolutely no racial or political ax to grind, are being forced to defend themselves and their respective fields from the most outrageous accusations, time that would be much better spent on valuable research.

    While mathematicians over the millennia have successfully solved some of the most perplexing problems, like the Poincaré Conjecture and Fermat’s Last Theorom, they will probably have more difficulty arriving at a solution for appeasing the woke mob now banging on their door.

    Difficult as it may be to fathom, the radical progressive inquisition has a beef with the cloistered community of number crunchers, made up as it is, according to the woke crowd, of closet racists and white supremacists. Needless to say, this latest accusation has sent shockwaves through the academic community.

    This month, Sergiu Klainerman, professor of mathematics at Princeton University, explained to the journalist Bari Weiss how he has personally witnessed “the decline of universities and cultural institutions as they have embraced political ideology at the expense of rigorous scholarship.” Klainerman admitted that he had “naively thought” that the STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) would be not be touched by this “ideological takeover.” Much to his chagrin, he was mistaken.

    “I was wrong,” he admitted. “Attempts to ‘deconstruct’ mathematics, deny its objectivity, accuse it of racial bias, and infuse it with political ideology have become more and more common — perhaps, even, at your child’s elementary school.”

    The story gets better. As an émigré of the formerly communist regime of Romania, Klainerman makes an observation that should give any freedom-loving American tremendous pause. The former denizens of the totalitarian Soviet state, he explained, viewed the field of mathematics as “a great equalizer: those from socioeconomically disadvantaged families had a chance to compete on equal footing with those from privileged ones.”

    “Mathematics also granted me an escape from the intoxicating daily drum of party propaganda — a refuge from the crushing atmosphere of political and ideological conformity [italics added].”

    Today, Klainerman’s dramatic life has come full circle as he finds himself struggling against a different sort of oppression, that is, the cancel cult – what some have called ‘Cultural Marxism’ – that has descended on college campuses around the country like a brain fog. It’s not communist theory, however, which is promulgating the lie of racism inside of the mathematic disciplines, but rather one of the wealthiest capitalists of our time, Bill Gates.

    Klainerman takes issue with a shocking document financed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and endorsed by various State of California educational entities, entitled, ‘A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction, Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction.’ The very first paragraph gives away the entire scheming plot:

    “This tool provides teachers an opportunity to examine their actions, beliefs, and values around teaching mathematics. The framework for deconstructing racism in mathematics offers essential characteristics of antiracist math educators and critical approaches to dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by visibilizing the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture.”

    [This opening paragraph provides a citation to a 2001 paper entitled, ‘White Supremacy Culture,’ yet that document fails to mention either the study of mathematics, or the university setting where such implied racism is said to occur. In other words, “racism in mathematics” is a priori accepted as fact].

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    How do you know if your classroom is – wittingly or unwittingly – promoting a white supremacy culture? According to the document that happens when “[T]he focus is on getting the “right” answer,” apparently an anal retentive trait of the fastidious Caucasian tribe. The quotation marks around “right,” incidentally, appear in the original, suggesting that there really is no “right” answer in the field of mathematics.

    That sort of thinking was tossed around back in August when James Lindsay, of New Discourses, posted a memorable meme that quipped: “2+2=4: A perspective in white, Western mathematics that marginalizes other possible values.” This blew up the Internet when enraged wokesters, who have made it their life mission to rage against every sort of scientific, biological and mathematical fact, responded that sometimes 2+2 could equal 5. You know, just like a born male can sometimes suffer menstrual cramps. It is worth considering how these same people would respond at their local grocer if the cashier tried to charge them for five apples instead of four. But I digress.

    To take the observation a bit further, Klainerman was not really going out on a limb when he said that without the precision of mathematical certainty, “bridges would collapse, planes would fall from the sky, and bank transactions would be impossible.”

    Other clues that your math class is a hotbed of white supremacist ideology is when your teacher requires students to “show their work in only one way;” math is taught in a “linear fashion” and skills are taught sequentially; expectations are “not met.” The reader is not informed as to what those expectations are.

    The irony is that in this effort to root out “racism” in the classroom, the authors of this document are themselves guilty of the very same sin as they attempt to assign attributes and stereotypes to an entire race of people. It requires little imagination to guess what the response would be if such “racial profiling” were turned around and applied to other races of people. Meanwhile, the notion that mathematics could be rooted in racism is simply absurd. The beauty of mathematics is that there can only be one correct answer to every problem, and talented students – regardless of skin color – all have the freedom to pursue this discipline.

    Indeed, mathematics is the most straightforward of all disciplines, which means that the final result is not determined by any subjective feelings of the teacher. Although there may be isolated cases where a particular educator may give preferential treatment to some students at the expense of others, that cannot be a logical reason to forward the preposterous charge that the world of mathematics is brimming with white supremacists.

    In fact, the field of mathematics, which has been built on the work of the ancients, like the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Egyptians, is in reality the very least segregated, the least racist, of disciplines. It is open to anyone who is willing and able to excel at number crunching, which may make it an easy target to be tarred as an exclusive white man’s club.

    Academics must begin confronting this unfounded criticism head on, lest the radical progressives succeed in convincing the world through aggressive bully tactics that 2+2 really does equal 5, and that math teachers are imbued with innate racism. Otherwise, the very foundation of Western civilization, dependent as it is on mathematical precision, will simply collapse from within.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 22:20

  • SUV-Sized Battery Was Just Jettisoned From The ISS
    SUV-Sized Battery Was Just Jettisoned From The ISS

    With space junk becoming a significant problem that could wreak havoc on working satellites, the International Space Station (ISS) decided to dump an SUV-sized pallet of batteries into low Earth orbit.  

    The ISS discharged a 2.9-ton pallet of used batteries last Thursday, the most massive object it has ever ejected, NASA spokesperson Leah Cheshier told Gizmodo.

    “The External Pallet was the largest object—mass-wise—ever jettisoned from the International Space Station at 2.9 tons, more than twice the mass of the Early Ammonia Servicing System tank jettisoned by spacewalker Clay Anderson during the STS-118 mission in 2007,” Cheshier said. 

    The pallet is made of nickel-hydrogen batteries and will orbit the Earth for the next two to four years “before burning up harmlessly in the atmosphere,” according to NASA.

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    She said the object is “no threat” to working satellites and will be closely monitored by U.S. Space Command.

    However, Phil Plait, whose “Bad Astronomy” blog runs on Syfy Wire, tweeted: “This strikes me (haha, a pun given the circumstances) as dangerous. It seems big and dense so unlikely to burn up completely.” 

    The ejection of the 2.9-ton object comes as the European Space Agency (ESA) recently warned that millions of objects are orbiting Earth, and there’s bound to be a collision between space junk and working satellites. 

    If readers are curious about just how much space junk is orbiting above, ESA’s animation shows an incredible view of all the debris:  

    The volume of both function and non-function objects in orbit has been steadily increasing since the start of the space age in 1957. Now there’s so much junk orbiting around the planet that collision risks are rising. 

    To solve this problem, ESA recently awarded the Swiss startup company Clearpace, a $117 million contract to remove space debris from orbit.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 22:00

  • Bitcoin Bros Rediscovering Our Monetary Past
    Bitcoin Bros Rediscovering Our Monetary Past

    Authored by Joakim Book via The American Institute for Economic Research,

    All eyes on bitcoin, it seems, as the price hits new all-time-highs, its proponents celebrate, and the economists who have long pronounced it dead and useless scratch their head in confusion (any “bubble” pronouncements as of late?)

    “The discomforting reality for the early idealists,” wrote Izabella Kaminska, a long-time critic of cryptocurrencies, before the price explosion in recent months, “is that 12 years on, the bitcoin ecosystem has more in common with the incumbent one it was hoping to displace than that original utopian vision.” 

    She’s more right than she knows. In one sense, we should probably celebrate this as it means that bitcoin is approaching the monetary commodity dream it always harbored: it is running into some eternal troubles common to all monetary systems. Even better, we should take the opportunity to teach some monetary history, as those in the crypto world have never been particularly well-versed in our monetary past. The audience they cater to is even less informed and so the “bitcoin heroes” – Saifedean AmmousRobert Breedlove etc – are celebrated for their wisdom, no matter how rudimentary or inaccurate. 

    It’s easy to discard an entire field of centuries-long academic inquiries, especially if you’ve never been exposed to it, or only investigated a caricature. Some humility is recommended since, as Denis Patrick O’Brien writes in his collection of scholarly articles The Development of Monetary Economics, “Monetary economics has attracted some of the very best people to have written about economic problems.” 

    In contrast to Bitcoin’s money supply mechanism, set in stone since its origin, many of bitcoin’s rivals – “alt-coins” or “sh**coins” – want to set their own monetary policy, laid down arcane rules in fancy white papers that only the insiders have the discretion to change. This dispute over rules and discretion about who runs the printing press is about three centuries old if not more, and was thoroughly investigated by the likes of Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Tooke, Horsley Palmer, Walter Bagehot, John Clapham and others. 

    Some of the seemingly novel features of many cryptocurrency innovations are not so novel, and quickly run into precisely the problems that plagued past economies; these were promptly examined and argued over by monetary economists long since dead and forgotten

    When Bitcoin was small and insignificant, the dollar-cost of sending value across the network was minuscule. For the first few years of the cryptocurrency’s existence, this was among the best reasons to use it: you could send any amount, to anyone in the world, much cheaper and much faster than the legacy banking system of the 2000s. That was roughly correct. Legacy systems were slow and expensive, and doing international banking only 15-20 years ago caused headaches to plenty more people than money launderers.

    The Internet, effective competition, and the rise of fintechs changed all that – but the most vocal bitcoiners remained in the past that the legacy system had long left behind, thinking that their magnificent invention still trumped the system against which bitcoin was created. For most uses it doesn’t: unless you’re living under authoritarian regimes or are trying to do business in the legal grey (two very important, yet comparatively small, market segments), using bitcoin for its initial transactional purposes isn’t that great. 

    How our monetary past informs Bitcoin’s current troubles

    Exhibit A: Second Layers. After 2017 – the bull-run, the congestion, the forks and battle over block sizes – the winning faction found an enticing solution to their crowded-mempool problems: second layers like the “Lightning network” or similar services like Liquid (with plenty of others in the works). Instead of settling on Bitcoin’s main blockchain, most minor transactions would take place on a second layer that only occasionally settled on the main network. That way, every on-chain transaction could include many more underlying transactions, netted against each other. Second layers make perfect sense against bitcoin’s inherent supply-schedule problem

    Except that for anyone who looked, this was just old commercial banking systems reinvented, trust sneaking in through the back door. A commercial banking system (with or without a central bank) that freely issues notes and deposits redeemable in some outside currency was also a second layer on top of the main currency layer of the realm (which in our monetary past was often gold or silver). The second-layer solutions sketched right now are supposedly full-reserve and don’t have maturity mismatch, but so started early banking before they developed into the (safe!) fractional reserve banks that bitcoiners detest so much. 

    Just like you must put trust in your commercial bank not to risk your deposits or excessively inflate the notes they issued, with bitcoin you must place faith in second-layer networks you join not to run off with your bitcoin or revert your transactions. Not your keys, not your… em, transactions.

    Why would anybody in the past take paper money, the value of which could be inflated away and had counterparty risk on the bank that issued it, over “hard currency” like gold? Easy, noted Ray Perman in his superb financial history of Edinburgh: “The first paper notes were seen as holding their value better than coin because they could not be debased and clipping them did not affect their worth.” There’s no risk-free baseline; you pick your poison. And sometimes, to the fury of bitcoin maximalists, that poison isn’t the technical hurdles of bitcoin but the sweet insecurity of political governments and central banks and our well-established systems of international commercial banking. 

    Exhibit BSpeed and Cost of Payment. Making a high-priority transfer on the Bitcoin network, i.e. having a great chance for your transaction to be included in the next few blocks, requires you to pay something like 30 cents during low-traffic times, and closer to $20 or $30 in high-traffic times. Many bitcoin wallets allow you to send transactions with “Low Priority” settings meaning that they will clear on the network perhaps a day or two later. This usually inches the price closer to that 30 cents than the 30 dollars I mentioned. 

    But hang on, wasn’t the beauty of Bitcoin that transactions were cheap and fast compared to the banking system it supplants? It seems this brilliant piece of tech ran into precisely the trade-off between speed, cost, and finality with which our legacy systems have struggled for centuries. Surprise, surprise, the revolutionary bitcoin network went full circle. You can have efficient and thus cheap payments, fast payments, or secure payments – but not all three. When Satoshi Nakamoto programmed finality into the bitcoin protocol, users could not compromise on that dimension; instead, they were left with choosing between fast or cheap payments. Just like the regular banking system. 

    Exhibit C: Black Boxes Moving Around. Another version of this is bitcoin on side-chains, like the tBTC project or Wrapped BTC, where trusted custodians hold your bitcoins in exchange for a token claim to that bitcoin, a token that itself lives on a different cryptocurrency chain (say Ethereum). Ideally, users could then move bitcoin around at much lower cost than on the Bitcoin main chain; instead of moving actual bitcoin, the user moves a digital box that contains said bitcoin. 

    In many places of our financial past, we used the shiny metal gold as base money. Moving it, especially in large shipments, was clunky and expensive. In the high seas, ships carrying it could founder and sink; in the woods of Europe lurked thieves. So far, that gold-bitcoin analogy should be clear and obvious. 

    Financial systems in Britain or the Dutch republic solved this expensive transportation problem by using paper claims to deposited gold. For centuries of international trade Bills of Exchange moved across the world, and only rarely did the underlying base money move. These “Wrapped BTCs” of the past let the expensive underlying asset lay still while paper claims to it moved instead. The financial system in different locations of international trade used bills of exchange – papers of credit – to net out transactions between them, supporting the real economy with a sophisticated and efficient banking system running in the background. In past times that made gold easier to use as money; in crypto times that makes bitcoin, with its highly variable transaction fees, easier to move around. 

    For all the revolutionary creed that surrounds the emerging monetary commodity that is bitcoin, it seems that its future more and more resembles the past it tried to escape. Happy times for us monetary nerds.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 21:40

  • Netflix Purges Password Moochers In Bid To Boost Paying Subscribers
    Netflix Purges Password Moochers In Bid To Boost Paying Subscribers

    After years of burning cash with heedless abandon, and with an ever-growing field of new low-priced competitors nipping at its heels, Netflix is understandably facing pressure to squeeze more profits out of its users. And user growth is still a critical metric for Wall Street.

    Readers may remember Netflix shares’ reaction to the company’s Q4 global paying subs number released back in January with the rest of the streaming giant’s Q4 earnings, when the company projected that it might become free cash flow positive for the year 2021.

    Well, as it turns out, that promise was accompanied by a gamble that could risk Netflix finally losing its dominant position in the streaming race, especially as new platforms are seemingly launched every few months, while more established competitors like HBO Max and Disney+ add millions of subscribers a month. Netflix is testing a new feature to try and force some of its non-paying users off the platform, according to Bloomberg.

    Sharing of Netflix passwords and account access has been rampant since the early days, back when a monthly subscription was roughly half the price it is now.

    And as Netflix shares lag the broader Nasdaq index (during a period that has seen high-flying tech shares underperform vs. “real economy” stocks like the members of the DJIA), the company is apparently betting that finally confronting its deadbeat users might convert more of them into subscribers (notably, it’s timing this initiative with the latest round of stimulus checks and renewed unemployment benefits).

    The big fear, according to Benchmark Co’s Matthew Harrigan, is that the crackdown could hurt NFLX’s pricing power. Last week, Needham called user churn the top risk for Netflix.

    But Wired has a different take: NFLX’s purge could have a silver lining, since it could help push users toward 2-factor authentication, which makes their accounts more secure.

    The limited test that Netflix introduced this week is basically a form of two-factor authentication, the kind you hopefully already have on most of your online accounts. Some users have begun to see the following prompt when settling in for a binge: “If you don’t live with the owner of this account, you need your own account to keep watching.”

    Below that, there’s an option to get a code emailed or texted to the account owner, which you can enter to continue watching.

    A source familiar with Netflix’s trial says that the company is still in the very early stages, and sees the effort as a way both to verify who’s using what accounts and to minimize the security issues inherent in unauthorized sharing.

    Netflix’s terms of service specify that accounts must not be shared with people living outside the user’s household. But one Wired editor reportedly found 90 authorized devices linked to the Hulu account she herself was mooching off of.

    Estimates from Bloomberg and others seem to put the percentage of Netflix users who are mooches at roughly 30%. While excising the mooches will help improve the quality of auto-generated recommendation lists for its paying users, Netflix could see a drop in hours consumed exacerbated by the fact that customers around the world are about to finally get up off the couch.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 21:20

  • The Gradual Return Of Good Sense
    The Gradual Return Of Good Sense

    Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic Research,

    President Biden made a statement last week that Americans might be able to gather in small groups by July 4, to celebrate Independence Day. One wonders who is protecting him from the reality: most of the country is almost entirely back to normal.

    Outside of California and some Northeast states, the lockdowns have largely ended, with ever more states repealing restrictions and mandates. Reimposing them for any reason seems almost unthinkable at this point. Anthony Fauci’s constant prattle about the dangers of opening up are falling on deaf ears. 

    The few states that are still locked down are rapidly losing residents and businesses. States that are entirely open are gaining them. As for the travel against which the CDC warns, the nation’s airports and highways are back to pre-lockdown levels of normal. The slogan “land of the free” is starting to mean something again. 

    Even the New York Times, which has led the lockdown effort for longer than a year, is starting to back peddle, finally. An article called “I Would Much Rather Be in Florida” points out:

    [M]uch of the state has a boomtown feel, a sense of making up for months of lost time.

    Realtors cold-knock on doors looking to recruit sellers to the sizzling housing market, in part because New Yorkers and Californians keep moving in. The unemployment rate is 5.1 percent, compared to 9.3 percent in California, 8.7 percent in New York and 6.9 percent in Texas. That debate about opening schools? It came and went months ago. Children have been in classrooms since the fall….

    Florida’s death rate is no worse than the national average, and better than that of some other states that imposed more restrictions, despite its large numbers of retirees, young partyers and tourists. Caseloads and hospitalizations across most of the state are down….

    Try to buy a home and the experience is frustrating for a different reason: an open house will have 30 cars parked outside. Though Florida’s population growth has slowed during the pandemic, documentary stamps, an excise tax on real estate sales, were 15 percent higher in January than they were a year ago. Filing fees for new corporations were 14 percent higher.

    Also notable is that the heavily curated comment section of the article is packed with people saying that we never should have locked down – a point of view practically banned for the better part of a year. 

    Meanwhile, the “science” behind accepted postulates such as the 6-feet-of-distance rule are unraveling by the day.study from Massachusetts found essentially no differences in rates of infection in students whether they are standing 6 feet or 3 feet apart. This prompted even Fauci to walk back his long-standing demand that students be 6 feet apart – just the latest of many flip flops. The study didn’t examine what would happen if everyone just behaved normally, as they do in Florida. In fact, one of the missing pieces of research for a whole year would have compared a normal-behaving maskless community with one that complied with all the extreme lockdown strictures. The closest we have to this are all the very many studies showing no correlation at all between lockdowns and disease control. 

    Remember that the whole notion of managing people’s lives to control a virus stemmed from untested models. That people should be compelled to stand apart is related to what Edward Stringham calls “Sim City Thinking” – the belief that society can be operated the way people play with computer games. It might have been wiser to have looked more critically at those models before adopting them the whole world over in the midst of a disease panic. 

    It’s a huge relief, to be sure, but it comes far too late, not only in the US but all around the world. The terrible damage of the lockdowns has become palpably obvious. UNICEF reports:

    • As of March 2021, 13 percent of 71 million COVID-19 infections in 107 countries (62 per cent of the total global infections) with data by age are among children and adolescents under 20 years of age.

    • In developing countries, child poverty is expected to increase by around 15 per cent. An additional 140 million children in these countries are also already projected to be in households living below the poverty line.

    • Schools for more than 168 million schoolchildren globally have been closed for almost a year. Two-thirds of countries with full or partial closures are in Latin America and the Caribbean.

    • At least 1 in 3 schoolchildren has been unable to access remote learning while their schools were closed.

    • Around 10 million additional child marriages may occur before the end of the decade, threatening years of progress in reducing the practice.

    • At least 1 in 7 children and young people has lived under stay-at-home policies for most of the last year, leading to feelings of anxiety, depression and isolation.

    • As of November 2020, an additional 6 to 7 million children under age 5 may have suffered from wasting or acute malnutrition in 2020, resulting in almost 54 million wasted children, a 14 per cent rise that could translate into more than 10,000 additional child deaths per month – mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. With a 40 per cent decline in nutrition services for children and women, many other nutrition outcomes can worsen.

    • As of November 2020, more than 94 million people were at risk of missing vaccines due to paused measles campaigns in 26 countries.

    The toll on civil liberties at home and around the world is extremely grim, and especially disturbing when you consider that all of this was preventable. As Florida governor Ron DeSantis says now with some frequency, lockdowns do not work and they cause immense harm. More opinion pages are admitting, as the Las Vegas Review Journal has said: “Virus lockdowns don’t appear to have worked as advertised.”

    Don’t hold your breath waiting for the New York Times editorial page to admit that. Perhaps someday but it won’t come soon.

    The lockdowners committed themselves to something previously unthinkable. To admit error at this point is too intellectually and psychologically upsetting. Regardless, we can be confident that as the years roll on, there will be a growing consensus that, as Jay Bhattacharya has said, lockdowns are the worst policy error of our lifetimes and many generations. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 21:00

  • "The FOMC Packed A Huge Surprise" – Fed Now Comfortable With "Slightly" Negative Rates
    “The FOMC Packed A Huge Surprise” – Fed Now Comfortable With “Slightly” Negative Rates

    While markets were focused on headline hot takes from today’s FOMC statement, those reading between the lines and focusing on the market plumbing – such as Curvature Securities’ Scott Skyrm – found “a huge surprise”: an increase in the RRP counterparty limit from $30 billion to $80 billion per counterparty.

    While at first look, it seems quite benign, Skyrm notes that “this implies the Fed is very comfortable with zero percent rates and maybe even negative rates.”

    Let’s rewind a little:

    This week, Repo GC averaged at .01% and few RRP counterparties showed up at the RRP window. Remember, RRP counterparties invest cash at the Fed in exchange for Treasury securities at a rate of 0.0%. If the cash investors can’t get collateral from the Repo market, they go to the Fed. Surprisingly, there was no RRP activity on Monday and today, and only $702 million on Tuesday. Rates are close to zero and the market isn’t even using the RRP window.

    Here’s the implication. As Skyrm explains, “if the Fed wanted overnight rates higher, they would have raised the IOER and/or RRP. Instead, they raised the RRP counterparty limit meaning they are very comfortable with rates here at zero, but don’t want them to drop into the negatives“… although they now seem to be ok with rates dipping occasionally into the red as they have done recently in GC repo…

    … and 1 month bills.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 20:52

  • Detroit's Westin Book Cadillac Hotel Heading For Foreclosure
    Detroit’s Westin Book Cadillac Hotel Heading For Foreclosure

    Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse for Detroit, the city’s iconic Westin Book Cadillac hotel looks like it’s heading for foreclosure.

    The 33 story hotel had undergone a $180 million renovation in 2008, but has suffered mightily as a result of the pandemic. The hotel’s owner owes $77 million in commercial mortgage backed securities debt which has been delinquent since last May, Deadline Detroit writes

    Owner John Ferchill said he hasn’t been able to come to an agreement with his lender: “We are not unique. We have tried everything to work with a lender who won’t work with us, which quite frankly is a testament to how good of a property we created. They would rather take it for themselves than work it out with the borrower. We have not received one concession.”

    Ferchill said “the state’s ‘draconian COVID rules'” also contributed to the decline in revenue. 

    The loan’s special servicer, CWC Capital Asset Management LLC, didn’t comment. 

    Justin Winslow, president of the Michigan Restaurant and Lodging Association, told Yahoo News: “This is a flagship hotel in the city of Detroit, and I think the frustrating reality is we’re only a couple months away it feels like at this point from demand coming back in very large numbers. To get this close to what feels like a finish line and to not be able to see it through is unfortunately, and to me, an avoidable outcome for the Book Cadillac.”

    Detroit was experiencing a boom in downtown hotels prior to the pandemic. Names like the Shinola Hotel on Woodward, the Element Detroit in the old Metropolitan Building on John R and the Detroit Foundation Hotel on Larned St. were all experiencing success prior to Covid provisions kicking in. 

    The Westin Book Cadillac was valued at $136 million in late 2019, but as of December 2021 is being valued at $74.6 million, slightly below the loan balance owed on the property. 

    Winslow blames the “inflexible nature” of commercial mortgage-backed securities loans: “This was a hotel that was very profitable many years in a row and can be again once the general public feels the immediate threat is gone. I think that with (the) vaccine that is a short-term horizon before that willingness comes.”

    Meanwhile, despite petitioning local government to help, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer vetoed recent legislation that Winslow said would have helped the industry in Michigan. 

    Winslow concluded: “That is not something I put exclusively or only at the governor’s feet because I think this is a process that requires the legislature to engage in honest negotiation to get something to the finish line that can actual help the industry. But vetoing legislation that would have had $300 million in property tax relief would have been direct relief to hotels and restaurants.”

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 20:40

  • "The Endpoint Of Critical Race Theory": Columbia University Faces Backlash For Segregated Graduations
    “The Endpoint Of Critical Race Theory”: Columbia University Faces Backlash For Segregated Graduations

    Authored by Benjamin Zeisloft via Campus Reform,

    Columbia University in New York City will host virtual graduation ceremonies segregated by race, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status, in addition to its main commencement ceremonies for all students.

    In order to “provide a more intimate setting for students who self-identify in a variety of ways,” the Ivy League school said these programs are a way to “complement” the main ceremonies.

    The additional virtual ceremonies include the “Native Graduation Celebration,” “Lavender Graduation Celebration” for LGBTQ students, “Asian Graduation Celebration,” “First-generation and Low-Income student Graduation Celebration,” “Latinx Graduation Celebration,” and “Black Graduation Celebration.”

    The university faced swift backlash for promoting segregated graduation programming.

    “Congratulations are in order for liberals and @Columbia University for successfully bringing segregation back by packaging it as ‘diversity inclusion,’” wrote conservative commentator Candace Owens.

    “Just one question: which ceremony do bi-racial children attend?”

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    “The endpoint of critical race theory: segregation,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) reacted.

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    As previously reported by Campus Reform, Cotton sent a letter to then-Attorney General Bill Barr in 2020 asking that the Department of Justice investigate the rising trend of segregation on the nation’s college campuses.

    Columbia issued a statement in response to the backlash.

    “Reports today and previous tweets misrepresent our multicultural graduation celebrations, which exist in addition to, not instead of, University-wide commencement and individual school Class Days,” wrote the school on Twitter.

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    “These events are important, intimate and welcoming spaces for students aligned with these groups to come together to celebrate their achievements if they wish,” said the university. “They are organized in tandem with students and student groups. In most instances, these celebrations evolved from ceremonies originally created by students and alumni.”

    “They are open to every student. They are voluntary. And they have become a highly anticipated and valuable part of the Columbia graduation experience,” added the university.

    Campus Reform reached out to Columbia University on Tuesday for additional comment. A university spokesperson provided the same statement as was issued on Twitter.  

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 20:20

  • Washington, Beijing Reportedly Far Apart On Key Issues Ahead Of Alaska Summit
    Washington, Beijing Reportedly Far Apart On Key Issues Ahead Of Alaska Summit

    In the span of just a few days, a high-level summit between Washington and Beijing in far-flung Anchorage, Alaska is about to kick off Thursday and continue through Friday. And as the world waits to see whether the fate of Taiwan will factor into the discussions, the Wall Street Journal has returned with some more details about Beijing’s agenda.

    Per the report, the two lead Chinese delegates (Yang Jiechi, a member of the Communist Party ruling body, and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, China’s top-ranking diplomat) plan to urge Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan to drop sanctions and restrictions on Chinese entities and individuals put in place by the Trump administration. Ransquawk described the meeting as “the first significant engagement” between the world’s two largest economies, and arguably, the world’s only two contemporary superpowers since President Trump left office. Depending on the outcome, the meeting could set the tone for bilateral relations for years to come.

    So far, Biden and his team have tried to maintain a tough-on-China stance, pledging to leave Trump’s tariffs and other punitive measures, like keeping Huawei on the Entities List, in place.

    US officials reportedly told WSJ that hot-potato topics like Beijing’s move to crush democratic freedoms in Hong Kong, and its aggressive policing of the South China Seat will factor in to the discussion. However, every time the US has expressed concerns about China’s increasingly aggressive military posture toward Taiwan, Beijing has replied by sharply insisting that Washington not meddle in China’s domestic affairs.

    Blinken used a trip to Japan and South Korea this past week to blast Beijing’s aggressive stance toward Taiwan. Politico mused in a headline that the two sides appeared headed for a “frosty” summit.

    Beijing has gone so far as to obliquely threaten the US with military retaliation if it continues to back Taiwan’s domestic pro-independence politics.

    WSJ noted that China is coming to the meeting with a different agenda that bears little overlap with the Biden Administration’s preferred talking points. Though the Chinese officials are reportedly planning to propose that high-level meetings between the two governments be re-established.

    Chinese officials reportedly started laying the groundwork for the summit late last year. Chinese sources reportedly told WSJ that “the US side proposed to hold this high-level strategic dialogue, which we think is meaningful…and…”we hope that the two sides can have a candid dialogue on issues of mutual concern.”

    Beijing is expected to propose a virtual climate summit set for April 22 to schedule a meeting between President Biden and President Xi. The two leaders, who have known each other for years, have spoken only once by phone since Biden took office.

    In summary, few expect the two sides to accomplish much more than an initial sizing up of the competition. Biden is preparing to convene a “quad” summit with several of China’s other recent adversaries like Japan and Australia. With all this in mind, Ransquawk speculated the focus will be on the tone of the meeting and how diverged /converged each other’s views are, as the focus shifts toward what might be accomplished during future rounds of talks.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 20:00

  • American Airlines "Looking Into It" After John Kerry Busted Flying Without Mask
    American Airlines “Looking Into It” After John Kerry Busted Flying Without Mask

    As ‘elites’ such as Gavin Newsom, Anthony Fauci and President Biden continue to make a mockery of their own pandemic guidelines, Americans are getting arrested at banks, tossed from restaurants and ejected from Costco for not wearing masks. Most recently, ‘Climate Envoy’ and former Secretary of State John Kerry was busted maskless on an American Airlines flight in violation of airline policy and a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) mandate requiring them on flights.

    First reported by the Tennessee Star, Kerry can be seen reading a book in first class while letting his mask hang down from his ear.

    In a statement to Fox News, the passenger that took the photo – who wished to remain anonymous –  said that the president’s climate convoy was wearing his mask at the boarding gate, only to ditch it after getting on the plane before other passengers.

    “I salute our Very Special Presidential Envoy for Climate for not flying private, but instead flying first class commercial with the rest of us common folk,” said the passenger, adding “And while he can’t bring himself to follow his own party’s mask restrictions, we should cut him some slack.”

    “Being an elite hypocrite is hard work!” the passenger then quipped.

    When asked to clarify their mask policy, American Airlines tweeted that “Masks are required on board our aircraft, and we are looking into this.”

    In January, the CDC issued a mandate which kicked in last month requiring individuals to “wear masks that cover both the mouth and nose” while taking public transportation or at a “transportation hub.”

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    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 19:40

  • Russia Recalls Its Ambassador After Biden Vows Putin Will "Pay A Price" For Meddling
    Russia Recalls Its Ambassador After Biden Vows Putin Will “Pay A Price” For Meddling

    Just a day after the public release of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s report alleging that Vladimir Putin ordered Russian agencies to conduct ‘influence operations’ during the 2020 election in order to ‘boost’ Trump at the expense of Joe Biden, an angry Kremlin has summoned its ambassador to the US back to Moscow for “consultations”.

    “The Russian ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Antonov, has been invited to come to Moscow for consultations conducted with the aim of analyzing what should be done and where to go in the context of ties with the United States,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement Wednesday.

    Ambassador Anatoly Antonov, via Sputnik

    Of note is that the statement emphasized Moscow hoped to prevent an “irreversible deterioration” in relations – something that appears to be increasingly difficult given President Biden’s interview also published Wednesday morning wherein the president vowed Russia will “pay a price” for “meddling” in US elections. Biden further agreed with ABC interview host George Stephanopoulos that Putin is a “killer”.

    Here’s the most controversial part of the interview which aired early Wednesday:

    Asked whether he believes Mr Putin is a “killer” in a pre-taped interview that aired on Wednesday, the president responded: “I do.”

    “The price he’s going to pay, you’ll see shortly,” he said.

    Mr Biden recalled meeting Mr Putin, during which he reportedly told him that he “doesn’t have a soul”: “I wasn’t being a wise guy.”

    “He looked back at me and said, ‘We understand each other’,” Mr Biden said.

    CNN is also reporting sanctions are likely coming as soon as next week, which will specifically target “people close to Russia President Vladimir Putin.”

    Biden during this latest bombshell interview had claimed he know’s Putin “relatively well”.

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    Biden recounted to Stephanopoulos that during a “long talk” with the Russian leader, he informed his Russian counterpart, “I know you and you know me. If I establish this occurred, then be prepared” — speaking of the election meddling allegations and the potential for sanctions.

    As for how Russia might reciprocate, it has very limited options – given especially the Kremlin no doubt senses that the Democratic administration is in large part playing to its base – the same which hyped and bought into the now long deflated ‘Russiagate’ narrative which persisted through the Trump years. This means Washington seems ready and willing with finger on the sanctions trigger to escalate things in a tit-for-tat fashion. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 19:20

  • Markets Relieved By Fed's Dovish Message… But For How Long?
    Markets Relieved By Fed’s Dovish Message… But For How Long?

    Authored by Steve Englander via Standard Chartered,

    The FOMC made few changes in the statement, but increased the ceiling for per counter-party overnight reverse repos from USD 30bn to USD 80bn.

    The Fed’s economic projections did not include an increase in the fed funds target rate through 2023, although 7 of 18 participants did project a fed funds increase.    

    Dovish message a relief to asset markets, but for how long?

    Investors were very focused on this FOMC meeting to see how projections and the policy stance would be affected by the March (and to some degree the December) fiscal stimulus. We had expected the Fed projections to show two 25bps hikes in 2023; we reckoned markets were anticipating one or somewhat less than one 2023 hike and the FOMC delivered none. This was a dovish surprise – the AUD, NZD, MXN, ZAR, NOK and BRL rallied more than 1% in the first hour after the announcement. Most major currencies appreciated within a range of 0.5% to 1.0%; 10Y UST yields, which had jumped 6bps in the run-up to the meeting, came back to their opening level of c.1.62%. Inflation breakevens moved somewhat higher, while real yields fell. The combined real and breakeven moves were supportive particularly for EM FX, but also G10 FX.

    Fed Chair Powell repeated that there was no discomfort with the current level of yields.

    Powell also made an effort to downplay the projections embedded in the dots, while emphasizing the importance of achieving (rather than forecasting) their inflation and unemployment targets under the Average Inflation Targeting framework.

    For now, investors are absorbing a message that the Fed intends to be dovish until data indicates otherwise. This might change if we get a run of strong data in the coming weeks as the US economy reopens and fiscal stimulus hits.

    In the short term, the fears that the market (as well as we) had of a Fed acknowledgment of a more optimistic landscape have dissipated. But we think these could be renewed if the pace of recovery suggests that full employment may be reached faster than shown in the dots.

    We expect US yields to keep grinding higher, but we also think that any USD-positive effect will be temporary, with the yield increases not enough to offset long-term USD negatives from a wider current account deficit and increased debt.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 19:00

  • Watch: California Neighborhood Leveled In Powerful Commercial-Grade Fireworks Explosion
    Watch: California Neighborhood Leveled In Powerful Commercial-Grade Fireworks Explosion

    “They are commercial grade,” Ontario Fire Department Chief Ray Gayk said in a news conference after a massive blast rocked a suburb of San Bernadino, California on Tuesday. He described further they were “like you would normally see in the fireworks show,” according to the the Los Angeles Times.

    Two people died when what appears to have been a private stockpile of commercial-grade fireworks ignited inside a suburban residence, erupting into a fireball and huge plume of smoke which prompted an immediate evacuation of the whole area, further causing several structures to catch fire. 

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    According to local KABC-TV, “Officials later put crime scene tape around the house and covered two bodies at the scene, confirming there were two fatalities in addition to some injuries.”

    And further, police say they are investigating the matter as a potential felony due to the large ‘illegal’ fireworks cache that possibly included other explosives.

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    “Residents across a vast area reported hearing the blast and feeling the ground shake shortly before 1 p.m.,” LA Times noted further. 

    Local reports additionally cited area residents and neighbors who said the house which allegedly contained the fireworks stockpile had been source of many prior complaints related to explosive detonations and frequent fireworks-related noise. 

    “Someone’s in trouble…” one eyewitness exclaimed.

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    Likely an investigation will also focus on whether local authorities ignored or failed to respond to the prior complaints of neighbors. Area residents said police were somewhat routinely called about blasts and noise at the property, but that the homeowners were “never caught in the act”.

    Surreal footage of the initial blast from multiple angles showed a small mushroom cloud plume of smoke extending far into the sky over the southern California residential area. 

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    “The boom pushed me back, and the window shattered,” one nearby eyewitness and area resident was cited as saying. “I got hit with the after-blast when I opened the door.”

    “Fireworks always go off over here. It shook the whole apartment from left to right,” she added.

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    Police and firefighters later said they had to cordon off a larger area than expected, preventing people from returning to their homes in the neighborhood, due to the vastness of the debris field.

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    Fires had continued to smolder into the evening, with reports of smaller, random follow-up blasts involving fireworks still going off. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 18:40

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Today’s News 17th March 2021

  • Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank On The Hook For 500M Euros In Greensill Collapse
    Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank On The Hook For 500M Euros In Greensill Collapse

    Just months after Germany’s financial regulator was exposed for being asleep at the wheel during the Wirecard scandal, both Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank are reportedly about to be on the hook for millions of euros of losses tied to Europe’s latest financial disaster, the collapse of Greensill Capital, and its Bremen, Germany-based banking arm, Greensill Bank.

    Germany’s regulator, BaFin, which was slammed for dropping the ball on Wirecard (at one point, the regulator accused a reporter for the FT of conspiring with short-sellers to discredit Wirecard; in the end, the paper was vindicated), warned Tuesday that a handful of German banks that backed Greensill will examine depositors claims and pay out anything that might be owed under a national deposit-insurance scheme. A German court in Bremen opened insolvency proceedings into Greensill earlier on Tuesday at the agency’s request.

    The Bremen Local Court appointed Michael Frege as the insolvency administrator. Frege, an attorney at law firm CMS, is one of Germany’s best known administrators, having gained notoriety from handling the insolvency of a Lehman Brothers unit and the dissolution of Maple Bank in 2016. 

    While dozens of German municipalities are at risk at losing some or all of the money they have deposited with Greensill, DB and Commerzbank will be left holding the bag because they’re two of the biggest members of a voluntary deposit-insurance scheme run collectively by Germany’s commercial banks.

    Although it’s too early to say how much they might owe, a payout from the fund would force the surviving members of the scheme to cough up more cash.

    One German media outlet, Manager Magazin, reported that Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank will each have to contribute €200MM to €300MM to cover deposits at the collapsed bank, sums that encapsulate their share of the damages from the deposit insurance scheme. Neither bank was willing to comment about their prospective liabilities.

    Bremen-based Greensill Bank had about €3 billion of insured deposits and an additional €500MM euros which aren’t covered, the latter include funds placed in the bank by German municipalities, which, as we have reported, expect to be wiped out.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 02:45

  • War Erupts Inside NATO's Atlantic Council Over "Pro-Russia" Article
    War Erupts Inside NATO’s Atlantic Council Over “Pro-Russia” Article

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

    An article written by two Atlantic Council employees that argues Washington should consider a more realistic approach to Russia caused quite the stir within the think tank. The article, written by Emma Ashford and Mathew Burrows, says the US should “avoid a human-rights-first approach to Russia.” The authors suggest that the Biden administration should instead “seek to build a less aspirational policy toward Russia, minimize the use of sanctions, and look for incentives that might induce Moscow to take steps in line with US interests.”

    Ashford and Burrows make an argument grounded in reality. The US does not have the power to control what happens inside Russia through sanctions and other unilateral means. The authors are not at all sympathetic to Russian President Vladimir Putin and don’t even suggest lifting sanctions that are currently in place. But at the hyper-interventionist Atlantic Council, the idea of taking a less hostile approach to Russia is out of the question to many of its employees.

    Kremlin/Reuters image

    Twenty-two Atlantic Council fellows signed a statement denouncing the article. “Their article is premised on a false assumption that human rights and national interests are wholly separate,” the statement reads. The statement ignores the fact that Washington cooperates with many countries with questionable human rights records, including some of the Atlantic Council’s top donors.

    In the 2019 fiscal year, the embassy of the United Arab Emirates contributed over $1 million to the Atlantic Council. The UAE’s state oil company also chipped in over $250,000 for the think tank. Abu Dhabi is not the only Gulf monarchy that funds the Atlantic Council, the embassy of Bahrain donated somewhere between $100,000 and $249,000.

    While the Atlantic Council’s Gulf funding is rarely questioned, the article from Ashford and Burrows caused some of its employees to complain about recent donations from Charles Koch, who funds the libertarian Cato Institute that advocates for a less interventionist foreign policy.

    The Atlantic Council received a $4.5 million donation over five years from Koch that set up the New American Engagement Initiative (NAEI) and brought over some experts from the Cato Institute, including Ashford. According to its website, the NAEI aims to question the “prevailing assumptions governing US foreign policy, in particular with respect to the efficacy of military intervention and the lost potential of diplomacy.”

    Atlantic Council fellows that signed the statement denouncing Ashford and Burrow’s article made it clear that to them, questioning US aggression is akin to spreading Russian propaganda. “The Koch industry operates as a Trojan horse operation trying to destroy good institutions and they have pretty much the same views as the Russians,” one person that signed the letter told Politico.

    “The general view at the Atlantic Council is to send them back to the Cato Institute where they came from,” another person that signed the statement said. While they all had harsh words for Ashford and Burrow’s article, the people that spoke with Politico who signed the statement refused to go on the record and spoke anonymously.

    One signatory to the statement did go on record in his criticism and published an article responding to Ashford and Burrow’s argument. Dylan Myles-Primakoff, who heads the Free Russia Foundation at the Atlantic Council, wrote a piece titled America’s Russia policy must not ignore human rights.

    Myles-Primakoff argued that “Russia’s domestic politics and its foreign policy are inextricably linked.” His main example for this was what he described as the 2014 “invasion” of Ukraine that resulted in Russia annexing Crimea. Myles-Primakoff said the annexation of Crimea had a purpose in “Russia’s domestic politics.” He said the Russian government “sought to convince Russians that the inevitable result of a popular reform movement like Ukraine’s Euromaidan was not dignity and democracy, but violence and chaos.”

    Myles-Primakoff is right that the Euromaidan protests that led to the ouster of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was democratically elected, caused Russia to annex Crimea, but he ignores crucial context. First, referendum after referendum shows the largely ethnic Russian population of Crimea favored joining the Russian Federation. This is also demonstrated by the fact that what Myles-Primakoff called an “invasion” was met with no violent resistance.

    Second, Myles-Primakoff makes no mention of Washington’s role in the ouster of Yanukovych. The US threw its full weight behind the opposition in Ukraine during demonstrations in 2013 and 2014, an opposition that even had a neo-nazi element. A few weeks before Yanukovych was forced out, a recording of a phone call between then-US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt and Victoria Nuland, who was working in the State Department at the time, was leaked and released on YouTube.  In the now-infamous phone call, Nuland and Pyatt discussed who should replace the government of Yanukovych.

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    Like the ethnic Russians in Crimea, the ethnic Russians in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region also rejected the post-coup government in Kyiv, sparking the war that has killed tens of thousands. The context of US involvement in the coup that sparked these events is crucial, especially when discussing what US foreign policy should look like in that part of the world. There’s an argument to be made that neither the annexation of Crimea nor the war in the Donbas would have happened the way it did if not for US intervention.

    Myles-Primakoff took issue with Ashford and Burrows pointing out that US-Russia relations began rapidly declining around the 2011 and 2012 protests in Russia. Ashford and Burrows write: “US-Russia relations declined markedly in 2011-12 after then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton voiced support for protests in Moscow.” Myles-Primakoff says this line ignores the context of what was happening in Russia at the time and blames Putin’s decision to run for a third term and alleged fraud in the 2011 parliamentary elections for the damage that was done to the US-Russia relationship at the time.

    But Myles-Primakoff again misses the mark with his argument. In 2011, Clinton voiced support for protesters in Russia and voiced concern over claims of fraud in the parliamentary elections. Putin responded by accusing Clinton of inciting protests. “They heard the signal and with the support of the US State Department began active work,” Putin said.

    Myles-Primakoff described Putin’s comments as a “wild conspiratorial response.” While Putin may have been overstating it, he had real reasons to fear that the US was funding protesters and opposition groups in Russia. Clinton based her claims of election fraud on a report from an election monitoring organization known as Golos, which was accusing the Russian government of violating election laws before votes were cast in the 2011 parliamentary election.

    At the time, Golos was funded by the US government through the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Golos was also receiving money from the National Endowment for Democracy, an organization that presents itself as a private company but is funded almost entirely by the US government.

    The US government was also funding political parties inside Russia at the time. “We had been offering political training to every political party in Russia, to Putin’s own party, to the Communists, but also to Putin’s opponents,” Victoria Nuland told PBS in 2017 when discussing the 2011 elections. Although Nuland said the US was training Putin’s United Russia party through the NED and similar organizations, the party had rejected earlier claims from Nuland that they got funding from USAID.

    With the US so deeply entrenched in Russia’s politics in 2011, Washington certainly had ways to influence Putin’s opposition, and these facts make the Russian president seem less paranoid than Myles-Primakoff would like readers to believe. Russia’s Central Electoral Commission eventually issued a report on the 2011 elections and found out of the 1686 reports on irregularities they investigated, 11.5 percent were confirmed to be true. Only 60 of the complaints were claims that voting results were falsified. In 2012, Putin kicked USAID out of Russia.

    Myles-Primakoff also addresses jailed Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, who Ashford and Burrows described as “an open nationalist who is widely known to agree with Putin on many foreign policy questions; he backed the Russian seizure of Crimea and has made racist and Islamophobic remarks.”

    Myles-Primakoff rebuked the claim that Navalny “backed” the annexation of Crimea by using a quote from Navalny in 2014. The opposition figure said, “Crimea was seized with egregious violations of all international regulations.” While this is a real quote from Navalny, Myles-Primakoff presented it out of context. Navalny made the comment while explaining that if he were president of Russia, he would not return Crimea to Ukraine.

    Here’s what Navalny said in October 2014: “Crimea, of course, now de facto belongs to Russia. I think that despite the fact that Crimea was seized with egregious violations of all international regulations, the reality is that Crimea is now part of Russia. Let’s not deceive ourselves. And I would also strongly advise Ukrainians not to deceive themselves.”

    Myles-Primakoff did not challenge the assertion that Navalny is a nationalist who has made racist and Islamophobic remarks. Due to past comments Navalny made, Amnesty International revoked his status as a prisoner of conscience, which is being spun by Western media as the result of a Russian government-backed smear campaign, but Amnesty denies that claim. “”Reports that Amnesty’s decision was influenced by the Russian state’s smear campaign against Navalny are untrue,” the rights group said in a statement.

    Ashford and Burrows also touch on what is perhaps the most important aspect of the US-Russia relationship: arms control. They argue that focusing on human rights inside Russia interferes with progress on arms control. Myles-Primakoff says this argument is irrelevant because Russia decided to extend New START, the vital nuclear treaty that would have expired in February, amid threats of sanctions from the new Biden administration. But extending New START is the bare minimum Washington and Russia could do.

    As the two largest nuclear powers, the US and Russia have an obligation to the world to negotiate new treaties to dismantle their enormous arsenals. With the Biden administration slapping new sanctions on Russia over Navalny, it makes it much harder for Moscow and Washington to negotiate a new treaty. New START had a built-in five-year extension, so renewing the treaty took little more than a phone call. A brand new treaty would require good faith.

    But most funders of the Atlantic Council have no interest in nuclear treaties or easing tensions with Moscow. The think tank receives contributions from the top US weapons makers, including Raytheon, General Atomics, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. The Atlantic Council is also funded by NATO, an alliance that has an interest in keeping tensions high and presenting Russia’s annexation of Crimea as an unprovoked “invasion.”

    With these facts in mind, it’s no surprise that Ashford and Burrows’ article caused such a stir within the Atlantic Council. By making such a fuss over a mild criticism of Washington’s hostile approach to Russia, the Atlantic Council fellows showed their hand.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 02:00

  • The Great American Delusion: 'Just That One Guy'
    The Great American Delusion: ‘Just That One Guy’

    Authored by Patrick Armstrong via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    There is an objective reality: and the most powerful and strong-willed individual can only shape the future within the existing possibilities.

    In my career I used to participate in regular meetings with an American intelligence agency. I – we – were always fascinated by their obsession with individuals. One time they proudly presented each of our group with a chart showing the Boss’ associates distributed into three groups. I’m sure creating this had cost a lot of time and money, but what use was it? Did it allow us to predict better, understand better? Of course it didn’t. Quite apart from the absurdity of thinking that an individual was 100% in one group and 0% in the other two – least one fitted two groups equally well – the truth was that they were a team which made decisions and outsiders had no idea what went on inside the process. The three-group division just led to more ungrounded speculation – if some decision were imagined to be to the benefit of one group, then a flurry of speculation about who was up and who was down would erupt. Theorising in the absence of data: a labour of crackpots. Lots of money, time and promotions but very little understanding. On another occasion their predictions at a leadership change were entirely personal – if X, then this, if Y, then that. (And the person who actually did succeed wasn’t on their list.) My group’s approach was to try and describe what constraints the as-yet-unknown successor would have to deal with. We were trying to work out the context; they were talking personalities. But there is an objective reality: and the most powerful and strong-willed individual can only shape the future within the existing possibilities. The American assumption seemed to be that the boss had unconstrained choices. Now it’s true that they thought of the country as a “dictatorship” but never even in the greatest tyranny has the ruler been able to do anything he wanted to. No wonder they have, over the ensuing twenty years, been invariably wrong. The simple-minded and ignorant obsession with personalities leads nowhere.

    Did it begin with the Calvinists of Plymouth Rock and their division of humanity into the saved and the damned? Was it reinforced a century and a half later by the conviction that King George single-handedly caused “repeated Injuries and Usurpations” and urged on “the merciless Indian Savages”? Or is it of more recent origin? Hollywood’s rugged individuals saving the day at the end of the movie? Who can say, but it seems to be hard-wired into the American view of the world – or at least their view of the rest of the world. And the news media play along every time: the problem is Leader X, if we replace him, all will be better.

    I have just finished a book about the CIA which mentions the Kennedy Administration’s obsession about Fidel Castro. “‘We were hysterical about Castro,’ Defense Secretary Robert McNamara acknowledged”; there were innumerable assassination plots. The missile crisis seems to have brought Kennedy to his senses and, a couple of months before his assassination, the CIA principal had to tell the mobster he had picked to organise it that the plot to kill Castro had been terminated. None of it amounted to anything and, in the words of one player “so much of the goddamn stuff was really juvenile.” Sixty years later, Fidel Castro is gone but Cuba remains – still defiant.

    Mohammad Mosaddegh of Iran was a problem; after he was overthrown Iran was not a problem for a while but today it’s an even bigger problem; and they still resent his overthrowNgô Đình Diệm in Vietnam was a problem; but his death just led to more war. Mohamed Farrah Aidid of Somalia was another who had to go, but after the Battle Of Mogadishu it was the Americans and NATO who went; Somalia, much now as it was then, has faded from the news. Slobodan Milošević was the Butcher of the Balkans until a court found that he wasn’t so guilty after allSaddam Hussein was a pretty comprehensive problem, the NYT informed us; now he’s gone and Iraq is still a problem – can’t win it, can’t leave it. Kims in North Korea come and go; it remains the same. And so on and on – Assad, Maduro, Qaddafi, Arafat, Daniel Ortega and Yanukovych; all individuals who were imagined to be the single roadblock in the path of… The Better, Progress, Democracy and all other Good Things.

    But the two biggest are Russian President Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. I have written enough about the crazy American obsession with Putin: five years ago I wrote A Brief Compendium of Nonsense About Putin. Since then he has grown in monstrosity: election rigger, computer hacker, serial poisoner, “Russia under Putin poses an existential threat to the United States and other countries of the West, Russia’s neighbors, and his own people” is a typical effusion. Note the personalism: the “existential threat” is “Russia under Putin”, not “Russia”. If only Putin could be got rid of…

    The author of this piece goes on: “China will be at the top of the to-do list”. And the Atlantic Council has emitted The Longer Telegram: Toward A New American China Strategy written by Anonymous. Clearly it is supposed to echo Mr X’s (George Kennan’s) Long Telegram. But some differences: this is longer – much longer, grinding on for seven times the length of Kennan’s essay. Secondly, Kennan himself didn’t think that his recommendations had been well followed and was utterly opposed to NATO expansion and Western triumphantasies. I will certainly not waste my time reading this midden of prolixity (one wishes an ex-PFC Wintergreen had binned it), the summary is more than enough – and it’s longer than Kennan’s essay. The very first sentence puts us on familiar ground

    The single most important challenge facing the United States in the twenty-first century is the rise of an increasingly authoritarian China under President and General Secretary Xi Jinping.

    “China under President and General Secretary Xi Jinping”, “Russia under Putin”. Back to personalities.

    …Xi has returned China… quasi-Maoist personality cult… systematic elimination of his political opponents…. Xi has used ethnonationalism… Xi’s China… Xi has demonstrated… China under… Xi is no longer just a problem for U.S. primacy. He now presents a serious problem for the whole of the democratic world…

    He is the problem and “All U.S. political and policy responses to China therefore should be focused through the principal lens of Xi himself.” No Xi, no problem; no Putin, no problem; no Saddam, no problem; no Qaddafi, no problem. Away we go again.

    Better informed people point out that Xi Jinping’s policies have a context: we start with Deng Xiaoping’s strategic guideline “hide capabilities and bide time”. Once capabilities could no longer be hidden, they moved to Hu Jintao’s “Actively Accomplish Something”. That something – or rather, those many somethings – are being actively accomplished by Xi Jinping. Far from a polity captured by a personality, China has a collective leadership focussed on a long-term strategy.

    But that is only one voice in the background and the personality-obsessed (Very Much) Longer Telegram comes from the Atlantic Council which has a far greater influence on U.S. and NATO activities. As it is engummed in personalism, so are they.

    What do the personality-obsessed suggest be done to get rid of Xi? Well, this is a little more difficult than other cases: bombing got rid of Saddam and Qaddafi but China is too strong. Economic measures, as even someone as dim as Anonymous realises, might hurt the USA more than China. Stripped of nostalgianism (the U.S. must “retain collective economic and technological superiority”), delusion (“Dividing Russia from China in the future is equally [critical]”) and degraded touchstones (“current rules-based liberal international order and, critically, its ideological underpinnings, including core democratic values”), the strategy offered is pitiful.

    We are invited to be “laser focused” on the assumption that Xi’s so-called one man rule is resented by many in China; if a wedge can be driven into the leadership, Beijing will return to the happy pre-Xi state when

    China, under all five of its post-Mao leaders prior to Xi, was able to work with the United States. Under them, China aimed to join the existing international order, not to remake it in China’s own image. Now, however, the mission for U.S. China strategy should be to see China return to its pre-2013 path—i.e., the pre-Xi strategic status quo.

    One is reminded of Napoleon’s delusion that Russia’s nobles could be wedged away from Alexander and the undying conviction that one more targetted sanction will make Putin’s henchmen kick him out. But, enough of Anonymous’ fancies – they have no base in reality: the USA out-sourced its manufacturing to China long ago and won’t be getting it back, wokeism is killing its education system, its politics are broken, its military is losing everywhere and doesn’t realise it, a tsunami of debt has built up. Most absurd of all, after years of needless hostility to Russia, Washington has no hope of separating Moscow from Beijing. And Xi Jinping is not some rogue who seized control – he is the top of a robust pyramid.

    The only significance of this paltry effort is that it gives us another – and depressingly influential – example of the curious American obsession with personalities – everything in Chinese-U.S. relations was going along swimmingly until Xi. But actually, as anyone capable of seeing reality knows, China is much, much more than one man.

    China/Russia/Iran/Iraq/insert-name-of-country was happy to accept its place in the Rules-Based International Order until that nasty Xi/Putin/Ayatollah/Saddam/insert-name changed everything; get rid of him and it will all fix itself.

    When are they going to understand that it’s a whole country, not just one guy?

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 00:05

  • US Admits Waging InfoWar Against Russia's Sputnik Vaccine To "Combat Malign Influence"
    US Admits Waging InfoWar Against Russia’s Sputnik Vaccine To “Combat Malign Influence”

    The Kremlin on Tuesday called out what’s it’s dubbed the “unprecedented” propaganda war against Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine. The words were issued by spokesman Dmitry Peskov in response to widespread allegations that the Untied States is actively trying to dissuade its allies from purchasing the Russian-produced vaccine. This despite the emerging scientific consensus that’s found it to be at least 91% effective while further preventing inoculated persons from becoming severely ill.

    The Kremlin is responding to newly emerged proof that the US intervened with the largest country in South America, Brazil. The Washington Post details that “Buried deep in the dry, 72-page annual report of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services lay a startling admission: U.S. health officials under President Donald Trump worked to convince Brazil to reject Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine.”

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    Brazil has long stood as the second highest COVID-19 infected country in the world behind the US, with over 11.5 confirmed infections so far (with the US now approaching the 30 million mark).

    Here’s the key controversial section from the 71-page document. The section is entitled “Combatting malignant influence in the Americas”

    “Examples include using OGA’s Health Attache office to persuade Brazil to reject the Russian COVID-19 vaccine,” the government report spelled out explicitly.

    Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has since claimed it never received directives or “consultations” such as are described in the report from the US, with a statement saying, “the Embassy of Brazil in Washington has not received consultations or actions from United States authorities or companies regarding the possible purchase, by Brazil, of the Russian vaccine against Covid-19.”

    Kremlin spokesman Peskov in his comments didn’t name the allegations specifically but only denounced generally that “In many countries the scale of pressure is quite unprecedented… such selfish attempts to force countries to abandon any vaccines have no prospects.”

    “We believe that there should be as many doses of vaccines as possible so that all countries, including the poorest, have the opportunity to stop the pandemic,” Peskov added.

    Via Reuters

    Thus far neither the US Embassy in Moscow nor the US Department of State have responded, according to Reuters.

    However, the annual HHS report clearly constitutes a “smoking gun” admission which details that Washington does indeed have a covert policy of blocking the Sputnik V vaccine’s spread. This is ironic given one would think Washington would be more focused on combatting the spread of the pandemic itself, regardless of politics or geopolitical maneuvering.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/16/2021 – 23:45

  • Study Shows Very Few Capitol Hill Rioters Were QAnon Red-Staters With Ties To 'Right-Wing' Groups
    Study Shows Very Few Capitol Hill Rioters Were QAnon Red-Staters With Ties To ‘Right-Wing’ Groups

    Authored by Victoria Taft via PJ Media (emphasis ours),

    A survey by the University of Chicago finds that most Capitol Hill rioters had no ties to any fringe right-wing groups and were merely engaged people outraged by what they believed was a rigged election.

    AP Photo/John Minchillo

    While colorful weirdos with names such as QAnon Shaman and Baked Alaska stole the headlines, people who were arrested by federal officials during and after the riot were a “broader core of people” with a healthy skepticism about the veracity of the November 2020 election, according to the study.

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    There was plenty of reason for the skepticism, considering the collusion between Big Tech, unions, lawfare, and Democrats’ combined efforts to sway the election. Those efforts were at the very least unethical.

    As Time Magazine enthused in an article entitled, “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election,” “there was a conspiracy unfolding behind the [election] scenes” of an “informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans” to “save” the election from Donald Trump.

    The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President.

    […]Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.

    Rather than being ill-informed, it appears that the Capitol Building rioters may have been better informed than most on these moves to sway the election.

    In a “working paper” that is considered to be a “novel approach” to “estimating community-level participation in mass protest events,” Asst. Prof. Austin Wright of the Harris School of Public Policy and David Van Dijcke of the University of Michigan found a surprising number of the people arrested at the Capitol Hill riot who were business owners and other professionals obviously upset over election fraud.

    The paper found that those arrested were “more likely to have traveled to the Capitol from Trump-voting “islands,” where residents are surrounded by neighborhoods with higher numbers of Biden supporters.” More than half came from counties that Joe Biden carried.

    Though the researchers include the fact that the overwhelming number of people live in Democrat areas, they also highlighted the fact “that proximity to Proud Boy chapters and local levels of engagement with misinformation posted on Parler, the exiled social media platform popular with the far right, are robustly linked to participation in the Capitol rally.

    However, researcher Austin Wright said living in those leftist areas “played a significant role.”

    Social isolation and the perception of being threatened by neighboring areas that largely hold opposing political views also played a significant role in who was there.

    The researchers also looked at cell phone data such as where in the country Capitol rioters called. Most were in the eastern, central, and southern parts of the country.

    Screenshot of study’s findings.

    Could the cancel culture and being surrounded by people with Trump Derangement Syndrome and other anti-conservatives have helped trigger the attack?

    They claimed some of the rioters were on the social media app Parler, though efforts to discover other social media apps used by the people arrested were not noted. 

    The survey found that approximately 10% percent of the Capitol rioters had a connection with Proud Boys, which they describe as a “hate group,” and Oath Keepers.

    Nearly 90% had no ties or right-wing affiliations whatsoever.

    And they found out that 85% of the people arrested were business owners or held down white-collar jobs.

    WTTW TV reported that researchers hadn’t even needed a “business owner” category before when looking into protest groups. Robert Pape, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, oversaw the study and said the caliber of people at the riot was surprising.

    “Normally, we don’t even have a category for ‘business owner’ when we study political violence, so this is a very big sign that we’re dealing with a new political movement with violence at its core that can’t be reduced to the usual suspects.”

    Jobs held by Capitol rioters.

    Perhaps they should consider that the 2020 election was seen by half the country as rigged. Election integrity efforts, not name-calling, lawfare, and canceling others who hold politically opposing views, will be key in winning back confidence in the elections process. If Democrats pass HR 1, all bets will be off.

    Victoria Taft is the host of The Adult in the Room Podcast With Victoria Taft” where you can hear her series on “Antifa Versus Mike Strickland.” Find it here.Follow her on Facebook,  TwitterParlerMeWeMinds @VictoriaTaft 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/16/2021 – 23:25

  • 8 Dead, 3 Wounded In Georgia Massage Parlor Rampage, 21-Year-Old Suspect Arrested
    8 Dead, 3 Wounded In Georgia Massage Parlor Rampage, 21-Year-Old Suspect Arrested

    After an hours long manhunt, a 21-year-old man has been captured in southwest Georgia, hours after eight people were killed in shootings at three Atlanta-area massage parlors…

    Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Capt. Jay Baker said the suspect, Robert Aaron Long, of Woodstock, was taken into custody in Crisp County, about 150 miles (240 kilometers) south of Atlanta.

    The eight women were shot dead in three separate incidents at two spas and a massage parlor in and around Atlanta.

    Around 5 p.m., five people were shot (4 dead, 1 wounded) at Young’s Asian Massage Parlor in Acworth, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Atlanta, Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Capt. Jay Baker said.

    From there, The Daily Mail reports that it’s believed Long drove more than 30 miles where a further two shootings occurred in northeast of the city in the suburb of Woodland Hills.

    Atlanta police officers responding to a call of a robbery in progress at Gold Spa around 5:50 p.m. found three women dead from apparent gunshot wounds, police said.

    While on the scene at Gold Spa, cops reportedly received a second call from the Aromatherapy Spa directly across the street and found one woman had been shot and killed there as well.

    While authorities were not immediately releasing the gender or race of the victims, Atlanta Police Chief Rodney Bryant said all victims were female and “it appears that they may be Asian.”

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/16/2021 – 23:05

  • Russia Reveals Total Number Of Soldiers Killed In Syria, Blasts "Morally Bankrupt" US Policies
    Russia Reveals Total Number Of Soldiers Killed In Syria, Blasts “Morally Bankrupt” US Policies

    Via AlMasdarNews.com,

    The First Deputy Chairman of the Defense Committee of the State Duma, Andrei Krasov, announced that 112 Russian soldiers were killed during the entirety of the armed conflict in Syria, according to Sputnik Arabic.

    The deputy’s statements came during a meeting with the State Duma Committee for Health Affairs, during which he said:

    “According to recent military data provided by the Russian Ministry of Defense, about 112 soldiers have been killed in Syria since the beginning of the armed conflict.”

    AFP via Getty Images

    This figure is far lower than the over 260 Russian armed forces deaths put forth by non-state monitoring groups like the anti-Assad Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).

    The Russian military officially entered the war in Syira on September 30, 2015 and have since established a number of bases across the country, including its main installation at the Hmemim Airport in Latakia.

    Among the most prominent field achievements made by the Syrian forces, with the support of Russia, was the lifting of the three-year-long siege on the city of Deir Ezzor, which was imposed on the administrative capital by the Islamic State (ISIS/Daesh).

    Furthermore, the Syrian Arab Army was able to retake a large amount of territory in the central part of the country that was occupied by the Islamic State since 2015; this included the ancient city of Palmyra (Tadmur) and the strategic Al-Sha’er Gas Fields. While the Syrian conflict has witnessed a significant decrease in violence since 2015, clashes are still ongoing in the central part of the country, where the Islamic State has reemerged.

    “We need to make the Russians pay a price in Syria…” the former Deputy Director of the CIA said in a 2016 interview.

    Meanwhile a top Russian diplomat blasted the US continuing ‘dirty war’ on Syria on Tuesday. 

    Russian Ambassador to the UK Andrei Kelin attacked the “morally bankrupt and unacceptable” US and UK sanctions meant to choke Damascus into submission.

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    “Development in Syria is being hindered not only by the consequences of conflict and COVID pandemic, but also by the illegal unilateral sanctions imposed on Syria by the US, the UK and some of their allies,” Amb. Kelin said

    “These restrictive measures not only put obstacles to the economic recovery, but also prevent essential purchases of pharmaceuticals, medical and construction equipment. This is morally corrupt and unacceptable.”

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/16/2021 – 22:45

  • Up To Two-Thirds Of Entry-Level Tech Jobs Go To Foreign Guest-Workers From Unranked Colleges
    Up To Two-Thirds Of Entry-Level Tech Jobs Go To Foreign Guest-Workers From Unranked Colleges

    A new report from Bloomberg reveals that up to two-thirds of entry-level tech jobs go to foreign guest workers from low-ranked colleges who don’t dare complain about long work long hours and low wages lest they destroy their chances of a green card – as opposed to hiring debt-laden American graduates willing to grind just as hard, yet have no such immigration leverage to exploit.

    According to the report, the United States in 2018 had “between 96,000 and 143,000 openings in IT occupa­tions that typically went to candidates with a bachelor’s degree or higher in computer science or engineering.”

    Meanwhile, the government grants annual “Occupational Practical Training” (OPT) work permits to hundreds of thousands of foreigners attending American universities – while also inviting roughly 85,000 foreign graduates to reside and work in the United States on H-1B work visas.

    In total, “OPT participants accounted for anywhere from one-third to one-half of new hires. If you add H-1B candidates, up to two-thirds of openings went to guest workers,” reads the report, which Breitbart News‘ Neil Munro notes relies heavily on Rutgers University high-tech employment expert, Hal Salzman.

    Setting the bar low

    When it comes to education, few OPT workers attended ranked colleges. “More than 70% of nonresident computer science master’s degrees awarded in 2018 came from unranked programs, or those ranked 50 and lower by U.S. News and World Report. Just 17% came from schools ranked in the top 25. [universities].”

    Breitbart News has extensively reported on the fraud-ridden OPT program — and its sister program, the Curricular Practical Training program — which provides Fortune 500 companies with roughly 400,000 cheap foreign workers each year.

    The OPTs — and the many similar H-1B, L-12, J-1, and TN visa workers — fill many starter-jobs and mid-career white-collar jobs in a wide variety of industry sectors, including tech, healthcare, academia, accounting, and design.

    Few of the OPT workers complain about their lower-wage jobs because their CEOs can fire them at will. –Breitbart

    At least one million foreign workers are working in low-wage white collar jobs, according to the report, which says that the “Green Card Workforce” contributes to suppressed salaries and a lack of American innovation.

    Read the rest of the report here.

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/16/2021 – 22:25

  • Who And What Killed George Floyd?
    Who And What Killed George Floyd?

    Authored by Pat Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

    Friday, as the jury was being empaneled for the trial of fired police officer Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis City Council voted 13-0 to approve a record $27 million civil settlement with the family of George Floyd over his death in police custody.

    The jury will not likely miss this message sent by the city fathers:

    I.e., an atrocity was perpetrated by our police, and we are admitting our responsibility and doing our duty by offering these reparations for Floyd’s cruel and unjustified death and the suffering visited on his family.

    Most Americans who saw the nine-minute tape of Chauvin with his knee on the neck of George Floyd as he pleaded, “I can’t breathe,” will probably concur with the charge of criminal culpability of Chauvin.

    Yet, over the months, new facts and factors have emerged.

    George Floyd was not choked to death. He was not asphyxiated. He was not killed by Chauvin’s knee on the side of his neck. An autopsy showed Floyd’s neck muscles were not even bruised.

    Floyd died when his heart stopped. Yet, he was already suffering from an enlarged heart with constricted arteries, one of five of which was 90% blocked and two others were 75% blocked.

    An autopsy found heavy concentrations of fentanyl in Floyd’s system and traces of methamphetamines. If Floyd had collapsed and died in the street while being wrested into the squad car, his death would have been attributed to a drug overdose and a bad heart.

    Also, a videotape of the minutes prior to Floyd’s being put on the pavement, his neck under Chauvin’s knee, shows Floyd crying, repeatedly, “I can’t breathe,” while resisting the two rookie cops trying to put him in the patrol car.

    Moreover, there is testimony from those with Floyd when he was stopped for passing an allegedly phony $20 bill, that he had passed out in the car before the cops arrived.

    And the arresting cops claim he was foaming at the mouth before being restrained.

    In short, Chauvin’s defense attorneys will likely make a credible case, backed by evidence, that Floyd’s death was not caused by the knee on his neck but by the battered condition of his heart, the near-lethal dose of fentanyl in his system, and his anxiety and panic at being arrested and fearing, as he wailed, that he was going to be shot.

    The prosecution will counter-claim that Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck, and the two other cops sitting on him, precipitated the stopping of his heart.

    But the prosecution faces other questions.

    How could Chauvin, who arrived late to the scene, know Floyd was a drug addict with a serious heart condition and a large amount of fentanyl in his system, before using the restraint technique of sitting on him and putting a knee on the side of his neck?

    What was Chauvin trying to do when he arrived to see two rookie cops trying to cope with a powerfully built, six-foot-four-inch, 220-pound man violently resisting arrest?

    Did Chauvin put his knee on Floyd’s neck to kill him? To torture or injure him? Or did he use the technique to restrain him?

    Prosecutors will contend that the knee on the neck was criminal assault, a felony that caused Floyd to black out and his heart to stop?

    But that raises another question:

    Is placing a knee on the side of the neck an outlawed or a prohibited procedure for police to use to restrain a suspect violently resisting arrest, as a chokehold is in some precincts?

    Or is it a procedure some police use legally at times?

    Chauvin was clearly familiar with the technique. Had he used it before without injury to a suspect?

    In a motion to dismiss the charges he himself faces in the death of Floyd, former police officer Thomas Lane included 30 pages of Minneapolis PD training materials including information on the “maximal restraint technique.” Lane included a photo of an officer with a knee on a suspect’s neck, similar to the hold used by Chauvin.

    In preparing for the trial of Chauvin, Minneapolis has fortified, with concrete barriers, fences and razor wire, the courthouse where it will be held. Understandably, for any acquittal of Chauvin, or conviction on a lesser charge than murder, could trigger a riot like those that plagued the city through the summer of 2020.

    And if a mob does take to the streets in Minneapolis, as it did all last summer, the national reaction will be telling.

    How does one accurately describe a crowd that gathers outside a courthouse to demand, on the threat of a riot, a verdict of guilty?

    And should a riot occur — and violent protests in Louisville, Seattle and Portland over the weekend seem to point to another such long hot summer – may we expect our new national leaders (Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer) to denounce the mob and stand up unequivocally for the rule of law?

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/16/2021 – 22:05

  • Biden Says Cuomo Should Resign If Investigation Confirms Harassment Allegations From 7 Women
    Biden Says Cuomo Should Resign If Investigation Confirms Harassment Allegations From 7 Women

    After doing everything he could to avoid getting dragged into Cuomogate (some still recall the name Tara Reid) and making an official statement on the record, late on Tuesday Joe Biden said that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo should resign if an investigation confirms the sexual harassment allegations against him.

    In what Bloomberg has dubbed “his most extensive comments about accusations made by several women against his longtime Democratic ally”, Biden reiterated his support for seeing the inquiry carried out but said that its findings could force the three-term governor from office.

    Asked by ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos if Cuomo should step down if the investigation confirms the allegations, Biden replied, “Yes” adding that “I think he’ll probably end up being prosecuted, too.” At another point in the conversation, Biden repeated the expectation, saying “there  could be a criminal prosecution that is attached to it.”

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    Well of course he will say that if the allegations are confirmed. The real question is whether Biden – a staunch believer that women never lie, especially #metoo women who are taking down republican opponents except when one of those women turns her attention on Biden himself – will challenge the recollections and veracity of the increasingly more numerous accusers who are now almost in the double digits… when it involves a close political ally.

    So caught in a bit of a bind, Biden said that “a woman should be presumed telling the truth and should not be scapegoated and become victimized by her coming forward.” 

    Well, then Cuomo should quit right? Not exactly, because while the presumption that a woman is telling the truth is equivalent to the presumption of guilt for the target of her allegations if that someone is republican, when it comes to fellow democrats it gets… complicated. 

    Which is why Biden once again refused to make any definitive statements, instead falling back to what he told reporters on Sunday that he was waiting for the probe to be carried out. ”I think the investigation is underway and we should see what it brings us,” BIden said in response to a question about whether the New York governor should resign; he echoed as much on Tuesday when he said that “the presumption” is that allegations should be taken seriously and investigated “and that’s what’s underway now.”

    Asked if Cuomo can continue to serve effectively even as New York elected officials including both of the state’s U.S. senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, have said he should step down, Biden responded: “Well, that’s a judgment for them to make.”

    According to CNN, the comments mark the President’s most explicit repudiation of Cuomo since multiple women made allegations of sexual harassment or unwanted advances against the New York governor. They came in an interview with Stephanopoulos in which Biden encouraged migrants not to come to the US as a crisis unfolds at the country’s southwestern border — with thousands of unaccompanied children now in federal custody — and he expressed openness to changing the Senate’s filibuster rule for the first time.

    Seven women have accused Cuomo of sexual misconduct and inappropriate workplace behavior. Cuomo, however, has repeatedly refused to step down and denied the allegations. The governor is also in deep trouble for his mishandling of the covid fiasco in New York; he could be criminally liable for dozens of nursing home deaths due to his catastrophic mishandling of the crisis… for which he won an Emmy and received constant praise from the “bluecheck” brigade.

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    State Attorney General Letitia James has appointed an outside attorney to investigate the claims made against Cuomo. State Assembly members last week initiated an impeachment investigation into the misconduct claims that could lead to his removal.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/16/2021 – 21:48

  • Alibaba Browser Pulled From China's App Stores As Xi Warns Tech Giants Pose "Risks" To CCP Control
    Alibaba Browser Pulled From China’s App Stores As Xi Warns Tech Giants Pose “Risks” To CCP Control

    Months after Beijing’s crackdown on China’s tech behemoths like Alibaba and Tencent unofficially commenced with the scuttling of Ant Group’s domestic IPO (what would have been the biggest corporate debut yet on the officially Communist nation’s public markets), President Xi finally spoke out about the campaign, suggesting that it’s only just getting started.

    And as if to underline his point, western media outlets reported Tuesday morning that Alibaba’s popular web browser had been removed from Chinese app stores. While removing apps is a common punishment in China for companies that have transgressed in the eyes of the CCP, the decision to suspend the Alibaba browser (known as the UC Browser) follows reports about the CCP leaning on Alibaba to divest its media holdings. The CCP reportedly fears that Alibaba’s vast news media properties represent an unwelcome rival to Beijing’s own propaganda machine.

    The decision to remove the popular UC Browser is the latest hit to the empire of Jack Ma, China’s most famous entrepreneur, after regulators scuppered the record $37bn initial public offering of Ant Group, Alibaba’s financial technology affiliate. Ma has barely been seen in public since the listing was pulled last November, as Xi tightens Beijing’s grip on the economy.

    According to minutes from a meeting of senior CCP leaders, President Xi warned that tech giants are growing “in an inappropriate manner” that creates risks for the Chinese system.

    “Some platform companies are growing in an inappropriate manner and therefore bear risks. It is a considerable problem that the current regulatory regime has failed to adjust” to the rise of these groups,” the minutes of the meeting said. Regulators will “step up” efforts to improve the regulation of China’s big internet companies, the minutes added.

    Xi added that the development of China’s platform economy is currently at a crucial stage, and it’s necessary to focus on the long term, strengthen weaknesses and create an innovative environment to promote the healthy and sustainable development of the platform economy. In the past, Xi has spoken about the importance of limiting monopolies, but this is the first time he has specifically addressed the problems posed by “platform” companies like Tencent, Alibaba, JD.co and others.

    Jack Ma

    Circling back to Alibaba, the decision to pull its browser from the app store followed the airing of a lengthy feature report slamming China’s tech industry during a prime time slot on China’s consumer rights day.

    The effort against UC Browser came after a programme on state-owned broadcaster CCTV targeted the tech industry on China’s consumer rights day, an annual event when the channel investigates alleged malpractice and documents the findings on a primetime show.

    This year’s programme included a segment on misleading online medical advertising. UC Browser was shown to allow private hospitals to bid for the names of China’s large well-known hospitals in keyword searches, leading potential patients to their websites instead of the public hospitals they intended to visit.

    But taking on Alibaba might be only the beginning. While Tencent founder Pony Ma has been more circumspect than Alibaba’s Jack Ma, whose errant comments at a tech conference in October were blamed for initially provoking the CCP, there’s no question that Tencent’s WeChat is the uber-app in China’s highly technological economy, where people routinely pay for goods via their smartphones thanks t the app. Tencent shares have plunged on the crackdown news as the company has also been targeted by China’s anti-trust regulators – even though so far Alibaba has faced most of the heat.

    As Rabobank’s Michael Every pointed out in a recent note to clients, the authorities seem to be sending the message that data and media must be state and not private-owned. That’s terrible news for Tencent, which is already being pushed to form a financial holding company to house its banking, insurance and payments businesses. Warburg Pincus slashed its estimated range for Ant Group’s valuation, calling for a range of between $200BN and $250BN, down from $280BN before the IPO unraveled, yet another sign that western investors are growing wary of the CCP’s intentions. Alibaba and Tencent shares have tumbled on the crackdown as well.

    China of course has massive tech ambitions, and these necessarily involve data and media. And while there’s no question that China has benefited from the astronomical economic growth afforded by these firms, a threat to the CCP’s dominance is still a threat no matter what.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/16/2021 – 21:45

  • "It's Gone Parabolic": Canadian Housing In One Shocking Chart
    “It’s Gone Parabolic”: Canadian Housing In One Shocking Chart

    It probably does not need much commentary, but as BMO Senior Economist Robert Kavcic writes in his morning charts, “if it’s not fully apparent to all parties that the Canadian housing market is boiling, this picture might convey the message…”

    Kavcic urges readers to note the acceleration: “that is, the 1-month change is faster than 3-month; which is faster than the 6-month; which is faster than the 12-month. In all cases but the 12-month (and that won’t be long either), price growth has accelerated through the rates seen in 2017, when policymakers were working on multiple fronts to tame the market.”

    * * *

    Curious for more: here are some facts on the state of Canada’s overheating housing market courtesy of BMO:

    Canadian Existing Home Sales (Feb.) — The Wild North

    Canadian existing home sales rose 6.6% in seasonally-adjusted terms in February, setting yet another record level. From a year ago, sales were up a hefty 39.2%, and the gains are about to look even more gawdy once we see comparisons to March, April and May (recall that the market was locked down last year). We’ve discussed at great length the factors that are driving record demand, but in case you’re new to the scene, here’s a quick refresher:

    • Employment in higher-paying industries recovered swiftly, supporting incomes among potential homebuyers.
    • Mortgage rates plumbed record lows and, while they’re backing up now, they’re still below pre-COVID levels, while many buyers are likely still on pre-approvals with rates locked in.
    • There’s has been a dramatic shift in preferences toward more space, further outside major urban centres (commuting requirements are down, and probably assumed to remain down).
    • Limited travel has created historic demand for second (recreational) properties, and households have equity in existing properties to tap.
    • Younger households are likely pulling forward moves that would have otherwise happened in the years ahead.
    • There has to be some FOMO and speculative activity in the market at this point (which is, unfortunately, tough to show with hard data until after the fact).

    On the flip side, there is precious little supply to meet that demand, at least in segments that the market wants. New listings actually jumped 15.8% (seasonally adjusted) in February, but the 11% gain from a year ago still trails well behind sales. More importantly, the standing inventory on the market remains almost non-existent by historical standards. The months’ supply of homes for sale across the country hit a record low of 1.8 in the month (the norm is about 5). Even if we re-set the sales pace to pre-COVID norms, we’d still only have about the half the normal supply on the market. Why? Here’s another quick refresher:

    • Mobility is down, so it stands to reason that listings (i.e., movement) are down, particularly for those in desirable locations to ride out the pandemic.
    • The past 15 years or so have been characterized by intensification, with new condo development running at twice the rate of that for single-detached homes – that’s not what the market wants right now.

    This leaves us with a perfect storm for higher home prices outside the major-city condo sector. The MLS benchmark price jumped 17.3% y/y in February, within reaching distance of the 2017 high (when policymakers were working on multiple fronts to cool the market). Annualized growth over the past six months was even stronger at 24%; and month-over-month, price growth in February alone was the strongest on record (dating back to 2000). In other words, parabolic.

    Regionally, almost all of the country is participating, with sales up by double-digits or more in all markets outside Quebec (that market is not weak by any means). Meantime, 22 of 26 major markets have seen the average transactions price rise by double-digits, with 20%-to-40% gains common. Markets that entered the pandemic in a position of strength (e.g., Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal) have strengthened further, while markets that were in the doldrums (e.g., Calgary, Edmonton, to a lesser extent Vancouver) have re-emerged. And, the strongest momentum is in what we can loosely call “cottage country”, with average price gains in some locations running around 50% y/y.

    In a separate release, Canadian housing starts pulled back to 245,900 annualized units in February, a still-high level following a near-record print in the prior month. Just so we’re clear that this is not a winter wonder, starts on a twelve-month average basis are running at 227k annualized, the strongest such pace since 2008; and over the past six months, starts are averaging 242k, the highest since at least 1990. Both single- and multi-unit starts declined in the month, as did all provinces but British Columbia.

    The Bottom Line: It should be fully apparent to all parties that the Canadian housing market is boiling, with strength across most markets, and extreme conditions in some.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/16/2021 – 21:05

  • The Consent Of The Governed
    The Consent Of The Governed

    Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

    In Holland Sunday, a protest demonstration against government Covid policies provoked a emergency order from that same government against thousands of people gathering in a place to … protest. The police and government had only “allowed” 200 demonstrators. So the government “allowed” a protest against itself, but demanded the right to determine where, how, and with how many people it could take place. But that’s not really a protest, is it? The police deployed dogs, horses and water cannons to disperse the crowd.

    In Greece, a video appeared last Sunday of a policeman severely beating a man. Protests against that have occurred daily since. The prime minister spoke out against the protests, not the policeman. That made people even angrier. And then he proposed a “police reform” law. Yeah. And everybody lived happily ever after. But under heavy restrictions.

    In the UK, a peaceful vigil for a woman kidnapped and murdered -by a policeman!- was broken up by police Saturday because there was “no permission” given for it. Several women were handcuffed and dragged across the pavement. Meanwhile, the government is introducing a “police reform” law (they’re popular these days!) that would impose conditions even on one-person protests. And protesters can’t make noise. And so much police will be deployed that it may become too costly to “allow” the protest.

    In Canberra, capital of Australia, 10s of 1000s protested because of a rape scandal inside government buildings. Good thing the restrictions were recently eased, or the same government that’s so busy trying to hide the scandal would have not “allowed” the protest.

    It’s perfectly safe to call this extremism. It all takes place against the background of one year of failed Covid measures and restrictions. Though of course governments will always claim the pandemic would have been much worse without them. But after a year, what right do they still have to impose restrictions? What right did they ever have in the first place to tell people they cannot travel, assemble, see their family or go to work? And how has that right, if they ever had it, changed after a year-long “emergency”?

    I’ve talked about legal issues before, but I still don’t see them discussed. I see no supreme courts testing laws or calling governments back. People in democracies are told they have basic and inalienable rights. But not anymore. Joe Biden talked about how Americans could, if they were good and obedient, maybe invite a few friends over for the Fourth of July. How many inalienable rights does that trample on in one go?

    “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

    Where did these governments all go wrong? Well, here:

    And here:

    They’re not benign public servants, they’re drug pushers -in this case vaccines- with armies and bodyguards. They protect corporations and institutions, not the rights of their people. They’re not democrats, they’re authoritarians. We are ruled by ideologies, not principles. The only rights we have are those that they “allow” us to have. There are no basic or inalienable rights left. Our politicians represent, and serve, long established parties and systems that have ruled for at least decades, in a symbiosis with corporations.

    If there’s one lesson to learn from the sordid never-ending Covid episode it must be that: your human rights are just a thin veneer that serves to make your reality look nice and shiny, but may be scraped off at any moment. What does that say about our forefathers and -mothers who fought, and died, in order to provide us with inalienable rights? Do we really owe those people less than we owe our current ruling classes?

    I read yesterday that the health minister of Jordan has resigned because 6 Covid patients died due to a failing oxygen supply in a hospital. I think that’s the first time I’ve seen a politician being held to account for Covid failure. And even he is probably just a scapegoat.

    I’ve seen a few reports on the damage the lockdowns and other measures do to children’s minds. They mostly talk about schools being closed, as if schools are every child’s happy place. Of course not. Children simply need other children, so they can find their place in the world, it has nothing to do with a school. But this goes far beyond children, untold millions of adults also will come away with mental traumas. People need people.

    We have a few questions we should ask ourselves. History teaches us that rights being taken away are awfully hard to regain. That the Constitution talks about the Consent of the Governed also means that the governed were considered to be able to make proper, just decisions about their own lives, and had the right to do that, without goverment intervention.

    But you are not.

    *  *  *

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/16/2021 – 20:45

  • "All Hell Could Break Loose": The Fate Of The Market Is In The Median 2023 Dot
    “All Hell Could Break Loose”: The Fate Of The Market Is In The Median 2023 Dot

    With less than 24 hours to go until one of the most closely watch Fed announcements in a long time, the VIX finds itself hanging just below 20, the gamma gravity in the S&P is at 4,000 while dealers remains short Nasdaq/QQQ gamma (which however is shrinking by the day). In short, depending on what Powell says (we previewed how market would respond to a hawkish… and dovish Fed), markets could tumble or surge.

    A quick rundown of the key technical factors ahead of tomorrow’s 2pm announcement:

    As our friends at SpotGamma note, the 400/4000 Call Wall in SPY/SPX has grown in size to over $5BN from yesterday – 10k 4000 strike calls were added yesterday, along with 100k SPY calls (to 400) – which increases its “pull” and yet total gamma is little changed in the S&P500 (that said, due to the FOMC tomorrow SG does not expect much movement today a forecast which has so far proven accurate).

    On the other hand, Nasdaq/QQQ gamma remains negative, but that continues to shrink and SG notes that the upcoming March op-ex should flush out the remainder of that negative gamma position.

    Meanwhile, the VIX continues to slide which is rather curious ahead of a major event-risk day such as the FOMC.

    Putting it all together, Nomura’s Charlie McElligott notes predicts “massive days ahead for markets”, between heavy central bank information and options flows around quarterly expiration, particularly noting

    1. the release of the Fed dots, featuring what Charlie calls the “credibility conundrum” of the market anticipating and pricing a ’23 rate liftoff along with Nomura/GS/JPM all calling for +25bps in 2023, yet with Bloomberg “consensus” of Street economists expecting that the Fed will not likely reflect this in their median forecast in order to strengthen their own forward guidance and avoid further tantrums (something we expanded on earlier), and…
    2. US serial Op-Ex in VIX Wed (ahead of the Fed) and Quad Witch Equities on Friday, which has the potential to unlock new ranges and see a heavy reduction of risk and Delta.

    Echoing SpotGamma’s forecast, McElligott notes that the quarterly equities expiration is likely to see “very substantial dealer gamma unclenching thereafter”, which following Op-Ex “exposes markets to larger price ranges with the inherent reduction of dealer hedging flows as that risk goes away, while the market is long a ton of Delta in SPX and IWM, and also set to be sharply de-risked, (SPX net Delta +$308.8B (85th %ile), with front-month +$209.4B and front-week +$139.2B of that).

    Next, the Nomura quant quantifies the impact of the expiration, writing that he sees a post Op-Ex reduction of the aggregate Gamma of -44.7% SPX / SPY, while the QQQ change is even greater at -60.0% (IWM is -50.5%; EEM is -62.7%), so as thresholds expire, CME warns that “we are open to big moves in both directions next week”

    Going back to the Fed, McElligott says that he believes that if we do get a “soft-surprise” of +25bps on median ’23 dot, that the Rates market will just keep feeding that status quo, grinding bear-steepener, but the immediate flow through is that stocks would knee-jerk trade lower (at least short-term), “as it would be higher yields for “tightening” and not “higher growth- / inflation- expectations”; ultimately though, the Nomura strategist views this is a much “healthier” outcome for both Rates and Equities markets. As a reminder, earlier we showed Goldman’s projections for the Fed’s latest set of dots, with the bank expecting 11 participants to show at least one hike in 2023 versus 7 showing no hikes (Of those showing at least one hike, most will show just one, but a handful will show two or more, in line with market expectations of 3 rate hikes)

    Alternatively, McElligott writes that if that ’23 median dot doesn’t move, the Equities party may likely gap-higher with the largest Gamma strike at Spooz 4000 being easily in-play and beyond (Charlie’s summary of the Greeks is charted below), while the previously discussed standoff in rates market-pricing vs the Fed “will only grow wider and force an eventually dangerous reckoning at a future point – market pricing QE Taper in ’22, first hike in late ’22, 3 or more hikes in ’23…..vs Fed “kicking the can” until a later date – but not now, with stocks staging a furious relief rally in response.

    Finally, as a reminder, the x-factor for rates or spreads – not to mention stocks – is the Fed’s “deafening silence” on SLR relief—with nothing still yet to be addressed there (more on that in a post latter today) leading to the “reflation” bear-steepener getting further pressed by traders until the narrative is altered either by data, some risk-off catalyst or the Fed/politicians finally concede on extending the SLR as the alternative could spark a full-blown bond (and stock) market crash.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/16/2021 – 20:44

  • U.S. Joins India And China In Ramping Coal Usage To Pre-Pandemic Levels
    U.S. Joins India And China In Ramping Coal Usage To Pre-Pandemic Levels

    Major users of coal across the world are set to ramp up their usage of the fossil fuel in coming months.

    Power plants in the U.S. are expected to consume 16% more coal this year than in 2020 and another 3% on top of that in 2022. China and India also have “no plans to cut back” their use of burning the fossil fueld. In fact, “it’ll almost be as if the pandemic-induced drop in emissions never happened,” Bloomberg reports

    Inevitably, this will result in higher emissions, which stands at stark odds with the climate initiatives that President Joe Biden ran on. Amanda Levin, policy analyst at the New York-based National Resources Defense Council said: “We’re going to see a really marked increase in emissions with coal consumption at U.S. power plants returning almost to 2019 levels.”

    She says that changes to mitigate usage could happen quickly if Biden implements his planned green-energy policies. 

    In the U.S., the ramp comes as a result of both costlier natural gas, and a broad re-opening from the pandemic. For India and China, the steady use is indicative of growing demand, despite the fact that both countries are trying to use wind and solar, as well. China’s power consumption, for example, has grown, despite the country reducing coal’s share in the nation’s energy makeup. 

    President Biden’s upcoming infrastructure bill is expected to include plans to “fulfill his campaign pledges on climate change, making the U.S. best poised to salvage progress in reducing global emissions,” Bloomberg reports.

    In China, President Xi Jinping has committed to net-zero emissions by 2060.

    India has not memorialized such an agreement yet and remains a “very long way” from a clean grid. The country said it is ahead of schedule to meet the initial carbon reduction pledged under the Paris Agreement. Coal still accounts for about 70% of the country’s electricity generation and consumption at plants will rise 10% this year. In fact, the climb is expected to continue every year through “at least 2027”. 

    Binay Dayal, technical director of Coal India, said: “There are climate-change issues about coal, but India’s energy needs won’t allow it to dump the fuel instantly.”

    In the U.S., demand for the fuel was cut by 19% due to the pandemic last year. That, coupled with roaring natural gas prices, make for a tailwind in coal usages throughout 2021 and into 2022. 

    Dennis Wamsted, an analyst for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, still thinks the longer-term trend for coal is lower, especially as emerging markets have started to favor gas and renewables. He concluded that for the long-term: “The trend is down, down and continuing to go down.”

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/16/2021 – 20:25

  • Former BlackRock ESG Chief: American Public Is Being Duped By "Greenwashing"-Wall-Streeters
    Former BlackRock ESG Chief: American Public Is Being Duped By “Greenwashing”-Wall-Streeters

    Over a month ago we first exposed the “Green Scam”. ESG, or Environmental, Social, and Governance, has become the virtue-signaling tour de force for asset mangers to skim even greater margins off retail dupes under pressure from their liberal peers. And since the green movement was here to stay, so was the wave of pro-ESG investing which every single bank has been pitching to its clients because, well you know, it’s the socially, environmentally and financially responsible thing.

    There is just one problem. Instead of finding companies that, well, care for the environment, for society or are for a progressive governance movement, it turns out that the most popular holdings of all those virtue signaling ESG funds are companies such as…. Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple and Amazon, which one would be hard pressed to explain how their actions do anything that is of benefit for the environment, or whatever the S and G stand for. It gets better: among the other most popular ESG companies are consulting company Accenture (?), Procter & Gamble (??), and… drumroll, JPMorgan (!!?!!!?!).

    Yes, for all those who are speechless by the fact that the latest virtue-signaling investing farce is nothing more than the pure cristalized hypocrisy of Wall Street and America’s most valuable corporations, who have all risen above the $1 trillion market cap bogey because they found a brilliant hook with which to attract the world’s most gullible, bleeding-heart liberals and frankly everybody else into believing they are fixing the world by investing in “ESG” when instead they are just making Jeff Bezos and Jamie Dimon richer beyond their wildest dreams, here is Credit Suisse’s summary of the 108 most popular ESG funds. Please try hard not to laugh when reading what “socially responsible, environmentally safe, aggressively progressive” companies that one buys when one investing into the “Green”, aka ESG scam.

    And today we get confirmation from ex-insider. Tariq Fancy, former chief investment officer for Sustainable Investing at BlackRock, wrote an op-ed in USAToday admitting that Wall Street is greenwashing the financial world, making sustainable investing merely PR, which is a distraction from the problem of climate change.

    The financial services industry is duping the American public with its pro-environment, sustainable investing practices. This multitrillion dollar arena of socially conscious investing is being presented as something it’s not. In essence, Wall Street is greenwashing the economic system and, in the process, creating a deadly distraction. I should know; I was at the heart of it.

    As the former chief investment officer of Sustainable Investing at BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world with $8.7 trillion in assets, I led the charge to incorporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) into our global investments. In fact, our messaging helped mainstream the concept that pursuing social good was also good for the bottom line. Sadly, that’s all it is, a hopeful idea. In truth, sustainable investing boils down to little more than marketing hype, PR spin and disingenuous promises from the investment community.

    SEC looking to ‘proactively identify ESG-related misconduct’

    In many instances across the industry, existing mutual funds are cynically rebranded as “green” — with no discernible change to the fund itself or its underlying strategies — simply for the sake of appearances and marketing purposes. In other cases, ESG products contain irresponsible companies such as petroleum majors and other large polluters like “fast fashion” manufacturing to boost the fund’s performance. There are even portfolio managers who actively mine ESG data to bet against environmentally responsible companies in the name of profit, a short-selling strategy. Risk managers are focused on protecting their investment portfolios from potential damages done by a worsening climate rather than helping prevent that damage from occurring in the first place.

    As disheartening as this reality is, claiming to be environmentally responsible is profitable. Last year alone, ESG mutual funds and exchange-traded funds nearly doubled. The investment community understandably reacted to this with cheers. But those cheers were only for fund managers and their bottom lines. No matter what they tout as green investing, portfolio managers are legally bound (as well as financially incentivized) to do nothing that compromises profits. To advance real change in the environment simply doesn’t yield the same return.

    In early March, my sentiments were echoed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which announced it was creating a Climate and ESG Task Force to “proactively identify ESG-related misconduct” such as inaccurate or incomplete disclosures by funds and companies — an unprecedented move that suggests there might be abuses that have gone unaddressed. 

    Ironically, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to learn some painful lessons. The initial response of rosy forecasts, loose half-measures and group denial boosted morale, but it also lulled the public into a false sense of security that prolonged and worsened the crisis.

    We need to fix the system before disaster strikes

    While how we fight a pandemic and climate change are very different, one aspect is clear. Both threats can only be won through the combined efforts of science and policy. In response to the pandemic, we’ve learned that only top-down government action, such as forcing the closure of high-risk venues and mandating masks indoors, makes a real difference. A “free market” will not correct itself or fix the problem by its own accord.

    Imagine the planet is a cancer patient, and climate change is the cancer. Wall Street is prescribing wheatgrass: A well-marketed, profitable idea that has no chance of curing or even slowing down the cancer. In this scenario, wheatgrass is the deadly distraction, misleading the public and delaying lifesaving measures like chemotherapy. But like giving false hope to unproven cures in the midst of a pandemic, the consequences of such irresponsibility are all too obvious. And motivation for why the industry continues to greenwash is all too obvious.

    When I left the industry in late 2019, due to family business obligations following the passing of my father-in-law, I was frustrated by the lack of any real change. But I took some comfort in believing that if we weren’t doing as much as we could, at least we weren’t doing any harm. Since my departure, I have had a lot of time to think about this issue, and I’ve reassessed my opinion. I believe we are doing irreversible harm by stalling and greenwashing. And all in the name of profits.

    We’re running out of time and need to accept the truth: To fix our system and curb a growing disaster, we need government to fix the rules.

    Fancy appeared later in the day on CNBC and stunned the always-ready-to-virtue-signal anchor by telling her that that “the financial services industry is duping the American public with pro-environment, sustainable investing practices.”

    He added that there is no evidence ESG investing has any social impact.

    Watch the full interview here:

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/16/2021 – 20:05

  • Chinese Tech Giants Build Tools To Bypass Apple's New Privacy Controls
    Chinese Tech Giants Build Tools To Bypass Apple’s New Privacy Controls

    As Beijing works to bring China’s powerful tech giants to heel, the FT has published a report detailing how Chinese tech giants are working to override new privacy controls being introduced by Apple to help protect the privacy of iPhone users from ruthless digital advertisers.

    Of course, the new privacy controls being introduced by Apple will make it harder to track iPhone users without their consent, something that both Facebook and the Chinese state see as a major problem. Pretty soon, America’s biggest social media giant might be lobbying to compare notes with the state-backed China Advertising Association.

    Some of China’s biggest technology companies, including ByteDance and Tencent, are testing a tool to bypass Apple’s new privacy rules and continue tracking iPhone users without their consent to serve them targeted mobile advertisements. Apple is expected in the coming weeks to roll out changes it announced last June to iPhones that it says will give users more privacy.

    Until now, apps have been able to rely on Apple’s IDFA system to see who clicks on ads and which apps are downloaded. In future, they will have to ask permission to gather tracking data, a change which is expected to deal a multibillion-dollar bombshell to the online advertising industry, and has been fought by Facebook, since most users are expected to decline to be tracked.

    In response, the state-backed China Advertising Association, which has 2,000 members, has launched a new way to track and identify iPhone users called CAID, which is being widely tested by tech companies and advertisers in the country.

    Per the FT, TikTok-owner ByteDance published a new 11-page guide for Chinese app developers suggesting that advertisers can use this new CAID system to track iPhone users, assuming the CAID technology has been embedded in the app. The FT managed to confirm that ByteDance and Tencent (which is also seeking to leverage CAID) are already testing the technology. While several parties are working to circumvent Apple’s new privacy controls (which, remember, threaten to hammer the digital advertising businesses of Facebook, Google and other US tech giants), Apple says it won’t grant any exemptions, potentially placing the company on the path toward a confrontation with Beijing.

    “The App Store terms and guidelines apply equally to all developers around the world, including Apple,” the company said. “We believe strongly that users should be asked for their permission before being tracked. Apps that are found to disregard the user’s choice will be rejected.”

    One person familiar with the situation said Apple would be able to detect which apps use the new tracking tool, but even so, it will need to tread carefully. Starting to ban apps backed by state-linked businesses could see Apple kicked out of China.

    But Zach Edwards, founder of Victory Medium, a tech consultancy, said: “They can’t ban every app in China. If they did it would effectively trigger a series of actions that would get Apple kicked out of China.” Three people with knowledge of briefings between Apple and developers also said the Cupertino, California-based company would be wary of taking strong action, despite a clear violation of its stated rules, if CAID has the support of China’s tech giants as well as its government agencies. Rich Bishop, chief executive of AppInChina, a leading publisher of international software in China, suggested that Apple might “make an exception for China” because tech companies and the government are “so closely aligned”.

    Fortunately, it looks like Apple has allowed for some wiggle room for Chinese apps…and others as well, since, according to the CAA, there is already demand for its workaround from European companies and advertising firms.

    Meanwhile, Yang Congan, chief executive of Digital Union, a Beijing-based data privacy company, suggested that CAID had been designed to get around Apple’s rules because its tracking methods might not “uniquely” identify the user. “This is the room that the industry has left to explore,” said Yang, who suggested this grey area was intentional.

    The CAA said the CAID solution “does not stand in opposition to Apple’s privacy policy” and that the association “is currently actively communicating with Apple, and the [CAID] solution has not yet been formally implemented”. CAID has been in a free demo phase for select companies in recent months. Two people briefed on the issue say Apple is aware of the tool and seems to have so far turned a blind eye to its use.

    The system is intended for use by local app developers in China, but at least one French gaming group has been encouraged to apply to use it and several foreign advertising companies have already applied on behalf of their Chinese divisions, two people familiar with the matter said. CAID is scheduled to be publicly released as soon as this week, according to a person briefed on the plan.

    Dina Srinivasan, a US-based antitrust scholar, said the issue highlighted how Apple’s policies alone could not solve glaring privacy issues. “The big picture is that there is simply too much money at stake,” she said. “There will always be an arms race to track consumers. Only legislation can make it stop.”

    In other words, it looks like Apple’s new rules are just another exercise in pro-privacy box-checking, because actually protecting consumers’ privacy simply isn’t financially feasible anymore.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/16/2021 – 19:45

  • Alaska Republican Party Censures Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Vows To Primary Her
    Alaska Republican Party Censures Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Vows To Primary Her

    Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    The Alaska Republican Party voted to censure Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and vowed to issue a primary challenge to her in 2022—coming after she voted to convict former President Donald Trump during February’s impeachment trial.

    Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) arrives before the fifth day of the Senate Impeachment trials for former President Donald Trump on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Feb. 13, 2021. (Stefani Reynolds – Pool/Getty Images)

    The state Republican Party said (pdf) it passed a resolution to censure—another term for a strong condemnation—Murkowski not only for her vote to convict Trump last month, but because she voted in favor of Democratic-led initiatives such as not placing limits on abortions, against the GOP-led repeal of Obamacare, and voted in favor of President Joe Biden’s pick for Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, among others.

    The aforementioned votes, the state Republican Party said, were “in conflict with the Alaska Republican Party platform.”

    The Alaska Republican Party said it will now “recruit a Republican primary challenger to oppose and prohibit Senator Murkowski from being a candidate in any Republican primary to the extent legally permissible.”

    According to the GOP’s resolution, Murkowski also voted “present” rather than in support of the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and “repeatedly spoken critically of President Trump throughout his term in office.”

    NRSC chair Sen. Rick Scott (R-Florida) has attempted to quell in-party fighting and said his committee will support incumbent senators for reelection in the 2022 midterms. That goes against what Trump proclaimed in his speech to conservative activists in Florida last month, where he promised to primary Murkowski, the six other Republican senators who convicted him, and all of the House members who voted with Democrats to impeach him.

    Last week, Trump issued a statement saying he would pledge to campaign against her next year.

    She represents her state badly and her country even worse. I do not know where other people will be next year, but I know where I will be—in Alaska campaigning against a disloyal and very bad senator,” the former president said.

    The Epoch Times has contacted Murkowski’s office for comment.

    In February, the Alaska senator said she would “vote again” to convict Trump if she were asked to do so.

    “If the party is to censure me because they felt that I needed to support the party, they can make that statement, but I will make the statement again that my obligation is to support the Constitution that I have pledged to uphold, and I will do that, even if it means I have to oppose the direction of my state party,” Murkowski said, according to the Anchorage Daily News.

    Murkowski hasn’t said whether she would seek another term in office. Murkowski won her reelection with 44 percent of the vote in 2016 against Libertarian candidate Joe Miller, who netted 29 percent.

    Other than Murkowski, Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Richard Burr (R-N.C.), Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), and Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) have been censured by Republicans in their home states following the impeachment vote. The Utah GOP said it will not censure Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), while Maine’s Republican Party has yet to meet on how to handle Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). Both Collins and Romney also voted to convict.

    *  *  *

    It seems Murkowski may pay the price for her loyalty to the Democrats…

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/16/2021 – 19:25

  • US Intelligence "On Alert" As North Korea Poised For First Weapons Test Of Biden Era
    US Intelligence “On Alert” As North Korea Poised For First Weapons Test Of Biden Era

    At a sensitive moment that both US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin are traveling in Asia where they are discussing both China and North Korea policies with allied leaders in Tokyo and Seoul on Tuesday and Wednesday, CNN has cited US intelligence officials who say Pyongyang is likely preparing to conduct its first weapons test since Biden entered the White House.

    CNN’s Barabara Starr reports that American intelligence agencies “are on alert as the US and South Korea conduct scaled-down, simulated military exercises” and further that “North Korea might decide whether to go through with a test after seeing what comes out of Blinken and Austin’s meetings in Asia.”

    The White House is reported to be mulling a response should North Korea actually go through with a test.

    Also on Tuesday, as CNN details, a top US general who heads up US Northern Command (which overseas defense of the continental United States), Gen. Glen Van Herck, issued the following warning:

      “The Kim Jong Un regime has achieved alarming success in its quest to demonstrate the capability to threaten the U.S. homeland with nuclear-armed ICBMs, believing such weapons are necessary to deter US military action and ensure his regime’s survival.”

      Meanwhile, on the same day the powerful sister of Kim Jong Un, Kim Yo Jong, warned the United States it must “refrain from causing a stink” if it desires to “sleep in peace” over the next four years.

      “We take this opportunity to warn the new U.S. administration trying hard to give off gun powder smell in our land,” she said. “If it wants to sleep in peace for coming four years, it had better refrain from causing a stink at its first step,” she added. It marked the first time the ‘rogue regime’ directly addressed the new Biden administration. 

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

      However, one prominent regional affairs expert, Tom Fowdy, called attention to the timing of all this sudden bluster out of Pyongyang, noting that “North Korea are masters at getting America’s attention and forcing themselves on the agenda. By making a series of threats now, Pyongyang are unintendedly distracting the US from the anti-China dynamic of Blinken’s visits too.”

      “North Korea plays what is essentially a small hand, to the absolute best of their ability every time. The two countries’ situations are very different, but it has to be said they are far more tactful, strategic, prudent and outright Machiavellian negotiators than China,” he added.

      Tyler Durden
      Tue, 03/16/2021 – 19:05

    Digest powered by RSS Digest

    Today’s News 15th March 2021

    • Heathrow Passenger Numbers Remain Grounded
      Heathrow Passenger Numbers Remain Grounded

      When Heathrow reported its 2020 traffic volume figures In January, the airport’s CEO, John Holland-Kaye, reflected on an “incredibly challenging” year for aviation. 

      Holland-Kaye added:

      “The aviation industry is the cornerstone of the UK economy but is fighting for survival.”

      As lockdowns continue to be enforced around the globe, the latest figures show no let up in this crisis. Compared to the same period last year, February 2021 saw a fall of 91 percent in passengers passing through its terminals.

      Infographic: Heathrow passenger numbers remain grounded | Statista

      You will find more infographics at Statista

      Reacting to this further development, Holland-Kaye struck a defiantly positive tone:

      Aviation has always led the UK economy out of recession, and we will do so again. The PM’s Global Travel Taskforce can lead the way on reopening international travel and trade safely – but ministers must get a grip of Border Force’s performance so that visitors get a warm welcome to Britain, not a 6 hour queue.”

      We wish him luck…”normal” seems a long way off and vaccine passports may not help people feel ‘free’ enough to travel.

      Tyler Durden
      Mon, 03/15/2021 – 02:45

    • What's The Plan In Europe – Blame UK & AstraZeneca?
      What’s The Plan In Europe – Blame UK & AstraZeneca?

      Authored by Bill Blain via MorningPorridge.com,

      What is going on in Europe? The political and economic options are limited, the outcomes predictable, and none of them are good. But don’t worry – Europe can always blame the UK and AstraZeneca.

      On the back of news of collapsing trade between Europe and the UK due to Brexit, I wish I could work out what’s going through the collective mindset of the European Commission and the European Central Bank regarding how they now intend to turn Europe into a major growth economy of economies, create jobs and wealth, foster social cohesion, and become a third force for moderation in geopolitics. What’s the plan I wonder… do they care to share it?

      To give Europe some credit, it’s done remarkably well holding together these last 12 years, creating an increasingly connected European state without the tedious need of anyone actually voting for it.  Political and Economic compromises have been made, but the whole thing has muddled through rather well – give or take suboptimal growth being hamstrung by the construct of the Euro.

      Since 2012, when Europe’s central bank finally cottoned on to the crisis then enveloping European bond markets, the ECB has have had but one policy: keep Interest Rates at zero and below, and wait, hope, and pray for recovery and inflation to discount down the debt. They are still waiting. As far as I can work out…. that’s about the sum of the economic side of the plan. Hope is never a strategy, and monetary mismanagement without some fiscal common sense to back it up looks an unlikely route to success.

      On the political side of the equation, for years the EC bumbled along as a rest home for “shunky retreads”. (I just love that description by the Australian Ambassador of the qualities required to become one of Europe’s unelected leaders.) Its’ main purpose was to ensure everyone got a fair chance to milk the teats of Brussels tax-free salaries and ensure the Germans didn’t cotton on the fact they were paying for much of it.

      Meanwhile, the big dogs of European politics: Merkel and various Frenchmen and occasional Italian got on with the real business of Europe, which was broadly the Germans making quite clear they weren’t going to pay for it – while everyone else tried to ensure they did. The poor Brits really didn’t get it – their role was to pay and keep paying.

      But things are gradually changing. Brexit has got the EC retreads all excited. They are very keen to show they have powers and are not afraid to use them…. They intend to keep punishing the Brits to dissuade any other nations in the Euro gulag from any thoughts of a similar exit. And, they are doing a damn fine job of it too…. Europe must be terribly pleased as Brussels announces its latest quotas of not letting in British fish, meat, or anything else… and sets new levels of Beastliness to Brits – B2B as its known in the Kommission.

      Everyone thinks it was the sainted Mario Draghi saying he would magically “do whatever it takes” that was the trick that saved Europe and the Euro. In reality it was a far more complex game of financial card sharping and a masterclass in political distraction as he persuaded the Germans to support it.

      Back in the early 2010s Yoorp was in deep crisis. The markets confidently expected the Euro to implode. Greece was a basket case. Italian bond yields were heading stratospheric and utterly unsustainable. Ireland was going to default. Portugal was on the verge of bankruptcy. Spain, and even France looked wobbly. We talked about the impossibility of the Germans ever agreeing to a bailout of Club Med.

      Then came the first genius moment: the ECB announced it was making unlimited repo facilities available to banks.

      I was on a Bloomberg, (or maybe it was CNBC?), show as it happened. I immediately opined it was a buy signal for European government bonds. The German bank analyst sitting next to me demurred and told the audience that was rubbish, “this is a carefully considered ECB plan to stabilise and assist banks” he sagely pronounced. After all, that’s exactly what the German politician being interviewed had just said.

      I shook my head and smiled in that way that clearly conveyed he was a simpleton. I  explained: “Bollchocks…. Here’s how it plays from here: banks will use the repo to use their government bonds as collateral to buy more government bonds, which they will use as collateral to borrow even more more money to buy more government bonds to use as more more collateral. Simples. This is the moment to buy European govt bonds.

      The analysts flustered and fluffed and came out with some line about the direct funding of European sovereign debt was not something the ECB would do. I shrugged and said.. sure… but watch bond yields and Bund spreads vs France, Spain and Italy. We did, and we’ve been watching them ever since and making lots of money off the ECB’s magic money tree.

      Well done Draghi. It largely worked, but the one thing the magic money tree has most definitely not done is drive any European recovery, jobs, yoof employment or social stability.. But hey-ho, the ECB says it will happen… if we just unlock some inflation.. and don’t tell the Germans.

      We are now into an era of ECB never-ending QE Infinity. Yesterday Christine Lagarde, ECB head girl, continued in the same vein as her predecessor and now Italian prime minister Draghi, pulling the wool over the Germans eyes. She is accelerating purchases under the €1.85 bazillion Pandemic/Permanent emergency purchase programme – buying back bonds at a “significantly higher pace” in coming months/years/centuries to limit any rise in European bond yields.

      Yep. It’s really, really important the ECB keeps European bond yields low. Because low bond yields have done so much to generate zero growth, create zero jobs, and done nothing to solve Club Med yoof unemployment. As Europe’s collective growth rate has limped along for the past 10-years, zero interest rates, ECB limits on spending and ECB policies have achieved the grand sum of a word that sounds like duck all. But it has held the Euro together and keep the ECB biggies in tax-free jobs.

      Almost as an apparent after-thought the EBC has effectively seized financial sovereignty from European states. Keeping interest rates unfeasibly low has kept the Euro nice and cheap for German exporters, while crushing the hopes of other European nations to adjust their economies to catch up Germany. The ECB also controls the disbursement (through the European Commission, so un-ably led by VDL) of the €750 bln recovery funds.

      450 million happy smiling flag-waving Yooropeans are eternally grateful to the ECB for its dedication to keep doing the same thing in the vain hope it might finally work. Just like they are delighted with the success of the EC in managing Yoorp’s vaccine rollout.

      Facts is facts… but Europe is not about to knock the socks off with the kind of Economic recovery we are now seeing in the US. Even in Brexit Britain recovery took a 3% dunt from the Christmas lockdown, but we’re on course for effective economy-wide vaccination and reopening this half of 2021.

      Of course, we won’t be going on holiday in Europe, because they will be into a fourth wave and banning us from their beaches, even calling it the British variant, to make quite clear it is not the EC’s fault for its vaccine rollout or the ECB’s ongoing monetary hopes.

      Meanwhile… Back in Covid land…

      I was surprised when a headline flashed across the screens: “Denmark Suspends AstraZeneca Vaccine Over Blood Clot Concerns”. Wow. That must be serious. Something must be well awry for the Danes to be concerned. Europe’s most laid-back nation doesn’t get het up about nothing – or so I thought.

      The Danes are sensible people. I doubted they would be given to slavishly following the dictates of the EU Brusselocracy to talk down the UK’s successful vaccination programme. I immediately called one of my sailing chums, who in addition to being a top vascular surgeon, recently manged to get together the 26 separate pieces of paper required to evidence his qualifications to stick needles in people’s arms as a Covid Vaccinator.

      He was equally surprised, commenting how unlikely it would be if Denmark’s tiny population revealed a serious blood issue which hadn’t been evidenced in the over 15 million dozes of the vaccine administered in the UK. Then he called back to say there had been 2 cases and death of an Austrian with multiple thrombosis 10 days after getting the AstraZeneca jab.

      The fact is a 60-year old Dane has died after getting the shot from a blood clot. 5 million Europeans have been vaccinated with the AstraZeneca drug. There have been a shocking, staggering 30 cases of obstructive blood clots among these 5 million. Which is a statistically incoherent connection – it’s absolutely in line with what you would expect to see in the general population said the European Medicines Agency, adding the benefits outweigh any risk.

      But with all the fake news surrounding the efficacy of AstraZeneca, the drug company’s difficulties in delivering doses, and Europe’s bumbling vaccine rollout… Give a good dog a bad name and it sticks – would seem to be the European policy. The Danes have banned it for at least 14 days – to be on the safe side.

      For the record, I recently got the AstraZeneca jab and had no side effects. This weekend, in protest at the Danish decision, I shall be cooking vitamin Pig from this Island for breakfast, and not doing anything with lego… and to show just how concerned I am I won’t watch anything with Sandi Toksvig in it. (The delightful and very funny Danish TV presenter is a national treasure here in the UK.. but she’s on the wrong side now…)

      Meanwhile, there are over 10 million doses of the AstraZenaca vaccine sitting in the US because the US has not approved it. The American’s have declined to let the drug maker deliver them to Europe. European Commission Kommissars say that is clear evidence of the UK deliberately stopping the export of the vaccine to Yoorp… apparently.

      Tyler Durden
      Mon, 03/15/2021 – 02:00

    • The US Keeps Losing In Every Simulated War-Game Against China
      The US Keeps Losing In Every Simulated War-Game Against China

      Via SouthFront.org,

      In the autumn of 2020, the US Air Force held a simulated war game against China, set approximately 10 years in the future.

      It began with a biological weapon that quickly dealt with America’s military bases and warships in the Indo-Pacific region.

      Then, China staged a massive military exercise to veil a gigantic deployment of an invasion force.

      The simulation culminated with Chinese missile strikes raining down on U.S. bases and warships in the region, and a lightning air and amphibious assault on the island of Taiwan.

      China won, within a very short timeframe.

      This was reportedly part of the classified war game and details are being revealed now.

      Around the same time, in real life, in September 2020, actual Chinese combat aircraft intentionally flew over the rarely crossed median line in the Taiwan Strait in the direction of Taipei an “unprecedented 40 times and conducted simulated attacks on the island” that Taiwan’s premier called “disturbing.”

      China’s air force released a video showing a bomber capable of carrying nuclear weapons carrying out a simulated attack on Andersen Air Force Base on the U.S. Pacific island of Guam.

      The title of the Hollywood-like propaganda video was “The god of war H-6K [bomber] goes on the attack!”

      The trend of China getting ahead and the US falling back was accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

      This month the Council on Foreign Relations released a special report, “The United States, China, and Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War.”

      It concluded that Taiwan “is becoming the most dangerous flash point in the world for a possible war” between the United States and China.

      In Senate testimony, the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Phil Davidson, warned that he believes China might try and annex Taiwan “in this decade, in fact within the next six years.”

      Separately, a Chinese think tank recently described tensions in U.S.-China relations as the worst since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, and it advised Communist Party leaders to prepare for war with the United States.

      Apparently, many Americans don’t realize is that years of classified Pentagon war games strongly suggest that the U.S. military would lose that war.

      “More than a decade ago, our war games indicated that the Chinese were doing a good job of investing in military capabilities that would make our preferred model of expeditionary warfare, where we push forces forward and operate out of relatively safe bases and sanctuaries, increasingly difficult,” Air Force Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote, deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration and requirements, told Yahoo News in an exclusive interview.

      “At that point the trend in our war games was not just that we were losing, but we were losing faster,” Hinote said. “After the 2018 war game I distinctly remember one of our gurus of war gaming standing in front of the Air Force secretary and chief of staff, and telling them that we should never play this war game scenario [of a Chinese attack on Taiwan] again, because we know what is going to happen. The definitive answer if the U.S. military doesn’t change course is that we’re going to lose fast. In that case, an American president would likely be presented with almost a fait accompli.”

      The Biden administration recently announced a new Pentagon task force to review U.S. defense policy toward China, to be headed by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

      The deteriorating security of Taiwan will be a major focus of the new task force.

      “By the way, three of China’s standing war plans are built around a Taiwan scenario,” Hinote said.

      “They’re planning for this. Taiwan is what they think about all the time.”

      No matter what, every war game scenario featuring Taiwan ends in the US losing.

      “Whenever we war-gamed a Taiwan scenario over the years, our Blue Team routinely got its ass handed to it, because in that scenario time is a precious commodity and it plays to China’s strength in terms of proximity and capabilities,” said David Ochmanek, a senior RAND Corporation analyst and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for force development. “That kind of lopsided defeat is a visceral experience for U.S. officers on the Blue Team, and as such the war games have been a great consciousness-raising device. But the U.S. military is still not keeping pace with Chinese advances. For that reason, I don’t think we’re much better off than a decade ago when we started taking this challenge more seriously.”

      Part of the problem is that China advanced its A2/AD strategy while the Pentagon was largely distracted fighting counterterrorism and counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for two decades.

      Beijing is also laser-focused on Taiwan and regional hegemony, while the U.S. military must project power and prepare for potential conflict scenarios all around the globe, giving the Pentagon what Ochmanek calls an “attention deficit disorder.”

      Finally, there is the complacency of the perennial winner that makes it hard for senior U.S. military officers to believe that another nation would dare to take them on.

      “My response is that China’s growing military confidence is manifesting itself in an increasingly belligerent approach to its neighbors, the growing frequency of the PLA’s violation of the airspace of Taiwan and Japan, and the bullying of other neighbors in the South China Sea,” said Ochmanek. “Under Xi Jinping there has been a dramatic increase in such provocations compared to a decade ago, and I think it’s grounded in his belief that militarily, China is strong enough now to credibly challenge us.”

      In the most recent war game, the Pentagon tested the impact of potential capabilities and military concepts that are still on the drawing board in many cases.

      The Blue Team, which represented U.S. forces, adopted a more defensive and dispersed posture less reliant on large, vulnerable bases, ports and aircraft carriers in a conflict with the Red Team, which represented China.

      The strategy strongly favored large numbers of long-range, mobile strike systems, to include anti-ship cruise missile batteries, mobile rocket artillery systems, unmanned mini-submarines, mines and robust surface-to-air missile batteries for air defense. A premium was put on surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities for both early warning and accurate intelligence to enable quicker decisions by U.S. policymakers, and a more capable command-and-control system to coordinate the actions of more dispersed forces.

      “We created a force that had resiliency at its core, and the Red Team looked at that force and knew that it would take a tremendous amount of firepower to knock it out,” said Hinote. The biggest insight of the war game, he said, was revealed when he talked afterward with the Red Team leader, who played the role of the PLA’s top general.

      “The Red Team leader is the most experienced and aggressive officer in these war games across the Defense Department, and when he initially looked at the resiliency of our defensive posture both in Taiwan and the region, he said, ‘No, I’m not going to attack,’” recalled Hinote. “If we can design a force that creates that level of uncertainty and causes Chinese leaders to question whether they can accomplish their goals militarily, I think that’s what deterrence looks like in the future.”

      On a sober note, Hinote pointed out that the Blue Team force posture tested in the recent war game is still not the one reflected in current Defense Department spending plans.

      “We’re beginning to understand what kind of U.S. military force it’s going to take to achieve the National Defense Strategy’s goals,” he said. “But that’s not the force we’re planning and building today.”

      Maybe one day the US will win in a simulation against China.

      Tyler Durden
      Sun, 03/14/2021 – 23:30

    • Welcome To The 'Upside-Down'
      Welcome To The ‘Upside-Down’

      Presented without comment… “welcome to the upside-down”

      Good evening, and welcome to the upside-down.

      Where what you see, can never be,
      and what you know, just isn’t so.
      Where bad is good and wrong is right.
      Where truth went down without a fight.

      Where you might just say, every day is opposite day.

      Can I offer you a mask or an anal swab?
      Rape is the law, if its for a good cause.
      Oh no, it isn’t mandatory, that would be cruel,
      but you have no choice, that’s our only rule.

      Before you enter I must tell you about the world’s deadliest disease.
      It can take you out with a single sneeze.
      It’s a clever bugger too, it can’t take out a violent mob
      it only thrives in those with jobs.

      But luckily, we have the only cure,
      it won’t stop it from spreading but that’s all we know for sure.
      So “What does it do?”, you may ask.
      No one knows, so please be sure to double mask.

      “It’s super safe” the doctor said.
      Even if you end up dead,
      because the antidote can’t kill you since
      it’s the leading cause of coincidence.

      Now roll up your sleeve and let’s go,
      I’ll take you through the backwards show.
      Where doctors kill and science shills
      for our lord and saviour, a man named Bill.

      To your left you will find our grand display
      of courageous men with nothing to say.
      They don’t provide, or lead, or slay.
      They smile, nod, and let you have your way.

      To your right you’ll see our exhibition of empathy.
      Where the rich stay home,
      and through their phone,
      demand that old folks die alone.

      Follow along the yellow dotted line,
      to our memorial of dissent, our evil shrine.
      The thought criminals and sense seekers and those who disrupt,
      the ones who tried to turn us right side up.

      They did not shrink to double think,
      so all of them died from “suicide”.

      Thank you very much for visiting THE UPSIDE DOWN!
      Now please return to the circus with the rest of the clowns.

      Tyler Durden
      Sun, 03/14/2021 – 23:00

    • Towards "One" World Currency
      Towards “One” World Currency

      Authored by Bruce Wilds via Advancing Time blog,

      Expect Government Crackdowns In A “Global Depression”

      For those professing a preference for one type of government over another, an ugly reality is they all cut from the same cloth. Whether we are talking about Democracy, Communism, Socialism, or Fascism the strong link they share is one of dominance and a desire to control. While seen as vastly different systems with distinct goals, each is rooted in the promise people should sacrifice as needed for “the greater good.” The main flaw in a democracy is that it allows a simple majority to force their desires upon others. This is why our forefathers set checks and balances in the Constitution, however, even these do not guarantee freedom will remain. 

      Today, the burden of risk and the amount of “skin in the game” is not equally shared by all of society. Over time our financial system and institutions have been corrupted by crony capitalism and a political system that panders to the masses by exchanging favors for baubles. It could be argued that those in power don’t have to take away our freedom by force if we are willing to surrender it or trade it for a few paid weeks off work. Nor do they have to be fair in how they go about this if they simply get a majority of the populace to go along with their plan.

      The suspicion governments are self-serving creatures is apparent in the old school British imperial definition of “commerce” which used free trade as a cover for the military dominance of weak nations. Those put in a position of being exploited often saw this as simply a ruse promoted by those wishing to abuse them. In short, opening borders and turning off protectionism simply makes it easier to rob countries of their wealth. America, a wayward child of England, has been accused of following this same path.

      Economic Hardship Takes Many Forms

      In my last article titled, “The first Global Inflationary Depression Is Possible” a case was made that the world was headed towards an economic crisis due to several factors. The problem is that such a scenario encompasses all aspects of life, from food and energy, to supply chains, geopolitics, and possibly even war. This article is an effort to offer up some ideas on how governments might respond to such an event based on current trends and some of the events that have occurred during the covid-19 pandemic. If we accept the idea that governments are self-serving and that a huge majority of the people suffer during an economic depression, we should expect frictions to develop as the populace seeks solutions to ease their pain.

      Sadly, governments across the world have overreached and crushed the rights of individuals during the pandemic. People have been denied the ability to travel, locked in their homes, followed by drones, and even been jailed. This may have been just a taste of what we might expect if governments are put under pressure to perform. Many people have pointed to the fact that in the past “war has been the go-to answer” often used to take our eyes off of problems. Hopefully, that will not be the case, however, many of the other options possible in the age of almost total surveillance do not seem much better. 

      It is wise to remember that when all is said and done, those in power will not be kind to us but they will rapidly throw us under the bus without a thought. Silencing dissidents or those that protest or disagree by limiting free speech is only a start. Lock-downs and curfews take on a whole new meaning when harshly enforced. They can include things like house arrest, cutting power, links to the internet and communication, and even water to areas where unrest gets out of hand. You can expect governments to remove anything that gives us the power to control our fate.

      Robots Could Be Used For Crowd Control

      The topic of our future and culture always circles back to and is directly linked to the issue of jobs vanishing as automation and an army of robots march into our workplace. This can result in a future that takes on a very grim dystopian appearance. The fear of being replaced by a robot or seeing your job being outsourced or eliminated is on the rise. Do not be surprised if in the end those displaced from the job market are only given enough to ensure they remain docile and behave. If and when this becomes an issue conflict and violence will arise.

      While some people credit Rahm Emanuel with the saying, Winston Churchill was the first to say, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” He said it in the mid-1940s as we were approaching the end of World War II, and history indicates those in government have taken heed. The one thing we can count on is that when things crumble, the old, “we should have done more” or the “it would have been far worse” lines always flow forth from those in charge. Under this logic, we should be prepared to be subjected to massive abuse by those with strong agendas.  

      Possibly, one of the most dire threats we face flows from the combination of big tech and those in pursuit of the highly touted one-world agenda. This brings together a slew of organizations, governments, companies, wealthy, individuals, and bankers with the goal of expanding their power. The gathering in Davos of the World Economic Forum is not for our benefit but more for plutocrats like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos that desire to “break the world” with their ruthless agendas to bring more political power into their hands. Recently a great deal of attention has been given to some of the ideas and vision the WEF has floated. One of the most powerful became visible when WEF public relations released a video entitled: “8 Predictions for the World in 2030. Its 2030 agenda offers a telling glimpse into what the technocratic elite has in store for the rest of us. It promotes the idea that  by 2030 “You will own nothing. And you’ll be happy. 

      How do you begin to fight or turn back a force that has even incorporated and leveraged the ever-present smartphone as an ultra-powerful surveillance device? By developing programs to organize phone data so that it provides real-time intelligence on every citizen, and using it to guide and influence our actions the power of the state has been deeply enhanced. The digital age has made it far easier for government to seize our computers and records to shape a case against anyone by massaging the data as they see fit. The reason we hear so little criticism of these actions from our government may be that we are next in line to have our freedom culled. Governments are not the friend of the average man. Orwell wrote about how governments could take on a life of their own and criticized totalitarianism throughout his writings.

      Totalitarianism, the most extreme and complete form of authoritarianism is a political concept that defines a mode of government, which prohibits opposition parties, restricts individual opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life. Political power in totalitarian states is generally pushed by those on the far left or right with strong agendas and an all-encompassing propaganda campaign, which is disseminated through mass media. Signs of its growth are often marked by political repression, growing control over the economy, restriction of speech, and mass surveillance.

      Of course, a huge step in individuals losing control over their lives would be the adoption of a single world currency. Those in charge of our financial machinery have indicated to the public their desire for more power. This means creating a truly global centralized economic system and a highly controlled world currency framework dominated by a select cult of banking oligarchs. This would, in effect makes the rest of the human race their slaves. The banking elites are positioning themselves to avoid blame for a disaster in which all fiat currencies fall in value by selling us on an elaborate recovery con-game which includes converting to a new worldwide currency. Remember, this is conceived and perpetuated by those with the most to gain.

      Magazine Cover From 1988

      For years the IMF has been discussing replacing the dollar with the SDR as the world reserve currency. It would require governments to borrow from the world central banking authority, rather than printing currency to finance their infrastructure programs. With governments floating the idea of going cashless and to digital currencies, this would give them even greater control over our lives. To be clear, the elites are positioned and merely waiting for a geopolitical disaster or catastrophe so overwhelming that when the time arrives they can portray themselves as our saviors by carrying out this plan. 

      This is all part of the New World Order and globalization idea pushed by many of the rich elite and world leaders. It contends that larger, more cooperative governments under one financial unit will benefit us all. The fact is Americans have a great deal to lose if the dollar is dethroned and declines in value. Those who will be crucified are the middle-class Americans whose wealth is locked into or are holding long-term USD bonds thinking they are a safe investment.  To Americans, the fate of dollar-dominated assets and their value when the dust finally settles should be a huge concern but most Americans fail to grasp the implications. 

      The transition to a world currency would take a far greater toll on paper assets than tangible goods. While recognizing the flaws of the dollar and our current system I have come to believe the other fiat currencies such as the euro and yen hold even less merit. This includes cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. Regardless, in the end, we should expect to be told and not given an option as to what is coming. If events unfold in the way those promoting a one-world currency hope, they will be able to portray cleaning up a financial mess as a blessing. The truth is, they will benefit greatly from putting a dagger in the heart of freedom. This is not written to frighten or as a prediction of doom but to dampen any illusions those at the top value those below them.

      Tyler Durden
      Sun, 03/14/2021 – 22:30

    • Anti-2nd Amendment Groups Swarm Senate Amid Push To Restrict Gun Rights
      Anti-2nd Amendment Groups Swarm Senate Amid Push To Restrict Gun Rights

      As Congressional Democrats turn their attention from stimulus to gun control, anti-2nd Amendment groups are focusing their lobbying efforts on the Senate after two major bills cleared the House last week.

      The bills – one of which could indefinitely delay background checks (H.R. 1446), and the other which would require a federal background check for private gun sales (H.R. 8) – made it through the House last week and are on to the Senate, where Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has promised to take quick action as Democrats hope to garner enough GOP support for them to pass, according to The Hill.

      Eight House Republicans voted for the background check legislation which would affect private transfers, however it would take at least 60 votes for the bills to make it through the Senate.

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

      “We have a slim gun violence prevention majority, but we have the majority, which we know includes eight Republicans,” said Brian Lemek, executive director at the Brady PAC.

      Also supporting the legislation are Everytown for Gun Safety and the Giffords Law Center.

      Some Senate Democrats say they’re already holding conversations with Republicans.

      “I’m talking to senators across the aisle, but the real difference-makers in this debate are the survivors, students, and family members who have made this issue a movement,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) told The Hill about his plan for getting Republican support.

      “The most powerful advocates for change are the people who have personal stories to share about how a background check could have saved someone they love — that’s who my Republican colleagues have to answer to,” he added.

      The Hill

      Gun rights advocates say the bills are a stupid idea.

      “The idea that this is going to make us safer is laughable,” said Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL). “Criminals looking to get their hands on firearms to use in crimes are not going to submit to background checks. Only law-abiding citizens will follow the law. This is a back door means of setting up a national registry of firearms – something I completely oppose.”

      Meanwhile North Carolina Rep. Richard Hudson (R) ripped Democrats for ‘capitalizing on half-truths to rob Americans of their Second Amendment rights,” according to The Truth About Guns.

      “Unfortunately, the Democrats in Congress are not serious about ending gun violence,” said Hudson. “And it’s obvious by the bills – they’re bringing up four this week – which would do nothing to have stopped a single mass shooting in this country, yet, they threaten the rights of law-abiding citizens.”

      “The Democrats have rushed two bills to the floor, no regular order, no hearing time,” Hudson continued. “They have allowed no meaningful input from Republicans and – and these bills, again, would have not stopped a single mass shooting, not Newtown, not Charleston, not Parkland, not Las Vegas, not Sutherland Springs, would not have stopped the shooting of our former colleague, Gabrielle Giffords because her shooter passed a background check.”

      “H.R. 8 fails to recognize the fact that every commercial gun sale in America requires a background check today,” Rep. Hudson explained. “And H.R. 1446 creates delays for law-abiding citizens, could be indefinite to acquire a weapon and would have not closed the Charleston loophole.”

      Rep. Hudson explained that the failure that led to the murders in Charleston, South Carolina’s Emmanuel AME Church was a matter of law enforcement not sharing disqualifying criminal information with the FBI. He said that a fix would be Rep. Tom Rice’s H.R. 1518, a bill which codifies current NICS practices. The Truth About Guns

      These surely law abiding citizens are going to be super bummed about the private sale background check thing:

      Tyler Durden
      Sun, 03/14/2021 – 22:00

    • The New New Deal Has Already Arrived. Thank The COVID Panic
      The New New Deal Has Already Arrived. Thank The COVID Panic

      Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

      We’ve entered a new era of politics and government in America, and the Left is pretty happy about it. This week, for example, The Guardian announced “Biden’s $1.9tn Covid relief bill marks an end to four decades of Reaganism.”

      From this point of view, “Reaganism” is code for extreme free-market libertarian public policy. Or as some call it: “neoliberalism.”

      The idea that this sort of  Reaganism took over the country contradicts reality, of course. By virtually every metric—from tax revenues and federal spending per capita, and in to the size of the regulatory state—the size of the American state has expanded relentlessly for more than 40 years. 

      But in many respects the headline is correct. The new Covid relief bill signals that whatever restraint on public spending existed before 2020 is now all but gone. And the bill represents the beginning of a new era: an era that can be likened to the New Deal. This has long been part of the plan according to social democrats and progressives. After all, there’s been a lot of talk from the Left for years about the need for a “new new deal.” Whether it centered on environmentalism or on health care, everyone in these circles agrees on one thing: we needed a new surge in the size and scope of the government sector.

      And now it’s happened. We’re in a new era when an ongoing crisis justifies any number of drastic new measures enacted by governments. To question this, the media and the pundits insist, constitutes “denying science” or “wanting grandma to die.” The only question now is how long this new era of enbridled government expansion will last. 

      Moreover, just as the New Deal turned an ordinary downturn into a decade-long depression—and did nothing to “end” the Depression—this new new deal will only ensure that any real recovery is years away. 

      A Great Leap Forward in Government Spending

      The most visible aspect of this all are the immense increases in government spending that have occurred over the past year.

      While it’s true the Biden administration is signing off on an immense $1.9 trillion “relief” package, the fact is the Trump administration already approved $4 trillion in new spending for covid-19 stimulus and relief bills. The Biden addition will be on top of that. To put this into perspective, keep in mind that during most of the Obama years, total federal outlays ranged from $3.5 to $3.9 trillion. Trump pushed those numbers up even further, topping $4.4 trillion in the 2019 fiscal year. In the 2020 fiscal year (which ended in September) outlays skyrocketed to 6.5 trillion. This doesn’t even capture all of Trump’s stimulus spending. Some of it will count under the 2021 fiscal year, and we still have a long way to go.

      Now Biden has added nearly $2 trillion to that total, and there’s likely to be more “relief” and “stimulus” going forward.

      Meanwhile, the one-year deficit exploded to $3.3 trillion in 2020, more than doubling the $1.4 trillion deficit that piled up in 2009. 

      To make this all possible, of course, the central bank has furiously created newly “printed” money, showering Washington and Wall Street with dollars as the Fed bought up US debt on the secondary market and even began buying corporate debt. Naturally, the Fed’s balance sheet is now well above seven trillion.

      The overall money supply has increased by nearly one-third since last March.

      Both of the US major parties have signed off on this. Political dissent in Congress is absent beyond a tiny handful of Republicans like Thomas Massie. The victory for the New New Dealers has been nearly total. 

      A New Surge in the Executive State and the Regulatory State

      A second major change that has taken place has been the surge in executive and regulatory power across the nation. This also reflects what happened during the original New Deal. As noted by Garet Garret at the time, the transformation of the US into an executive-dominated regime is one of the primary characteristics of the New Deal. What had once been three separate branches, with a dominant legislative branch, the new regime was something else. Now, he pointed out, laws are routinely created within the executive branch itself, and interpreted by administrative law judged within the same branch. The old checks and balances had disappeared. 

      It’s a little different this time, though, as this has perhaps been most noticeable at the state level. In nearly every US state, state governors granted themselves vast new regulatory powers, and ruled by decree.

      Every few weeks—or even every few days in some case—governors announced new regulations on a level of micromanagement that would have been considered unthinkable prior to 2020. Governors continually issued new regulations about how many people were allowed to enter a grocery store or a restaurant. They issued edicts on what sorts of masks employees and customers must wear. They dictated operating hours for all sorts of firms. During March and April, these governors even placed millions of their citizens under house arrest, threatening arrest of peaceful residents who stepped outside for “nonessential” reasons.

      At the federal level, President Trump issued new edicts on federal spending, health care, and international travel. In September, the White House unilaterally declared that landlords were no longer permitted to evict tenants who missed rent. Millions of rental contracts were rendered null and void by a stroke of the president’s pen.

      This was all done in most cases without the passage of any laws through the “traditional” methods of public debate, and legislative processes. Chief executives across the nation simply did as they pleased. 

      Corporatism Ascendant

      Like the original New Deal, much of our New New Deal is built around cushy partnerships between the central government and immense corporate interests.

      Wall Street, for example, has already become accustomed to being bailed out repeatedly by outright cash transfers to big banks and other corporate players—as happened in 2008. But Wall Street also benefits perennially from the so-called Greenspan Put which is a wink-and-nod arrangement between the central bank and the upper echelons of Wall Street.

      Thanks to the Greenspan Put, Wall Street knows that if the stock markets and the financial sector face any substantial losses due to market “instability,” the Fed will intervene with injections of easy money, and asset purchase programs.

      The Fed is still sitting on trillions in junk assets it bought up during the Great Recession to prop up Wall Street’s portfolios.

      With the Covid Panic came a new round of bailouts. Sure, these bailouts weren’t like the 2008 bailouts. Things were more hidden this time around. The asset purchases from the central bank continued and were expanded. Moreover, this time the free money and the cheap loans were ostensibly geared toward medium-sized and small businesses. But, Big Business reaped the greatest rewards.

      For example, the Paycheck Protection Programs (PPP) was supposed to prop up the “little guy.” But as Alana Abramson at Time notes, the reality was something different:

      The implementation of the program, says John Arensmeyer, the CEO of the Small Business Majority, an advocacy group that represents more than 65,000 independent companies, was structurally flawed. Because PPP required banks to act as intermediaries, it created a dynamic wherein larger, more established companies—often with existing relationships and lines of credit with banks—received funds before smaller operations, who feared their collapse was imminent.

      The law’s definitions were also problematic. While PPP defined “small businesses” as entities with up to 500 employees, the law included a provision pertaining to the food and hospitality sectors wherein companies with individual locations of fewer than 500 people were still eligible. That meant that large, multi-million dollar chains, like Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse and Shake Shack were able to apply, often edging out the smaller mom-and-pop enterprises that the law was touted as propping up. 

      This should surprise no one. Since 2008, and with a wave of new regulations imposed on the financial sector, Wall Street and the banks have become all the more geared toward working with large, established firms while smaller businesses, farmers, and other small enterprises find it increasingly difficult to secure loans, and take advantage of the ultra-low interest rates that favor large established firms.

      Don’t expect this to end with Covid. The first New Deal paved the way for the economic regimentation and rationing of the Second World War.  It also set the stage for the war on free speech and the prosecution of “sedition” during the war. Dissent cannot be tolerated during the “crisis,” and once the regime has control of the levers of the economy, it doesn’t let go easily. 

      On there other hand, there are signs of hope. Americans of the 1930s meekly did as they were told. When FDR told American to hand over all their gold via executive order, for instance, the overwhelming majority did so without complaint.  The naive Americans of that age generally believed what their politicians told them. Much of America today appears less primed for compliance. Public trust in government institutions, the media, and public health officials has gone into steep decline.

      This is why Biden complained last week that  confidence in the regime “has been plummeting since the late 60s to what it is now.” So, he’s now, “on a mission to restore faith in government.” The good news is he’s likely to fail. 

      Tyler Durden
      Sun, 03/14/2021 – 21:30

    • "How I Got Rich On Tesla Stock"
      “How I Got Rich On Tesla Stock”

      Satire? Maybe. Truth, definitely.

      “Tesla stock is the new bitcoin… decentralized from ever going down.”

      “…according to my calculations, it’s pretty safe to assume Tesla stock is going to keep ’10x-ing’ every year…”

      “dude, the only thing that can stop Tesla stock from ’10x-ing’ every year, is if it starts ’20x-ing’ every year.”

      “It’s easy to start a profitable car company, you just buy a bunch of bitcoin, which increases in value, which helps you cover all your losses from making cars.”

      “There’s no problem that Elon can’t fix.”

      “…how the f**k is Tesla stock down 35% in the last month?!”

      “…do you think I should sell?”

      Enjoy…

      Tyler Durden
      Sun, 03/14/2021 – 21:05

    • Freelancers Punished In New IRS Rule Under COVID Stimulus
      Freelancers Punished In New IRS Rule Under COVID Stimulus

      By Sovereign Man Blueprint

      A few hundred pages into the latest $1.9 trillion Covid relief law, the “American Rescue Plan Act of 2021,” you’ll find Section 9674. It says that a “third party settlement organization” does not have to report to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) any payments to contract workers under $600.

      These third parties include Uber, Airbnb, Etsy, eBay, Freelancer, and other platforms which facilitate payments to gig workers. The problem is that this little amendment lowers the reporting threshold from $20,000 to $600. Previously, a gig worker could earn up to $20,000 on these platforms without the IRS being informed of their income.

      What this means:

      From this rule change the IRS expects to collect an additional $1 billion annually, presumably from the poorest gig workers who previously earned under $20,000 per year. These low earners previously flew under the radar.

      But now they could be met with surprise bills from the tax man when it comes time to file. And as many of these contractors are living paycheck to paycheck, they may incur additional IRS penalties if they are unable to pay what the IRS says they owe.

      Of course, the same politicians who snuck this into the bill are the ones who declared over and over that their tax policies would only affect millionaires and the ultra wealthy. But now, one of the first things they do is shake down the lowest tax bracket.

      We hope these gig workers enjoy their stimulus checks. They are soon going to learn that nothing is free when it comes to the government. There are always strings attached.

      What you can do about it:

      The good news is that freelancers, gig workers, self-employed individuals, and contractors have a number of tools at their disposal to legally minimize their tax bill.

      Solo 401(k)

      Solo 401(k)s are retirement accounts for business owners and contractors with no full-time employees – only you, part-time and contract labor (those filing an IRS 1099, which signals that they are NOT employees). For the self-employed and those with side hustles, the structure, flexibility, investment options, and annual contribution limits make a Solo 401(k) a potential go-to retirement option.

      In 2021, Solo 401(k) owners can put away $58,000 tax free each year. If you’re 50 or older, that amount goes up to $64,500. The taxes on this income will be paid when you are retired and collect the money, presumably in a lower tax bracket. A Solo 401(k) allows you to take out a loan against your balance, and invest in more asset categories like precious metals, international real estate, and cryptocurrency.

      Plus there are no reporting requirements until the account reaches $250,000. Click here to read a September 2018 Monthly Letter on Solo 401(k)’s (although certain numbers may be out of date, the general information is still accurate).

      Foreign Earned Income Exclusion

      The US is one of only two countries in the world that taxes its citizens no matter where they live. (The other country is Eritrea in east Africa, but they don’t have the resources to enforce their tax policy. So that leaves the US as the sole global enforcer of citizenship-based taxation.)

      But, by moving overseas, US citizens can take advantage of the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion (FEIE), a special provision in the US tax code that allows US citizens living abroad who file Form 2555 along with their tax return to earn up to $108,700 per year (and growing) tax-free.

      “Earned income” means that investment income and dividends do not apply for the exclusion. But self-employed, freelancers, and digital nomads can absolutely take advantage of the rule.

      You can even use the Housing Deduction or Exclusion to save even more.

      Puerto Rico Act 60, Chapter 3 (previously Act 20) Tax Incentive

      Contract workers, freelancers, consultants, and the self-employed can also reduce their tax burden significantly by moving to Puerto Rico and establishing a corporation. This used to be called the Act 20 Export Services Act, now reorganized under Chapter 3 of Act 60. If your company provides services to clients outside of Puerto Rico, the corporate tax rate is just 4% and dividends to the owner are tax free.  You will still have to pay yourself a reasonable salary, subject to federal payroll taxes and Puerto Rico’s income tax. However what is considered “reasonable” in Puerto Rico is often much lower than the mainland.

      Since Puerto Rico is a US territory and can set its own tax policies, it’s one of the only options for US citizens to legally escape most federal taxation.

      Of course this probably won’t help many Uber drivers and Airbnb hosts. But a broad swath of services do work, for example:

      • Research and development
      • Advertising and public relations
      • Any kind of consulting (economic, scientific, environmental, technological, managerial, marketing, human resources, computer, auditing…)
      • Creative industries (design, art, architecture, creative education, etc.)
      • Commercial art and graphics services
      • Professional services (legal, tax, accounting…)
      • Data processing centers
      • Computer programming
      • Blockchain-related businesses
      • Remote medical services (telemedicine)
      • Educational and training services

      Just keep in mind that the clock is ticking on the Puerto Rico incentives. They have already come under attack by certain lawmakers and could be eliminated or altered.

      However, when you are granted these tax incentives, you sign a contract with the Puerto Rican government. Based on past court cases, new rule changes do not alter the agreement you signed. In other words, you are grandfathered in under the rules in effect when you sign the tax decree.

      There is another risk to consider, however— these tax benefits to US citizens would be eliminated if Puerto Rico became a state.

      Tyler Durden
      Sun, 03/14/2021 – 20:40

    • Next All Time High: "1 Day Or 25 Years?"
      Next All Time High: “1 Day Or 25 Years?”

      As DB’s Jim Reid wrote in his latest Friday Thematic Research recap from the last day of the week, Thursday saw the first all-time high in the S&P 500 for a whole month.

      It was nevertheless the 11th ATH in 2021 to date, and if anyone (spuriously) decides to annualize this, it would mean 57 in total for the year which would be the fourth largest behind 1995 (77), 1964 (62) and 2017 (62).

      As Reid observes, such clusters of all-time highs are unsurprisingly focused around secular market valuation highs with the late 1920s, mid 1960s, late 1990s and the current period the obvious points. However, there have also been long periods where we’ve been devoid of ATHs, usually after one of these market peaks. The longest was the 6490 business days between September 1929 and September 1955.

      Between March 2000 and May 2007 we went 1803 business days and between October 2007 and March 2013 we went 1376 business days.

      After the 1960s peak, inflation meant we did see all a few ATHs in the 1970s but in real terms it took well into the late 1980s to hit fresh ATHs. Indeed on a nominal basis we didn’t pass the peak reached in 1968 for the last time until 1982 even as inflation climbed around 280% over the period.

      More recently we seen a much more brisk ascent, if only in nominal terms, thanks to the Fed’s relentless injections of liquidity. AS a result, since 2013 the longest we’ve gone without an ATH was the 286 business days between May 2015 and July 2016.

      And while Friday’s action saw a continuation of the upward momentum in stocks as well as the 12th ATH of the year, Reid is concerned that history suggests that “there might be a point where we have to wait a decade or two for a new one”… however with a new round of stimulus checks now arriving and with US GDP set to grow at near double digits rates – and faster than China – Reid concludes that “perhaps that period will wait for a while yet.”

      Tyler Durden
      Sun, 03/14/2021 – 20:15

    • Small Business Guarantees Are A Bucket Of Moral Fraud
      Small Business Guarantees Are A Bucket Of Moral Fraud

      Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,

      The coronavirus Small Business Relief program is a bucket of first come first serve moral fraud.

      The New York Times says Small-Business Relief Effort ‘a Mess’

      The Hill says Small businesses still struggling for loans even as $100B is approved

      The Trump administration has approved roughly $100 billion of the $350 billion allocated for emergency loans to small businesses devastated by the coronavirus outbreak, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told lawmakers on Wednesday.

      But the figure has done little to ease the rising fears of smaller businesses still struggling to access the funds — and growing ever-more concerned that the program is tilted in favor of larger enterprises with existing relationships with banks.

      The concern from small businesses is simple: they fear the money will run out before they can access it.

      A lot of money [is] first-come, first-serve, and many unbanked people who are underbanked or unserved … don’t have banking relationships, sophisticated in a way that others do,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Wednesday in an interview with NPR.

      Money Might Run Out

      Let’s tap into that idea that money might run out with an investigation of the Small Business Loan Rules.

      ​The program offers loans of up to $10 million to cover eight weeks of payroll plus some additional expenses, like rent and utilities.

      The loan can effectively turn into a grant. Most, and in some cases all, of the loan will be forgiven if a company uses the money to retain workers or hire back positions it had to cut. The S.B.A. has waived many of its usual requirements for these loans and will not require collateral for them.

      Businesses can have their loans forgiven in full if they maintain their full-time equivalent head count (based on a 40-hour workweek) and wages for eight weeks after the loan is disbursed, the Treasury Department said. The agency said that “not more than 25 percent” of the forgiven amount may be used for nonpayroll costs, like rent.

      Companies can borrow up to two months of their average monthly payroll costs for the past year, plus an additional 25 percent, up to $10 million. “Payroll costs” include salary, wages, tips, commissions, paid leave benefits, employer-paid health insurance premiums, and state and local payroll taxes.

      The CARES Act text says that you can claim your “wage, commission, income, net earnings from self-employment or similar compensation,” up to $100,000 a year.

      You’ll have two years to pay off the balance, at a 1 percent interest rate. No payments are due for the first six months after you get the loan.

      Hooray I am Qualified!

      Check this out.

      • Self-employed people are eligible for benefits.

      • Benefits will be based on previous income, using a formula from the disaster unemployment assistance program.

      • Self-employed workers are also eligible for the additional $600 weekly benefit provided by the federal government as part of the CARES Act.

      Moreover, one does not even have to request an amount.

      The S.B.A. will determine how much someone like me can borrow using a formula intended to approximate six months of my operating expenses.

      This is despite the fact that I have not lost a penny in earnings.

      Let that sink in.

      I cannot find any requirement anywhere that prevents someone like me from making an outright bundle.

      Hooray! Six Months Double Income

      Nowhere does the application (that I am aware of) ask me if I have lost any income.

      Even if it did, all I would have to do is stop paying myself salary, let the profits accumulate, and use the loan to cover my previous income.

      Since the loan is used to pay salary, (my own), it would be forgiven. Heck, I could even hire my wife and kids except for the fact I have no kids.

      On top of that, and despite the fact I have not lost a dime, I will receive an automatic check because the government is sending out blanket $1,000 checks to everyone.

      Moral Hazard?

      You bet. I will not take advantage but under the rules I easily could.

      Some will.

      From the Bank Perspective

      Assume the banks are getting flooded with loan requests.

      Who do they want to lend to?

      1. Someone who does not need the money at all and is no credit risk OR

      2. Someone who might go out of business

      Any reasonable credit scoring algorithm would direct these loans to the safest place, category number one.

      Lesson of the Day

      When government fires money out of cannons, it generally does not get into the hands that government intended.

      The more cynical will believe it actually does get to the intended people, just not the alleged beneficiaries.

      Tyler Durden
      Sun, 03/14/2021 – 19:50

    • The "Most Important Question" For Investors: Where Will Biden's Trillions In Stimmys End Up?
      The “Most Important Question” For Investors: Where Will Biden’s Trillions In Stimmys End Up?

      Now that the $1.85 trillion Biden stimulus is officially being deployed with tens of millions of stimmy checks being sent out this weekend to household across the nation, BofA’s Jared Woodard writes that the “most important question” in for investors in 2021 is “what will US households do with their extra money as the economy fully reopens?” or in other words, where will all those stimmy checks go. And while the consensus is that the record “savings glut” will be spent, will the consensus be wrong again? Here, BofA sees two possible outcomes:

      • Big Spending: a sustained real-economy consumption boom, higher wages & services inflation; bullish for GDP, but bearish for stocks because of 1. Fear of Fed tightening and 2. “Mere Rotation”…recent market action shows it’s a zero-sum environment where pro-inflation trades are financed by selling down deflation assets (growth stocks, bonds, EM) as institutional cash levels are low;
      • Big Saving: after an initial surge of leisure & services spending, consumption reverts to trend as structural forces of stagnation reassert themselves; households keep cash directed to saving (cash, debt payments, financial assets), Fed fears subside; net bearish GDP given supreme expectations, but more bullish for markets.

      For what it’s worth, Woodward notes that he previously already expressed some hesitation about the “Big Spending” view last month. To explore this further he looked at the distribution of cash among US households.

      As of Q3 2020 (latest distributional data), the top 20% of households had $10.2tn in liquid assets. The next 20% had $2.3tn, and the bottom 0-60% combined had just $2.7tn. That includes checking accounts, CDs, and money market funds; it doesn’t include equities or bonds.

      What about all o f the post-COVID stimulus, where did that go? From the end of 2019 through September 2020, liquid household assets rose $2.2tn. This number is what monetarists and inflation hedgers are so excited about. Clearly, spending $2tn rapidly into a $21tn economy would be a recipe for a big boom.

      But again, and as we have shown every quarter when we discuss the household balance sheet (which just last week was reported to hit a record $130 trillion as of Dec 31, 2020) the data shows a very skewed situation. The top 20% saw their cash increase by $1.5tn since Covid hit vs. just $0.7tn for everyone else. The top 1% alone saw cash assets rise by nearly as much as the bottom 80% of the country combined. Updated through today, these numbers would reflect even more inequality, as many low-income households had to use their cash during the difficult winter to cover urgent spending needs.

      As Woodard then politely puts in, “In a consumption-based economy like the US (70% of GDP), inequality isn’t just a topic for political debate, it’s a mathematical problem.”

      Whether a given dollar gets spent or saved depends on who’s holding it. One Boston Fed study found that in normal circumstances the bottom 20% of households were likely to spend $0.97 of every dollar earned, while the top 20% spent just $0.48 of every extra dollar. In other words, if the goal is to boost economic activity, sending money to people who will just sit on it may not be very effective.

      That’s why BofA believes that a glut of cash on the balance sheets of already-wealthy households is unlikely to boost inflation in a sustained way.

      How they’ll spend it

      So much for the theory, what about reality? Here, too, there is a problem as recent data confirms that households are still saving much more than usual, even as vaccine distribution accelerates:

      • Consumer credit use in January was a sharp disappointment, falling $1.6bn vs. expectations of a +$12bn rise. Census Bureau data showed that, of households that received a stimulus check in the 1st half of February, 73% saved or paid down debt.

      • BofA aggregated credit and debit card data shows that, among people ages 73-92 (many of whom presumably are already vaccinated), spending on air travel jumped, but not on lodging (visiting family?), with only a small uptick in restaurant spending and no increase in brick-and-mortar retail.

      To get a clearer picture, at the end of February Bank of America surveyed more than 3000 people about how they would use another stimulus check.

      • 30% said they would mostly pay off debts, 25% said they would save it, and 9% said they would invest it. The bank groups all three of these as “saving” in a broad sense, since the payments stay within the financial system and don’t create demand for goods & services in the real economy. Only 36% of respondents said they would spend the money.
      • “Saving” plans were much higher than what history would suggest, in every category. Even among people making less than $30,000/year, 53% of people said they wouldn’t be spending the next round of stimulus.

      When the BofA team then compared consumer plans for 2021 stimulus money with 2020 uses they reported, the financial category saw the largest increase (+1.7% to investing, +0.8% to debt payoffs, and just -0.2% to cash saving).

       

      Needless to say, a rebound in spending (even dramatic in its scope) among high-income households won’t suffice. Why? Because leisure, restaurant, and related travel spending only accounted for 4% of GDP pre-COVID. And work-from-home lockdowns could mark a peak in higher-end consumer spending, as workers returning to offices have less time to shop online.

      Sure, there are some caveats to this survey: maybe people don’t know their own spending patterns that well, or maybe plans will change as springtime hopes yield a mask-ripping summer. Even then, however, BofA’s Woodard notes that after a one-time surge of enthusiasm, if most savings are stuck with wealthy households unlikely to spend, and the bottom 80% devote their excess cash to debts, savings, and stocks anyway, it’s not clear who will be doing all the sustained, voracious consumption markets now are pricing in.

      Why is all of this important?

      Because as BofA explains, having priced in a dramatic rebound in inflation in coming months on the back of anticipated surges in spending, the market may be disappointed as the “fiscal liquidity trap” proves to have a far stronger gravity than most pundits and politicians expect. It would also mean that inflation – after an initial burst higher in mid-2021 – will collapse, and is why BofA expects that year-end core CPI will be just 1.7% as the upcoming June CPI spike fades. Here are some other reasons why Woodard believes that the market is in for a major disinflationary shock in the second half of 2021.

      1. Supply disruptions are temporary. Supply-chain bottlenecks, semiconductor shortages, and manufacturing delays today are likely to be relieved as the labor force returns to work. High prints in manufacturing price indexes (e.g. ISM) largely reflect high commodity prices and therefore headline, not core inflation;

      2. Structural job losses. Post-pandemic work-from-home could mean smaller rebounds in restaurants, in-person retail, and business travel. Progress on AI & automation could mean fewer industrial jobs to return to, especially at the low end. Before the pandemic, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projected the number of low-wage jobs to grow >5% over the next decade; now, there may be a net decline of 0.5%, bad news for 13% of low-wage workers still unemployed;

      3. Union membership is near record lows, just 11% of the workforce today vs. 26% in 1953. Unions are politically almost homeless, with modern Democrats relying less on union votes and more on big tech donors; within the GOP, even “populist” senators haven’t endorsed the unionization vote at Amazon in Alabama.

      4. Capex is coming. In the unlikely event wage growth does accelerate sharply at the low end, companies can accelerate R&D to prevent labor from gaining bargaining power. BofA expects corporate capex to rise 13% in 2021. Note that deflationary tech capex now accounts for nearly 30% of the S&P 500 total, a record high (Exhibit 13);

      5. The baby bust. Already-plunging global birth rates accelerated lower: e.g. the Brookings Institution estimates 300,000 fewer babies born in the US this year because of the pandemic. Global central banks have called this one of the single greatest causes of lower GDP growth and falling interest rates.

      * * *

      Let’s assume BofA is right and spending on goods and services disappoints overwhelmingly. One potential implication is that there would be far more in stimmy checks going into the stock market. But how much?

      Recall that one week ago DB’s Jim Reid asked just this, i.e., “How Much Money Will Biden’s New Stimulus Inject Into The Market“, and wrote that while rising yields are a threat to all risk assets, “it’s worth highlighting that a large amount of the upcoming US stimulus checks will probably find their way into equities.”

      Then, like BofA, he referred to a survey conducted by DB’s chief equity strategist Binky Chadha polling online brokerage account users which suggested they would invest around 37% of future stimulus checks in the stock market (this is well above the 9% response from the similar BofA poll). This is a material force because as Reid notes, “behind the recent surge in retail investing is a younger, often new-to-investing and aggressive cohort not afraid to employ leverage.”

      What does this mean quantitatively? Here is Reid’s math:

      “Given stimulus checks are currently penciled in at c.$405bn in Biden’s plan, that gives us a maximum of around $150bn that could go into US equities based on our survey. Obviously only a proportion of recipients have trading accounts, though. If we estimate this at around 20% (based on some historical assumptions), that would still provide around c.$30bn of firepower – and that’s before we talk about any possible boosts to 401k plans outside of trading accounts.”

      Reid’s conclusion: “stimulus checks could accelerate the large inflows into US equities seen in recent months after many years of weak flow data. Will this be enough to offset any impact of higher yields? Expect this push/pull to continue for some time.”

      Now add to this assessment, BofA’s skepticism which, if correct, would likely mean even more money being allocated toward risk assets, whether blue chips, meme stocks, cryptos or – the latest get rich quick rage – NFTs. This take is bolstered by a recent report from Bloomberg which similarly notes that while many cash-strapped families will use funds from the $1.9 trillion pandemic-relief bill to cover rent or past-due accounts, “another cohort may use the $1,400 payments to ignite the stock market’s next retail frenzy.”

      “I probably will take about half of it to invest into stocks,” said Iyana Halley, a 28-year-old actor who recently appeared in NBC’s television drama “This Is Us.” The Los Angeles resident remains on the fence about which equities to buy, but has been keeping a close watch on social media and seeking guidance from a friend she trusts.

      Actress Iyana Halley

      “I want to see what will make the most sense, where I can get the most out of my money,” Halley said in an interview. “I’m still new to the stock-market world, so trying to figure stuff out.”

      Traders are also hoping to figure it out as soon as possible, because the retail buying may come as soon as Monday once the stimulus checks received over the weekend are invested, giving the Nasdaq 100 Index new wind after it fell into a correction earlier this month amid a crash for some of the market’s most speculative names.

      The checks “could offer a short-term ‘shot in the arm’ to a market that was otherwise looking run-down and vulnerable to a sell-off,” said Sam Stovall, the chief investment strategist at CFRA Research.

      “Stimulus checks will almost certainly drive more retail buying,” said Eric Liu, co-founder of Vanda Research, a firm that tracks retail flows in the U.S. “The social media attention has remained strong.”

      Tyler Hopkins, a 26-year-old computer technician for a school district an hour east of Los Angeles, spent about half of his two previous pandemic stimulus payments on stocks including GameStop Corp. and non-fungible tokens. He plans to buy more shares of retail favorites when the latest payment hits his bank account.

      “I’ve been buying crypto and stocks for a while now, but the stimmys helped pay some bills and I put the rest of them into investing,” Hopkins said.

      So while one can debate about the precision, one thing is clear: tens if not hundreds of billions from the latest Biden Bonanza will end up in the market. Yet for all the excitement that the stimulus payments are stirring up among younger traders looking to make a killing, some investment professionals have been wringing their hands. They worry that unsophisticated newbies buying stocks they heard about from memes or online forums like WallStreetBets could take already stretched valuations even higher.

      “You could say it’s like gasoline on a fire,” said Kimberly Woody, a senior portfolio manager at GLOBALT Investments. It’s “participation from a lot of folks that really just don’t know what they’re doing.

      To be sure, the latest investing spree will merely cap off a retail mania that has been raging for almost a year now. The gamification of investing and consumers seeking entertainment during pandemic lockdowns led to massive surges in stocks generally shunned by the long-term investor community, from companies like Gamestop, AMC Entertainment Holdings and headphone maker Koss Corp. Those bets helped spark massive rallies that featured dizzying bouts of volatility.

      * * *

      Not everyone will spend their stimmy chasing momentum in the latest meme stock however: Halley, the Los Angeles actor, is aware of how dicey it is taking a flyer on the fringes of the stock market, so she’s hedging her bets. She plans to spend the other half of her stimulus on acting classes.

      “I think with stocks or any kind of investment, it’s always going to be a risk,” she said, much to the amazement of financial professionals many of whom realize something Halley does not: the stock market is the final bubble, the one that is now “too big to fail”, and whatever happens the Fed can never let it burst…

      Tyler Durden
      Sun, 03/14/2021 – 19:25

    • Greenwald: The Leading Activists For Online Censorship Are Corporate Journalists
      Greenwald: The Leading Activists For Online Censorship Are Corporate Journalists

      Authored by Glenn Greenwald via Substack,

      There are not many Congressional committees regularly engaged in substantive and serious work — most are performative — but the House Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law is an exception. Led by its chairman Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) and ranking member Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), it is, with a few exceptions, composed of lawmakers whose knowledge of tech monopolies and anti-trust law is impressive.

      In October, the Committee, after a sixteen-month investigation, produced one of those most comprehensive and informative reports by any government body anywhere in the world about the multi-pronged threats to democracy posed by four Silicon Valley monopolies: Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. The 450-page report also proposed sweeping solutions, including ways to break up these companies and/or constrain them from controlling our political discourse and political life. That report merits much greater attention and consideration than it has thus far received.

      The Subcommittee held a hearing on Friday and I was invited to testify along with Microsoft President Brad Smith; President of the News Guild-Communications Workers of America Jonathan Schleuss, the Outkick’s Clay Travis, CEO of the Graham Media Group Emily Barr, and CEO of the News Media Alliance David Chavern. The ostensible purpose the hearing was a narrow one: to consider a bill that would vest media outlets with an exemption from anti-trust laws to collectively bargain with tech companies such as Facebook and Google so that they can obtain a greater share of the ad revenue. The representatives of the news industry and Microsoft who testified were naturally in favor of this bill (they have been heavily lobbying for it) because it would benefit them commercially in numerous way (the Microsoft President maintained the conceit that the Bill-Gates-founded company was engaging in self-sacrifice for the good of Democracy by supporting the bill but the reality is the Bing search engine owners are in favor of anything that weakens Google).

      While I share the ostensible motive behind the bill — to stem the serious crisis of bankruptcies and closings of local news outlets — I do not believe that this bill will end up doing that, particularly because it empowers the largest media outlets such as The New York Times and MSNBC to dominate the process and because it does not even acknowledge, let alone address, the broader problems plaguing the news industry, including collapsing trust by the public (a bill that limited this anti-trust exemption to small local news outlets so as to allow them to bargain collectively with tech companies in their own interest would seem to me to serve the claimed purpose much better than one which empowers media giants to form a negotiating cartel).

      But the broader context for the bill is the one most interesting and the one on which I focused in my opening statement and testimony: namely, the relationship between social media and tech giants on the one hand, and the news media industry on the other. Contrary to the popular narrative propagated by news outlets — in which they are cast as the victims of the supremely powerful Silicon Valley giants — that narrative is sometimes (not always, but sometimes) the opposite of reality: much if not most Silicon Valley censorship of political speech emanates from pressure campaigns led by corporate media outlets and their journalists, demanding that more and more of their competitors and ideological adversaries be silenced. Big media, in other words, is coopting the power of Big Tech for their own purposes.

      My written opening testimony, which is on the Committee’s site, is also printed below. The video of the full hearing can be seen here. Here is the video of my opening five-minute statement:

      My full written statement, which focused on the key role played by corporate news outlets in agitating for online censorship against their competitors and ideological adversaries and the threat that poses to democracy, is printed below:

      Opening Statement of Glenn Greenwald

      March 12, 2021

      Before the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law

      Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee:

      Thank you for the opportunity to testify. 

      I am a constitutional lawyer, a journalist, and the author of six books on civil liberties, media and politics. After graduating New York University School of Law in 1994, I worked as a constitutional and media law litigator for more than a decade, first at the firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, and then at a firm I co-founded in 1997. During my work as a lawyer, I represented numerous clients in First Amendment free speech and press freedom cases, including individuals with highly controversial views who were targeted for punishment by state and non-state actors alike, as well as media outlets subjected to repressive state limitations on their rights of expression and reporting. 

      Since 2005, I have worked primarily as a journalist and author, reporting extensively on civil liberties debates, assaults on free speech and a free press, the value of a free and open internet, the implications of growing Silicon Valley monopolistic power, and the complex relationship between corporate media outlets and social media companies. That reporting has received the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting. In 2013, I co-founded the online news outlet The Intercept, and in 2016 co-founded its Brazilian branch, The Intercept Brazil

      Over the last several years, my journalistic interest in and concern about the dangers of Silicon Valley’s monopoly power has greatly intensified — particularly as wielded by Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. The dangers posed by their growing power manifest in multiple ways. But I am principally alarmed by the repressive effect on free discourse, a free press, and a free internet, all culminating in increasingly intrusive effects on the flow of information and ideas and an increasingly intolerable strain on a healthy democracy.

      Three specific incidents over the last four months represent a serious escalation in the willingness of tech monopolies to intrude into and exert control over our domestic politics through censorship and other forms of information manipulation: 

      1. In the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election, The New York Post, the nation’s oldest newspaper, broke a major story based on documents and emails obtained from the laptop of Hunter Biden, son of the front-running presidential candidate Joe Biden. Those documents shed substantial light not only on the efforts of Hunter and other family members of President Biden to trade on his name and their influence on him for lucrative business deals around the world, but also raised serious questions about the extent to which President Biden himself was aware of and involved in those efforts.

      But Americans were barred from discussing that reporting on Twitter, and were actively impeded from reading about it by Facebook. 

      That is because Twitter imposed a full ban on its users’ ability to link to the story: not just on their public Twitter pages but even in private Twitter chats. Twitter even locked the account of The New York Post, preventing the newspaper from using that platform for almost two weeks unless they agreed to voluntarily delete any references to their reporting about the Hunter Biden materials (the paper, rightfully, refused).

      Facebook’s censorship of this reporting was more subtle and therefore more insidious: a life-long Democratic Party operative who is now a Facebook official, Andy Stone, announced (on Twitter) that Facebook would be “reducing [the article’s] distribution on our platform” pending a review “by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners.” In other words, Facebook tinkered with its algorithms to prevent the dissemination of this reporting about a long-time politician who was leading the political party for which this Facebook official spent years working (See The Intercept, “Facebook and Twitter Cross a Far More Dangerous Line Than What They Censor,” Oct. 15, 2020).

      This “fact-check” promised by Facebook never came. That is likely because it was not the New York Post’s reporting which turned out to be false but rather the claims made by these two social media giants to justify its suppression. The censorship justification was that the documents on which the reporting was based constituted either “hacked materials” and/or “Russian disinformation.” 

      Neither of those claims is true. Even the FBI has acknowledged that there is no evidence whatsoever of any involvement by the Russian government in the procurement of that laptop, and not even the Biden family, to this very day, has claimed that a single word contained in the published documents is fabricated or otherwise inauthentic. Ample evidence — including the testimony of others involved in the original creation and circulation of those documents — demonstrates that they were fully genuine.

      This means that two of the largest and most powerful Silicon Valley giants suppressed crucial information about a leading presidential candidate — the one which employees at their companies overwhelmingly supported — shortly before voting commenced. While Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey apologized for this banning and acknowledged that it may have been wrong, Facebook has never done so. 

      While we will never know whether this censorship altered the outcome of the election, it is clear that this was one of the most direct acts of information repression about an American presidential election in decades. That was possible only because of the vast power wielded by these platforms over our political discourse and our political lives.

      2. In the wake of the January 6 riot at the Capitol, Facebook, Google, Twitter and numerous other Silicon Valley giants united to remove the democratically elected sitting President of the United States from their platforms.

      While many defenders of this corporate censorship tried to minimize it by claiming the President could still be heard by giving speeches and holding press conferences, several leading news outlets followed suit by announcing that they would not carry his speeches live and would only allow to be heard the excerpts they deemed to be safe and responsible.

      In response, numerous world leaders — including several who had clashed in the past with President Trump — expressed grave concerns about the dangers posed to democracy by the ability of tech monopolies to effectively remove even democratically elected leaders from the internet.

      German Chancellor Angela Merkel argued through her spokesperson that “it is problematic that the president’s accounts have been permanently suspended,” adding that “the right to freedom of opinion is of fundamental importance.” Attempts to regulate speech, the Chancellor said, “can be interfered with, but by law and within the framework defined by the legislature — not according to a corporate decision.”

      The European Union’s Commissioner for Internal Markets Thierry Breton warned: “The fact that a CEO can pull the plug on POTUS’s loudspeaker without any checks and balances is perplexing.” Commissioner Breton noted that this collective Silicon Valley ban “is not only confirmation of the power of these platforms, but it also displays deep weaknesses in the way our society is organized in the digital space.” (CNBC, “Germany’s Merkel hits out at Twitter over ‘problematic’ Trump ban,” Jan. 21, 2021).

      The Health Secretary for the United Kingdom, Matt Hanckock, sounded similar alarms. Speaking to the BBC, he said “‘tech giants are ‘taking editorial decisions’ that raise a ‘very big question’ about how social media is regulated,” adding: “That’s clear because they’re choosing who should and shouldn’t have a voice on their platform” (CNBC, “Trump’s social media bans are raising new questions on tech regulation,” Jan. 11, 2021). 

      Objections to Silicon Valley’s removal of President Trump from their platforms were even more severe from officials with the government of French President Emmanuel Macron. The French Minister for European Union Affairs Clement Beaune pronounced himself “shocked” by the news of President Trump’s banning, arguing: “This should be decided by citizens, not by a CEO.” And France’s Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said: “There needs to be public regulation of big online platforms,” calling big tech “one of the threats” to democracy (Bloomberg News, “Germany and France Oppose Trump’s Twitter Exile,” Jan. 11, 2021).

      Perhaps the most fervent and eloquent warnings about the dangers posed by this episode came from Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. In a press conference held the day after the announcement, he said:

      It’s a bad omen that private companies decide to silence, to censor. That is an attack on freedom. Let’s not be creating a world government with the power to control social networks, a world media power. And also a censorship court, like the Holy Inquisition, but in order to shape public opinion. This is really serious.

      The Associated Press further quoted President López Obrador as asking: “How can a company act as if it was all powerful, omnipotent, as a sort of Spanish Inquisition on what is expressed?.” And AP confirmed that “ Mexico’s president vowed to lead an international effort to combat what he considers censorship by social media companies that have blocked or suspended the accounts of U.S. President Donald Trump,” and is “reaching out to other governments to form a common front on the issue” (Associated Press, “Mexican President Mounts Campaign Against Social Media Bans,” Jan. 14, 2021).

      Please listen to the Mexican President’s warnings about Silicon Valley censorship when asked about the Trump ban. Following the center-right Chancellor Merkel, the leftist AMLO said they were becoming “a world media power” anointing themselves “judges of the Holy Inquisition”: pic.twitter.com/5cL5vqq3Ug

      — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 11, 2021

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      These world leaders are expressing the same grave concern: that Silicon Valley giants wield power that is, in many instances, greater than that of any sovereign nation-state. But unlike the governments which govern those countries, tech monopolies apply these powers arbitrarily, without checks and without transparency. When doing so, they threaten not only American democracy but democracies around the world.

      3. Critics of Silicon Valley power over political discourse for years have heard the same refrain: if you don’t like how they are moderating content and policing discourse, you can go start your own social media platform that is more permissive. Leaving aside the centuries-old recognition that it is impossible, by definition, to effectively compete with monopolies, we now have an incident vividly proving how inadequate that alternative is. 

      Several individuals who primarily identify as libertarians heard this argument from Silicon Valley’s defenders and took it seriously. They set out to create a social media competitor to Twitter and Facebook — one which would provide far broader free expression rights for users and, more importantly, would offer greater privacy protections than other Silicon Valley giants by refusing to track those users and commoditize them for advertisers. They called it Parler, and in early January, 2021, it was the single most-downloaded app in the Apple Play Store. This success story seemed to be a vindication for the claim that it was possible to create competitors to existing social media monopolies.

      But now, a mere two months after it ascended to the top of the charts, Parler barely exists. That is because several members of Congress with the largest and most influential social media platforms demanded that Apple and Google remove Parler from their stores and ban any further downloading of the app, and further demanded that Amazon, the dominant provider of web hosting services, cease hosting the site. Within forty-eight hours, those three Silicon Valley monopolies complied with those demands, rendering Parler inoperable and effectively removing it from the internet (See “How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler,” Glenn Greenwald, Jan. 12, 2021).

      The justification of this collective banning was that Parler had hosted numerous advocates of and participants in the January 6 Capitol riot. But even if that were a justification for removing an entire platform from the internet, subsequent reporting demonstrated that far more planning and advocacy of that riot was done on other platforms, including Facebook, Google-owned YouTube, Instagram and Twitter (See The Washington Post, “Facebook’s Sandberg deflected blame for Capitol riot, but new evidence shows how platform played role,“ Jan. 13, 2021; Forbes, “Sheryl Sandberg Downplayed Facebook’s Role In The Capitol Hill Siege—Justice Department Files Tell A Very Different Story,” Feb. 7, 2021).

      Whatever else one might want to say about the destruction of Parler, it was a stark illustration of how these Silicon Valley giants could obliterate even a highly successful competitor overnight, with little effort, by uniting to do so. And it laid bare how inadequate is the claim that Silicon Valley’s monopolies can be challenged through competition.

      How Congress sets out to address Silicon Valley’s immense and undemocratic power is a complicated question, posing complex challenges. The proposal to vest media companies with an antitrust exemption in order to allow them to negotiate as a consortium or cartel seeks to rectify a real and serious problem — the vacuuming up of advertising revenue by Google and Facebook at the expense of the journalistic outlets which create the news content being monetized — but empowering large media companies could easily end up creating more problems than it solves.

      That is particularly so given that it is often media companies that are the cause of Silicon Valley censorship of and interference in political speech of the kind outlined above. When these social media companies were first created and in the years after, they wanted to avoid being in the business of content moderation and political censorship. This was an obligation foisted upon them, often by the most powerful media outlets using their large platforms to shame these companies and their executives for failing to censor robustly enough. 

      Sometimes this pressure was politically motivated — demanding the banning of people whose ideologies sharply differs from those who own and control these media outlets — but more often it was motivated by competitive objectives: a desire to prevent others from creating independent platforms and thus diluting the monopolistic stranglehold that corporate media outlets exert over our political discourse. Further empowering this already-powerful media industry — which has demonstrated it will use its force to silence competitors under the guise of “quality control” — runs the real risk of transferring the abusive monopoly power from Silicon Valley to corporate media companies or, even worse, encouraging some sort of de facto merger in which these two industries pool their power to the mutual benefit of each.

      This Subcommittee produced one of the most impressive and comprehensive reports last October detailing the dangers of the classic monopoly power wielded by Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple. That report set forth numerous legislative and regulatory solutions to comply with the law and a consensus of economic and political science experts about the need to break up monopolies wherever they arise. 

      Until that is done, none of these problems can be addressed in ways other than the most superficial, piecemeal and marginal. Virtually every concern that Americans across the political spectrum express about the dangers of Silicon Valley power emanates from the fact that they have been permitted to flout antitrust laws and acquire monopoly power. None of those problems — including their ability to police and control our political discourse and the flow of information — can be addressed until that core problem is resolved. 

      What is most striking is that while Silicon Valley censorship of online speech and interference in political discourse is recognized as a grave menace to a healthy democracy around the democratic world, it is often dismissed in the U.S. — especially by journalists — as some sort of trivial “culture war” question when they are not actively cheering and even demanding more of it. Even more bizarre is that opposition to oligarchical censorship and monopoly power is often depicted by the liberal-left as a right-wing cause, largely because they perceive (inaccurately) that such oligarchical discourse policing will operate in their favor.

      Whatever labels one wants to apply to it, it should not require much work to recognize that vesting this magnitude of power in the hands of unaccountable billionaires, who operate outside the democratic process yet are highly influenced by public media-led pressure campaigns, is unsustainable.

      Tyler Durden
      Sun, 03/14/2021 – 19:00

    • Marines Admit 'Messing Up' For Attacking Tucker Carlson Over 'Pregnant Soldiers' Commentary
      Marines Admit ‘Messing Up’ For Attacking Tucker Carlson Over ‘Pregnant Soldiers’ Commentary

      The US Marines admitted to ‘messing up’ after ganging up on Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who mocked the military’s shift from defense to social justice issues – after remarks by President Biden on International Women’s Day on how he’d nominated two women for four-star command positions in the armed forces.

      So we’ve got new hairstyles, maternity flight suits. Pregnant women are going to fight our wars,” Carlson said on Wednesday night, adding “It’s a mockery of the US military” before he compared the US military to China’s – which is “becoming more masculine.”

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      Following Carlson’s segment, the official Twitter account for the II Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group joined a pile-on by several woke military officials – tweeting a picture of a female soldier carrying a male soldier, tagging Carlson with the caption “what it looks like in today’s armed forces,” adding “Get right before you get left, boomer.”

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      After the Marines were called out for using their official platform to further a SJW agenda, they admitted “We are human and we messed up.”

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      Also slamming Carlson was Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, who said “What we absolutely don’t do is take personnel advice from a talk show host.”

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      Tucker responded to the Defense Department’s criticism, saying “If the Pentagon can show that pregnant pilots are the best, we will be the first to demand an entire air force of them,” adding “The US military is not a vehicle for achieving equity.”

      Responses have not been kind to the woke Marines.  

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      Tyler Durden
      Sun, 03/14/2021 – 18:35

    • Hedge Fund CIO: "Ethereum Now Races Toward Becoming The Foundation Of A New Global Financial System"
      Hedge Fund CIO: “Ethereum Now Races Toward Becoming The Foundation Of A New Global Financial System”

      From Eric Peter, CIO Of One River Asset Management, who in November executed a $600 million purchase of bitcoin, then the largest public transaction to date, with the blessing of Brevan Howard’s Alan Howard. He has called bitcoin the most interesting macro trade he’s seen in thirty years in the business.

      “Okay, so now please explain how these things are going to change the world,” asked the CIO.

      He was not referring to the global transition to monetary/fiscal policy coordination which will interact with political, social and geopolitical forces to create a future quite unlike our recent past. We had already discussed that. He was asking about digital assets, blockchain, tokenization.

      Virtualization. It is no longer possible to understand what is happening in markets, let alone what is to come, without developing a deep understanding of these things.

      “It is not that they are going to change the world,” I said. “It is that they are already quietly changing the world, markets, and beneath the surface the process is accelerating faster than you can imagine.”

      * * *

      “I feel super lucky,” said an artist who calls himself Beeple, in an online forum, upon learning that bidders lifted his digital collage to $20mm in Christie’s virtual auction. “Everydays – The First 5000 Days” ultimately sold for $69.3mm to an investor who calls himself Metakovan, the founder of Metapurse, a fund that collects non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

      Metakovan paid in ether, which for the 7.70bln of earth’s 7.75bln people who do not yet know, is the digital currency of the Ethereum network. That network resides in the cloud, which virtually no one can quite comprehend even as it becomes integral to nearly all our activities.

      And Ethereum, despite almost no one understanding what it is, now races toward becoming the foundation of a rearchitected global financial system.

      “I didn’t see this coming,” remarked Beeple, now the world’s 3rd most expensive living artist. Such is the pace of change, that not even our artists can see beyond the horizon. We now live in a world where a Beeple can produce a virtual image, tokenized into an NFT, and purchased in a virtual auction by a Metakovan for 38,382 ether, settled on the Ethereum network, instantly, securely, all in the cloud, without the need for a legacy bank, or a single dollar.

      Every aspect of the transaction, from Beeple’s creation of something from nothing to Metakovan’s acquisition of something in exchange for nothing, is high performance art. Sublime. A testament to human imagination, ingenuity, evolution. A glimpse of a wild, unrecognizable future.

      “I feel like I got a steal,” said Metakovan, transmitting his ether to Christie’s. Naturally, unimaginative skeptics remain stuck in the past, seeking reckless safety in yesteryear’s risk-free assets, or else hedging fears of monetary debasement with investments that will work if the virtual future resembles the industrialized 1970s.

      The hostile pundits, of course, see manias in all things digital. But throughout human history, not a single bubble ever burst when virtually no one understood what was going on. Rather, that was when the fun had only just begun.

      * * *

      Wait What? Everything you will ever own or have ever traded will be tokenized someday in some way. Take art. A token will be generated by a smart contract and permanently linked to the work. Both ownership and authenticity of the art is verifiable. That token can be traded. Ownership can be split, allowing fractional tokenized ownership. When the piece is sold in the future, the artist can earn a portion of the proceeds if that was built into the contract. Anything can be built into these new contracts, embedded into the code, instantly processed, in perpetuity.

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      One Hand: At the 2000 peak, how many friends owned loads of internet stocks? How many explained why those companies would change the world? How many traded dotcom stocks actively? In 2007, how many were highly levered to housing? How many believed real estate never goes down? Or believed they were experts? How many flipped a house? And how many do you now know who are highly leveraged to digital assets? Or understand how they work? Or could explain the $69.3mm Beeple NFT transaction? Could you count them on just one hand?

      Tyler Durden
      Sun, 03/14/2021 – 18:10

    • Merkel's Party Suffers Stunning Defeats In 2 German States Amid Bungled Pandemic Response
      Merkel’s Party Suffers Stunning Defeats In 2 German States Amid Bungled Pandemic Response

      Projections show that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union party just got rocked by clear defeats in two German state elections Sunday. Significantly it’s being widely interpreted as a severe setback and sign of things to come just six months ahead national voting to determine who will lead the country. Though Merkel – who has been in power since 2005 – is not running, the CDU hoped to capitalize off her past four consecutive national election victories. 

      It appears Sunday’s resounding message is the bloc’s dominance is coming to a swift end. Two governors seen as further to the left are the projected winners in the southwestern states of Baden-Wuerttemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate, riding a wave of popular discontent over Merkel’s perceived bungling of the pandemic crisis and the government response. 

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      As The Associated Press comments, “Amid discontent over a sluggish start to Germany’s vaccination drive, with coronavirus restrictions easing only gradually and infections rising again…”

      And additionally Merkel’s bloc was “hit over the past two weeks by allegations that two lawmakers profited from deals to procure masks early in the coronavirus pandemic.”

      Based on current polling data it stands to be the CDU’s worst post-World War II defeat in both states. Here’s a breakdown of the projections based on exit polls:

      Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) already faced a challenging task against two popular state governors from rival parties. Exit polls for ARD and ZDF television indicated that those governors’ parties – the environmentalist Greens in Baden-Wuerttemberg and the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) in Rhineland-Palatinate – were set to finish first, some 8 percentage points ahead of the CDU.

      The Greens won 31.5 percent of the vote in Baden-Wuerttemberg and the CDU 23 percent, down from the 27 percent it polled at the last state election in 2016, according to the ZDF polls.

      In neighboring Rhineland-Palatinate, the SPD came first again with 33.5 percent of the vote ahead of the CDU, which led there in opinion polls until last month but was projected to have secured only 25.5 percent support in Sunday’s election.

      Via AFP

      Christian Democratic Union general secretary, Paul Ziemiak, said as the results were being tallied, “To say it very clearly, this isn’t a good election evening for the CDU.” He added, “We would have liked different, better results.”

      “The CDU has seen its national popularity wane from 40% last June, when Germany was widely praised for its response to the coronavirus pandemic, to around 33% this month,” Reuters noted in its prior analysis. 

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      Various German and other European media are predicting this marks the beginning of a glimpse of life after Angela Merkel. 

      Tyler Durden
      Sun, 03/14/2021 – 17:45

    • Stockman: Free Lunches For All?
      Stockman: Free Lunches For All?

      Authored by David Stockman via InternationalMan.com,

      In light of Sleepy Joe’s new $1.9 trillion package of free stuff, it’s time to get out our magnifying glasses. The purpose is to compute the size of the hole in America’s collective paycheck that purportedly requires such continued, beneficence from our not-so-rich Uncle Sam.

      There is no reason in the world why the February (pre-Covid) level of wage and salary disbursements is not an appropriate benchmark for measuring the pocketbook hit from the Covid-lockdowns that have wreaked havoc on the US economy since March. This happened after Dr. Fauci convinced President Donald to pull the plug on MAGA and his own tenure in office, too. (Of course, 80-year-old Dr. Fauci is still there, preparing to bamboozle yet another “elected” president.)

      Last February, The Donald was boasting that he had delivered the greatest economy the world had ever seen, and Wall Street agreed, pushing stocks high into the nosebleed section of history.

      As it happened, the February run rate (annualized) of wage and salary disbursements was $9.659 trillion, which comes to about $805 billion per month. So we would suggest that if $805 billion in monthly wages was enough to justify celebration of the Greatest Economy Ever, then the shortfall from that benchmark is a solid measure of the hit to US worker earnings that has occurred since February.

      The Covid wage and salary loss is as follows:

      • March: −$25b;

      • April: –$76b;

      • May: –$61b;

      • June: –$43b;

      • July: –$31b;

      • August: –$19b;

      • September: –$12b;

      • October: –$6b;

      • November: –$3b;

      • December est: $0b;

      • 10-month total: –$276b

      The total of $276 billion in lost paychecks compares to $8.05 trillion in wages and salaries that would have been earned during that period at the February rate ($805 billion). Therefore, the cumulative shortfall through year-end amounted to just 3.4%.

      More importantly, the $0-$6 billion monthly shortfall since September has been so small as to constitute a rounding error in the scheme of things, as suggested by the fact that American households spend far more—about $8 billion per month—on pet food and pet care alone.

      Yet Sleepy Joe has teed up another $850 billion of direct aid to households, which, in the aggregate, are no longer suffering any material paycheck shortfall. And what is especially egregious about filling a nonexistent income hole in this manner is that 53% of this amount goes to “stimmy” checks and child tax credits, which are not means-tested except at the top of the income scale ($200,000 for a married couple):

      Sleepy Joe’s $850 Billion of Direct Handouts to Households:

      • Stimmy checks and child tax credits: $450b;

      • Unemployment benefits: $200b;

      • Health insurance aid: $100b;

      • Rental assistance: $35b;

      • Child care aid: $40b

      • Safety net: $20b

      Still, to paraphrase Walter Mondale’s famous campaign slogan from 1984: Another $850 billion for income replacement but “Where’s the Hole?”

      Of course, there are other ways to measure the hit to the national economy from the Covid lockdown, which we will amplify below. But first, it would be well to summarize the “solution” that Washington’s fiscally incontinent politicians have thrown at the “problem” during the last 12 months—a “problem” that they have never bothered to quantify.

      With the new Biden package, new spending authorized by the five major Covid relief measures can be summarized as follows (IN billions):

      • Families First act: $192b;

      • CARES act: $2,200b;

      • Paycheck Protection program: $733b;

      • Response and Relief Act: $935b;

      • Biden Jan. 14th plan: $1,900b;

      • Five-package total: $5,960b.

      The Washington politicians are preparing to throw nigh onto $6 trillion at a $274 billion hole in the nation’s wage bucket. That’s a solution 22X bigger than the putative problem!

      The overwhelming share of the economic harm occurring since March is due to the misguided (and unconstitutional) lockdown policies of the government and the public hysteria fanned by Dr. Fauci, and not the disease itself. But if the state gets into the business of fully compensating the public for the endless harm wrought by its policies, insolvency will be guaranteed.

      Why does Washington have the right to burden future taxpayers with permanent debt service payments in order to make whole a $276 billion loss of income and 3.4% inconvenience among taxpayers today?

      The simple fact is that the overwhelming share of this $276 billion of wage losses has fallen on low-wage and part-time workers in the social–congregation sectors of the economy (bars, restaurants, gyms, hotels, cinemas, ballparks, etc.) that the Virus Patrol has shut down. The right solution is to send the Virus Patrol packing and let these unfairly penalized employees go back to work.

      Even if you think that the total wage and salary loss above understates the economic damage caused by the lockdowns, the massive fiscal overkill by way of bailouts cannot be denied.

      For instance, GDP is the most comprehensive measure of economic activity that we have (despite its flaws), but the loss of GDP after February has also been only about 3.6%. In fact, based on the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow forecast, we project that nominal GDP during Q4 will post at about $21.650 trillion, a figure only 0.46% below the Greatest Economy Ever level of Q4 2019.

      If we assume that Q4 2019 is a reasonable pre-Covid benchmark for the level of total economic activity in the USA, we get the following shortfall, including an estimate for Q4 based on the Atlanta Fed’s latest outlook.

      Quarterly GDP Change From Q42019 Benchmark:

      • Q1 2020: -$47b;

      • Q2 2020: -$557b;

      • Q3 2020: -$144b;

      • Q4 2020E: -$25b;

      • 4-quarter total: -$775b

      Even if you want to count everything, including losses from the $2.5 trillion of imputed activity in the GDP, the pending $6 trillion of Everything Bailouts is 7.7X the size of the problem!

      By contrast, it is well worth looking at the other side of the coin: namely, the surge in transfer payments since last February stemming from a combination of the built-in safety net (principally unemployment insurance, food stamps and Medicaid) and disbursements of stimmy checks, enhanced Federal UI benefits as authorized by the Everything Bailouts.

      At the pre-covid level in February, total government transfer payments (including state and local) were running at a $3.165 trillion annual rate or about $265 billion per month. As shown in the chart below, however, that monthly figure skyrocketed by 107% to $546 billion in the month of April alone.

      And, no, that latter figure is not the annualized rate: In their infinite generosity, government programs pumped more than one-half trillion dollars into the household sector during April alone. That’s $18.2 billion per day!

      Thereafter, the tsunami of transfer payments began to abate but was still running at a level of $400 billion monthly in July and $306 billion in November. Overall, the 10-month total of incremental transfer payments above the February level totaled $1.05 trillion.

      You can’t make this up… Transfer payments to households during the past 10 months have exceeded the loss of household wages and salaries ($276 billion) by nearly four times.

      So the question recurs: Why does Sleepy Joe think we need another $850 billion of transfer payments to households on top of the immense generosity already dispensed per the chart below?

      Total Government Transfer Payments, Annualized

      He’s doing it because he can—because the nation-wreckers in the Eccles Building have determined to purchase $120 billion of government debt and GSE securities per month for the indefinite future. As Fed Chair Powell rattled on recently, they are not even thinking about tapering this tsunami of fake money created from thin air by the Fed’s digital printing presses.

      When it comes to the rampant fiscal incontinence in Washington DC enabled by the Fed, did the election outcome make any difference?

      It did not. Sleepy Joe is about to give the once and former King of Debt a run for his money when it comes to the annals of fiscal infamy in America.

      As we said, free lunches for one and all… except the debt is never going away, and future generations will surely rue the day.

      *  *  *

      The truth is, we’re on the cusp of a economic crisis that could eclipse anything we’ve seen before. And most people won’t be prepared for what’s coming. That’s exactly why bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released a free report with all the details on how to survive an economic collapse. Click here to download the PDF now.

      Tyler Durden
      Sun, 03/14/2021 – 17:20

    • "Out Of Control" Brush Fire Sweeps Through New Jersey Town 
      “Out Of Control” Brush Fire Sweeps Through New Jersey Town 

      Several Mid-Atlantic and Northeast states are under “Red Flag Warning” on Sunday afternoon, which means critical fire weather conditions are underway. With that being said, reports are pouring in on social media of a dangerous brush fire sweeping through Lakewood, New Jersey. 

      The Lakewood Police Department said the brush fire was initially reported on Airport Road around 1300 ET. Video posted to Twitter by The Lakewood Scoop showed the inferno. 

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      The fire has engulfed multiple building structures. 

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      Dozens of firefighters from surrounding towns have arrived on the scene. 

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      The brush fire appears to be expanding. 

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      Firefighters are battling the blaze as it rips through a residential community. 

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      Highways and roads around the incident area are closed as the fire continues to spread. Reports now show one firefighter has been injured. 

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      More views of the large brush fire in Jersey. 

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      Route 70 has been shut down. 

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      A helicopter with a specialized bucket suspended on a cable is now combating the fire. 

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      Firefighters are at a Lowe’s on Route 70.

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      Possible commercial zone ablaze. 

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      “Blaze is currently out of control,” The Lakewood Scoop tweeted.

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      This situation appears to be deteriorating: “Business-owners attempting to extinguish fires near their shops,” the local paper said.

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      A brush fire has developed near Costco on Route 70.

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      The smoke plume from Lakewood is showing up on the radar. 

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      More businesses are in the path of the fire. 

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      Hilton hotel in Lakewood was evacuated as the wildfire dangerously approaches the structure. 

      Air quality has rapidly deteriorated in the area. 

      “This story is developing… 

      Tyler Durden
      Sun, 03/14/2021 – 16:55

    • Backlash As Rich Countries Vaccinate A Person Per Second With Poor Nations Alleging "Vaccine Apartheid"
      Backlash As Rich Countries Vaccinate A Person Per Second With Poor Nations Alleging “Vaccine Apartheid”

      Authored by Jake Johnson via CommonDreams.org,

      The governments of the world’s wealthiest countries—including the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom—are facing growing backlash for continuing to block an India and South Africa-led proposal to temporarily waive a restrictive global intellectual property rights agreement, an effort aimed at spurring broad-based production of coronavirus vaccines and getting the shots to poor nations struggling to administer a single dose.

      According to Oxfam International, a member of the People’s Vaccine Alliance, “rich countries are vaccinating at a rate of one person per second yet are siding with a handful of pharmaceutical corporations in protecting their monopolies against the needs of the majority of developing countries.”

      Image: Hindustan Times via Getty Images

      On Thursday—the one-year anniversary of the WHO’s official global pandemic declaration—representatives from the U.S. and other wealthy nations teamed up to thwart, once again, the push by more than 100 member nations of the World Trade Organization to suspend certain provisions of the so-called TRIPS Agreement, an intellectual property rights arrangement.

      “The proposal was co-sponsored by 57 countries in the trade group and on Thursday support split largely along the lines of the WTO’s self-identified developed and developing countries,” Law360 reported. “The only developing country to oppose the waiver was Brazil.”

      Supporters of the waiver argue the prohibitive patent rights that governments have granted to private pharmaceutical companies are standing in the way of the kind of global vaccination campaign needed to stop the spread of a virus that does not respect borders. Fearing the emergence and normalization of “vaccine apartheid,” the head of the WHO and others have raised alarm over the fact that more than 100 poor nations have not yet been able to start inoculating their populations.

      “It is unforgivable that while people are literally fighting for breath, rich country governments continue to block what could be a vital breakthrough in ending this pandemic for everyone in rich and poor countries alike,” Anna Marriott, Oxfam’s health policy manager, said in a statement.

      “During a pandemic that is devastating lives across the planet,” added Marriott, “governments should be using their powers now, not tomorrow, to remove intellectual property rules and ensure pharmaceutical companies work together to share technology and fix raw material shortages, all of which are standing in the way of a massive scale-up in production.”

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      Despite a fierce lobbying campaign by the pharmaceutical industry in the US and elsewhere, support for the India-South Africa proposal has grown since the effort was first tabled in October, with dozens of U.S. members of Congress and more than 100 members of the European Parliament joining a supermajority of WTO member nations in backing the idea. Voicing support for the proposal, one commentator recently called it “an existential threat to the continuing practice of treating medicines as a commodity.”

      “There is no reason we have to prioritize the profits of pharmaceutical companies over the dignity of people in other countries,” U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) told the New York Times last week.

      In a video released on Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) urged President Joe Biden to support the TRIPS waiver, arguing that “ending this pandemic requires collaboration, solidarity, and empathy.”

      “It is unconscionable,” said Sanders, “that amid a global health crisis, huge multibillion dollar pharmaceutical companies continue to prioritize profits by protecting their monopolies and driving up prices rather than prioritizing the lives of people everywhere, including in the Global South.”

      As the Corporate Europe Observatory reported, “If know-how and vaccine recipes are shared, generic manufacturers could start supplying the countries in the back of the queue, for instance the 85 nations set to receive vaccines only in two years time.”

      “Had it not been for the stiff resistance by the US, Switzerland, Norway, and not least the E.U., that vision could have become a reality,” the organization noted. “But the European Commission has shown no sign of budging at the WTO negotiations. At a meeting in Geneva on 11 March the EU’s rejection was reiterated.”

      With the U.S. facing accusations of vaccine hoarding as it buys up enough supply to inoculate the eligible population twice over—and refuses to donate excess doses to countries pleading for them—Biden on Friday announced an agreement with Japan, India, and Australia to bolster global vaccine production with the stated goal of remedying shortages in Southeast Asia.

      As the Times reported, “the Biden administration committed to providing financial support to help Biological E, a major vaccine manufacturer in India, produce at least one billion doses of coronavirus vaccines by the end of 2022.”

      While viewed as a welcome addition to lagging global vaccination efforts, the deal falls well short of the sweeping recipe-sharing that experts and activists say is required to ensure that no one is denied access to a life-saving shot.

      Calling the new agreement a “step in the right direction,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said Saturday that Biden must now “take the next step and endorse the TRIPS waiver.”

      “The waiver is supported by over 100 countries and being opposed by only a handful of rich countries,” Schakowsky noted. “The world needs as much vaccine manufacturing capacity as it can get. Time is of the essence.”

      Tyler Durden
      Sun, 03/14/2021 – 16:30

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    Today’s News 14th March 2021

    • China's Arctic Ambitions Pose Growing Threat To Canadian Interests, Top Defence Official Warns
      China’s Arctic Ambitions Pose Growing Threat To Canadian Interests, Top Defence Official Warns

      Authored by Andrew Chen via The Epoch Times,

      China’s geo-political ambition in the Arctic is posing a growing threat to Canadian interests, a top Defence official warned.

      Defence Deputy Minister Jody Thomas told the Ottawa Conference on Security and Defence on Wednesday that as melting ice opens up the Arctic Ocean, Beijing has set eyes on the Northwest Passage for new shipping routes and resource extraction, including fish, fossil fuel, and minerals.

      “We should not underestimate at all that threat of resource exploitation in the Arctic by China in particular,” Thomas said, according to a Globe and Mail report.

      “China has a voracious appetite and will stop at nothing to feed itself, and the Arctic is one of the last domains and regions left and we have to understand it and exploit it and more quickly than they can exploit it,” she said.

      Last December, Ottawa blocked a Chinese state-owned company from taking over a Nunavut gold mine, which would give Beijing a stronger foothold in the Arctic. David Harris, a former contractor with the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, previously told The Epoch Times that a deal with China would have posed serious security and economic threats to Canada.

      Beijing’s aggressive moves to control rare-earth minerals—material that is crucial for the high-tech and military industries—and its plans to seize minerals in Canada’s northern region prompted the United States and Canada to develop a joint strategy last year to reform the global critical mineral supply chains and reduce reliance on Chinese exports.

      Thomas also said Canada has sent a message to China by deploying warships to the South China Sea, where Beijing has in recent years been actively seeking military and geo-political dominance. The South China Sea is also vital for global shipping and commerce.

      “The deployment of the Navy in particular to the South China Sea is one of the messages that can be sent,” Thomas said, Globe and Mail reported.

      “[The deployments] are about the rules-based order and freedom of navigation, the freedom of the seas and the fact we will not be bullied into changing the geography of the world.”

      “A lot of people wonder why we care about the South China Sea. It’s because the geography of this planet has been changed and we have allowed it to happen,” she said.

      Thomas said Russia’s activities in the Arctic are also troubling. Last month, Russia launched a space satellite to monitor the Arctic climate, as the country seeks to develop the energy-rich region. Russia has also built military bases in their Arctic region.

      “Nobody would invest the kind of money in building up the military capacity in the Arctic without reason, intent, or purpose. We should not be naive about that. It doesn’t mean it is immediate—but it is there,” Thomas said.

      Tyler Durden
      Sat, 03/13/2021 – 23:30

    • Explained: The 3 Major COVID-19 Variants
      Explained: The 3 Major COVID-19 Variants

      As billions of people gear up for widespread vaccination against COVID-19, another issue has reared its head. Three major COVID-19 variants have emerged across the globe—and preliminary research suggests these variants may be cause for concern.

      But, as Visual Capitalist’s Carmen Ang explains below, what makes them different from the original strain?

      The following visualizations answer some key questions, including when these variants were first discovered, how far they’ve spread worldwide, and most importantly, their potential impact on the population.

      Some Context: What is a Variant?

      Before diving in, it’s important to understand why viruses mutate in the first place.

      To infect someone, a virus takes over a host cell and uses it to replicate itself. But nature isn’t perfect, and sometimes, mistakes are made during the replication process—those mistakes are called mutations.

      A virus with one or more mutations is referred to as a variant. Most of the time, variants do not affect a virus’s physical structure, and in those instances, they eventually disappear. However, there are certain cases when a mutation impacts part of a virus’s genetic makeup that does change its behavior.

      According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) a change in behavior can alter:

      • Rate of transmission

      • Deadliness

      • Ability to potentially infect someone with natural or vaccine-induced immunity

      Preliminary research has detected some of these changes in the three major COVID-19 variants—B.1.1.7B.1.351, and P.1.

      The 3 Major COVID-19 Variants

      The three major variants emerged at different times, and in different parts of the world. Here’s an overview of each variant, when they were discovered, and how far they’ve spread so far.

      B.1.1.7

      The B.1.1.7 variant was detected in the UK in the fall of 2020. By December 2020, it had spread across the globe, with cases emerging across Europe, North America, and Asia.

      Currently, the variant has been reported in roughly 94 countries.

      Early research suggests it’s 50% more transmissible than other variants, and potentially 35% more deadly than the standard virus. Luckily, studies suggest that some of the existing vaccines work well against it.

      B.1.351

      In October 2020, the second major variant was discovered—B.1.351. It was first identified in South Africa, but by end of the year, it had spread to the UK, Switzerland, Australia, and Japan.

      There are approximately 48 countries with reported cases, and research suggests several of the existing COVID-19 vaccines may not be as effective against this variant.

      P.1

      The P.1 variant was the last to arrive on the scene.

      It was first discovered in January 2021, when Japan reported four cases of the variant, which was found in travelers who had arrived from Brazil.

      Approximately 25 countries have reported cases of the P.1 variant, and early research suggests this variant is not only more contagious, but could also have the ability to infect people with natural immunity who had already recovered from the original strain.

      Still Early Days

      While there have been preliminary studies showing a dip in vaccine effectiveness, some experts emphasize that it’s too early to tell for certain. More data is needed to gain a deeper and more accurate understanding.

      In the meantime, experts are emphasizing the importance of following our current public health strategies, which include physical distancing, vaccination, washing your hands, and using masks.

      Tyler Durden
      Sat, 03/13/2021 – 23:00

    • Here's How 30 Preppers Have Adapted And What They Foresee Happening Next
      Here’s How 30 Preppers Have Adapted And What They Foresee Happening Next

      Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

      There’s a lot more crazy and a lot less money than usual, and as I’ve written before, the face of prepping has changed. It’s a lot more difficult (and expensive) to go out and stockpile as we did a few years ago, and the event we’ve faced has been a slow-burning SHTF event that has slowly and insidiously taken away financial security from hundreds of thousands of Americans.

      I wondered how others have changed the way they prep to adapt to these times so I asked the folks in our Me-We group if they’ve changed how they prep and if so, what changes they’ve made. If you are interested in joining the group, go here, answer four questions, and be sure to change your profile picture from the Me-We basic images. We don’t care what you change them too, we’re just trying to avoid “bot” traffic from prowling through our group.

      Here’s how readers have changed the way they prep.

      With some of the comments, I’ve added a comment or a link in italics for more information.

      Eileen:

      I am working on doing even more with even less. I was laid off at the beginning of Covid. Hubby’s paycheck is down a bit. We have been watching the cost of regularly used items skyrocket, yet again. Teaching myself to grow more long term food items this year. At this point, Daisy, just not giving up feels like prepping, even if it’s just to get up tomorrow and try again.

      Here’s an article on how to keep going when things feel hopeless.  ~ D

      Lynn:

      We are getting ready to move. I am using my food preps to see what we really need and what has been hard to use up. Mostly pertaining to food and household essentials. Saving the money to buy fresh preps after the move. We moved a year ago and I had a huge stockpile that had to be moved twice in two months. I think it is better to use it up than move it and then replace it with fresh food and water.

      This is a great way to rotate your stock and always have fresher products available. Just pay attention to the things that are in shortage or difficult to acquire. You may not want to go through that supply just yet. ~ D

      Jeff:

      I have been building up at least a year’s supply of essential items like laundry detergent, shampoo, hand soap, toothpaste, etc. I will be using the stimulus check to add to my freeze-dried food inventory (mostly protein) since I have 1k lbs of dry food stored away. I don’t know if hyperinflation, war, or another pandemic may hit but if it does the goal is to be able to go at least a year without leaving the house.

      This is a fantastic goal!

      Tami:

      After the Texas snowstorm, I’m prepping mainly for life without electricity. I’ve lived off the grid before but had stopped so I’m going back to it. I also realized my need for more stored water .

      Here’s an article about preparing for longer-term power outages. It’s a great place to start if you’re new to prepping or if you simply need to make sure you have the things you need. ~ D

      Christina:

      Prepping mainly for economic upheaval. We kicked up food storage (have a working pantry) January 2020, but it wasn’t an issue to grocery shop in my area, so I slacked off a bit. August of 2020, we put together 6 months of food (again a working pantry I use and replenish), paying off debts, saving money, buying silver, ammo, guns, etc. Anything that will aid us as food and fuel prices goes up or our income goes down. So far, our income has increased since last year, but you never know. I’ll add my pantry includes HH / personal items too.

      Stocking up on things other than food is really important. Here’s a list of non-food stockpile items that may inspire you to add to your own supplies. ~ D

      Vicki:

      We are prepping for civil unrest and skyrocketing inflation. I’ve been watching the groceries I normally buy going up a lot. We are planning to grow more veggies and put in some more fruit trees. We are also making sure we have extras of the tools we use, and enough supplies to fix things(tools, machinery, plumbing, electrical, etc.) that might break. Lumber has also gone up a huge amount, so we are buying extra of that too.

      Having spare parts for tools and essential equipment is a vital and often overlooked prep. ~ D

      Diane: Everything I can think of from food to security.

      Keeping your preps balanced and not focusing too specifically on just one aspect is advised. Toby talks about the vital balance in this article. ~ D

      Max:

      Building out networks and relationships. Human terrain not “stuff”.

      Here’s advice on building community even during a pandemic and be sure to check out Selco’s on-demand webinar about community building. ~ D

      Susan:

      I think hyperinflation and the possible dollar collapse is more possible now than ever. I am adding canned and dried food stocks to my preps especially items that are predicted to become exorbitantly expensive like corn and coffee. I am also eagerly watching my garden waiting for it to thaw out. Most of the snow and ice is gone except in the woods.

      Here are some things you can do right now to get ready for garden season and here’s some advice on how to start planning your garden. ~ D

      Sheri:

      I’m turning more of my yard into vegetable/herb gardens and will preserve most of the produce. Adding to non-perishables when I see a good sale. Learning basic survival and self-sufficiency skills. Moving toward a simpler lifestyle, so living without modern conveniences will be less of a shock.

      This is precisely why my preps are low-tech. ~ D

      Stacy:

      Survived Texas without blaming the governor or president for leaving me in the cold. We need more stored water. Had enough but saw that I needed more for cleaning. Need larger pots. Fed 7 people easy as my house was only one with gas cooktop. Need cookware to feed 20…and preps to make my own soup kitchen. Need back up potty! Do I have 100 candles? More lamp oil. The little tealight under flowerpot did help to make room cozier. Store for this. A way to wash clothes. A way to take warm shower and wash hair. Prepare a menu, recipes, and storage for meals on the stove top. Prep to share with family. (I live on 20 member family compound.) A way to charge phone. Size c batteries to listen to CDs….more CDs. Hootch. OTC

      Awesome learning experience. I can definitely help with instructions for this off-grid kitty litter potty for humans. ~ D

      Ezra:

      We are working on paying off debts (Dave Ramsey) and materials for life without electricity. We lost power for 4 days during the winter storm here in Texas

      Here are a couple of articles you may find helpful regarding debt (one is directly from Dave’s strategies) and here’s an ebook about dealing with power outages. ~ D

      Lynn:

      We are focusing on our garden this year. Our goal is to be as self-sufficient as possible in regard to produce. I want to save seeds from the garden for the future. We aren’t growing grains, wheat, and oats, though. That is a future project.

      Here’s our favorite source for seeds – you can also get a free garden planner at that link and it is a small, family-run business. ~ D

      Rob:

      The money hasn’t changed for me in the Great White North. I’ve realized, though, that prepping for an event like an EMP is trying to play apocalypse lottery; better to consider the consequences of whatever it is you worry about and prepare for those. It stops you from making assumptions. (Makes an ass of U and umptions). I.e. instead of prepping for an EMP, I’m prepping for a collapse of communication and transportation of goods like food, no matter the cause. I’m expanding my EMP-proof storage still but I’m more prepared to handle, say, a food shortage whereas before my food plans only involved getting out of the city and joining a full farm.

      I think there’s a lot of wisdom to what you said there. A lot of folks hyperfocus on just one thing when in fact most disasters are an entire series of bad things. Some useful links might be this one about making a Faraday cage, this one about a communications collapse, and this one about the strain on our transportation system for goods.

      Bestsmall country:

      Hi Daisy, I’ve been watching everything since early 2018, and the most striking thing is the correlation between Q and the Bible!! I did most of my prepping back then. Long-life food, seeds (I learned how to grow veg). All done under the radar, especially Crypto and PMs. Skills will be the REAL asset. I’m hoping a local viewer of my channel will ‘kidnap’ me because the idiots that wouldn’t listen will be banging on my door

      OpSec is more important than ever! Here’s an article that might help others who are thinking like you about doing things under the radar. ~ D

      Kamay:

      Not much change, if any. Been prepping for the collapse of society, food shortages, and the possibility of a grid failure. We try to do all farming, gardening, preservations without the use of electricity and fancy gadgets. We recycle, upcycle, make do and live outside the box.

      Simplicity is key! I like your style :). ~ D

      Letia:

      I need to get ready for a garden! Strawberries will come back, and I’ll start canning again. I need to check my jars. I have some cases but need to check in case folks are back to normalcy or still canning. I need to practice shooting! I need to work on security with more cameras and change the button lock on my back door. 🙄

      DEFINITELY practice shooting. It’s a perishable skill. Here’s an article about creating a safe room at a reasonable price that might be helpful for the security aspect. ~ D

      Kris:

      Taking care of my animals and plans to raise more meat chickens – so more to feed. Buying feed in bulk and pricing out different feed options, etc.

      Have you checked out the fodder method? I took a class on it when I lived in California, but did not set up my own system because we were moving. Here’s a really good article about it. The guy I took the course from had chickens strictly on fodder and free-range. ~ D

      Roxanne:

      We’re pretty much preparing for our retirement. Then we’ll be on a much lower income. We’ve paid off all our debt except what we use on our credit cards which we pay off every month. We’ve sold off a lot of things which we didn’t need to get rid of the debt. We’re thinking we could be looking at another depression or some other economic troubles. I’ve been trying to grow different vegetables to learn how to do it well. I also have been dehydrating what I can and vacuum sealing them in large mason jars. I plan to learn to pressure can this year so I can take advantage of any sales at the stores on meats and vegetables which don’t grow here.

      Here’s an easy how-to for pressure canning, and if you happen to have a glass top stove, some pressure canning options that will work for you.

      Heather:

      We of the Down Under are keenly aware that we no longer matter with your particular ruling family’s politics. China is now a far more serious threat in the Pacific area. We also no longer refine fuel here, much of it comes from Singapore. We are prepping for blockade/ interruption to supply lines as this would pretty much cripple the country. We have gardens, fruit trees, and are stocking up a bit more on canned goods. We aren’t allowed to store more than a couple of jerry cans of fuel. Also, I have been sure to keep medical checkups and dental checkups very up-to-date for the family as you never know when these things just won’t be available.

      You bring up an excellent point with regard to medical and dental care. During the past year of Covid restrictions many people saw health issues getting far worse because they were unable to seek preventative care, or even take care of conditions that arose.  Handling these things while we an is vital. ~ D

      Shannon:

      I prep for hyperinflation, power grid issues, (due to natural disasters), and civil unrest. I live in the PNW, so we’ve had our share of rioting, unrest, and fluke weather. Prepping food, supplies to deal with no electricity, trying to learn how to cope without electricity. We sold property in Ca. and moved up here and bought property with land.

      With the changes you’ve made, you are most likely looking for some suggestions on becoming more self-reliant with the land and new resources you have available. Check out the self-reliance manifesto here. (Some links are no longer working – we’re striving to keep up!) ~ D

      Kate:

      We’re planning to buy a house/property in the next few years, so we’ve been saving wherever possible. Luckily the covid didn’t affect our income. Cutting back on trips to town. Waiting for the garden to dry out and also waiting for my seeds to arrive. Going to grow mostly for cellar storage this year….potatoes, squashes, carrots, turnips, etc. Jar lids are really hard to find here on Vancouver Island…hopefully, by the fall, I’ll be able to can sauce and V8. Keeping up with buying hard copy books on natural medicine, crafts, foraging.

      I’ve really lucked out and gotten some used books on those topics at yardsales. I once spent $100 at a yardsale buying every book the person was selling because her deceased relative had been into food preservation and herbalism. Talk about a motherlode. Another potential goldmine for you is Thriftbooks, which has millions of used books for sale. If you are new to root cellaring, this article may be helpful. ~ D

      K:

      I’ve spent the last year really focusing on smaller potential SHTF situations (a week to a month type). I feel like I’m in decent shape as far as that goes. Now my focus is more long-term. I want to get sustainable food production set up and keep hounding my kids about the likely change to digital currency in the next few years along with a rise in inflation. I have preached for years that our reliance on food from outside of our areas is going to be a problem in the future. That’s my focus now.

      A couple of articles on two topics you mentioned are this one about how our everyday lives would change in a cashless society and this one about why preppers need to localize their food sources. ~ D

      James:

      Economic misfortune, (job loss, economy downturns) civil unrest, power grid/natural disasters. I am set for two years monetarily, approximately 6 months for comestibles, and a decent self-defense set up although still working on hardening the house. I am also to a lesser extent prepared to bug out home if things really go to s**t, however as I am currently OCONUS I am probably screwed on that part.

      That definitely makes things difficult. I think what I would focus on in your shoes is making certain that your family members are able to hang in there for a period of time while waiting for you to make it home. You don’t want them to be in a situation where only you know how to do something important. Redundancies are essential. ~ D

      Rita:

      We have concentrated more on being self-contained and self-sufficient. We source our needs locally as much as possible. A LOT quieter about accomplishments and acquisitions. For the most part, we no longer have strong public opinions about much of anything. We are becoming more internalized and grey. As we get older, the fighting spirit is still there, but reality says to stock up and shut up. We see civil unrest, and difficult times, if not out and out economic collapse and civil war. The USA is a powder keg right now and some dumba** is going to light the match

      Surviving this crazy time does have a lot to do with keeping your thoughts more private. And sometimes the fight you win is the one you don’t participate in. ~ D

      Valerie:

      Economic collapse is my greatest concern. We are planting a larger garden and stocking up on nonperishable food. I plan to can more this year. In fact, today I scored a lightly used All American 910 canner at the goodwill. $5.99. Scratch that off my bucket list!

      Oh my gosh, what a SCORE!!!!!! I’m sure a lot of us reading that are positively green with envy. And the good thing about the All American is there are no parts or gaskets that might need to be replaced. ~ D

      Rosemary:

      I can’t shake the feeling that we will have a grid-down situation in the near future, so getting prepped for that has been my top priority. Next is food shortages and hyperinflation. Bigger garden & more canning is on my list for this season. I wanted to buy heating mats & lights too this year but didn’t have the extra funds, so I am trying Winter Sowing in gallon water & milk jugs. I have 20+ jugs done so far with lots more to do. Fingers crossed it’s a success!

      I’ll be really interested to hear how your Winter Sowing goes! Please keep us posted. Here’s a link to my book on Amazon, Be Ready for Anything. It goes into a lot of detail about long-term power outages in both summer and winter. ~ D

      Martha:

      Although my area doesn’t normally see really low temps, it does get cold in the winter, and after seeing what happened in Texas, I’m adding a portable heater (either propane or kerosene) to my list of supplies  ASAP.  Just wish AC was as easy to prep for if the grid goes down.  Looking at doing solar with battery backup to keep fridge, freezer running too, and even 1 window ac unit to keep the house at least bearable when it 115 in the summer.

      Wow, that sure sounds like some miserable weather to lose power in. Here’s an article about handling hot weather power outages, an article about how to calculate how much power you need to be able to generate, and the off-grid heater I recommend. ~ D

      Laura:

      In light of the recent hacking into MULTIPLE national security systems, I think the grid down is the biggest threat. Financial collapse would be second after that. I’m using some of the stimulus funds to buy larger ticket items. A respirator/gas mask is next on my list. Additionally, I bought heating pads and fluorescent lights for seed planting this year-going well. Also just bought five 55-gallon water barrels that need washing and set up. Busy time for me trying to keep up with all this.

      Here are some thoughts on preparing for a major cyber attack and an article on respirators and gas masks – I hope you find them helpful. ~ D

      Daisy:

      Yep, it’s me. The thing that I have changed over the past year about my preparedness is paying attention to the local governments and how they’ve responded. I’ve lived in 3 different places over the course of the lockdowns and each place has managed the response to covid very differently. It’s important to understand how your own local government reacts to things because once you do, you can begin to predict what they’ll do in a different situation. I’ve also gotten a lot better at getting information from others without them realizing I’m doing it, and making friends who can be helpful in a variety of events. (Read more in this article.)

      Traveling from place to place, I’ve learned to prep fast and I’ve learned how to make due with what’s available, instead of being so choosy. I plan to continue working on my adaptability levels, for I believe that is my most important skill. My primary goal is to avoid trouble in the first place and my secondary goal is to survive if I can’t. I foresee more restrictions after a brief reprieve and a lot more difficulty for those who just want to be left alone to do so without jumping through hoops.

      Tyler Durden
      Sat, 03/13/2021 – 22:30

    • Air Force Receives First F-15EX Capable Of Carrying Hypersonic Weapons
      Air Force Receives First F-15EX Capable Of Carrying Hypersonic Weapons

      On Wednesday, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) officially accepted the first McDonnell Douglas F-15EX Strike Eagle from Boeing at the defense contractor’s facility in St. Louis, reported Defense News. The fourth-generation fighter has been upgraded with larger weapon capacity and advanced flight control systems. 

      “This is a big moment for the Air Force,” Col. Sean Dorey, F-15EX program manager with the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center’s Fighters and Advanced Aircraft Directorate, responsible for the acquisition, modernization and sustainment of the aircraft, said Thursday in a press release.

      We first proposed the question in 2019 of why the Trump administration was rushing to procure an upgrade version of the 45-year old jet. We suggested, at the time, it was due to weapon capacity issues of the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor and Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II “were not able to accommodate heavier weapons, such as hypersonic missiles.” 

      Last month, the F-15EX completed its first test flight from St. Louis Lambert International Airport in Missouri. Here’s a video of the flight:

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

      Prat Kumar, Boeing vice president, and F-15 program manager, recently said the F-15EX “is capable of incorporating the latest advanced battle management systems, sensors, and weapons due to the jet’s digital airframe design and open mission systems architecture.” 

      The USAF expects to purchase at least 144 F-15EX within the next five years. 

      While the internal weapon bays of U.S. stealth fight jets (F-22 & F-35) have limited capacity to carry hypersonic weapons, the Russians are already developing a prototype hypersonic missile that can fit within the weapon bays of its stealth jet, the Sukhoi Su-57. 

      Besides heavy bombers, the U.S. is expected to rely on fourth-generation fighters to deploy hypersonic weapons. 

      Tyler Durden
      Sat, 03/13/2021 – 22:00

    • Free Speech: And… It's Gone
      Free Speech: And… It’s Gone

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

      It’s no surprise to me that the war against speech is accelerating. There’s desperation in the air everywhere.

      From the barricading of the U.S. Capitol since January 6th to the shrill calls for continued lockdowns over a virus mostly behind us, we see those with power lashing out trying to hold on to it.

      And it’s no more obvious than in the lockdowns on speech. In the past week we’ve seen another major assault on Twitter-alternative Gab. A massive attack on its security architecture handing out the passwords and information of millions of users to the dark web.

      Then Texas Governor Greg Abbott, you know the guy who let millions of Texans freeze last month rather than order the coal-fired plants brought online in defiance of the DoE, piles on calling Gab “anti-semetic.”

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

      Abbott’s just doing what he’s paid to do, serve everyone but Texas.

      Gab CEO Andrew Torba then informed us that the attacks on Gab are far deeper than even a putz like Abbott’s. The relentless pressure to cut his company off from the doing business continues, with bank after bank refusing to do business with them.

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

      Torba’s invoking Operation Chokepoint is important here. It reminds us that Biden is a cypher put in place to restore Obama to the White House as functional president.

      Honestly, taking a step back, is this at all rational? All Torba and Gab want to do is operate a social media platform that conforms, ruthlessly, to the first amendment. Nothing more, nothing less.

      It’s not like Gab is funded by foreign intelligence services spreading obvious agitprop and propaganda. No, sorry, that’s the job of the mainstream media and Twitter.

      I thought if we didn’t like the treatment we got on Twitter we could go ‘build our own’ and that would be fine. Separate but equal, freedom of and from association and all that.

      But, no, any competition that doesn’t adhere to the current orthodoxy of what constitutes ‘acceptable speech’ is now no longer tolerated. Free Speech is not an option.

      It’s an obvious coordinated assault from every angle to extend ‘cancel culture’ into a cultural revolution. Because it’s not enough to hound people whose opinions you don’t like from the public square, they have to be beaten out of society entirely, even if the means employed to do so are patently hypocritical.

      And don’t think that doesn’t tie right into what’s coming from Operation Chokepoint vis a vis gun ownership in the coming weeks, but I digress.

      Then there’s Amazon’s abrupt turn into the Ministry of Information Gating. From removing a documentary about Clarence Thomas from its streaming service — during Black History Month — to making it verboten to talk about gender dysphoria as a mental illness, which it may well be.

      Amazon is lurching quickly from refusing to publish certain topics under its Kindle Direct Publishing platform to denying authors space on their virtual shelves. I think we’re close to the point where keeping Orwell’s 1984 on the shelves is tolerated because It’ll soon be looked on as children’s literature.

      Speaking of which, the long march of communists through our educational institutions has now led to pulling sales of six classic stories by Dr. Seuss by its publisher and President Biden banning Dr. Seuss from “Dr. Seuss Day.”

      Although the company made the decision last year, they chose to make the announcement on March 2nd: National Read Across America Day—or, as it’s more commonly knownDr. Seuss Day.

      In 1998, the National Education Association partnered with Dr. Seuss Enterprises 1998 to launch Read Across America Day as a way to encourage children to read. The important role Dr. Seuss has played in children’s literacy was remarked upon by former President Obama, who began the presidential tradition of issuing yearly Read Across America Day proclamations, each of which mentioned Dr. Seuss. In 2016, Obama described the world-renowned author as “one of America’s revered wordsmiths.”

      Attacking Dr. Seuss, even in the mildest way, is yet another tactical move to outrage anyone with a connection to their past. It’s done to create a false discussion of racism and force people to take up the defense of something that needs no defense.

      It’s done to undermine parental choices of what stories they should read their children at night and adding more divisive fodder for family get-togethers (remember those?) where the kids come home from school and blame their racist parents for programming them from birth because Dr. Seuss.

      We’re dealing with people who have no ability to parse nuance or engage in any reasonable discussion of the past. As opposed to turning the depictions of Asians or blacks in Dr. Seuss into a teaching moment about how far we’ve come their impulse is to remove it from ‘polite society’ for the good of everyone.

      And that’s what’s truly shameful.

      Frankly, I’m ambivalent about Dr. Seuss because when I re-read The Cat in the Hat recently I couldn’t tell if it was a cautionary tale about child predation or programming children to accept it?

      I’d go on some long-winded rant about Jung and these malformed people being unwilling to accept and integrate heir shadows, but what’s the point in 2021?

      We’re now dealing with an acceleration of the erasure of the past that will not abate until it consumes most of the people perpetrating it in the first place. So, my advice to you is duck where you can and drink heavily.

      I’ve only covered a couple of these recent events here, because there are too many to list. But it was this post on RT which caught my attention in light of the growing attacks on alternative speech platforms and journalists.

      Because in the days after Buzzfeed fired one-third of the staff at the former Prom Queen of the Woke, the Huffington Post, we’re treated to this fake spat between ‘journalists’ over something Tucker Carlson said.

      This manufactured harassment controversy over his showing a publicly-available picture of some chick (yes, I’m a misogynist, but hey I’m protecting her identity!) who works at the New York Times is on its face laughable. It won’t do anything other than improve Carlson’s ratings.

      Because it isn’t enough to be a disgraced plagiarist fired by that pillar of responsible journalism, Buzzfeed, to try and keep the lights on this incel Broderick pens a piece going after, of all people, Glenn Greenwald.

      Responding to Broderick’s broadside on Thursday, Greenwald noted that journalists have “bizarrely transformed from their traditional role as leading free expression defenders into the most vocal censorship advocates, using their platforms to demand that tech monopolies ban and silence others.”

      Broderick was fired from BuzzFeed for “serial plagiarism” but now wants to reinvent himself as “the Guardian and Defender of Real Journalism” with a straight face, Greenwald pointed out. He also blasted mainstream journalists as having a “bottomless sense of entitlement and self-regard and fragility” and seeking to create a world in which they can attack whoever they want, while banning anyone who criticizes them for it.

      First they came for Gab and no one listened. Then they came for Parler who knuckled under. And now they’ve driven the best investigative journalists to Substack and that’s too much free speech?

      But it’s part of the pattern of behavior that continues well beyond Gab’s persecution.

      Because the most disturbing thing I’ve seen this week isn’t any of this. It is the now zero-tolerance for anyone on platforms like YouTube or Patreon who voice any skepticism from the WHO and/or the CDC about COVID-19, the vaccines or anything related.

      Fearless people like The Last American Vagabond, Whitney Webb and now Venessa Beeley have all been canceled by Patreon. My subscribers keep wondering when I’m going to be canceled. I guess we’ll find out soon enough. I continue to get notes from Patrons telling me they won’t support Patreon because ‘they suck’ or ‘they’re evil.’

      And I don’t blame them one bit. Vote with your dollars, force me to consider alternatives (which there are if you are interested).

      But, at the same time, the more Patreon or Twitter or YouTube acts the way they do the more opportunity there is for someone else to build something better.

      That’s what Torba did in 2016 and he’s paid a terrible price for it. He lived by one of Jordan Peterson’s new rules when he built Gab in the first place: “Notice where opportunity lurks when responsibility has been abdicated.”

      Our responsibility to free speech has been abdicated by our professional journalists for decades. In fact, I’d argue, outside of the people I’ve mentioned so far in this article, there are precious few people writing today who could even rise to the level of ‘yellow journalist,’ present company included.

      I’ve been saying since Torba started Gab in 2016 that what is needed is a blockchain-based, censorship-proof platform with inviolable property rights in that which you create. That would disempower gatekeepers like Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and ensure the costs of government censorship would rise to the point of failure.

      And Torba is absolutely right that this assault on free speech in the U.S., and really the world over, is driving the industry towards that eventuality when he mentions bitcoin. Early attempts at this have been a mess — Steemit, Minds, etc. — but the basic concept is sound.

      What these folks are doing with Operation Chokepoint is no different than Trump going Sanctions Slap Happy for four years on our national rivals. Trump tried to raise costs on Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela to the point where they would cry in submission.

      And it didn’t work. And I told you (and Trump) it wouldn’t work. Repeatedly.

      Because the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility is universal in all human endeavors.

      There is an upper limit to the efficacy of any particular activity, simply because accumulating more of one thing lowers its marginal return on your investment of time and/or capital. it’s why Pareto is the law of the land, ultimately.

      In the case of censorship or economic starvation (same thing), when you make the cost of doing business in one arena too expensive — selling oil for dollars, for example — you make the transition away from that medium of exchange (the dollar) relatively more attractive.

      Russia now does more than half of its business in local currencies. Iran is empowering Iranians to mine bitcoin to evade sanctions and procure things from overseas. Both are working with trading partners to bypass the dollar and the euro to effect international trade.

      And soon, all the dissident journalists of exceptional character will be the ones who validate new business models and publishing platforms that do the same. In the same way that we helped validate Patreon’s business model in the first place, which helped us bypass the traditional publishing firms like Buzzfeed and which drove the HuffPo to irrelevancy.

      That’s what’s coming with all of this censorship and marginalization of dissident voices — the proliferation of new platforms that are hardened against cancellation. The people like George Soros who believe they can drive the truth back underground to the days where publishing materials and disseminating them were hideously expensive are living a lie.

      And they are wasting everyone’s time pursuing this in their sick, pathetic attempts to maintain and solidify societal control at a level that is the very definition of unsustainable.

      Today it’s the opposite of that. Today it’s cheaper and easier than ever to produce and disseminate superlative work to an audience. Finding the audience is the hard part. And that’s what they are trying so desperately to keep us from achieving.

      But we will achieve it because total surveillance and the complete abolition of our property right in the work we produce is a fantasy of the deranged and the arrogant. And that’s why their fear is so real you don’t need to be a dog to smell it.

      In the face of planned economic and societal destruction which is driving up the cost of everything, free speech is the most precious commodity of all.

      *  *  *

      Join my Patreon if you want to tell them you value free speech

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      Tyler Durden
      Sat, 03/13/2021 – 21:30

    • Tesla Killer? Spy Photos Of First Ford F-150 All-Electric Pickup Emerge 
      Tesla Killer? Spy Photos Of First Ford F-150 All-Electric Pickup Emerge 

      Introduced in 1948, the Ford F-150 has been America’s best-selling vehicle for the last 43 years. After seven decades of production, Ford is set to introduce an all-new model for the Ford truck lineup, called F-150 Electric. Details have been limited so far, but new spy pictures from Autoblog show the truck is the “real deal.” 

      Autoblog snapped a series of pictures of the electric prototype F-150. The blog said:

      From a distance, an F-150 is an F-150, an F-150, but this one stands out right away not for what has been added, but rather for what’s missing: a tailpipe. Looking closer, we can see a few other telltale elements. For starters, there’s that beefy electric drive unit tucked up in front of the under-bed spare. It’s much wider than the differential you’d see in a conventional pickup; Ford probably left the spare wheel in place on purpose to help obscure it from view. 

      These shots were taken from a distance, so there’s not much more to be gleaned from the angles of the undercarriage. The drive unit takes up a pretty large chunk of real estate back there, plus the quality makes it difficult to discern much else. We can see what appear to be conventional leaf shackles on either side. We’re not surprised that Ford is likely sticking with a conventional leaf-spring setup back here, as it is likely far too crowded for coils.

      Our spy also snagged some photos of the prototype’s flanks. There are some angles that could show hints of the truck’s battery pack peeking out from under its left side. They’re not definitive, but that’s where the ICE F-150’s fuel tank resides, so it’s a logical location. We suspect the pack will be larger than the fuel tank, which means it would probably bleed over to the passenger side as well (where the exhaust is normally routed). 

      Autoblog said the new truck could be released as soon as the second half of 2022. Already, Ford’s Mustang Mach-E electric vehicle has made a splash among the American consumer. So much so that Morgan Stanely warned, the new all-electric Mustang is taking market share from Tesla. 

      Considering most Americans resonate better with Ford (than Tesla), after-all, the F-150 (gas version) has been the best-selling vehicle in the country for more the four decades – this is bad news for Elon Musk. 

      … and, by the way, GMC’s 1,000 horsepower all-electric Hummer will be released as early as this fall.  

      Tyler Durden
      Sat, 03/13/2021 – 21:00

    • More California Cities Experiment With "Hero Pay" Leading To Predictable Results
      More California Cities Experiment With “Hero Pay” Leading To Predictable Results

      Authored by Jazz Shaw via HotAir.com,

      Back in early February, we looked at a story out of Long Beach, California where the City Council passed an ordinance requiring large, chain grocery stores to provide workers with an extra four dollars per hour as “hero pay” during the pandemic.

      That immediately resulted in two of the biggest Kroger stores in the area closing their doors permanently, putting hundreds of people out of work. At the time, I noted that a number of other large municipalities in the Golden State were either already drafting or considering similar legislation.

      But having seen what happened in Long Beach, they thankfully had sufficient warning not to make the same mistake.

      Or so you would have thought. But as it turns out, you’d have been wrong. Los Angeles plunged ahead and passed the same type of law, only they upped the ante and made it five dollars per hour. Try not to faint from shock when I tell you that three more Kroger stores shut down in short order. If only someone could have somehow foreseen this and avoided all of these closures. (Washington Examiner)

      The list of Southern California stores that have been forced to close over government-implemented “hero pay” hikes has grown to five after three more locations announced they will close their doors.

      Two Ralph’s locations and one Food 4 Less location, both owned by the grocery giant Kroger, in West Los Angeles will close due in part, the company says, to a Los Angeles City Council mandate requiring some employers to provide an additional $5 per hour in hazard pay for workers on the “front-lines” during the coronavirus pandemic, according to Fox 11 Los Angeles.

      “The mandate will add an additional $20 million in operating costs over the next 120 days, making it financially unsustainable to continue operating underperforming locations,” Kroger said in a news release.

      Thanks to the City Council’s efforts to “help heroes” during the pandemic, 289 more people lost their jobs overnight. It’s also worth noting that these aren’t minimum wage jobs for students. Thanks to California’s generous labor laws, those grocery store workers were making an average of $18 per hour, which works out to the equivalent of $24 per hour when you include the mandatory benefits they receive. On top of that, those neighborhoods will now be without one of the larger grocery shopping options with the most diverse range of products.

      The only winners here were the smaller grocery stores in those communities. Because L.A. modeled its ordinance on the one enacted in Long Beach, the rules were not applied equally. The “hero pay” requirement was only imposed on larger, national chain stores. Perhaps some of those smaller stores can hire a few of the newly unemployed clerks from Krogers.

      Members of the Los Angeles City Council took another page out of Long Beach’s book, talking about the greedy chain stores and their “record profits.” But as we discussed last time, profit margins in grocery stores are just about as thin as you could imagine because of the competitive nature of the industry. When you suddenly jack up their labor costs by more than 25% overnight, the outlets immediately become unprofitable or uncompetitive. Kroger knows this and isn’t going to wait around and keep bleeding off revenue while waiting to see if the City Council comes to its senses.

      This is yet another case of municipal mismanagement, as bumbling bureaucrats dream up ways to “do the right thing” during the pandemic. Sadly, they decided to start tinkering with bits of the private sector’s machinery when they clearly didn’t understand how it operates.

      Tyler Durden
      Sat, 03/13/2021 – 20:30

    • "Roadable Aircraft" Could Finally Get Off The Ground In New Hampshire
      “Roadable Aircraft” Could Finally Get Off The Ground In New Hampshire

      The most promise for a “flying car” that would be both road-worthy and air-worthy came in January of this year when Woburn, Massachusetts-based Terrafugia received a Federal Aviation Authority airworthiness certificate. But, as Bloomberg notes, by February, it appears hopes were dashed when the company laid off 43 employees and stated it was working on a “new endeavor”.

      For right now, New Hampshire appears to be the only state that is keeping the dream of flying road vehicles alive. New Hampshire “became the first U.S. state to make flying cars road-legal” thanks to a bill being called the “Jetsons bill”. If the machines pass testing with the FAA and owners pay a $2,000 fee, their drivers/pilots are welcome to drive them to the airport – before taking off into the sky in them.

      The state is known for its liberal transit laws – motorcyclists don’t need helmets and cars don’t require seatbelts. “Live Free of Die,” the state’s license plates read. Terrafugia has been performing test flights in the state since 2018. Company Pal-V also sells one product, called the Liberty, out of the airport in Manchester, New Hampshire. 

      Kevin Colburn, vice president and general manager of Terrafugia, said New Hampshire’s bill “opens up interesting possibilities for leisure trips to islands.” He continued: “The time savings in a place like New Hampshire, where the mountainous topography makes for some very indirect and lower-speed driving trips could be substantial.”

      “You need to build something that’s safe both in the air and on the ground. In the air, you want to minimize weight, and on land, you need to be crash-proof if you hit a brick wall. It’s a matter of threading the needle,” Colburn said. 

      But New Hampshire could be the place where it happens. “I can see a lot of developers going there to test roadable aircraft,” said Laurie Garrow, an urban and regional air mobility specialist at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

      Keith Ammon, a sales rep for Pal-V, helped write the Jetsons bill. He said of his company’s Liberty: “It’s a gyrocopter. The power goes directly to the blades. The blades fold up, and on the road, it’s three-wheeled, meaning you can lean into the turns like a motorcyclist.”

      The Liberty costs $390,000. Ammon is part of a group in the state called the “Free State Project” that aims to “establish residence in a small state and take over the state government.” The libertarian thread through the state could encourage continued innovation and experimentation. 

      Hybrid road/air vehicles are attempting to come of age right at the same time as electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing vehicles (eVTOLs). eVTOLs are best known as flying taxis – an industry that Morgan Stanley predicts could reach $1.5 trillion by 2040. Names like Porsche and Boeing have already teamed up on eVTOLs. Terrafugia’s owner, Geely, is also working on them with Tencent. 

      Comparatively, roadable aircraft can seem clunky. But don’t count the spirit of innovation in New Hampshire out. “When I read about Terrafugia’s layoffs, it blew my mind,” Ammon said. “But this industry has taken a long time to get off the ground, and we will move forward.”

      He concluded: “We’re not ants in a colony. It’s important that we recognize the spirit in each individual, and it’s important that we give people choices. Libertarians are not selfish because they want each person to explore their own eccentricities, their own creativity. If everyone can do that, we’ll have a more free and happy society.”

      Tyler Durden
      Sat, 03/13/2021 – 20:00

    • Newt Gingrich Locked Out Of Twitter For Criticizing Biden's Immigration Policy
      Newt Gingrich Locked Out Of Twitter For Criticizing Biden’s Immigration Policy

      Authored by Annaliese Levy via SaraACarter.com,

      Former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Newt Gingrich was locked out of his Twitter account for over a week after he published a tweet that criticized the Biden administration’s approach to the southern border and raised concern over immigrants crossing the border illegally who may be infected with COVID-19.

      “If there is a covid surge in Texas the fault will not be Governor [Greg] Abbott’s common sense reforms. The greatest threat of a covid surge comes from Biden’s untested illegal immigrants pouring across the border. We have no way of knowing how many of them are bringing covid with them,” Gingrich tweeted on March 3.

      Twitter promptly sent Gingrich a message explaining that his account was locked for “violating rules against hateful conduct.”

      In an opinion piece published in The Washington Times, Gingrich defended his tweet saying that he was reacting to a recent story that said federal officials had no way of testing people who are picked up by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol — or forcing them to quarantine.

      In order to unlock his account, Gingrich was required to delete his tweet or go through an appeals process. Gingrich assumed he received this message by accident.

      “Thinking this must have been an error somehow generated by the company’s algorithm, we sent Twitter a message pointing out that my tweet didn’t “promote violence against, threaten, or harass” anyone. We asked that my account be released,” Gingrich said.

      Twitter reiterated to Gingrich that his tweet had broken their rules of conduct.

      “I fail to see how drawing attention to the public health dangers of massive illegal immigration during a pandemic can be censored. So, to unlock my account, I deleted the tweet this morning,” Gingrich wrote.

      “There was no reason to censor my tweet or lock my account,” Gingrich continued. “Nothing in the flagged tweet “promotes violence against, threatens, or harasses” anyone. It is simply pointing out the fact that those entering the country illegally are not tested for COVID-19 and could be a health risk.”

      In an open letter to Twitter officials, Gingrich posed the following questions:

      Do the Twitter censors acknowledge that we are in a pandemic?

      Do the Twitter censors acknowledge that testing is a key tool in fighting the pandemic?

      Do the Twitter censors acknowledge that, unlike people entering the country legally, people who come into the United States illegally are not tested for COVID-19?

      Do the Twitter censors acknowledge that, unlike U.S. citizens, people who come into the country illegally are unlikely to voluntarily get tested because they are trying to keep a low profile?

      If so, how exactly do they justify censoring discussion of the threat to public health posed by people coming into the U.S. illegally without being tested?

      Gingrich noted that the vast majority of those being silenced online are conservatives.

      “This entire experience has made it even more clear to me that Twitter is only interested in censoring conservatives,” Gingrich said.

      “I hope Twitter will stop its aggressive and biased censorship, and return to the spirit and ideals of free speech which allowed it to prosper in the first place.”

      Tyler Durden
      Sat, 03/13/2021 – 19:30

    • Air Travel Hits Highest Level In A Year Amid Eased Restrictions, TSA Says
      Air Travel Hits Highest Level In A Year Amid Eased Restrictions, TSA Says

      It appears that both confidence in the vaccine rollout as well as declining coronavirus infection numbers across previously highly impacted states are factors driving Americans back into resuming air travel. 

      According to new numbers from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), air travel hit its highest point nationwide in almost a year on Friday, also amid broad re-opening mandates and a rollback in restrictions in a number of states. 

      The agency reports that it “screened 1.3 million people at airport security checkpoints Friday, the highest figure since March 15, 2020, according to TSA spokesperson Lisa Farbstein,” The Hill writes.

      It comes as the Biden administration touted at the end of this week that over 100 million doses of the vaccine have been administered to Americans nationwide.

      Over the past months reports began indicating travel numbers that suggested an approaching ‘return to normal’ over the November and December holidays – when prior single-day highs were seen. Airlines since last spring were forced to make major cuts to routes and number of flights, while at the same time implementing changes in cabin rules such as mask mandates. 

      Recall that airlines were already struggling even before the pandemic, but the nationwide lockdowns produced an effective halt in the majority of air travel for weeks last March when stay-at-home orders were issued across the majority of states.

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

      Into last spring and summer travelers were still skittish despite multiple published studies and scientific institutions remarking on the surprisingly low levels of recorded transmissions of the virus due to air travel:

      At first thought, a narrow metal tube in which strangers are crammed together for hours might seem like a flying petri dish, especially during a pandemic. The reality is a bit more nuanced. While there are risks associated with flying, it may be safer than you think.

      For starters, the air quality on a commercial airliner is actually quite high, with the air volume in the cabin being completely refreshed every two to four minutes. Air flows into the cabin vertically — it enters from overhead vents and is sent downward in a circular motion, exiting at floor level. Once air leaves the cabin, about half is dumped outside, and the rest is sent through HEPA (high-efficiency particulate air) filters, similar to those used in hospitals, before being mixed with fresh outside air and entering the cabin again.

      A spokesperson for Airlines for America, a major lobby group for the industry, said to The Hill this week, “We remain confident that this layered approach significantly reduces risk and are encouraged that science continues to confirm there is a very low risk of virus transmission onboard aircraft.”

      Tyler Durden
      Sat, 03/13/2021 – 19:00

    • US Now Engaged In "Indirect Diplomacy" With Iran On Reviving Nuke Deal: Sullivan
      US Now Engaged In “Indirect Diplomacy” With Iran On Reviving Nuke Deal: Sullivan

      Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

      National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said the US is engaged in “indirect diplomacy” with Tehran through Europeans and other parties on the way forward to revive the Iran nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA.

      “Diplomacy with Iran is ongoing, just not in a direct fashion at the moment,” Sullivan told reporters on Friday. “There are communications through the Europeans and through others that enable us to explain to the Iranians what our position is with respect to the compliance for compliance approach and to hear what their position is.”

      National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, via AP

      “Compliance for compliance” is a phrase Biden administration officials are using as their stance on the JCPOA. The issue is, the US is the party that came out of compliance first by reimposing sanctions on Tehran in 2018. After that, Iran waited a year before it began gradually increasing the activity of its civilian nuclear program.

      Throughout this process, Iran has tried everything to preserve the JCPOA by working with the other signatories to the deal. And since the US withdrew, Iran is no longer bound by the limits set by the JCPOA, so it is not technically violating the agreement.

      The Biden administration has rejected the idea of offering sanctions relief before talks with Iran. “We are waiting at this point to hear further from the Iranians how they would like to proceed,” Sullivan said.

      “This is not going to be easy but we believe that we are in a diplomatic process now that we can move forward on and ultimately secure our objective, which is to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and to do so through diplomacy,” Biden’s national security advisor added.

      Tyler Durden
      Sat, 03/13/2021 – 18:30

    • Goldman's Clients Are Asking If There Are Any Cheap Stocks Left
      Goldman’s Clients Are Asking If There Are Any Cheap Stocks Left

      Well, technically, Goldman clients are asking if they should be buying anything at all, period, in a time of resurgent volatility driven by rising rates and bond market vol, which sparked a high beta/growth panic in equities two weeks ago but have since seen the influence fade.

      For those who missed last week’s rollercoaster, Goldman recaps it as follows: “10-year Treasury yields jumped 20 bps last week, retreated by 10 bp, and then reversed that decline to end this week at a new 12-month high of 1.62%.” Yet despite this latest spike in rates, the VIX tumbled with stocks rising to all time highs, even though Treasury implied volatility is now at the highest level since last March, according to the SRVIX index…

      … and almost there according to the MOVE index.

      Yet anyone hoping for a quick and painless reprieve from surging rates will be disappointed. In his latest Weekly Kickstart, Goldman’s David Kostin writes that the bank’s economists expect that rates will continue to rise in coming months and forecast 11% real US GDP growth in 2Q with core PCE inflation rising to 2.3% “suggesting that investors will have to continually grapple with the anxiety about economic overheating and Fed tightening that has gripped markets in recent weeks.” Goldman also expects the 10-year yield will rise to 1.8% by mid-year and 1.9% by year-end. At the rate it is going, it may get there next week.

       

      This is a big problem for Goldman because while we already know that equities are extremely overpriced according to most valuation metrics, with the S&P 500 trading above the 90th percentile in absolute valuation… 

      … and prompting Goldman clients to ask what – if anything – is  still cheap, Kostin responds that stocks are “only” in the 40th percentile relative to interest rates. Which is a problem if rates continue to rise as the only metric on which stocks are cheap will soon suggest they are not that cheap when compared to rates.

      So, to ease client nerves, Kostin writes that in his view “equity valuations should be able to digest 10-year yields of roughly 2% without much difficulty” assuming of course, that the move higher in real yields is slow and contained, something it wasn’t in recent weeks when the surge in real yields was a 2+ std dev event. In fact, it is safe to say that no move higher in yields will ever be contained and organized with trillions in AUM on the verge of panic liquidation any time 10Y yield spikes.

      Still, even if the 10-year yield hits 2% against a constant S&P 500 forward EPS yield of 4.5% (the inverse of a 22x P/E multiple) that would reduce the yield gap between stocks and bonds to approximately its 45-year average of 250 bp, neither rich nor cheap.

      So what else do Goldman’s clients think? Well, based on Kostin’s client conversations, most investors share the bank’s view that interest rates will continue rise, but many believe that the equity market rotations that have recently accompanied rising rates have gone too far. Translation: Goldman clients are desperately trying to convince nobody but themselves that the turmoil is over (spoiler alert: it is only just starting).

      Still, the last month has indeed been a nightmare for most investors as nothing – both value stocks and cryptos – seemed to work. Consider that Goldman’s sector-neutral long/short growth factor declined by 12% during the past month, the largest 1-month decline in its history since 1980. At the same time, the 4-month stretch of Value factor outperformance since the vaccine efficacy announcements in November matches the average length of Value rotations since the Financial Crisis, the factor’s 30% recent rise rivals two of the decade’s largest Value rallies, in 2013 and 2016.

      But what may be even more challenging is that value no longer is cheap as it was just a few weeks ago. Specifically, Kostin notes that this week Goldman’s equity analysts’ proprietary Reopening Scale climbed to a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10…

      … even as the bank’s Reopening basket has already recovered 75% of its decline, suggesting markets have vastly outrun the recovery. Consider that Goldman’s Cyclicals vs. Defensives basket pair has climbed to its highest level since the post-tax reform surge of early 2018…

      and the relative P/E valuation of the baskets stands at its highest historical level outside of the post-GFC recovery.

      So with many cyclicals and “reopening” stocks no longer trading at depressed levels, and with growth stocks susceptible to further market turmoil on the back of rising rates, Goldman’s clients ask: “Where is there still value in the US stock market?”

      Well, since Goldman makes its money by making markets, and has a sworn duty to encourage clients to buy cheap stocks even when there aren’t, Kostin answers with a decisive yes.

      Starting at the top of the list, the Goldman strategist writes that at a factor level, “Value” still looks very attractive relative to history.The P/E multiple gap between the highest valuation and lowest valuation S&P 500 stocks, on a sector-neutral basis, registered 231% at the start of 2021, the highest level since 2000. That spread has since declined to 161% but is still substantially above its 40-year average of 103%

      Kostin has some more good news for value investors: “as rates rise and growth accelerates, Value should continue to outperform. High dividend yield stocks, a close cousin of Value, look particularly depressed.”

      As a result, at a macro level, S&P 500 dividend futures “also still appear to present an attractive value, with the 2023 contract trading 11% below our top-down forecast and only 5% above realized 2019 payments. “

      A second curious observation is that “surprisingly, the valuation of the S&P 500 Info Tech sector also registers below its historical average relative to the broad index.” As we have documented for the past 4 weeks, much recent investor focus –and portfolio pain –has been concentrated in the longest-duration stocks with attractive long-term growth prospects but weak current profitability. Long-duration equities are particularly sensitive to rising rates, as evidenced by the 13% decline of our new Long Duration basket during the past month.

      Goldman’s Short Duration basket (GSTHSDUR) rallied by 12% during the same time. However, there is a large difference between the profitability and valuations of S&P 500 Info Tech and stocks like those in our Non-Profitable Tech basket (GSXUNPTC). Tech’s current 16% P/E premium to the S&P 500 is actually lower than the 40-year average of 32% (29% excluding 1998-2002). One further bullish case for growth stocks: as rates rise, near-term growth and profitability become more valuable; these are strengths of many large-cap tech firms (of course, if rates rise too far too fast, growth stocks will be crushed regardless)

      Third, Kostin notes that some of his favorite current thematic investment strategies also remain attractively valued in relative terms despite sharp recent appreciation:

      Our Low Labor Cost basket has outperformed the S&P 500 by 800 bp in the past six weeks (14% vs. 6%) but still trades at an 17x forward P/E, representing a 20% discount to the S&P 500. Our High Operating Leverage basket trades at the same P/E as the S&P 500, but has averaged a 7% premium during the past decade. Both baskets should outperform as the economy improves and unemployment falls.

      Still, not even Kostin can say that the market as a whole is anything but extremely overpriced, and admits that “In absolute terms, most of the US equity market carries above-average valuations relative to history.This is unsurprising with the S&P 500 trading at 22x NTM P/E (96th percentile)” (see chart above). In fact, the Goldman strategist admits that valuations today are even more elevated than they were in 2000. 20 years ago, the aggregate S&P 500 P/E was a similar 24x, but the median stock traded at 14x. Today, the median firm trades at 21x.

      A breakdown by sector reveals that the recently hammered defensive industries generally trade at the lowest valuations in the market today, while Consumer Staples, Communication Services, and Health Care trade at the lowest valuations relative to their own histories and vs. the S&P 500. And while Goldman admits that Defensives should carry a discount in an economic environment of improving growth and rising rates, the bank believes that Health Care stands out as an attractive longer-term opportunity. Relative to other “bond proxy” sectors, Health Care generates much stronger EPS growth and has historically exhibited less interest rate sensitivity: “The sector’s current 23% FY2 P/E discount to the S&P 500 matches the largest discount in our 45-year data history, and like other comparable historical episodes is likely explained by an over-abundance of political uncertainty.”

      Finally, and extending on a point he made last week, Kostin writes that Goldman’s macro forecasts also suggest that two of the most quintessential value sectors can still appreciate in coming months despite being the strongest recent performers in the market.

      Case in point, Energy – which we have been pounding the table on since last summer (see the Exxon posts) – has returned 40% YTD and continues to trade with a very close relationship to long-term oil prices. Goldman’s commodity strategists expect Brent crude will rise 8% to $75/bbl next year. Energy is also the only S&P 500 sector with short interest above its historical average. This will be key once Quants (which recently covered their energy shorts) go massively long the energy sector as we previewed on Friday. Similarly, Financials, the second best sector YTD (16%), trades closely with Treasury yields. Although it has recently rallied more than its typical relationship with rates would have implied, relative valuations remain low compared to history and Goldman expects value to keep outperforming if the economy continues to accelerate and rates continue to rise.

      Tyler Durden
      Sat, 03/13/2021 – 18:00

    • How Partisan Politics Rots Your Brain
      How Partisan Politics Rots Your Brain

      Authored by David D’Amato via Libertarian Institute & Libertarianism.org,

      Recent research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques is allowing us to peer into the connections, yet shrouded in mystery, between local brain activity, cognitive processes, and partisan attachment. This developing body of knowledge has revealed the profound importance of evolution in shaping the ways in which our brains process all kinds of information, in particular political information. At the center of this evolutionary journey is the importance of groups—of being initiated and accepted into them, of aligning ourselves with them, of being loyal to them regardless of philosophical considerations. The social dynamics of group membership and participation are programmed more deeply into our brains than is abstract philosophizing. “In other words, people will go along with the group, even if the ideas oppose their own ideologies—belonging may have more value than facts.” Because we once moved from place to place as nomads, such groups are our homes even more than any physical locations are.

      We now have decades of research suggesting—if not proving— “the ubiquity of emotion‐​biased motivated reasoning,” reasoning that is qualitatively different from the kind operating when subjects are engaged in “cold reasoning,” where the subjects lack a “strong emotional stake” in the subjects at issue. Coupled with a growing literature on the startling character and extent of political ignorance, the current state has dire implications for human freedom. The stakes are high: in their 2018 study of why and how partisanship impairs the brain’s ability to process information objectively, NYU researchers Jay J. Van Bavel and Andrea Pereira note that “partisanship can alter memory, implicit evaluation, and even perceptual judgments.” 

      One recent study, published last fall by a team from Berkeley, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins, set out to better understand how partisan biases develop in the brain. The researchers had subjects watch a series of videos, using fMRI to explore the “neural mechanisms that underlie the biased processing of real‐​world political content.” The results showed that partisan team members process identical information in highly biased and motivated ways. The researchers locate this neural polarization in the part of the brain known as the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a region associated with understanding and formulating narratives. The study also found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that to the extent a given participant’s brain activity during the videos aligned with that of the “average liberal” or “average conservative,” the participant was more likely to take up that group’s position.

      The study accords with years of previous research showing that partisans’ opinions on important social, political, and economic issues are affected by subconscious brain processes—processes of which they’re neither aware nor in control. This ought to be deeply concerning to everyone who belongs to a political team: processes are taking place in your brain, underneath or beyond the level of direct awareness, that are informing your conclusions about important social and political issues. To reflect on this for even a moment should fill anyone who aspires to critical thinking or rationality with a kind of dread, for loyalty to the team seems to be overriding the higher faculties of the mind.

      But, the authors are careful to note, it’s important not to interpret these results as pointing to some kind of determinism, whereby we can’t choose how to think or what we believe. As one of of the study’s authors, Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki, says, “Critically, these differences do not imply that people are hardwired to disagree.” Rather, these neural pathways seem to be carved largely by the kinds and sources of the media we consume. From the data yielded by such research, among many other similar studies, a picture begins to emerge of partisanship as a kind of mind poisoning, an infection that leads to serious and, importantly, measurable cognitive impairment. Evidence suggests that, under the influence of partisanship, we can’t even understand our own thoughts and opinions.

      In another important, recent experiment, researchers wanted to understand the relative accuracy of participants’ introspective constructs. The researchers set out to gauge people’s ability to understand their own choices, to see clearly “the elements of internal argumentation that lead to [their] choices.” In particular, the researchers wanted to know how subjects would deal with choices that had been manipulated—that is, whether subjects would “notice mismatches between their intended choice and the outcome they are presented with.” Would subjects recognize that something was off? If they failed to notice the manipulation, would they offer justifications for choices they had not even made? The assumption is that subjects who fail to notice the mismatches must not really understand the reasons for their choices or “the internal processes leading to a moral or political judgment.”

      The results revealed a conspicuous “introspective blindness to the internal processes leading to a moral or political judgment.” People didn’t seem to understand why they had made the decisions they’d made (or had not made), though some exhibited what the researchers call “unconscious detection of self‐​deception“—these subjects were unable to detect the manipulations of their answers, but they did register lower confidence in the manipulated choices, which the authors suggest points to “the existence of a neural mechanism unconsciously monitoring our own thoughts.”

      Once one has chosen and joined a team, she has very little control over her own thoughts. When they are introduced, new data are distorted, misinterpreted, or discarded based on their consistency with what we may describe as a program running in the background: partisanship leads the team member into a cognitive position of unconscious self‐​deception. Few of us, if fully understanding this phenomenon, would choose it for themselves—at least that’s the hope of many who study this area. As the authors observe, “reflecting on our beliefs may help to develop free societies.” They suggest that if citizens better understood the brain mechanics of the cognitive impairment and self‐​deception brought on by partisanship, they’d be positioned to make better decisions. Research has shown that “reflecting on how we make decisions leads to better decisions.”

      Similar research on self‐​deception in politics has also confirmed the presence of the Dunning‐​Kruger effect (to summarize, people think they know a lot more than they actually do). Further, the effect is exaggerated within the context of politics, with low‐​knowledge participants describing themselves as even more knowledgeable than usual once partisanship is made a conspicuous factorVitor Geraldi Haase and Isabella Starling‐​Alves posit that the kind of self‐​deception that is such “a major characteristic of political partisanship…probably evolved as an evolutionary adaptive strategy to deal with the intragroup‐​extragroup dynamics of human evolution.” Objective truth, meaning roughly an accurate model of reality, is not important, at least not anywhere near as important, as conformity and indeed submission, which we may associate with social reality.

      Whatever its flaws, evolutionary psychology offers us several promising leads on the question of just why the brain isn’t able to perform on partisanship. This notion of social reality is an important clue. At this juncture, it is important to underline the fact that when we speak of partisanship, we are not speaking of ideology; the relationship between partisan identification and political ideology is complicated, the connection between the two not particularly strong. Ideologues tend to think systematically, and the philosophical contents of their beliefs are deeply important to them. What is important to the partisan is not what she believes, but that she aligns her beliefs with those of her team or in-group—or else, as may be the case, that she is loyal to and supportive of the party group despite any real or perceived ideological nonconcurrences.

      Americans tend to vastly overestimate the differences in political ideology and policy preferences between Democrats and Republicans. In fact, most Americans are not at all ideological, can’t describe ideologies accurately (as their proponents would describe them), and have almost no information on either the history of ideas or the empirical evidence that bears on particular political or policy questions. Interestingly, partisanship doesn’t necessarily seem to be about politics in the normative or philosophical sense, as “people place party loyalty over policy, and even over truth.” There are actually relatively weak correlations between partisan identity and concrete policy preferences. “[P]artisan affect is inconsistently (and perhaps artifactually) founded in policy attitudes.”

      Indeed, strong partisanship is necessarily an impediment to ideological thinking insofar as ideology is predicated on an integrated and consistent approach to policy questions, as against the blind, team‐​rooting approach associated in the literature with partisanship. Ideological people, whatever their flaws, hold political actors and government bodies to account. Partisans change positions readily and shamelessly, depending on anything from who is living in the White House, to the vagaries of party leaders, to what is perceived as popular at the moment. Further, individual Americans’ political opinions are remarkably unstable over time, vacillating between glaring contradictions, relying on a confused amalgam of elite opinions. Partisanship as we know it rather seems to be a holdover from humankind’s history of tribal loyalty, with “selective pressures hav[ing] sculpted human minds to be tribal.” That is, evolution selected for just the kinds of cognitive biases we find in partisans on both sides today (importantly, neither “team” is immune).

      A recent paper published by the American Psychological Association suggests that from a cognitive and psychoneurological standpoint, partisans of the left and right are much more like each other than they are like nonpartisans. As study co‐​author Leor Zmigrod writes, “Regardless of the direction and content of their political beliefs, extreme partisans had a similar cognitive profile.” Specifically, partisans of all stripes show lower levels of cognitive flexibility; importantly, even when processing information that has no political character, they are more dogmatic, less adaptable, and less able to complete tasks that require an “ability to adapt to novel or changing environments and a capacity to switch between modes of thinking.”

      Partisanship quite literally makes one dumb—or is it that dumb people are just more likely to be committed partisans? Zmigrod is careful to point out that the study can’t give us the answer to that question, that we would need longitudinal studies in order to better understand the causal direction and causal phenomena at play. As soon as partisanship is introduced, as soon as a question mentions a politician or political party, subjects are unable to accurately assess basic facts. Indeed, remarkably, tinging a question with a political shade renders many subjects unable to answer a simple question even when they are given the answer. Relatedly, studies have shown that one’s political affiliations even affect her ability to perform basic math: given an operation that yields a statistic contradicting a subject’s partisan view, the subject will tend to question the result rather than updating based on the evidence or attempting to reconcile the new information with her politics.

      In a groundbreaking study published last summer, a team of researchers led by the University of Exeter’s Darren Schreiber attempted to address the lack of brain imaging research specifically aimed at better understanding nonpartisans, a group that has been neglected as almost all such research has focused on the differences between the brains of partisans of the left and right. The study found that nonpartisans’ brains are different from those of their brainwashed brethren, particularly in “regions that are typically involved in social cognition.

      It may be that the next stage in human evolution will involve rewiring our brains to accept the fact that current groups are artificially and arbitrarily defined—that all human beings are one people. For just as there is harmful, toxic tribalism, there is also socially beneficial, cooperative, cosmopolitanism. As social policy expert Elizabeth A. Segal writes, “Ultimately our goal should be to build the tribe we all belong to: that of humanity.” Libertarians take this lesson quite seriously, for we tend to see ourselves as part of a common global community of connected individuals who are perfectly capable of dealing with one another through peaceful and mutually‐​beneficial interactions. We celebrate social, cultural, religious, and linguistic differences as the spice of life rather than see them as dividing lines or impediments to willing collaboration. If we can understand and think clearly through partisanship, we can begin to build a freer world based not on arbitrary divisions and compromised reasoning, but on mutual respect and renewed emphasis on rigorous critical thinking.

      Tyler Durden
      Sat, 03/13/2021 – 17:30

    • Border Crisis Explodes: Texas Child Migrant Facility At 700% Capacity As ICE Begs For Volunteers; White House Denies Lawyers Access
      Border Crisis Explodes: Texas Child Migrant Facility At 700% Capacity As ICE Begs For Volunteers; White House Denies Lawyers Access

      A flood of child migrants filling Texas immigration facilities has turned into a full-blown crisis in the seven weeks since President Biden took office – a stark contrast to the Trump administration, which required that migrants wait in Mexico while the United States processed asylum requests, as opposed to Biden’s policy of letting everyone in and simply trusting migrants to show up for their hearings.

      In recent days, over 3,500 unaccompanied minors have been held in Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) detention centers designed for adults – while Biden officials privately warned on Friday that the administration can’t handle the influx of children, according to the Daily Mail. So far this year, apprehensions are on track to eclipse the last decade of migrant detentions, even with a notable spike in 2019.

      So far in March, more than 4,200 people are arriving into America across the border per day, which if sustained would rival the 132,856 apprehensions recorded in May 2019 – which was the most in 13 years.  

      The surge is leading to overcrowded conditions as the CBP centers – built for adult men – and the HHS shelters do not have space for the mounting numbers. –Daily Mail.

      At one Border Patrol facility alone, hundreds of illegal child migrants have been crammed into packed conditions – with some sleeping on the floor because there aren’t just enough beds, they’re run out of mats, according to the Associated Press, citing nonprofit lawyers who interviewed over a dozen children at a Donna, Texas holding complex. Some of the children told attorneys that they’ve been there for a week or more in direct violation of the agency’s three-day limit for detaining child migrants. Over 130 children have been held in CBP facilities for more than 10 days, while many say they haven’t been allowed to phone their parents or other relatives who may be wondering where they are.

      An aerial view of the Donna facility which is at 726 percent of its legal pandemic capacity (via the Daily Mail)

      Despite concerns about the coronavirus, the children are kept so closely together that they can touch the person next to them, the lawyers said. Some have to wait five days or more to shower, and there isn’t always soap available, just shampoo, according to the lawyers.

      President Joe Biden’s administration denied the lawyers access to the tent facility. During the administration of former President Donald Trump, attorney visits to Border Patrol stations revealed severe problems, including dozens of children held at one rural station without adequate food, water, or soap. –AP

      “It is pretty surprising that the administration talks about the importance of transparency and then won’t let the attorneys for children set eyes on where they’re staying,” said attorney Leecia Welch of the National Center for Youth Law, adding “I find that very disappointing.”

      According to the report, more children are waiting longer in Border Patrol ‘cages’ (and tents) because long-term facilities operated by the US Health and Human Services department have become quickly filled to capacity as hundreds of children are apprehended daily at far higher rates than they are being released to parents or sponsors. It takes an average of 37 days to release a child from HHS custody.

      Meanwhile, ICE has been asking for volunteers to send to the US-Mexico border ‘as soon as this weekend’ to help out at the Donna, Texas facility – which is 729% over capacity, according to CBS News.

      And it’s not just Texas:

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

      “This situation mandates immediate action to protect the life and safety of federal personnel and the aliens in custody,” said ICE acting assist director for field operations, Michael Meade, in an email obtained by the Washington Post.

      “Start and end dates are TBD, but could begin as soon as this weekend at location along the SWB [southwest border], most likely Texas,” he continued. “It is anticipated that the enforcement actions will continue to grow over the coming months.”

      On March 2, the Donna complex was holding more than 1,800 people — 729% of its pandemic-era capacity, which is designed for 250 migrants, according to an internal CBP document reviewed by CBS News.

      Most of the minors said they had only showered once while in U.S. custody, even though they’d been held for more than five days, according to Desai. Some said they had showered twice.

      They all said they wanted to shower more and were told they couldn’t,” Desai said. -CBS News

      Democrats, meanwhile, are scrambling to defend Biden’s handling of the migrant surge (which he created).

      “It will be nothing like what we saw in the Trump administration of babies being snatched from the arms of their parents,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) during a Thursday press briefing. “I trust the Biden administration’s policy to be based on humanitarian[ism] and love of children rather than political points or red meat for their Republican base.”

      Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-CA) – vice chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, says party leaders are keeping a watchful eye on the administration to ensure guidelines – which are not being followed – are followed.

      “There is a process for this. The Biden administration will move toward that process, and we will hold them accountable, just like we did the prior administration, to ensure that they’re following the law,” said Aguilar – before giving Biden a huge pass. “But this is a process that is rooted in compassion. And that’s the difference between the prior administration and this administration.”

      House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) disagrees.

      “Biden has created a crisis on the border that he won’t admit; 100,000 illegal immigrants were encountered just last month. Put that in perspective. That is larger than the hometown of Scranton, Pa., of our President Biden, and now it’s only growing month after month,” he said, adding that Biden “tears the wall down at the border, but he put one around the Capitol.”

      Tyler Durden
      Sat, 03/13/2021 – 17:00

    • Fact vs. Fiction: Understatement Of Housing Inflation Exceeds "Bubble" Levels
      Fact vs. Fiction: Understatement Of Housing Inflation Exceeds “Bubble” Levels

      Submitted by Joseph Carson, former chief economist of AllianceBernstein

      The understatement of housing inflation in the consumer price index has reached a new milestone. As reported, the gap between the actual change in house prices and owners’ rent, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), exceeds the “bubble” levels.

      In February, BLS reported owner’s rent increased 2% over the last 12 months. House price inflation, as reported by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), increased 11.4%. That gap over 900 basis points exceeds the 800 basis point gap recorded during the housing bubble peak.

      The consumer price index was created and designed to measure prices paid for purchases of specific goods and services by consumers. The CPI was often referred to as a buyers’ index since it only measured prices “paid” by consumers.

      The CPI has lost that designation. It is no longer measures actual prices. For the past two decades, BLS imputes the owners’ rent series, using data from the rental market, no longer using price data from the larger single-family market.

      Imputing prices for the cost of housing services make the CPI a hybrid index or a cross between a price index and a cost of living index. A hybrid index is not appropriate as a gauge to ascertain price stability, especially when the hypothetical measure of owner’s rent accounts for 30% of the core CPI.

      The CPI missed the price “bubble” of the mid-2000s, and the economic and financial fallout was historic. History sometimes repeats itself in economics and finance. Policymakers forewarned.

      Tyler Durden
      Sat, 03/13/2021 – 16:30

    • One Year On: Visualizing Key Events In The COVID-19 Timeline
      One Year On: Visualizing Key Events In The COVID-19 Timeline

      It’s been a long and eventful year since COVID-19 was officially declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020.

      The tangible and intangible costs of COVID-19 have been severe. In this visual COVID-19 timeline, Visual Capitalist’s Iman Ghosh delves into some significant milestones that have occurred around the world.

      December 2019-February 2020 – Pre-Pandemic COVID-19 Timeline

      The origin story actually begins at the turn of the new year, as events began bubbling under the surface in Wuhan, China. The first coronavirus cluster was reported on December 31, 2019, with initial exposures linked to the Huanan Seafood Market.

      In the new year, the first coronavirus cases began filtering outside of China, to Thailand and the U.S.—causing the WHO to declare a public health emergency of international concern. As the death toll ticked up to over 200, it was clear that this was no ordinary virus.

      All dates in the graphic are based on when events occurred rather than when they were widely reported.

      In February 2020, the novel coronavirus was finally named COVID-19. In addition, the Diamond Princess cruise ship was linked to 624 confirmed cases in late February—the highest case cluster outside of China at the time. The ship captured international headlines when it was refused port in a number of countries, casting COVID-19 into the spotlight.

      This month also marked a significant turning point. Dr. Li Wenliang, a Chinese doctor, had tried to draw global attention to the severity of China’s outbreak before he passed of COVID-19 on February 7, 2020.

      “If the officials had disclosed information about the epidemic earlier I think it would have been a lot better […] There should be more openness and transparency.”

      – Dr. Li, in a NYT interview a few days before his passing

      Italy and Iran then grew significantly as global hotspots of COVID-19. The U.S. reported its first death due to COVID-19—however, it was only discovered in April that there were in fact two prior deaths due to the virus in the country.

      On March 11, 2020, WHO made a critical decision. As the virus began to transcend borders and claim thousands of lives, it announced that the COVID-19 outbreak had officially become a deadly global pandemic.

      In the year that followed, the virus was relentless in spreading around the world. How have cumulative case counts and death tolls evolved since the beginning?

      Let’s explore key events in the COVID-19 timeline that took place over the course of the past year.

      365 Days of the Pandemic

      The initial impacts of the pandemic were felt swiftly, and progressively became worse. Within the first three months, the world paid a high human and economic toll.

      March-May 2020 – Whiplash for the World

      Following the WHO announcement, numerous sporting events were cancelled, from the NBA and NHL 2019-2020 seasons to the UEFA Euro men’s soccer championship. Even the Tokyo Summer Olympics were postponed for a year.

      In late March 2020, the U.S. surpassed China to become the hardest-hit country by COVID-19. In terms of overall case numbers, it remains the global epicenter of the pandemic today, followed by India and Brazil.

      The stock market took a severe hit, with a crash rivaling other recessions and significant financial crises. For example, here’s how the Dow Jones Index Average dropped in March alone:

      Stock markets re-entered a bull market in April, but the damage had already been done. The S&P 500, for example, would only return to pre-pandemic levels in August.

      The onset of the pandemic led to additional economic chaos. The price of oil flipped negative in April, and over 10 million Americans lost their jobs in the sudden downturn.

      To help prop up the economy, the U.S. unveiled the $2 trillion CARES Act, the largest economic stimulus package in history—near 10% of national gross domestic product.

      Multiple countries locked down their borders to the rest of the world, from the European Union to India. These travel bans and reduced mobility affected not just airline revenues, but temporarily had a noticeable effect on carbon emissions too.

      In addition, two world leaders—UK’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Russia’s President Mikhail Mishustin—contracted COVID-19.

      June-November 2020 – A Deadly Surge

      Numbers kept rising over the next six months, following the shifting geography of COVID-19 into densely populated regions such as Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. In a controversial move, Brazil stopped making its COVID-19 case data public starting June 7, 2020.

      Global deaths due to COVID-19 surpassed half a million at the end of June—and jumped to over 1 million by the end of September. Another heartbreaking record was set in mid-October when global cases leapt up by 1 million in just three days.

      Former U.S. President Donald Trump, Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, and Poland’s President Andrzej Duda were among many more world leaders to test positive for COVID-19.

      December 2020-March 2021 – Vaccines Bring Hope

      At the very end of 2020, some optimism for things going back to normal was restored when Moderna announced the very first vaccine candidate, followed by Pfizer/BioNTech.

      However, more alarm was raised as reports of a faster-spreading, more infectious strain of COVID-19 emerged from the UK. Two more variants have also since been discovered:

      *Note: P.1 was first detected in Japan but traced back to Brazil

      In January 2021, WHO organized an international scientific consultation around these variants. The good news? Existing and emerging vaccines will still potentially provide adequate protection against these variants.

      In March 2021, the U.S. Congress approved President Biden’s $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill. Some details of the money breakdown include:

      • Up to $1,400-per-person stimulus payments for 90% of households
      • $350 billion in state and local aid
      • $8.5 billion to rural hospitals and healthcare providers

      The rest is expected to go towards safely reopening K-12 schools, assisting hard-hit small businesses, extending food stamp benefits, vaccine R&D and distribution, and more.

      An End in Sight for the COVID-19 Timeline?

      With the global vaccine rollout now underway, many more key vaccine producers, from AstraZeneca/Oxford University to Johnson & Johnson, have joined in the fight to return life to normal.

      Although there have been deep losses due to COVID-19, many hope that we’ll learn from the lessons of this past year, and emerge stronger than ever.

      “We have come so far, we have suffered so much and we have lost so many. We cannot, we must not squander the progress we have made… Science, solutions and solidarity remain our guide. There are no short-cuts.

      Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of WHO

      Tyler Durden
      Sat, 03/13/2021 – 16:00

    • China Splurges On Iranian Oil Despite US Sanctions
      China Splurges On Iranian Oil Despite US Sanctions

      Authored Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

      Despite the U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil exports, some Chinese refiners are buying so much Iranian crude that the ports in the Shandong province, where most independent refiners are based, are experiencing tanker traffic congestions, analysts and traders have told Bloomberg.

      China has never actually stopped buying crude oil from the Islamic Republic, even after the Trump Administration slapped sanctions on Iran’s oil sales in 2018, warning buyers to stay away from Iranian crude and risk being sanctioned and cut off from the U.S. banking system.

      Various reports, media investigations, and tanker-tracking firms suggest that China has been receiving much more oil from Iran than the official figures report, when they report imports from Iran.

      The Islamic Republic has been using ship-to-ship transfers with transponders turned off to avoid detection, skirting U.S. sanctions.

      Some Chinese refiners are now taking advantage of the heavily discounted Iranian crude amid surging benchmark oil prices. Those buyers in China who import oil from Iran are reportedly buying the crude at a discount of $3 to $5 per barrel off the Brent Crude benchmark, according to Bloomberg.

      In addition, oil demand in China is back to pre-crisis levels, and some refiners prefer lower-priced crude when Brent is nearing the $70 per barrel threshold.

      China’s imports of crude oil from Iran in March are expected to more than double from February and reach around 856,000 barrels per day (bpd), which would be the highest estimated volume of Chinese imports of Iran’s oil in nearly two years, Kevin Wright, a Singapore-based analyst at Kpler, told Bloomberg. The estimated import level this month includes the oil that Iran is said to have transferred from ship to ship at some point along the route to hide the fact that the origin of the crude was actually Iran.

      As a result of the higher imports from Iran, tankers are estimated to have waited for days at Shandong ports, analysts told Bloomberg.

      Tyler Durden
      Sat, 03/13/2021 – 15:30

    • "It's Never Different This Time" – Creator Of Bond Volatility Gauge Warns Selloff Isn't Over
      “It’s Never Different This Time” – Creator Of Bond Volatility Gauge Warns Selloff Isn’t Over

      Ever since the 10-year yield eclipsed 1.25% last month, the market has been eying the steady ascent in yields with trepidation. Last week, the selloff in Treasuries finally forced Jerome Powell to acknowledge the growing inflationary pressures facing the US economy. 

      Although tech stocks and the Nasdaq rallied back on Tuesday following a reflation-inspired rotation into ‘real economy’ stocks, many investors are bracing for bonds and stocks to continue to move lower in tandem. With volatility in equities and fixed income on the rise, RealVision invited the Convexity Maven himself, Harley Bassman, the creator of the MOVE index (a volatility gauge for bonds similar to the equity-focused VIX), to discuss Bassman’s outlook for rates and markets. Unsurprisingly, he sees more volatility, and higher convexity, ahead.

      During the interview, which was conducted by Logica Capital Advisors portfolio manager and chief strategist Mike Green, Bassman explained why he feels interest rates will continue their recent trend higher as markets move recover from Fed-induced mispricing.

      MIKE GREEN: Mike Green. As usual, coming from Marin County these days. Incredibly excited to have my good friend Harley Bassman back on Real Vision for– it’s been forever since you and I have had a chance to talk. Basically, the last time we talked was probably in the EQ Derivatives Conference in 2018, 2019? It’s been a long time.

      Let’s talk interest rates. You are known as Mr. Convexity, you are the inventor of the MOVE index, the equivalent of the VIX for the fixed income space. In an environment in which chaos and drama dominate the interest rates space, there’s nobody that I’d rather talk to than Harley Bassman. Harley, what the hell is going on with interest rates?

      HARLEY BASSMAN: Well, that’s a good question. I would say that this notion that rates are exploding higher and bad things are happening, it’s not quite the case. I would say that when 10-years were at 0.75, that was the wrong price. All we’re doing now is going to the right price as opposed to where we were before, which is the wrong price. I would push back at you. We’ve seen a significant curve steepening. I’m quite certain we’re going to talk about that today quite a bit.

      To illustrate this mis-pricing in rates, Bassman pointed to the historical relationship between the fed funds rate and a popular gauge of inflation expectations five years out. 

      Looking back to the period before the pandemic, Bassman and Green mused about the brief yield curve inversions that surfaced in 2019, and the fact that, as it would happen, the coronavirus-inspired recession came about less than one year later. Many economists dismissed these kinks in the yield curve as temporary phenomena, arguing that the predictive power of the yield curve only applies when inversions persist for weeks or a month or longer.

      The big question, as Bassman put it: does the coronavirus-inspired global recession validate the predictive powers of the yield curve? Bassman believes the answer is yes.

      MIKE GREEN: Now, this required you to develop a virus from bats and release it into China and then release it to the United States, but you managed to get the recession.

      HARLEY BASSMAN: Well, what I want to ask you is, do you think this counts? I’ll go first. I say it does. Because I say whenever you get some event, especially a recession, that it’s always a surprise. By definition, a surprise is unknown. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a surprise. Therefore, since the warning came, we could not predict what it would be, but we did get it. You’re saying that a bad virus doesn’t count. Well, I would say maybe a housing crisis doesn’t count from the last recession we had. Does this count, Mike?

      Green agreed with Bassman, adding that slowing home and auto sales in the runup to the pandemic suggested that a recession was likely in the offing anyway. But was last year’s economic chaos enough to “cleanse” this dynamic? Or did the Fed only succeed in delaying the inevitable?

      Following a brief discussion of convexity hedging and the Fed’s impact on the mortgage-bond market, Green and Bassman turned their attention to the outlook for Fed policy, and whether the central bank will move to cap long-term rates via yield curve control to try and prevent any harmful market ructions. In the coming months and years, Bassman believes the Fed will strive to keep front-end rates anchored as promised, while allowing long-term rates to move higher, alleviating the stress on the banking system, pension funds and other savers.

      [HARLEY BASSMAN]…Certainly, volatility reduction has been a specific policy that they’ve been using. I actually think that they’re not going to do yield curve control the back end. My feeling is they’re going to hold the front end, overnight rate stays where it is, as promised, the next two years no matter the inflation number, maybe they hold 2s, maybe 5s. I think they’ll let 10s and 30s go, or at least move up. That’s not a bad thing. The government can move their funding to the front end, and the Fed could absorb it through either money printing, and we could discuss whether it’s money printing or not, what I think.

      The back end going up is public policy good. A steeper curve helps the baking system. For good or for ill, we no longer do barter. We don’t use gold. We are a financial economy, and we’re highly levered. The banking system, maybe there’s bad guys in there and certainly there were villains 10 years ago who should have gone to jail, and didn’t, but the banking system is the plumbing of our financial economy, and we need to maintain it. Therefore steeper curve helps that plumbing system, so the government can do it. The Fed and fiscal policy can be more efficient.

      Having a good plumbing system is good. Number two is taking the whole curve down has not been at zero cost. You’ve taken money from the lenders and given them to the borrowers. Is that a good thing? No, you’ve done a few shows on pension fund instability. If we take the back end up, that helps pension funds, that helps insurance companies. That’s a public policy good. Steepen the curve out, I’m not saying rates going from zero on the front end to 10 on the back but putting the back end at three, four or five is not a disaster, I don’t think, for the overall macro economy.

      A quick look at what forward rates are doing clearly shows that, at this point, Fed tightening is already being built into the system.

      But does that mean the Fed will be raising the Fed funds rate two years from now? No – in fact, Bassman believes the smarter policy would be to taper first. This would allow the curve to steepen while still keeping front-end rates anchored, which is a “better way to bring the world into line, rather than taking the front end up”, Bassman said.

      As the conversation moved toward an analysis of the risks introduced by the Fed’s policy of “financial repression” – as Green termed it – the two men came to their first disagreement of the evening: whether the inevitable inflationary fallout from the Fed’s policy decisions would be “worth it.” As Bassman acknowledged that his mantra is “it’s never different this time” – a sign he has no illusions about where all of this is headed.

      HARLEY BASSMAN: Circling back to our first two sentences here, it’s never different this time. That’s my mantra. It’s never different this time. I can’t explain why or how but I just do not think that we’ve reinvented human tragedy. Hubris, greed, ego. We wrote about it, the Greeks wrote about it, Shakespeare wrote about it. It just hasn’t changed, and it’s this idea that we’ve invented a new paradigm I just don’t believe it. It’s a different song, but it’s still music and I think that we’ll find some way to go and cause trouble, which is why I believe in inflation ultimately.

      Is it next year? No. Is it in 20 years? I don’t know. What I do think, it’s going to happen in two to four years when the demographic bubble rolls over. We could do that later on. I think we’re going to get it because I don’t think you could print the coin of the realm at a faster pace than the overall growth of the economy without inflation at some point. Now, could it take 20 years? Why not? It took 400 years for the Roman Empire collapsed, so in the grand scheme of things, maybe not.

      This policy of money printing is not going to end well. That doesn’t mean it was a bad public policy, by the way, because having the economy totally collapse either in 2009 or last year is certainly a bad idea, so maybe deferring the pain or spreading the pain out. I think that inflation is the ultimate solution. Because inflation is a beautiful tax. It taxes, everybody. It taxes them silently, and the politicians dumped a vote on it. As a tax, everyone — well, I wasn’t happy, but it’s the easiest one to live with in a democracy.

      While that’s certainly one way to look at it, some listeners were put off by Bassman’s take.

      At any rate, readers can read the transcript of the interview below, and decide for themselves. Anybody interested in watching or listening to the interview will need to subscribe.

      Tyler Durden
      Sat, 03/13/2021 – 15:00

    • Fentanyl Flowing Into United States At Record Volume
      Fentanyl Flowing Into United States At Record Volume

      Authored by Charlotte Cuthbertson via The Epoch Times,

      The amount of fentanyl seized while coming through the southern border during the first 5 months of fiscal year 2021 is already higher than all of fiscal year 2020, according to the latest statistics from Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

      CBP has seized more than 5,000 pounds of fentanyl since Oct. 1, 2020, said acting CBP Commissioner Troy Miller during a March 10 media call.

      “We are seeing a dramatic increase in fentanyl seizures this fiscal year, more than 360 percent higher than this time last year,” Miller said.

      “Nationwide drug seizures increased 50 percent in February from January. Cocaine interceptions increased 13 percent, seizures of methamphetamine increased 40 percent, seizures of heroin went up 48 percent.”

      Fentanyl is the synthetic opioid attributed to the escalating overdose death rate in the United States. It is most often manufactured in Mexico using chemicals supplied by China. It’s mixed with other narcotics to increase potency as well as pressed into counterfeit pain pills commonly known as “Mexican oxys.”

      “The cartels are dominating the distribution of this poison and it’s really, really alarming,” Derek Maltz, former head of the DEA’s special operations division, told The Epoch Times.

      “I do anticipate the crisis continuing on this escalating path. And to be honest with you, it’s really sad, because I’ve been communicating with a lot of parents who have lost their young kids, especially to the counterfeit pills. And it’s all coming from Mexico.”

      Overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids (other than methadone) between 2005 and 2018. (DEA 2021 report)

      The Rio Grande City Border Patrol station takes care of a 68-mile strip of international border in south Texas. It sits within the Rio Grande Valley Sector and in 2019 was the busiest of the nation’s 135 stations for drug seizures and the second busiest for illegal alien apprehensions.

      Then-deputy chief Border Patrol agent for the Rio Grande Valley sector Raul Ortiz, said in March 2019 “we’re not even probably catching about 10 percent of it [drugs].”

      Border experts have said it’s likely Border Patrol drug seizures will decrease as illegal immigration surges—agents will be tied up with large groups of people rather than interdicting drugs. Border Patrol highway checkpoints are also closing in many areas as agents are sent to the border to help with processing the increased numbers.

      The Biden administration has said there’s no crisis on the border and urges potential migrants not to come in illegally. But the latest illegal crossing numbers show that February hit a 14-month high with more than 100,000 Border Patrol apprehensions.

      Mexico’s president has expressed concern that President Joe Biden’s policies are encouraging illegal immigration and human trafficking along the border with the United States.

      “They see him as the migrant president, and so many feel they’re going to reach the United States,” Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said of Biden the morning after a virtual meeting with his U.S. counterpart on March 1, according to Reuters.

      Maltz said, “perception is reality. People around the world look at Biden as a softie on immigration.”

      “The open border is a disaster. It just increases the [cartels’] ability to move drugs freely into America,” he said.

      “Also, most importantly, it allows them to get their command and control operatives in the [United States] to establish the stash houses, the distribution outlets, the money collection points, so they have lots of people in America who are able to operate freely around the country.”

      Areas of influence of major Mexican cartel within the United States. (DEA report 2021)

      The cartels control the south side of the U.S.–Mexico border and anyone who crosses illegally has to pay them. Many can’t afford the smuggling fees and become indentured to the cartels once they reach the United States. Others realize it’s more lucrative to become involved in transnational crime rather than get a job at a fast food restaurant, for example, Maltz said.

      “This didn’t start under Donald Trump. It didn’t start under Barack Obama. It didn’t start under George Bush. This drug crisis has been escalating for years,” he said.

      “But they’re doing it at levels that we’ve never seen in the history of the country.”

      Tyler Durden
      Sat, 03/13/2021 – 14:30

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