Nov 12

Today’s News 12th November 2020

  • US Color Revolution: The Not So Phantom Menace
    US Color Revolution: The Not So Phantom Menace

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/11/2020 – 23:40

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

    “There is no civility, there is only politics…

    The Bureaucrats are in charge now…”

    – Senator Palpatine

    The Black Revolution in the U.S. is proceeding according to script. We are into the 3rd act of it.

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    Act I was the Coronapocalypse setting the stage for vastly expanded government powers and the systemic undermining of the sitting President.

    Act II was the summer of violence and fake polling data which created the illusion of a society at war with that same President for not addressing the needs of the people.

    Underneath the headlines the forces arrayed against Trump were building the infrastructure to ensure that however the people voted on November 3rd, the outcome was pre-determined in their favor against him.

    Act III is the election itself and the aftermath. The coup has begun. The pressure campaign to force the incumbent Trump, hated by the establishment, to concede has ratcheted up to eleven.

    This is all very normal for color revolutions, just ask Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus or Viktor Yanukovich formerly of the Ukraine. We can’t ask Slobodon Milosovic. He dead.

    But the one thing happened they didn’t count on, Trump actually winning the election by margins in swing states that couldn’t be overcome without overt and blatant fraud.

    That’s created the opportunity for a complete reversal of the current results and a successful countering of the color revolution strategy, which rests on a media-made frenzy supported by foreign government leaders to oust the sitting president from power quickly without proper adherence to the process.

    And that feeds the plot points for the next eight weeks until Congress convenes to certify (or not) the Electoral College.

    President Trump refuses to concede the election, and rightly so. There are multiple paths to not only victory for him but also exposing the deep corruption of the election process and the people who control it.

    Lukashenko survived the color revolution in Belarus because the attempt there was ham-fisted. It lacked the ingredients necessary to pull it off – identitarian division within the people and ‘corporate’ sponsorship.

    The conditions weren’t ripe for that kind of result. All he had to do was offer reforms once the energy died down and make peace with Russia and he would survive.

    Ousting him from power may not have been the primary goal, but achieving the secondary goal of severing EU and US ties to it and forcing Russia to devote resources to Belarus is almost as important.

    So, if Trump wants to lead the nation he has to show it by fighting tooth and claw, just like Lukashenko did. And that means organizing support for him across the country. This is why he is incredibly smart to organize rallies. According to Axios:

    President Trump plans to brandish obituaries of people who supposedly voted but are dead — plus hold campaign-style rallies — in an effort to prolong his fight against apparent insurmountable election results, four Trump advisers told me during a conference call this afternoon.

    “Insurmountable election results??” Really? A few thousand votes separates Trump from outright sweeping all the battleground states whose vote totals are very sketchy and this is ‘insurmountable?’

    This is what I mean by the pressure campaign having gone plaid. There is no responsible journalism left within the major media outlets.

    Only those who were forced out on principle or corruption have the ability to speak their mind now.

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    Never in a million years would I look to Megyn Kelly for the voice of rationality. But it looks like being excommunicated from the inner circle does wonders for one’s ability to tell the truth.

    The division today was cynically stoked and nurtured for this current operation to effect this exact result. The bigger point Megyn doesn’t articulate is that this division is exactly the kind of ‘secondary goal’ desired if Trump prevails in the courts or through the Electoral College.

    Regardless of the outcome that division cuts deep enough to ensure an America permanently weakened, ripe for a complete remaking into a hellish place. There is a full-court press on right now across the world to attack sovereignty of important states whose populations are dissident to The Davos Crowd’s Great Reset — notably the U.K., the U.S., Poland and Russia.

    Trump’s fight is their fight. His supporters and sovereigntists of all stripes are to be ritualistically humiliated by every headline, every utterance, every Tweet and every newscast between now and when the State Legislatures meet to select slates of Electors in December.

    The media will never concede they were wrong, will never report on anything fairly. They are in on the grift. Looking for them to admit anything is a waste of energy and time. Simply turn them off and become #Ungovernable.

    This is a psychological war now, designed to rob you of your reason and sap your willingness to fight by creating an overwhelming picture of Trump as the bad guy, Quixotically clinging to power we’re being told he’s already lost.

    But Megyn Kelly is right in telling people that there will be no reconciliation without acceptance. And since, at its core, leftism is a religion without the ability to forgive, since it is vehemently anti-Christian, there will be no acceptance back into the fold, including for her.

    It will be marginalization, retribution and continued vitriol of all Trump supporters and anyone not down with being reset into the grand vision of the New Soviet Green Man.

    They haven’t even secured the presidency yet and BLM/Antifa are already turning on white Biden supporters who are urging peace.

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    Nothing shields you from the mob once the mob gets going. I hope this person’s conscience is clean that he did his part to stop Orange Man Bad because once this is over, that’s all he’ll have left.

    Klaus Schwab told you this. You’ll Own Nothing and be Happy.

    Or else.

    The choice was struggle sessions or Trump rallies. I told you months ago you would be faced with the Hobson’s Choice of accepting their dystopic future or having your house burned down.

    Millions chose poorly last week and they will have massive buyer’s remorse as the plans are rolled out and they are sacrificed.

    Don’t believe me? Ask Ukrainians if they are better off six years after their color revolution or not? That one was successful.

    Act III of a color revolution is the most dangerous. It is the one where chaos can reign for months and the balance tipped by the slimmest of margins. But in the end it always comes down to the willingness of the people to decide their future.

    Because taking down the U.S. is such a monumental undertaking they had to create a problem global in scale, COVID-19.

    The U.S. has everything against it in this situation. The oligarchy and its quislings are firmly in command of the narrative. There are real, deep divisions to keep people fighting each other while the oligarchs proceed with their plans.

    Trump is trying to marshal a counter-revolution on the ground and in the courts. The evidence will be presented. Apparatchiks will ignore their orders. Protests will miraculously spring up in all the right places.

    The media will misrepresent everything.

    It will be up to us to decide which way the State Legislatures decide whose electors go to Washington D.C. next month by putting real pressure on them to act on their conscience and the evidence. That’s the law.

    But the menace of it is real and it won’t go away regardless of the outcome of the election. It no longer lurks in the shadows. It slouches towards Washington waiting to be reborn.

    *  *  *

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  • "Catastrophic Collisions" – NASA Warns About New 5G Satellite Constellation
    "Catastrophic Collisions" – NASA Warns About New 5G Satellite Constellation

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/11/2020 – 23:20

    Several private companies are planning to launch large, low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite constellations. NASA, who generally doesn’t comment on these types of developments, recently published a stark warning for AST & Science, which intends to launch a massive constellation of hundreds of large 5G satellites. 

    NASA engineer Samantha Fonder expressed concern about AST’s 5G mega constellation of satellites in a recently penned letter to FCC’s Marleen Dortch, about how the space agency worries its assets in orbit could experience a “catastrophic collision,” reported Ars Technica. 

    “NASA submits this letter during the public comment period for the purpose of providing a better understanding of NASA’s concerns with respect to its assets on-orbit, to further mitigate the risks of collisions for the mutual benefit of all involved,” Fonder wrote. 

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    Since AST’s satellites are large, she noted that they could cause thousands of probable accidents every year. AST insists it’s committed to resolving the issues with NASA.

    Aside from the satellites’ size, Fonder fears that AST’s inexperience could result in a high rate of satellites failing to achieve orbit.  

    Fonder added, “for the completed constellation of 243 satellites, one can expect 1,500 mitigation actions per year and perhaps 15,000 planning activities. This would equate to four maneuvers and 40 active planning activities on any given day.” 

    At the end of the letter, she requests the FCC, given the size of AST’s satellites and inexperience, along with the heightened probabilities that collision could be seen as LEO has been transformed into a crowded mess of satellites and space debris, that “AST should consider alternative orbit regimes for this constellation.” 

    Besides Fonder’s warning, the European Space Agency (ESA) also warned about thousands of new satellites and dangerous space debris that have jammed up Earth’s orbit. 

    While it becomes clear space debris is becoming a significant issue, ESA recently awarded the Swiss startup company Clearpace, a $117 million contract, to remove space debris from orbit. Though the program to remove space junk won’t start until 2025. 

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    Judging by ESA’s animation above of satellites and space junk, collisions are bound to happen… 

  • We Honor Veterans By Preventing Homelessness, Suicide
    We Honor Veterans By Preventing Homelessness, Suicide

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/11/2020 – 23:00

    Authored by Brendan Cushing-Daniels & Christopher R. Fee via RealClearPolitics.com,

    We hope the incoming administration makes honoring our veterans a priority, not just today but all year long. President Dwight D. Eisenhower created Veterans Day to show the same commitment to veterans that he showed our troops during World War II.

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    Our veterans are our noblest citizens. Yet too many who helped preserve our freedoms wind up homeless, or even more tragically, take their own lives.

    Two years ago, John Scott Hannon, a decorated veteran of 23 years and a former top-ranked Navy SEAL platoon commander, died by his own hand as a result of his invisible wounds of war. We wish we could say this was an isolated case, but the fact is that among those who have served, suicide is more lethal than the battlefield.

    In the last 14 years, nearly 18,000 Americans died while on active duty in the military. During that period, 73,000 veterans took their own lives. Moreover, veterans who were homeless at any point in their lives were 75% more likely to die by suicide compared to other veterans. More than two-thirds of the veterans who took their own lives had no recent contact with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (the VA). That fraction is certainly much higher for veterans experiencing homelessness.

    Suicide prevention is the top clinical priority of the VA, which has requested an additional $76 million for suicide prevention in the coming year. Its efforts, and those of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, are reducing suicide and improving housing stability.

    In 2018, the VA introduced universal screening for suicide risk in all primary-care settings, evaluating nearly 4 million veterans in the first two years. Veterans, particularly those experiencing homelessness, are unlikely to engage in therapies requiring regular visits, so the VA has pioneered a 20- to 40-minute intervention program to develop coping strategies and reduce access to potential suicide methods like firearms and drugs.

    Early results are promising. In the six months following the intervention, veterans are 45% less likely to attempt suicide, compared to veterans who are simply referred to follow-up care. Over the past four years, studies show that homeless veterans who used at least one homeless program were 20% less likely than other homeless veterans to die of suicide.

    Homelessness is a key predictor of veteran suicide, but the good news is that programs are working. Between 2010 and 2017, 600,000 veterans and their families have been housed or prevented from becoming homeless.  

    Although we applaud these efforts, there is much work left to be done, and every single day, not just on Veterans Day.

    The Commander John Scott Hannon Veterans Mental Health Care Improvement Act of 2019 sits on the president’s desk awaiting his signature. Among other things, this legislation directs the VA to create a job description specific to this problem for mental health counselors, expands funding for suicide prevention, and increases access to cognitive behavioral therapy. 

    Commander Hannon was born to a life of service to country to parents serving in the diplomatic corps. His own, ultimately fatal, invisible wounds of war animated his fight for mental health services for all veterans. Veterans Day is an appropriate time for us to reflect on the sacrifices of all service members and for us to recommit to providing veterans the care they deserve when they come home.

    In Ike’s words, “Let us solemnly remember the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to preserve our heritage of freedom.” But on that day and every other day, let Americans “pay appropriate homage” to our veterans by providing them with the housing, resources, and support systems they need and deserve. 

    Signing the act won’t accomplish all of that, but it would be a good faith gesture, and a tiny step in the right direction.

  • "A Vaccine For The Rich" – Pfizer's COVID-19 Jab Almost Impossible To Distribute In Poorer Countries
    "A Vaccine For The Rich" – Pfizer's COVID-19 Jab Almost Impossible To Distribute In Poorer Countries

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/11/2020 – 22:40

    A logistical “roadmap” from Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical has been released showing the staggering logistical feats required to transport and store the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which has just been christened by Bloomberg as “the vaccine of the rich”.

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    Offering some more insight into details that have been the subject of much speculation on Wall Street, Bloomberg reported on this “complex and costly” private network that companies are building to help distribute vaccines like Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine (a technology that’s also being used by another leading candidate, Moderna), that is, once it has finally been approved.

    Countries that don’t already have these networks will need to build them from scratch if they wish to substantially reduce the supply bottleneck, which would be “a herculean task”.

    That means that countries will need to build from scratch the deep-freeze production, storage and transportation networks needed for the vaccine to survive. This massive investment and coordination required all but guarantees that only rich nations will manage to dial up access, with the wealthy first in line to receive their doses.

    “Its production is costly, its component is unstable, it also requires cold-chain transportation and has a short shelf life,” said Ding Sheng, director of the Beijing-based Global Health Drug Discovery Institute, which has received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

    The WHO and Bill Gates have invested plenty of time on a PR campaign warning that access to the vaccine must be made ‘universal’ – that is, extended to all of earth’s 7.7 billion people – or humanity won’t manage to eradicate COVID-19.  Together, they’ve backed a project called ‘Covax’ which aims to raise $18 billion to pay for vaccines for poorer countries.

    But even once they’ve been paid for, the task remains: how can we physically ship and store them in such vast quantities?

    The massive expense of the infrastructure investment means many of these poorer countries are now faced with a difficult choice: invest in the supply network, even before the vaccines have been approved, and take a risk should unforeseen complications arise, or wait to see how everything pans out for the developed world, sacrificing valuable time. Many of these economies could simply wait longer until more conventional vaccines, using other technologies, such as Russia’s adenovirus-vector vaccine, are available. Generally speaking, mRNA vaccines are a new class of vaccines, which is why some are apprehensive about the long-term side effects, which can’t be reliably studied.

    “If there is a protein-based vaccine that could achieve the same effect as an mRNA vaccine does and there’s the need to vaccinate billions of people every year, I’d go for the protein-based shots in the long run,” Ding said.

    Countries like India are facing particular difficulties given that shipping regular consumer goods remains a difficult, even treacherous, process across much of the country’s hinterland. Health-care experts in the country have already dismissed sub-zero storage as completely unworkable – “just forget it, one said.”

    Many working in the country’s public health and the pharmaceutical industry have already voiced concern that India lacks the necessary capacity and capability to deliver a vaccine across its vast rural hinterland and population of over 1.3 billion people at the breakneck speed now expected.

    “Most of these vaccines need minus 70 degrees, which we just can’t do in India, just forget it,” said T. Sundararaman, a New Delhi-based global coordinator of the People’s Health Movement, an organization that brings together local activists, academics and civil society groups working on public health.

    “Our current cold chains are not able to cope with some districts’ need for measles vaccines, and that’s only for children below the age of 3,” he said. “That’s a really trivial number of people compared to the numbers that will need a Covid-19 vaccine.”

    When asked at a Tuesday briefing if India’s government would look to buy any of the Pfizer vaccine, Rajesh Bhushan, the secretary at the health ministry, said New Delhi is in talks with all vaccine manufacturers. He added that India was in a position to “augment and strengthen” its existing cold-chain capacity, but declined to release any purchase details immediately.

    So, judging by the way things are going…

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    …it looks like the world is headed for a tiered system: one vaccine for the wealthy, and one another for the poor.

  • Get Ready For Chaos Regardless Of Who Ends Up In The White House
    Get Ready For Chaos Regardless Of Who Ends Up In The White House

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/11/2020 – 22:20

    Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

    In July of this year in my article ‘Election 2020: The Worst Case Scenario Is The Most Likely One’, after I outlined the strange factors surrounding Biden and Trump, I stated that:

    “These factors and more lead me to predict that Election 2020 will be a contested election which ends with Trump staying in office but accused of usurping the democratic process. This outcome is the worst possible outcome and also the most advantageous for the globalist establishment.”

    I also noted the predictive programming campaign by the media and members of the Council On Foreign Relations like Max Boot to acclimated the public to the idea of a contested election while also “wargaming” (planning) that exact outcome. I stated:

    “…Boot is back again, this time writing about how he thinks Donald Trump will try to “hijack” the presidency in 2020.

    In an article for the Washington post titled ‘What If Trump Loses But Insists He Won’, Boot outlines a scenario that was “war gamed” by a group called the Transition Integrity Project. The group played out a scenario in which there is a razor thin victory for Joe Biden, followed by actions by Trump to keep control of the presidency through lies and legal wrangling. The group also predicted civil unrest leading to potential “civil war” as the fight over the White House expands.

    This article is, I believe, an attempt at predictive programming by the establishment. They are TELLING US exactly what is about to happen. A contested election, civil war, martial law, economic collapse and the US will be destroyed from within.”

    So far it appears my prediction was correct. As I write this the Trump Administration is filing suit in Pennsylvania over suspicious ballot actions including blocking Republican observers from watching the vote count. The fact that PA is allowing mail-in votes to be counted even though they are postmarked well after the cut-off date will also come into question. Evidence of ballot fraud is popping up in multiple swing states; it’s starting to look like Trump might remain in office after all.

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    If ANY of the reports of fraud are verified by the courts then the election situation changes completely. Millions of Americans will lose faith in the process and the election itself would be invalidated. Even if the uncovered fraud is not proven to have effectively shifted the vote in favor of Biden, no conservative will accept Biden as president, and the Trump Administration will have a perfect rationale for refusing to concede the White House.

    Many Americans do not seem to understand the dynamic at play here. They think “winning” the vote count means an automatic Biden presidency, but this is not actually the case. Trump is already in possession of the White House – If he will not leave because of possible election tampering, then who is going to remove him? Perhaps one of the alphabet agencies, but on whose orders or authority? The military won’t remove him as the majority of them are conservative, and certainly not the Democrats as they have no ability to project power. Trump stays in because the only people that could possibly pressure him to leave (conservatives) will probably not do so.

    Another scenario could involve “activist” state electors. Voters within the electoral college do not necessarily have to vote according to the popular vote within their respective states. Some states have laws that bind electors, but many do not, including Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, and Minnesota. The states that do have laws have little ability to enforce them, and activist electors can only be slapped with a misdemeanor. Basically, there is nothing anyone can do to stop the electoral college from voting for Trump instead of Biden.

    If electors in swing states congregate in December to cast their votes and decide to cast for Trump instead of Biden because they suspect ballot fraud, this would be perfectly legal, and again, Trump stays in office.

    Then there is the issue of congress finalizing the election results. Neither party currently holds a 218 seat majority in congress, and if one half of representatives refuse to validate the election then challenges to the results will arise. Once again there is a problem of legitimacy going forward for Joe Biden.

    I realize that these factors and many more are giving conservatives continued hope of pulling out an election “victory”. However, I want readers to set aside the concept of “winning” for a moment and consider the bigger picture.

    I was able to predict the outcome of the 2020 election (so far) because I based my analysis on what would be the most advantageous result for the globalist establishment.

    Meaning, even if Trump stays in the Oval Office, the globalists have much to gain.

    First, lets not be naive about the situation – Trump’s cabinet is LOADED with globalists from the Council on Foreign Relations as well as numerous banking elites. If they want to steer the election response from Trump’s side, they easily can. Trump is contesting the election because he is being advised to do so.

    Second, the mainstream media and the Biden campaign are already preemptively declaring Biden the winner. This sets the stage for a dangerous dynamic; consider what would happen if leftists go into December/January under the assumption that they have the presidency in the bag, when suddenly it is all snatched away from them? This narrative creates the ultimate rage scenario for the political left; they will consider Trump a usurper of the presidency and from that point on they will rationalize any and all mob violence. This civil unrest will be blamed entirely on Trump and conservatives.

    Third, a mass unrest event triggers a demand for law and order. There are two ways this can be achieved: A constitutional way and an unconstitutional way. The elites in Trump’s cabinet will push for the unconstitutional response, meaning they will push for martial law. Martial law will inevitably lead to numerous violations of the Bill of Rights, which are UNACCEPTABLE under ANY circumstances.

    Not only this, but what would happen if conservatives, normally staunch defenders of individual rights, suddenly decide it’s okay to trample those rights in the name of “defeating the political left”? We become the greatest hypocrites of the age, we lose the moral high ground in the long term and no one will listen to us when we argue for liberty in the future. The greatest defenders of freedom become freedom’s greatest destroyers. Again, the globalists benefit.

    Anyone who tells you martial law is “the lesser evil” and that we have no other choice has an agenda they are not being honest about.

    Fourth, with Trump still in office the establishment’s “great reset” agenda will continue using conservatives as the scapegoats of the economic collapse they created. Beyond that, the contested election can be used as further excuse for economic instability. The central banks which have used endless stimulus measures to inflate the massive “Everything Bubble” ever since 2008 need to divert blame for the bubble’s eventual implosion, and now they have numerous distractions that will allow them to do just that.

    Fifth, even if millions of Americans view Trump’s actions as justified and the election results as rigged, much of the rest of the world will treat Trump and conservatives as pariahs. The situation becomes much worse if conservatives support martial law. The narrative will be that America is under illegitimate and tyrannical rule, and that international intervention may be required. At the very least, there will be global economic penalties, including the loss of the dollar’s world reserve status which will lead to a flood of dollars returning to the US from overseas and hyperinflation in prices.

    Now don’t get me wrong, a Biden presidency will lead to immediate and violent repercussions as well, but conservatives need to wake up to the reality that a Trump presidency is not an answer to any of their problems or fears. It’s a Catch-22 situation.

    Under Biden, expect the economic crash to speed up dramatically. Biden will initiate Level 4 lockdowns nationwide within weeks of becoming president and this will cause the destruction of the small business sector, which is already barely hanging on for dear life. The globalists will have to bring down the economy faster under Biden so that they can claim the crash is a residual effect of the Trump Administration. If they wait too long, the blame will fall on Biden and by extension the globalists.

    Level 4 lockdowns would also help prevent conservatives from relocating to more friendly states and regions. And, they would help prevent conservatives from congregating in large groups and organizing resistance to leftist policies.

    Censorship of conservative voices and platforms will have to accelerate under Biden as well, because the more conservatives are able to share information in real time, the more galvanized they will become and the more confident they will be in refusing to submit to pandemic restrictions (among other things). I believe that web service providers will start directly censoring conservative websites that use their servers. Sites like mine will be removed from the web entirely, or filtered out completely by search algorithms.

    Finally, under Biden there will be an immediate call for draconian gun control measures and perhaps even gun confiscation. This will be done by executive order, and it is likely that Red Flag laws will be used. A leftist or globalist agenda cannot progress while conservatives are armed. It is impossible. No one will go along with pandemic restrictions in conservative leaning states. No one will agree to carbon controls. No one will adopt new and insane hate speech laws designed by social justice lunatics.

    A Biden presidency would galvanize and unify conservative groups more than anything in recent history. Eventually, conservatives will revolt (including many in the military and law enforcement) and there will be nothing leftists or globalists can do about it. Disarmament would have to happen quickly.

    This is why I believe that Trump staying in office is a better model for the globalists. Tricking conservatives into jubilantly supporting martial law measures and bringing in tyranny under their own banner is a better tactic than creating a direct confrontation between conservatives and globalists through Biden’s lockdowns.

    As mentioned above, though, there is a solution. Welcome a Trump presidency if fraud is discovered but refuse to support martial law. Instead, conservatives can protect their own towns and counties by organizing community security for themselves. There is no need for the military to take on domestic security concerns. Rather, conservatives must react as many did in Idaho during the BLM riots.

    When BLM and Antifa tried to bus hundreds of protesters into rural parts of the Northwest, conservative groups fielded hundreds of armed members of the community to maintain security. BLM and Antifa activists remained relatively peaceful and quiet, there was no looting and no one was hurt (as opposed to numerous other cities). It was the best possible outcome.

    This model must be enacted all over the country, and Americans must take their security into their own hands. I would even suggest we start using the “M word” again: Militia.

    Conservatives states and counties should start seriously considering the formation of community militias, because government cannot be trusted to remain benevolent or just when it is given the ultimate power of martial law. In the event of a Biden presidency, militias will also be necessary as a deterrent to totalitarian enforcement of federal pandemic lockdowns. If leftists want to destroy their own local economies through unnecessary lockdowns, let them. Conservatives don’t need to follow the lemmings off that cliff.

    Constitutionally, militias are supposed to be verified by state governments. This might not be possible. If not, then communities should form militias anyway; just don’t call it an official or “organized” militia. If state governments try to sabotage such measures then they should be bypassed and ignored. We don’t need them in order to provide security for ourselves.

    If this solution is not taken seriously and conservatives do not take matters into their own hands, I foresee catastrophe. Either we will be lured into giving credence to liberty crushing martial law, or, we will be at the mercy of Biden’s medical tyranny. The future depends on us…

    *  *  *

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  • $61 Million Of Meth Seized At Texas Border Crossings Amid Cartel Crime Wave 
    $61 Million Of Meth Seized At Texas Border Crossings Amid Cartel Crime Wave 

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/11/2020 – 22:00

    Methamphetamine is flooding across the Mexico-US border at an all-time high, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers have ramped up patrols at border crossings to disrupt the illegal drug trade made possible by Mexican drug cartels.  

    CBP released a statement on Nov. 3 detailing how the Colombia-Solidarity Bridge and World Trade Bridge border crossings recently seized, in two separate events, about $61 million worth of meth. 

    “The trafficking and production of methamphetamine has increased substantially over the past year, causing drug traffickers to become more creative in their methods of smuggling their product into America,” said Acting Port Director Andrew Douglas, Laredo Port of Entry.

    The packages contained nearly 3,000 pounds of meth were intended to supply multiple U.S. cities along the ‘meth superhighway‘. CBP explains, in both seizures, how officers confiscated the illegal drugs. 

    On Tuesday, Oct. 27, the first enforcement action occurred at the Colombia-Solidarity Bridge when CBP officers assigned to the cargo facility encountered a tractor hauling an empty trailer from Mexico. The 2006 Freightliner tractor and shipment were referred for a canine and non-intrusive imaging system inspection, resulting in the discovery of 618 packages containing 1988.12 pounds of alleged methamphetamine discovered within the trailer. The narcotics have an estimated street value of $39,762,165. -CBP

    On Wednesday, Oct. 28, at the World Trade Bridge, the second seizure occurred when CBP officers assigned to the cargo facility encountered a tractor hauling a shipment of frozen vegetables arriving from Mexico. The 1999 Freightliner tractor and shipment were referred for a canine and non-intrusive imaging system inspection, resulting in the discovery of 352 packages containing 1049.84 pounds of alleged methamphetamine discovered within the trailer. The narcotics have an estimated street value of $20,996,610. -CBP

    On Nov. 8, CBP tweeted two pictures, showing the bricks of meth, indicating the narcotics have an estimated street value of $60,758,775.

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    According to a Fox News report from early September, CBP meth seizures have so far doubled over last year as drug cartels ramp up production and flood the U.S. with supply. 

    Officers say in all, the total volume of meth seized is almost double than last year, with still a couple of months left to go in the fiscal year. The volume of meth seized has been increasing annually for several years. In the fiscal year 2019, the Office of Field Operations seized some 68,585 points of meth nationwide, compared to 118,153 pounds this year. -Fox News

    The latest meth seizures come as President Trump has had 371 miles of border wall installed on the southern border. <!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>

    As meth floods into the US, there’s some hope, as shown by the CBP’s latest meth seizures, that the newly erected border wall is possibly working. 

  • The Dystopic Great Reset & The Fight Back: Population Reduction And Hope For The Children Of Men
    The Dystopic Great Reset & The Fight Back: Population Reduction And Hope For The Children Of Men

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/11/2020 – 21:40

    Authored by Joaquin Flores via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Genesis 11:5 – And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.

    The Great Reset, the 4th Industrial Revolution, the 4th Turning, the Great Awakening, and Artificial Intelligence. These are the real themes that are shaping the socio-political, cultural, and ideological landscape of our lives in 2020.

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    The push for lockdown and quarantine towards a Great Reset is increasingly understood by critics as program of mass enslavement and collective punishment, population reduction, presented within the trappings progressive talking points. In our last piece on the Great Reset, ‘Whose Great Reset? The Fight for Our Future – Technocracy vs. the Republic’, we confronted the Orwellian nature of the term itself, showing that the ostensibly technocratic new proposal was being made in a way that appears to short-cut the decision making processes of sovereign states as well as democratic processes within republics.

    In the eternal words of the Irish author, Oscar Wilde, ‘Life imitates art far more than art imitates life’.

    “That we live in a time where the plans of the elite are more openly and more brazenly spelled out, in fiction, in public mythology, in culture, and are manufactured in a way entirely out of the hands of the vast majority of people whose lives will be forever changed, likely for the worse, is hands-down the real catastrophe of our time.”

    There is a strange, if little known fact about the lived lives of prisoners. Now that humanity faces the real daunting probability of a lockdown regime on the flimsy pretext of a virus with a 99.9% survival rate, we need to understand something about prisoners and the Great Awakening. The Great Awakening is the product of how actually imprisoned people respond to imprisonment. Just as a person deprived of vision develops an outstanding sense of smell and hearing, a person deprived of physical freedom develops a profound and reified spiritual or supernatural freedom, which is the awakening. In a strange twist of fate, the more that people are locked down, the more they awaken.

    We are caught between two seeming contradictions which in fact reconcile each other. On the one hand we understand that everything happens for a reason and that justice always prevails in the end, and on the other hand we know that the possible destiny that we can have only comes at the cost of tremendous struggle, self-discipline, moral fortitude, and sacrifice. This much is the mindset of the awakened, of the political soldier, in the course of the fight against the Great Awakening and within the age of the 4th Turning.

    Censoring Facts, Reifying Fiction

    Last month, the father of UK PM Boris Johnson, Stanley Johnson, was caught at a second time in public, not wearing a mask. Was he unaware that there is a highly contagious pandemic, one which affects his age group in particular? Does he not know what is going on in the UK and around the world?

    Or does he know something that the rest of us do not? The folly that it may be, it came to be learned that it was Stanley Johnson who wrote the dystopian fiction novel, The Virus, one that describes much of what we are living through today. He is also the author of World Population and the United Nations: Challenge and Response, a non-fiction primer on the subject described in its title. In The Virus,

    In both the narrative arc of the novel, and in his own introduction, Stanley Johnson lays out the necessity of a virus in the eyes of an insidious elite to curb population growth. This coincidence with the actual Agenda 201/2030 of the UN on population control, and the commitment of vaccine advocate and WHO beneficiary Bill Gates to decrease world population, is absolutely disconcerting and raises questions about further coincidences that have since arisen. This of course includes the very position that Boris Johnson holds today in managing the real-life version of the virus in Britain today.

    But is this a mere matter of coincidence, or not? That question has become the subject of a vigorous debate, with one side of the debate arguing that it is not a coincidence being tremendously censored by social media and effectively barred from giving their side, and the other side being the only voice one hears and sees across social and legacy media.

    The fact of this censorship over this question alone appears to lend credence to those being censored, as is often the unintended consequence of censorship, and perhaps the last hope of man.

    This is an astonishing example of life imitating art, and now with an increasing public awareness on the relationship between vaccines and infertility, we arrive at the predicate to the film ‘Children of Men’.

    Children of Men depicts a world in global chaos, war, strife, open street battles between members of quasi-governmental forces and various radical and religious cults, a jihadist military push through the streets of Paris, a paramilitary junta, the effects of mass migration, open air prisons, and worse. This has taken hold of most of Europe and presumably the world. This breakdown seems to have been the product of a global pandemic of infertility of an unknown origin. A film from 2008, anyone seeing the film today would instantly recognize the scenes as approximating real-life footage seen on the news in the world of 2020.

    The global infertility crisis creates a pervasive sense of insecurity, the impossibility of a stock market, and a conscious sense of impending doom and nihilist response on the part of elites.

    Taken together with Johnson’s ‘The Virus’, we can make a rather educated guess how such an outcome would manifest in a reality where life is imitating art: the virus or the vaccine created to the cure the virus, in fact lends towards infertility.

    It isn’t difficult to make such a guess, for the reason that, day by day, we see this dystopia becoming our everyday reality. It has become a matter of fact much more than of fiction.

    This compels us to approach, soberly, a reassessment of the concept of progress and where it leads

    The themes of a virus used as a predicate for both population control and a total social transformation, as we wrote about in ‘Whose Great Reset’, is one which mirrors the effects of war: both in terms of a mass casualty event and the need to ‘build back better’ after an apparent socio-economic collapse induced either by the calamity or by the government’s heavy-handed response.

    The Ideological State Apparatus of Technocratic Late Modernity

    For any number of years, social critics and public philosophers have raised concerns about the never-ending rise of the technocratic and futurist cult of late modernity. In many ways, this is caught up with the entire ideological project of our epoch, as a left-façade over a technocratic thought-police-state has been weaponized as what Louis Althusser had called the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) in his landmark text of the same name, “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État (Notes pour une recherche)“.

    That we live in a time where the plans of the elite are more openly and more brazenly spelled out, in fiction, in public mythology, in culture, and are manufactured in a way entirely out of the hands of the vast majority of people whose lives will be forever changed, likely for the worse, is hands-down the real catastrophe of our time.

    For generations, citizens were bombarded with futurist and technocratic motifs, where people were encouraged to naively project their own goodness onto the aims of political and corporate leaders, and scientists, even while this goodness had not been proven or established. The white lab-coat had become synonymous not only with trust, but with good intentions, and in that sense replaced the priest’s frock and black robe. This has cultivated a fertile soil for the likes of the Dr. Anthony Fauci and his ilk. This has culminated in the now open implementation of a so-called ‘4th Industrial Revolution’, a progressivist framework wrapped within the sociology of Marx but absent its humanism and emancipatory components – a ‘technocratic Marxism of elites’.

    The church of the progress myth has characterized much of the socio-political discourse of the last century. It has been one which has prepared several generations to accept the ‘challenges of change’ as a foregone necessity, towards the forging of a ‘brave new world’. It has served as the underlying assumption of the three most impactful ideologies of the 20th century: liberalism, fascism, and communism. So many apple-carts have been overturned along the way towards some combination of those ends, that today there are hundreds of millions of people who have never seen an apple cart with their own eyes.

    The Ideological State Apparatus has proscribed that criticisms of real-existing policies, plans, and commitments at the level of the UN, such as Agenda 21 and Agenda 2030, are censored across social media. The censorship itself gives credence to the ‘no coincidence’ side of the present debate, because the aim of global population reduction is not only explicit, but central. The established ideological apparatus proscribes that questioning the agenda is ‘science denial’, and ‘far-right conspiracy’, which are the double-plus ungood thought-crimes of our day. Central to the ideological apparatus were the cultural and political tropes which thematically dovetailed with cultural and supply-line globalization within the framework of first-world service-based economies, itself founded on the premise of planned-obsolescence.

    Population reduction however is an open goal of elites and their global governance institutions, and all that is contentious is the idea that the same governments that lied about the pretexts for the wars in Iraq and Vietnam, which then went on to murder millions of innocent people, may be lying again today about the methods they may use towards that end.

    And yet the past methods of population control such as warfare of the total war type, are unacceptable for elites today because of the specter of a nuclear holocaust that would also contaminate life for the elites themselves. Johnson is not only aware of this, but is explicit in his introduction to ‘The Virus’. We can also include that war will result in one side or the other being blamed at a time of great collusion between world powers, but yet a global pandemic seems to be an act of god – when in fact perhaps it is the outcome of man playing at god.

    The Ideological State Apparatus began to mutate in the late 1970’s, absorbing, deforming and then projecting back onto a society a mutated form of the very same protest radicalism which previously challenged the older Ideological State Apparatus. This new ISA was characterized by a new social morality, which delivered the now pervasive cult of political correctness. This ideological authoritarianism is one where slavery and self-harm are virtue signals, and this cultural shift towards public flagellation made possible the idea that lockdown, quarantine, and mask wearing was a sign of virtue more so than health. Without this change in the ISA over the past few decades, there could have never been a new normal.

    Conclusion

    As we have laid out the surface of the problem and begun to hint at the necessary course of solutions, in Part II we will dig deeper into the problem and flesh out what a just order would look like. In Part II, we will look at the origins of the social contract and the problem of free men versus the growing bureaucratic form, in history. This will set us up to look at why at the philosophical level our present elites have landed on misanthropy and genocide as a human population reduction program, as the best possible solution. Finally we will explain that while a 4th industrial revolution will come either way, that population reduction and slavery is not a necessary component of it. Rather, that it is up to free men to determine what that will look like and we will sketch out its actual functions.

  • Beijing Fears Esper's Exit Raises Risk Of Military Action & 'Accidents'
    Beijing Fears Esper's Exit Raises Risk Of Military Action & 'Accidents'

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/11/2020 – 21:20

    In the wake of Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s firing early this week The South China Morning Post reports that leaders in Beijing are worried the sudden transition in the key Pentagon post dramatically raises the risk of accidental conflict, or at least signals a tougher stance out of an unpredictable US administration in its las 70 days in the White House.

    The regional publication also wrote that Christopher Miller as acting defense secretary has also raised serious concerns. One Beijing-based Chinese military analyst, Zhou Chenming, warned of “possible military adventures” related to Taiwan following Esper’s exit.

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    Via AFP

    And speaking of the new acting defense secretary, Zhou pointed out that “Miller has a strong special forces background. He joined the special forces and commanded it and specializes in surprise attacks and adventure operations.”

    Beijing has viewed Esper as a more stable influence over the Pentagon and in Trump’s cabinet – for example when last month the Pentagon agreed to hasten talks over a ‘crisis communications’ hotline with Chinese PLA officials. 

    Zhou further cited increased US naval “freedom of navigation” exercises near China, as well as increased joint US-Taiwan military drills which though long remaining ‘unofficial’ and undeclared, have now become for the first time “official” – as with this week’s drills involving US Marines.

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    Outgoing Secretary of Defense Mark T. Esper (left) and his successor, currently National Counterterrorism Center Director Christopher Miller, Source: DoD/AP

    An unnamed Chinese military source told SCMP further:

    “The PLA leadership wonders if someone in the American military is going to take a risk and cause accidental conflicts with the Chinese military, especially in the South China Sea, following Esper’s termination.”

    It does appear a sudden bolder US posture is making itself felt in the region, as Taiwanese media reports: “Taiwan’s Naval Command on Monday (Nov. 9) confirmed media reports that a contingent of U.S. Marines have arrived at the invitation of Taiwan’s military and will begin training Taiwanese troops for four weeks starting that day, marking the first public acknowledgment of U.S. Marines training in Taiwan in over 40 years.”

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    Meanwhile in Washington, some defense and intelligence officials have also expressed worry that Trump will be feeling more unconstrained and adventuresome when it comes to potentially provocative actions toward either China or Iran now that key officials in the Pentagon’s civilian leadership have left their posts.

  • Biden Picks Longtime Adviser And Obama Ebola Czar As Chief Of Staff
    Biden Picks Longtime Adviser And Obama Ebola Czar As Chief Of Staff

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/11/2020 – 21:00

    Joe Biden has chosen his longtime adviser and former Obama admin Ebola ‘Czar’ Ron Klain to reprise his role as Chief of Staff, according to the Associated Press, which – if Biden is elected – means he’ll likely be swamped with pandemic-related challenges amid a divided Congress.

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    “His deep, varied experience and capacity to work with people all across the political spectrum is precisely what I need in a White House chief of staff as we confront this moment of crisis and bring our country together again,” Biden said in a Wednesday night statement.

    Klain, a Harvard Law graduate and former editor of the Harvard Law Review, previously served as Biden’s Chief of Staff from 2009-2011, as well as former Vice President Al Gore from 1995-1999 after having worked on the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1992. He was a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Byron White in 1987 and 1988, and served as Chief Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee during Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court nomination.

    Towards the end of the Clinton presidency and the lead-up to the 2000 election, Al Gore’s campaign chairman Tony Coelho forced Klain out after Gore loyalists felt he was too loyal to the Clintons, only to return to the Gore campaign the next year. He eventually served as General Counsel of Gore’s Recount Committee during the disputed 2000 election.

    Klain was also heavily involved in former Senator John Kerry’s failed 2004 bid for president.

  • "Nasdaq Whale" Beached: SoftBank's Attempt To Corner Tech Stocks Leads To $3.7BN Loss
    "Nasdaq Whale" Beached: SoftBank's Attempt To Corner Tech Stocks Leads To $3.7BN Loss

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/11/2020 – 20:40

    The last time we looked at SoftBank’s performance in the public capital markets following the stunning news reported here first that it was the Japanese Conglomerate that had attempted to corner the Nasdaq using derivatives to create the biggest “gamma squeeze” on record which led to a massive late-August melt up in FAAMG names (and the broader tech sector), was two months ago when according to press reports, Masa Son sprawling investment vehicle had generated some $4 billion in profits at which point it had largely unwound many of the call spread trades in question.

    It turns out there was more.

    SoftBank today revealed that its secretive new unit, which was launched this summer to manipulate play the market in tech stocks and which is called “SB Northstar” had racked up trading losses of $3.7bn so far, a huge swing to the $4 billion profit that had been reported previously by established financial media. 

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    There was more: as we also first reported in “How SoftBank Made Billions Using The Biggest “Gamma Squeeze” In History”, SoftBank confirmed that Akshay Naheta, a 39-year-old former Deutsche Bank trader now based in Abu Dhabi, manages SB Northstar, which is registered in the Cayman Islands. This directly contradicts what SoftBank had said previously when they told the FT that Naheta was not formally in charge.

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    So what happened? Here is a brief walk down memory lane for those who missed the story:

    Back in August, SoftBank first revealed that it was planning to invest about $10bn in publicly traded tech stocks as a way to diversify a portfolio that is heavily reliant on shares in Chinese ecommerce group Alibaba.

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    However, despite telling the press that it had every intention of curbing its exposure after it had been named as a major market participant, by the end of September, Northstar had purchased nearly $17BN of shares in US tech companies, including $6.3BNn in Amazon, $2.2bn in Facebook, $1.8bn in Zoom and $1.4bn in Alphabet.

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    What is notable, is that while SoftBank initially disclosed that Northstar’s capital would be just $555MM when its unveiled the existence of the asset management unit in August (of which a third would come from Masa Son), Northstar has had far more capital at its disposal, because as the FT reports, “it uses loans of cash and publicly traded securities from SoftBank’s vast balance sheet to make investments in publicly listed stocks.”

    Indeed, on Wednesday, SoftBank revealed that at the end of September, Northstar managed roughly half, or $21BN of its $43BN cash pile, which has surged as the conglomerate executed a series of asset sales under pressure from activist investors such as Elliott Management.

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    In October, the unit also took out a margin loan of $6BN using SoftBank’s Alibaba shares as collateral.

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    More importantly, SoftBank also invested another $3.4bn in various equity derivatives in the form of call spreads which included long call options that were worth $4.7bn by the end of September, paired with “short call options” which SoftBank booked as $1.3bn in liabilities. Northstar also held short future contracts on stock indices, which were valued at minus $697 million.

    Where things went haywire is that while the short side of the bets was supposed to merely offset the premium of the upside bets, some of the bearish positions took on outsized losses as tech shares soared during the three months to September, resulting in SoftBank booking total derivatives losses of $2.7BN.

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    According to the FT, the total loss for Northstar ballooned to $3.7BN for the quarter, including $900MM in unrealised valuation losses on investments made by the unit.

    While it is possible that SoftBank recouped some of these losses after September, it is unlikely: citing sources, the Financial Times reports that Northstar switched to long call options after the tech rally in late summer to reduce its risk ahead of the US election, and are now going back into buying equities. Alas, that coincided with an especially turbulent period for the Nasdaq, which means that unless SoftBank timed its exit perfectly, it lost even more on theta and as implied vol fizzled while the Nasdaq drifted lower.

    Separately, in its latest investor presentation, SoftBank also stated how much impact these derivatives trades could have on pre-tax profits. A 30% rise in the stocks that Northstar went long on would have boosted its long call options by $14bn, but seen its short call options lose $5.7BN. Alternatively, a 30% fall in the stock price, would have hit its long call options by $4.3BN but boosted its short call options by $1.2BN, still resulting in sizable losses.

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    The not insubstantial P&L exposure is at odds with Son’s previous attempts to play down the risks posed by its foray into short-term trading of highly liquid stocks, saying the investments amount to only 7% of its total equity holdings worth $292Bn. Still, as noted above, it didn’t take much to flip what was a $4BN profit in early September in the portfolio to a $2.7BN loss by the end of the month, especially considering the modest drop in the Nasdaq over that time period.

    The result is that despite the much needed extra disclosure, the FT reports that analysts remain nervous, noting that Masa Son has an additional $50BN in cash burning a hole in his pocket following the disposal of SoftBank’s stakes in T-Mobile, Alibaba and its domestic telecoms arm.

    “SoftBank Group’s motivations are not clear,” Jefferies analyst Atul Goyal said. “For such a long-term investor as Mr Son, we don’t understand the attraction of short-term call spreads.”

    Son, meanwhile, has argued that his group cannot ignore the Big Tech if it wants to bet on the future of artificial intelligence. “The real frontrunner in the AI revolution is Gafa (Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon). We need to put them into our portfolio.”

    And he is doing it by buying call spreads on the FAAMGs which are trading just shy of their all time highs. Could Masa’s attempt to extract a little more upside from the tech sector mark the top? We don’t know but we will remind readers that the Japanese billionaire, who was nearly ruined when the dot com bubble burst, decided to rush into bitcoin at the very top in late 2017.

    As we reported in April of 2019, he ended up losing $130 million when he cashed out, a move  which according to the WSJ dented “his reputation as a patient and prophetic investor.” And the WeWork fiasco wasn’t even on the horizon… Ironically, if Son had only held on, he would be on the verge of breaking even with Bitcoin trading nearly at $16K and just shy of its all time high around $20K.

    Luckily for SoftBank investors there is now an adult in the room: as the WSJ reports, billionaire hedge fund investor Paul Singer is going over every Masa Son action with a microscope, which means that the possibility of even greater derivative losses is at least contained.

  • JPMorgan Is No Longer The World's Most Important Bank
    JPMorgan Is No Longer The World's Most Important Bank

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/11/2020 – 20:20

    For the past three years, JPMorgan – the largest US bank by assets and market cap – was viewed by investors but more importantly by regulators, as the world’s most systematically important bank which however is as much as bragging right as a curse as it required Jamie Dimon’s bank to pay a higher capital burden due to its massive balance sheet (Chinese banks which are generally bigger have explicit state support and as such as broadly viewed as less risky).

    All that changed today when the Basel-based Financial Stability Board released its latest annual rankings of systematically important banks, which saw JPMorgan drop one notch, from the 4th bucket where it had been since 2017 and which carried a 2.5% additional capital buffer, to the 3rd bucket, which JPMorgan will shares with Citigroup and HSBC. The FSB’s SiFi ratings are based on a bank’s size, scope of cross-border business and connections to other firms, which are used to assess the risk of financial contagion.

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    JPMorgan benefited from a surge in revenue from stock and bond trading desks in the midst of the pandemic, which contributed to a surprise increase in third-quarter earnings. Its shares, which plunged with other bank stocks in March, recently rebounded but have still fallen 16% so far this year.

    Deutsche Bank, which once headed the list remains in the the 2nd, less risky bucket, which requires a 1.5% capital buffer. Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs were also found to pose a lower risk to the financial system and were lowered one level to the lowest importance tier. At the same time, China Construction Bank rose one level in this year’s assessment of 30 firms, to the 2nd bucket.

    According to Bloomberg, the latest list uses information from before the Covid-19 pandemic, “which forced lenders to set aside tens of billions of dollars to cover potential credit losses, while authorities eased or delayed rules to help the industry respond.”

    Participation in the FSB list is hardly a bragging point: inclusion of a banks means more stringent capital demands and closer scrutiny of their risk management. FSB member authorities apply the following requirements to G-SIBs:

    Higher capital buffer: Since the November 2012 update, the G-SIBs have been allocated to buckets corresponding to higher capital buffers that they are required to hold by national authorities in accordance with international standards. The capital

    • buffer requirements for the G-SIBs identified in the annual update each November will apply to them as from January fourteen months later.5 The assignment of G-SIBs to the buckets, in the list published today, therefore determines the higher capital buffer requirements that will apply to each G-SIB from 1 January 2022.
    • Total Loss-Absorbing Capacity (TLAC): G-SIBs are required to meet the TLAC standard, alongside the regulatory capital requirements set out in the Basel III framework. The TLAC standard has begun being phased-in from 1 January 2019 for GSIBs  identified in the 2015 list that continued to be designated as G-SIBs.
    • Resolvability: These include group-wide resolution planning and regular resolvability assessments. The resolvability of each G-SIB is also reviewed in a high-level FSB Resolvability Assessment Process (RAP) by senior regulators within the firms’ Crisis Management Groups.
    • Higher supervisory expectations: These include supervisory expectations for risk management functions, risk data aggregation capabilities, risk governance and internal controls.

    The FSB panel, which recommends changes that national supervisors may implement, said shifts in the rankings reflect underlying changes in banks’ activity. The FSB is chaired by Fed vice chairman Randy Quarles, and includes representatives from authorities including the European Central Bank and Bank of England.

  • Biden 'Science' Advisor Calls For 4-6 Week Nationwide Lockdown To Avoid "COVID Hell"
    Biden 'Science' Advisor Calls For 4-6 Week Nationwide Lockdown To Avoid "COVID Hell"

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/11/2020 – 20:00

    Meet the esteemed Dr. Michael Osterholm, who serves as director of the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, and is the latest “scientist” to join Joe Biden’s “special coronavirus transition advisory team.”

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    We have to do something, Osterholm argues, or – echoing the exact same words Dr. Fauci has fearmongered America with – the U.S. is headed for dark days before a vaccine becomes available.

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    The ‘casedemic’ does look terrifying.

    So what is his suggestion?

    Simple…

    A nationwide lockdown would drive the number of new cases and hospitalizations down to manageable levels while the world awaits a vaccine, Osterholm told Yahoo Finance on Wednesday.

    “We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the wages, lost wages for individual workers for losses to small companies to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments. We could do all of that,” he said. “If we did that, then we could lockdown for four-to-six weeks.”

    So a massive bailout for state and local governments… oh and “we, the people” while we all suffer locked-down like a dementia-ridden presidential candidate in our basements through Thanksgiving and Christmas… with depression and suicide rates soaring ever higher?

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    As a reminder, we note that this is the same ‘scientist’ who co-wrote an op-ed with Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari in which the two argued for more restrictive and uniform lockdowns across the nation.

    “The problem with the March-to-May lockdown was that it was not uniformly stringent across the country. For example, Minnesota deemed 78 percent of its workers essential,” they wrote in the New York Times.

    “To be effective, the lockdown has to be as comprehensive and strict as possible.”

    In other words – Obey! Or the economy gets it… Again!

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    There’s just one thing… the real ‘science’ – where actual experiments are undergone, results noted, and theses concluded – shows that lockdowns do not work…

    As we detailed earlier, in a surprising report out of JPMorgan, the bank finds no meaningful curve development differences between countries with and without strong curve intervention.

    This makes the bank question if existing public health intervention (i.e., lockdown/ stricter social distancing) should remain in place next year, and leads JPM to conclude that “public health policy should consider approaches biased towards economic/pubic mental health over the urge to close the curve in 2021.“

    To reach its “startling” conclusion, JPMorgan compared countries without lockdown, keeping the economy open under certain levels of social-distancing (Brazil, US, Sweden, Japan, Korea) to countries with strong curve intervention (UK, Germany, Italy, France, China, India) to see any meaningful differential in the curve development.

    This outcome suggest that COVID-19 follows a similar diffusion and development process of other infectious diseases with certain life cycles. Therefore, JPMorgan would argue that public health policy should consider a bit more biased approach on economic/pubic mental health over the aim to close the infection curve in 2021 as lockdowns could be costly to the economy.

    JPMorgan’s conclusion: “Keeping public activities open and tracing susceptible people leveraging technology looks to have better risk reward to us.”

    And just in case you shrug off JPMorgan’s ‘scientific’ findings, a recent study in The Lancet (yes, that scientific journal) found no correlation whatsoever between severity of lockdown and number of covid deaths. And they didn’t find any correlation between border closures and covid deaths either. And there was no correlation between mass testing and covid deaths either, for that matter. Basically, nothing that various world governments have done to combat covid seems to have had any effect whatsoever on the number of deaths.

    As Raul Ilargi Meijer noted, lockdowns are based on pretending we can make time stand still.

    That, like in one of those slick videos, everything else stops moving while you can walk around it. All Else Being Equal. It never is, not for 6-7 months. And that the first lockdown didn’t work, at least not for long, should perhaps be a lesson. Maybe you should look for answers elsewhere. Because the damage just goes on, economically, psychologically, physically.

    I’m not pretending I have the answers. I do have questions though. While the situation reminds me of Sisyphus, forced by Zeus to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity. Every time he nears the top of the hill, the boulder rolls back down.

    We need to find a balance between the threat of COVID19 and the threat of everything else, very much including those things that are caused by our approach to COVID.

    Presumably, Dr. Osterholm and the rest of his 11 wise men (and women and non-binary individuals) on Joe Biden’s COVID advisory team did not bother to look at the actual science… or actual facts… preferring instead to tie their careers to a Federal Reserve president (with no background in ‘sciencey’ stuff – but very well versed in massive government-funded bailouts) and the belief that if we just keep puking borrowed- or tax-payer-funded cash at people while shutting down the economy, then we will “keep the coronavirus pandemic in check and get the economy on track until a vaccine is approved and distributed.”

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    TL;DR: Ignore common sense and the real-world science experiment that just took place, shutdown the economy to get the economy back on track.

  • De Blasio's Daughter In Verbal Slip Up, Claims Biden "Was Able To Steal" Election
    De Blasio's Daughter In Verbal Slip Up, Claims Biden "Was Able To Steal" Election

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/11/2020 – 19:40

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    Mayor De Blasio’s daughter was caught in an embarrassing on camera verbal slip up when she told an interviewer that Joe Biden “was able to steal” the election.

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    There were in fact two major gaffes, with Chiara de Blasio initially telling the interviewer how happy she was that “now we have the first black Asian female president in office elected,” referring to Kamala Harris.

    Harris would of course become Vice President if Biden’s win is certified, although many have suggested that she could soon find herself in the Oval Office given Biden’s declining cognitive abilities.

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    De Blasio followed up by saying that Biden stole the election, before correcting herself.

    “Joe Biden was able to steal…steal no, was able to win,” she said before apologizing.

    Given what happened, maybe de Blasio was right the first time.

    The 25-year-old has become a prominent left-wing activist and she was arrested back in May during a George Floyd protest.

    *  *  *

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  • JPMorgan Finds No Benefits From COVID Lockdowns
    JPMorgan Finds No Benefits From COVID Lockdowns

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/11/2020 – 19:35

    While the latest vaccine progress news out of Pfizer was welcome by the market (and its CEO who sold over 60% of his PFE stock on the day of the announcement) in a week where global infection resurgence continued with cases jumping 8% W/W last week (537k vs. 309k in Aug-Oct) and EU/ UK re-imposed lockdowns, considering that approximately 60% of population will need to be covered by a vaccine, near term pressure on infection curve/ hospital capacity, growing mortality tally, and stricter public
    health policies to pull back secondary infection rate (or R0) below 1 will likely persist for the foreseeable future.

    However, in a surprising report out of JPMorgan, the bank finds no meaningful curve development differences between countries with and without strong curve intervention. This makes the bank question if existing public health intervention (i.e., lockdown/ stricter social distancing) should remain in place next year, and leads JPM to conclude that “public health policy should consider approaches biased towards economic/pubic mental health over the urge to close the curve in 2021.“

    To reach its “startling” conclusion, JPMorgan compared countries without lockdown, keeping the economy open under certain levels of social-distancing (Brazil, US, Sweden, Japan, Korea) to countries with strong curve intervention (UK, Germany, Italy, France, China, India) to see any meaningful differential in the curve development.

    Here is what the largest US bank found in its comparison between countries with and without strict social distancing measures and lockdowns:

    • Infection scale/speed: Confirmed cases scale: Infection scale is smaller for countries with strict control measures but no meaningful gap with countries without stricter controls (confirmed out of total population: 0.9% vs. 1.2%). Infection speed: Countries with strict control measures have a shorter period to arrive at first peak (78 days vs. 106 days), implying stricter social distancing measures or lockdowns could lead to faster peak infection. Tests performed: countries with stricter measures have performed a greater scale of tests, at 37% of the total population vs. 32% for those with certain levels of social distancing but no full lockdowns. Also in Brazil and India with relatively relaxed social distancing measures on COVID-19, daily new infections have been trending down and this perhaps is due to the natural life cycle of infectious disease thus COVID-19 could have a similar life span.

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    • Mortality comparison: In an unexpected twist, the mortality rate (= death/ confirmed) was higher for countries with stricter control measures, at 2.6% vs. 2.0% for those without. Death per million people: lower for countries with stricter control measures (240 deaths per 1mn people vs. 273 deaths per mn) compared to those without strict control measures.

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    • Antibody: Antibody level: the average antibody levels are similar for both groups of countries. Average 3.6% of participants were found to have antibodies in countries with strict control measures, vs. 3.0% in countries without. However the gap in between is not meaningfully large. Time to arrive at 80% recovery rate (= recovered/ confirmed): Days to arrive at 80% recovery rate is shorter for countries with stricter control measures than countries without (119 days vs. 129 days).

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    Paradoxically, the data show that there exists some degree of i) shorter period to peak infection, ii) smaller scale of death per million and iii) slightly larger scale of antibody level found in countries with stricter social distancing measures and lockdowns. However JPMorgan does not see a large meaningful difference between two groups.

    This outcome suggest that COVID-19 follows a similar diffusion and development process of other infectious diseases with certain life cycles. Therefore, JPMorgan would argue that public health policy should consider a bit more biased approach on economic/pubic mental health over the aim to close the infection curve in 2021 as lockdowns could be costly to the economy.

    JPMorgan’s conclusion: “Keeping public activities open and tracing susceptible people leveraging technology looks to have better risk reward to us.”

    Of course, if this had been known in early March when the establishment rushed to close the economy resulting in the biggest economic and financial crisis since the Great Depression, the consequences – for both the US economy and the outcome of the election where Trump’s handling of the covid crisis became the front and center issue – would have been profound.

  • Once "Immune" To The Pandemic, The Financial Industry Is About To Face A Wave Of Layoffs
    Once "Immune" To The Pandemic, The Financial Industry Is About To Face A Wave Of Layoffs

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/11/2020 – 19:20

    We covered  when Wells Fargo laid off 700 employees in early October, noting the bank, best known in recent years for scamming retail customers and botching small business refi loans, was just likely just starting to implement a larger plan that would result in the loss of tens of thousands of jobs.

    We knew then that other banks would eventually follow suit and now, it looks like this is starting to take place. JP Morgan has started hundreds of dismissals, including 80 at its consumer unit. Goldman has also started eliminating about 400 positions, including “back office roles”. 

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    While much of the financial sector was spared from massive layoffs due to the pandemic, hiring has finally slowed and other banks are starting to look at implementing cuts, according to Bloomberg.

    Alan Johnson, the head of compensation-consulting firm Johnson Associates Inc., predicts that the financial industry will see its headcount fall by 10% by mid-2021.

    “Financial services and banking has too many people. Next year is going to be very low hiring. There’ll be some layoffs,” he said.

    “Firms are not hiring at the levels they were. The trajectory of economic recovery is so unknown and it’s so uncertain and it’s so significant, and you overlay the pandemic and remote working and Zoom — if you’re a laid-off employee, this is a very difficult set of circumstances,” he added.

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    And so the financial service workers who spent the pandemic earning fees “arranging emergency loans” and handling an influx of volume on trading desks could all eventually see their heads on the layoff chopping block.

    Firings will likely focus on traditional banking, Bloomberg says, as banking services move to online formats. Wall Street could see some layoffs, however, especially given recent mergers (like that of Schwab and TD Ameritrade) in the brokerage space. 

    Even worse is that financial executives who are being laid off from large banks may find it difficult to find jobs at smaller, rival firms. The length of time to land a job has “roughly doubled” for senior executives since before the pandemic. Openings in banking and finance are down 21% from a year prior, according to data from Indeed.com.

    The one silver lining appears to be mortgage operations. With rates at historic lows, mortgage banks are the sole area in the industry that is adding personnel. 

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    Jeramy Kaiman, head of professional recruitment in western U.S. at staffing firm Adecco Group said: “Mortgage is booming — I don’t even know what other word to say. Candidates are all receiving three to five offers in 24 hours when they’re on the market.”

    As noted, Wells Fargo is expected to shed “up to tens of thousands” of workers over the next few years, reducing branches as part of its cost-cutting initiative. 

    Vickee Adams, spokeswoman for Wells Fargo, said: “In those situations, to ensure we continue to serve customers well, we keep employees working in other nearby branches whenever possible. We are as responsive to our employees as possible, providing jobs-search resources and other assistance as best we can.”

  • Talk Of "Unity" Is Both Hypocritical And Delusional
    Talk Of "Unity" Is Both Hypocritical And Delusional

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/11/2020 – 19:00

    Authored by Gary Galles via The Mises Institute,

    In Joe Biden’s address after being declared president-elect by news organizations, he promised to be a leader who “seeks not to divide but to unify.” Making that assertion after the campaigns we have seen, not to mention the light-years-apart treatment of the candidates, while Donald Trump is still adamantly disputing the election because of alleged Democrat malfeasance is, at a minimum, ironic. And it would be the height of hypocrisy if only a few of Trump’s claims of cheating are true. But we need to go further and recognize that even the possibility of Joe Biden uniting us is a delusion.

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    Agreement on the specific ends we want to achieve is unattainable because our desires are mutually inconsistent. Our agreement is very limited on even very broadly defined issues, and once we look further than vague, aspirational language and feel-good generalities, Americans disagree on virtually everything.

    All of us want to be fed, clothed, housed, educated, etc. We agree in that sense. But we disagree about virtually every aspect of who, what, when, where, why, and how. We want different types and amounts, in different ways, at different times and places, and for different people. We are vastly different in the tradeoffs we are willing to make among our desires, not to mention who we think should pay our bills. Once we consider any of the myriad actual choices faced, the fact of scarcity necessitates that our specific ends conflict, rather than align.

    Consider a mundane example played out daily in our homes – breakfast. Does everyone in your family agree on “the most important meal of the day”? Does everyone even eat breakfast? Does each member have coffee, a cold caffeine drink, or neither? Juice? What kind? Are all agreed on when, where, what, or how much to eat? Do we agree on who should pay for breakfast, cook it, and clean up after it? Do we agree on the “dress code” that should apply, either at breakfast or afterward?

    Diverse individuals have diverse preferences. Multiplying this single example by the uncountable decisions that must be reached in society every day makes our fundamental disunity clear. And we are no more unified when we get to public policy. We are not in agreement about people’s rights and government powers that some view as essential but others view as unforgivable. The same is true of many foreign policy choices. We cannot be unified as “one nation under God” when some vehemently reject any reference to God. We cannot be unified about abortion when some view it as murder and others consider it sacred. Policies that take from some to give to others also inherently create disagreement from those whose pockets are involuntarily picked. Reducing what we take from some, entailing giving less to others than they wish, also triggers disagreement. So long as government dictates such choices, political unity is unattainable.

    In fact, politics as currently practiced eviscerates the one thing Americans could agree about. This reflects the far-too-little-recognized fact that we have greater agreement on what all of us want to avoid than on what all of us want. None of us wants what John Locke called our “lives, liberties, and estates” violated. That is, each of us wants rights and property defended against invasion. Respecting all of our property rights reduces the risk from predation for each of us. But creating added rights and privileges for some at the expense of others’ equal rights and privileges makes government the most dangerous predator, even when who is selected to do so is determined by majority vote.

    Each of us would like the freedom to peacefully pursue our own goals. As Lord Acton put it, “liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition,” because freedom to choose for ourselves is always the primary means to our ultimate ends. That is why the traditional functions of government are to protect us from abuse by our neighbors and foreign powers, while its greatest threat is supposed protectors becoming predators against citizens. That is why Acton recognized that liberty requires “the limitation of the public authority.” But we are incredibly far from agreement on that today.

    Well-established property rights and the voluntary market arrangements they enable let individuals decide for themselves, limiting each of us to persuasion rather than coercion. Except in the very unusual case where we must all make the same choice, this allows us to better match our choices to our preferences and circumstances. And unlike minority votes in elections, every dollar “vote” matters.

    In fact, we should recognize that markets are our primary means to transform our disagreements into mutually beneficial cooperation, while restrictions on markets hobble that essential function.

    Say I offer you a widget for sale at $10 and you say yes. That does not mean we agree on its value. We disagreed. I valued it at less than $10 worth of other goods and services, or I wouldn’t have sold it for that. You must have valued it more than $10, or you wouldn’t have bought it for that. Importantly, however, we have transformed our disagreement on values into an exchange that gives both of us benefits we consider to be worth more than the costs.

    In contrast, talk of political unity is primarily rhetorical cover for those who are in power to coerce those who disagree with them. They benefit themselves at others’ expense, taking others’ resources and making them acquiesce in what they object to. And unlike markets, in which greater disagreements about value create greater net benefits from voluntary arrangements, “unifying” political initiatives are just ways to control who will be forced to do what for others, driving Americans apart while hamstringing cooperative arrangements and squandering the wealth they would have created.

    Grand invocations that “I will unify us” are actually shorthand for “We disagree about many things, but those in this group are unified against others’ preferences, and we mean to get our way, regardless of their well-being and desire,” which is made clear by the demonization of anyone who doesn’t support the supposed “unity” position as divisive.

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    That kind of unity is tyranny. Strengthening our union actually runs along a different path than the unity of 50 percent plus one, unified against the interests of others. It is uniting in a common commitment to honoring one another’s rights and the liberty this makes possible for all of us. Without unity in that, we can never achieve the kind of unity that is actually desirable and achievable. The alternative is the prospect of more of what we have experienced of late, which resembles what Thomas Hobbes called “a war of all against all.” But if we are united only by the ongoing fight to win that war against other Americans, we are selling out the birthright we have from our Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

  • Deutsche Bank Proposes A 5% "Work From Home" Privilege Tax
    Deutsche Bank Proposes A 5% "Work From Home" Privilege Tax

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/11/2020 – 18:54

    At a time when the Fed is already monetizing the entire US budget deficit thanks to helicopter money, sparking conversations about the utility of taxation, and when a Biden administration is set to at least try and roll back most of the Trump tax cuts, the last thing the population wants to hear about is even more taxes.

    Yet in a “modest proposal” from Deutsche Bank, the bank argues that in a time of pervasive covid shutdowns, “those who can work from home (WFH) receive direct and indirect financial benefits and they should be taxed in order to smooth the transition process for those who have been suddenly displaced.”

    In other words, the argument goes that working from an office is somehow punitive, and since WFH during the pandemic leads to “many benefits” as a resulting “disconnecting themselves from face-to-face society” a 5% tax for each WFH day “would leave the average person no worse off than if they worked in the office.” The bank calculates that such a tax could raise $49bn per year in the US, €20bn in Germany, and £7bn in the UK. “That can fund subsidies for the lowest-paid workers who usually cannot work from home.”

    In the report written by DB strategist Like Tumpleman, he argues that the popularity of WFH was growing even before the pandemic: “between 2005 and 2018, internet technology fuelled a 173 per cent increase in the number of Americans who regularly worked from home. It is true that the overall proportion of people working from home before the pandemic was still small, at 5.4 per cent based on census data, but the growth was still way ahead of the growth in the overall workforce.”

    Naturally, the covid shutdowns have turbocharged that growth, and as a result the proportion of Americans who worked from home increased ten-fold to 56% during the pandemic. Many of these people will continue to work remotely for some time. Indeed, two-thirds of organizations say that at least three-quarters of their staff can work from home effectively, according to S&P Global Markets. Meanwhile, a DB survey shows that, after the pandemic has passed, more than half of people who tried out WFH want to continue it permanently for between two and three days a week.

    This sudden shift to WFH means that, for the first time in history, “a big chunk of people have disconnected themselves from the face-to-face world yet are still leading a full economic life” as if that is somehow a bad thing.

    It gets crazier: the bank claims that working in the comfort of one’s own home leads to a slew of financial benefits including:

    • financial savings on expenses such as travel, lunch, clothes, and cleaning.
    • indirect savings via forgone socializing and other expenses that would have been incurred had a worker been in the office.
    • intangible benefits of working from home, such as greater job security, convenience, and flexibility.
    • There is also the benefit of additional safety.

    As if it is difficult to find someone who also sits in front of a computer all day long in Bangladesh and has the exact same skillset but would work for a fraction of the pay.

    Yet those people who are working remotely are, according to DB, the equivalent of social parasites as they “contribute less to the infrastructure of the economy whilst still receiving its benefits” potentially extending the slump in national growth. In other words, the mere act of working from home makes you guilty of not propping up the economy!

    That, according to Templeman “is a big problem for the economy as it has taken decades and centuries to build up the wider business and economic infrastructure that supports face-to-face working. If a great swathe of assets lie redundant, the economic malaise will be extended.”

    In short, those who failed to develop the appropriate skillset and are “forced” to work in society – mostly employees of service companies – and who were unable to refused to educate and train themselves to be able to “enjoy” the benefits of work from home jobs which incidentally include sitting in front of a computer for hours on end and in some notable cases masturbating in front of a zoom conference call, have to be rewarded monetarily by all those who are lucky enough to not have to work in public.

    While it would be easy to laugh and merely brush this idea off as another ridiculous policy proposal from a bank whose very existence would be very much in question had it not been for several rounds of generous taxpayer funded bailouts, since this is yet another grossly socialist proposal we are concerned it has a very high probability of passage not only in Europe but also in the US, especially if Democrats manage to pull of a “Blue wave” sweep in Georgia in January.

    So far a WFH tax has merely been floated by a handful of Wall Street strategists; however once this idea gets more popular coverage, expect a groundswell of support for the idea which will promptly lead to yet another tax.

    Below we republish the Deutsche Bank note in its entirety because it is clearly a blueprint for what’s to come:

    A work-from-home tax, by Luke Templeman

    For years we have needed a tax on remote workers – covid has just made it obvious. Quite simply, our economic system is not set up to cope with people who can disconnect themselves from face-to-face society. Those who can WFH receive direct and indirect financial benefits and they should be taxed in order to smooth the transition process for those who have been suddenly displaced.

    The popularity of WFH was growing even before the pandemic. Between 2005 and 2018, internet technology fuelled a 173 per cent increase in the number of Americans who regularly worked from home1. It is true that the overall proportion of people working from home before the pandemic was still small, at 5.4 per cent based on census data, but the growth was still way ahead of the growth in the overall workforce.

    Covid has turbocharged that growth. During the pandemic, the proportion of Americans who worked from home increased ten-fold to 56 per cent. In the UK, there was a seven-fold increase to 47 per cent. Many of these people will continue to work remotely for some time. Indeed, two-thirds of organisations say that at least three-quarters of their staff can work from home effectively, according to S&P Global Markets. Meanwhile, a DB survey shows that, after the pandemic has passed, more than half of people who tried out WFH want to continue it permanently for between two and three days a week

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    The sudden shift to WFH means that, for the first time in history, a big chunk of people have disconnected themselves from the face-to-face world yet are still leading a full economic life. That means remote workers are contributing less to the infrastructure of the economy whilst still receiving its benefits.

    That is a big problem for the economy as it has taken decades and centuries to build up the wider business and economic infrastructure that supports face-to-face working. If a great swathe of assets lie redundant, the economic malaise will be extended.

    WFH is financially rewarding

    WFH offers direct financial savings on expenses such as travel, lunch, clothes, and cleaning. Add to these the indirect savings via forgone socialising and other expenses that would have been incurred had a worker been in the office. Then there are the intangible benefits of working from home, such as greater job security, convenience, and flexibility. There is also the benefit of additional safety. The newly-discovered gains of home working, both tangible and intangible, all have value. And they generally outweigh the costs. The latter have mostly come in the form of additional mental stress of juggling work and children, and dealing with an imperfect home-office setup. These costs should not be underestimated, however, they usually pale in comparison with the gains. Hence why the vast majority of home workers want to continue remote working, on at least a part time basis, after the pandemic passes.

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    First, the tax will only apply outside the times when the government advises people to work from home (of course, the self-employed and those on low incomes can be excluded). The tax itself will be paid by the employer if it does not provide a worker with a permanent desk. If it does, and the staff member chooses to work from home, the employee will pay the tax out of their salary for each day they work from home. This can be audited by coordinating with company travel and technology systems.

    The tax rate? Those who can work from home tend to have higher-than-average incomes. If we assume the average salary of a person who chooses to work from home in the US is $55,000, a tax of five per cent works out to just over $10 per working day. That is roughly the amount an office worker might spend on commuting, lunch, and laundry etc. A tax at this rate, then, will leave them no worse off than if they had chosen to go into the office. If we apply the same tax rate to workers in the UK with an assumed average WFH salary of £35,000, it works out to just under £7 per day. In Germany, a WFH salary of €40,000 leads to a tax of just over €7.50 per day.

    A tax at this level means that neither companies or individuals will be worse off. In fact, companies may be far better off as the savings from downsizing their office will more than make up for the cost of the WFH tax they will incur.

    How much will the tax raise?

    First the US. Of the 104m Americans who work full time, half worked from home during the pandemic. That is up from the 5.4 per cent who already worked from home before the pandemic. Of that additional 45 per cent, our survey shows that three quarters want to work from home to some degree post-covid with 16 per cent wanting one day a week, 33 per cent two days, 19 per cent three days, 4 per cent four days, and 4 per cent five days.

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    Adding this up, there could be 4.2bn new days every year being worked from home postcovid. With an additional 394m days for those part time and full time staff who already work from home and are not self-employed, that gives 4.6bn WFH days per year. At an average salary of $55,000 and a tax rate of five per cent, the WFH tax will raise $48bn per year. The same calculation in the UK and Germany (using country specific WFH data and the salary levels assumed above) yields a tax take of £6.9bn and €15.9bn respectively.

    What can the government do with this money?

    In the US, the $48bn raised could pay for a $1,500 grant to the 29m workers who cannot work from home and earn under $30,000 a year (excluding those who earn tips). Many of these people are those who assumed the health risks of working during the pandemic and are far more ‘essential’ than their wage level suggests.

    Similarly, in Germany, the €15.9bn raised could fund a €1,500 grant to the bottom 12 per cent of people in the country who have a standard of living equivalent to €12,600 (after adjusting for the size of their household). Similarly in the UK, the £6.9bn raised could provide a grant of £2,000 to the 12 per cent of those aged over 25 who work for the minimum wage. Of course, the exact amount of the grant could be based on an asymmetric tapering system.

    Some will argue against the tax. They will say that engagement with the economy is a personal choice and they should not be penalised for making that decision. Yet, these people should remember that governments have always backsolved taxes to suit the social environment. Consider that in centuries past, when it was socially unpalatable in the UK to introduce an income tax, the government implemented a window tax. As society changed, the window tax was abolished and, eventually, an income tax was introduced. In the same way, as our current society moves towards a state of ‘human disconnection’, our tax system must move with it.

    Best of all, a WFH tax does not merely subsidise businesses that have no long-term future. If, for example, a city-centre sandwich shop is no longer needed, it does not make sense for the government to support the business in the medium term. But it does make sense to support the mass of people who have been suddenly displaced by forces outside their control. Many will have to take low-paid jobs while they retrain or figure out their next step in life. From a personal and economic point of view, it makes sense that these people should be given a helping hand. It also makes sense to recognise that essential workers that assume covid risk for low wages. Those who are lucky enough to be in a position to ‘disconnect’ themselves from the face-to-face economy owe it to them.

  • Whitehead: End The Government's War On America's Military Veterans
    Whitehead: End The Government's War On America's Military Veterans

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/11/2020 – 18:20

    Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “For soldiers… coming home is more lethal than being in combat.”

    – Brené Brown, research professor at the University of Houston

    The 2020 presidential election may be over, but nothing has really changed.

    The U.S. government still poses the greatest threat to our freedoms.

    More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, even more than the perceived threat posed by any single politician, the U.S. government remains a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us.

    This threat is especially pronounced for America’s military veterans, especially that portion of the population that exercises their First Amendment right to speak out against government wrongdoing.

    Consider: we raise our young people on a steady diet of militarism and war, sell them on the idea that defending freedom abroad by serving in the military is their patriotic duty, then when they return home, bruised and battle-scarred and committed to defending their freedoms at home, we often treat them like criminals merely for exercising those rights they risked their lives to defend.

    The government even has a name for its war on America’s veterans: Operation Vigilant Eagle.

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    As first reported by the Wall Street Journal, this Department of Homeland Security (DHS) program tracks military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and characterizes them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.”

    Coupled with the DHS’ dual reports on Rightwing and Leftwing “Extremism,” which broadly define extremists as individuals, military veterans and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” these tactics bode ill for anyone seen as opposing the government.

    Yet the government is not merely targeting individuals who are voicing their discontent so much as it is taking aim at individuals trained in military warfare.

    Don’t be fooled by the fact that the DHS has gone extremely quiet about Operation Vigilant Eagle.

    Where there’s smoke, there’s bound to be fire.

    And the government’s efforts to target military veterans whose views may be perceived as “anti-government” make clear that something is afoot.

    In recent years, military servicemen and women have found themselves increasingly targeted for surveillance, censorship, threatened with incarceration or involuntary commitment, labeled as extremists and/or mentally ill, and stripped of their Second Amendment rights.

    In light of the government’s efforts to lay the groundwork to weaponize the public’s biomedical data and predict who might pose a threat to public safety based on mental health sensor data (a convenient means by which to penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors), encounters with the police could get even more deadly, especially if those involved have a mental illness or disability coupled with a military background.

    Incredibly, as part of a proposal being considered by the Trump Administration, a new government agency HARPA (a healthcare counterpart to the Pentagon’s research and development arm DARPA) will take the lead in identifying and targeting “signs” of mental illness or violent inclinations among the populace by using artificial intelligence to collect data from Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home.

    These tactics are not really new.

    Many times throughout history in totalitarian regimes, such governments have declared dissidents mentally ill and unfit for society as a means of rendering them disempowering them.

    As Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum observes in Gulag: A History: “The exile of prisoners to a distant place, where they can ‘pay their debt to society,’ make themselves useful, and not contaminate others with their ideas or their criminal acts, is a practice as old as civilization itself. The rulers of ancient Rome and Greece sent their dissidents off to distant colonies. Socrates chose death over the torment of exile from Athens. The poet Ovid was exiled to a fetid port on the Black Sea.”

    For example, government officials in the Cold War-era Soviet Union often used psychiatric hospitals as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally through the use of electric shocks, drugs and various medical procedures.

    Insisting that “ideas about a struggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure,” the psychiatric community actually went so far as to provide the government with a diagnosis suitable for locking up such freedom-oriented activists.

    In addition to declaring political dissidents mentally unsound, Russian officials also made use of an administrative process for dealing with individuals who were considered a bad influence on others or troublemakers.

    Author George Kennan describes a process in which:

    The obnoxious person may not be guilty of any crime . . . but if, in the opinion of the local authorities, his presence in a particular place is “prejudicial to public order” or “incompatible with public tranquility,” he may be arrested without warrant, may be held from two weeks to two years in prison, and may then be removed by force to any other place within the limits of the empire and there be put under police surveillance for a period of from one to ten years. Administrative exile–which required no trial and no sentencing procedure–was an ideal punishment not only for troublemakers as such, but also for political opponents of the regime.

    Sound familiar?

    This age-old practice by which despotic regimes eliminate their critics or potential adversaries by declaring them mentally ill and locking them up in psychiatric wards for extended periods of time is a common practice in present-day China.

    What is particularly unnerving, however, is how this practice of eliminating or undermining potential critics, including military veterans, is happening with increasing frequency in the United States.

    Remember, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) opened the door for the government to detain as a threat to national security anyone viewed as a troublemaker. According to government guidelines for identifying domestic extremists—a word used interchangeably with terrorists—technically, anyone exercising their First Amendment rights in order to criticize the government qualifies.

    It doesn’t take much anymore to 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 government’s dictates.

    In fact, as the Washington Post reports, communities are being mapped and residents assigned a color-coded threat score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about a person’s potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether they’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.

    The case of Brandon Raub is a prime example of Operation Vigilant Eagle in action.

    Raub, a 26-year-old decorated Marine, actually found himself interrogated by government agents about his views on government corruption, arrested with no warning, labeled mentally ill for subscribing to so-called “conspiratorial” views about the government, detained against his will in a psych ward for standing by his views, and isolated from his family, friends and attorneys.

    On August 16, 2012, a swarm of local police, Secret Service and FBI agents arrived at Raub’s Virginia home, asking to speak with him about posts he had made on his Facebook page made up of song lyrics, political opinions and dialogue used in a political thriller virtual card game.

    Among the posts cited as troublesome were lyrics to a song by a rap group and Raub’s views, shared increasingly by a number of Americans, that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an inside job.

    After a brief conversation and without providing any explanation, levying any charges against Raub or reading him his rights, Raub was then handcuffed and transported to police headquarters, then to a medical center, where he was held against his will due to alleged concerns that his Facebook posts were “terrorist in nature.”

    Outraged onlookers filmed the arrest and posted the footage to YouTube, where it quickly went viral. Meanwhile, in a kangaroo court hearing that turned a deaf ear to Raub’s explanations about the fact that his Facebook posts were being read out of context, Raub was sentenced to up to 30 days’ further confinement in a psychiatric ward.

    Thankfully, The Rutherford Institute came to Raub’s assistance, which combined with heightened media attention, brought about his release and may have helped prevent Raub from being successfully “disappeared” by the government.

    Even so, within days of Raub being seized and forcibly held in a VA psych ward, news reports started surfacing of other veterans having similar experiences.

    “Oppositional defiance disorder” (ODD) is another diagnosis being used against veterans who challenge the status quo. As journalist Anthony Martin explains, an ODD diagnosis

    “denotes that the person exhibits ‘symptoms’ such as the questioning of authority, the refusal to follow directions, stubbornness, the unwillingness to go along with the crowd, and the practice of disobeying or ignoring orders. Persons may also receive such a label if they are considered free thinkers, nonconformists, or individuals who are suspicious of large, centralized government… At one time the accepted protocol among mental health professionals was to reserve the diagnosis of oppositional defiance disorder for children or adolescents who exhibited uncontrollable defiance toward their parents and teachers.”

    Frankly, based on how well my personality and my military service in the U.S. Armed Forces fit with this description of “oppositional defiance disorder,” I’m sure there’s a file somewhere with my name on it.

    That the government is using the charge of mental illness as the means by which to immobilize (and disarm) these veterans is diabolical. With one stroke of a magistrate’s pen, these veterans are being declared mentally ill, locked away against their will, and stripped of their constitutional rights.

    If it were just being classified as “anti-government,” that would be one thing.

    Unfortunately, anyone with a military background and training is also now being viewed as a heightened security threat by police who are trained to shoot first and ask questions later.

    Feeding this perception of veterans as ticking time bombs in need of intervention, the Justice Department launched a pilot program in 2012 aimed at training SWAT teams to deal with confrontations involving highly trained and often heavily armed combat veterans.

    The result?

    Police encounters with military veterans often escalate very quickly into an explosive and deadly situation, especially when SWAT teams are involved.

    For example, Jose Guerena, a Marine who served in two tours in Iraq, was killed after an Arizona SWAT team kicked open the door of his home during a mistaken drug raid and opened fire. Thinking his home was being invaded by criminals, Guerena told his wife and child to hide in a closet, grabbed a gun and waited in the hallway to confront the intruders. He never fired his weapon. In fact, the safety was still on his gun when he was killed. The SWAT officers, however, not as restrained, fired 70 rounds of ammunition at Guerena—23 of those bullets made contact. Apart from his military background, Guerena had had no prior criminal record, and the police found nothing illegal in his home.

    John Edward Chesney, a 62-year-old Vietnam veteran, was killed by a SWAT team allegedly responding to a call that the Army veteran was standing in his San Diego apartment window waving what looked like a semi-automatic rifle. SWAT officers locked down Chesney’s street, took up positions around his home, and fired 12 rounds into Chesney’s apartment window. It turned out that the gun Chesney reportedly pointed at police from three stories up was a “realistic-looking mock assault rifle.”

    Ramon Hooks’ encounter with a Houston SWAT team did not end as tragically, but it very easily could have. Hooks, a 25-year-old Iraq war veteran, was using an air rifle gun for target practice outside when a Homeland Security Agent, allegedly house shopping in the area, reported him as an active shooter. It wasn’t long before the quiet neighborhood was transformed into a war zone, with dozens of cop cars, an armored vehicle and heavily armed police. Hooks was arrested, his air rifle pellets and toy gun confiscated, and charges filed against him for “criminal mischief.”

    Given the government’s increasing view of veterans as potential domestic terrorists, it makes one think twice about government programs encouraging veterans to include a veterans designation on their drivers’ licenses and ID cards.

    Hailed by politicians as a way to “make it easier for military veterans to access discounts from retailers, restaurants, hotels and vendors across the state,” it will also make it that much easier for the government to identify and target veterans who dare to challenge the status quo.

    Remember: no one is spared in a police state.

    Eventually, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we all suffer the same fate.

    It stands to reason that if the government can’t be bothered to abide by its constitutional mandate to respect the citizenry’s rights—whether it’s the right to be free from government surveillance and censorship, the right to due process and fair hearings, the right to be free from roadside strip searches and militarized police, or the right to peacefully assemble and protest and exercise our right to free speech—then why should anyone expect the government to treat our nation’s veterans with respect and dignity?

    It’s time to end the government’s war on the American people, and that includes military veterans.

    Certainly, veterans have enough physical and psychological war wounds to overcome without adding the government to the mix. Although the U.S. boasts more than 20 million veterans who have served in World War II through the present day, large numbers of veterans are impoverished, unemployed, traumatized mentally and physically, struggling with depression, suicide, and marital stress, homeless, subjected to sub-par treatment at clinics and hospitals, and left to molder while their paperwork piles up within Veterans Administration offices.

    At least 60,000 veterans died by suicide between 2008 and 2017.

    On average, 6,000 veterans kill themselves every year, and the numbers are on the rise.

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    The plight of veterans today—and their treatment at the hands of the U.S. government—remains America’s badge of shame.

    So here’s a suggestion: if you really want to do something to show your respect and appreciation for the nation’s veterans, why not skip the parades and the flag-waving and instead go exercise your rights—the freedoms that those veterans swore to protect—by pushing back against the government’s tyranny.

    It’s time the rest of the nation did its part to safeguard the freedoms we too often take for granted.

    Freedom is not free.

  • Toobin Fired From New Yorker For Jerking Off During Zoom Call
    Toobin Fired From New Yorker For Jerking Off During Zoom Call

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/11/2020 – 18:00

    Journalist Jeffrey Toobin, who was suspended by CNN and The New Yorker after he was caught masturbating on a zoom call last month in full view of colleagues, has been fired by the latter publication.

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    Toobin confirmed his firing in a Wednesday tweet, writing “I was fired today by @NewYorker after 27 years as a Staff Writer.”

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    In a memo to Condé Nast employees, executive Stan Duncan wrote: “I am writing to share with you that our investigation regarding Jeffrey Toobin is complete, and as a result, he is no longer affiliated with our company.”

    “I want to assure everyone that we take workplace matters seriously. We are committed to fostering an environment where everyone feels respected and upholds our standards of conduct.”

    Meanwhile, a New Yorker spokesperson told The Hill: “As a result of our investigation, Jeffrey Toobin is no longer affiliated with the company.”

    After originally reporting on October 19 that Toobin had ‘exposed himself’ during the zoom call, Vice issued a late day correction to note that Toobin was actively jerking off.

    “This piece has been updated with more detail about the call and the headline has been updated to reflect that Toobin was masturbating.” –Vice

    Toobin told Vice that he had “made an embarrassingly stupid mistake, believing I was off camera,” before apologizing to his wife, family, friends and co-workers.”

    “I believed I was not visible on Zoom,” he added.

    CNN, meanwhile, has yet to take action against Toobin, who will quite literally never live this down.

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Nov 11

Today’s News 11th November 2020

  • Trump Files Emergency Injunction In Michigan Alleging Fraud; Demands Recounts Over 'Malfunctioning' Dominion Machines
    Trump Files Emergency Injunction In Michigan Alleging Fraud; Demands Recounts Over ‘Malfunctioning’ Dominion Machines

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/11/2020 – 01:43

    The Trump campaign has requested an emergency injunction in a federal lawsuit aimed at preventing the State of Michigan from certifying the results of last week’s election until election officials can certify that only legally cast, on time, and legally observed ballots are included in the count. The campaign is alleging several types of fraud, misconduct, and invalidated ballots based on a number of reasons – including ‘malfunctioning’ vote counting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems.

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    The Tuesday night filing in the US District Court for the Western District of Michigan alleges, among other things, that officials prevented GOP challengers from observing the count, scanned “batches of the same ballots multiple times,” illegally accepted and pre-dated late ballots, including from unmonitored drop boxes, and that election workers illegally duplicated ballots,” according to a statement from the campaign. The lawsuit requeusts that the court toss all ballots not observed by a GOP election challenger who has been “allowed to meaningfully observe the process and the handling and counting of the ballot.” 

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    Absentee ballot removed for counting at TCF Center in Detroit, Nov. 4 2020 (photo: Kimberly P. Mitchell, Detroit Free Press)

    The complaint includes “more than one hundred credentialed election challengers” who have provided “sworn affidavits” that they were prevented from reviewing the ballot count, or validate the legitimacy of absentee ballots. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is accused in the suit of failing to follow state election code, which allowed “fraud and incompetence to corrupt the conduct of the 2020 general election.”

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    GOP challengers allegedly blocked and intimidated: 

    • Many challengers testified that their ability to view the handling, processing, and  counting of ballots was physically and intentionally blocked by election officials.
    • At least three challengers said they were physically pushed away from counting tables by election officials to a distance that was too far to observe the counting.
    • Republican challengers who left the TCF Center were not allowed to return, while Democrats were, resulting in “many more Democratic challengers allowed to observe the processing and counting of absent voter ballots.”
    • Many challengers testified that they were intimidated, threatened, and harassed by election officials during the ballot processing and counting process.

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    GOP election challengers demand to be let into the TCF Center in Detroit on Wednesday, Nov 4 2020

    For reference, here’s a video of people cheering as GOP poll watchers were thrown out of the TCF Center in Detroit as absentee ballots were counted.

    Batches of ballots run through multiple times:

    Multiple GOP challengers attested that “batches of ballots were repeatedly run through the vote tabulation machines,” with one challenger saying she observed “a stack of about fifty ballots being fed multiple times into a ballot scanner counting machine.” Another challenger claims they “observed a station where election workers were working on scanned ballots that had issues that needed to be manually corrected,” adding “I believe some of these workers were changing votes that had been cast for Donald Trump and other Republican candidates.”

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    When challengers did bring up issues with ballots, they were “ignored and disregarded,” according to the complaint, with one claiming that “ballots with votes for Trump were separated from other ballots,” and that when they raised challenges over ballot numbers which didn’t match their envelopes, they were “disregarded and ignored by election officials,” and the “ballots were processed and counted.”

    The filing also claims that ballots which could not be read by a machine were unlawfully duplicated out of the view of challengers, and weren’t conducted by a bipartisan pair of election inspectors.

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    Faulty tabulation software:

    The suit notes that in Antrim County, Michigan, voting machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems “were at fault” when they erroneously gave over 6,000 Trump votes to former Vice President Joe Biden. The ‘error’ – potentially affecting the same machines used in Wayne County – was blamed by Secretary of State Benson on a county clerk who failed to update certain “media drives.”

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    Also noted were Dominion machine errors in Oakland County Michigan, which resulted in a Democrat being wrongly declared the winner of a commissioner’s race by 104 votes – only to have their seat flip back to the rightful Republican candidate after the error was caught.

    “These vote tabulator failures are a mechanical malfunction that, under MCL 168.831-168.839, requires a “special election” in the precincts affected,” reads the filing.

    Back-dated absentee ballots:

    The filing also alleges backdating of ballots, after attorney and GOP challenger Jessica Connarn says she was told by a poll worker told her they were “being told to change the date on ballots to reflect that the ballots were received on an earlier date.”

    Connarn has provided a photograph of a note handed to her by the poll worker as evidence they were instructed to change the date so that absentee ballots received after 8:00 p.m. on Election Day would be counted.

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    Poll workers count absentee ballots for the city of Detroit at the TCF Center in downtown Detroit on Tuesday, November 3, 2020. (Photo: Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press)

    The Trump campaign also says that ballots were deposited in remote, unattended drop boxes which are “essentially equivalent to a polling place where a person can deposit a ballot,” but “there is no validation that the individual deposing a ballot in the box is an individual who is qualified to cast a vote or to lawfully deliver a ballot cast by a lawful voter.” The filing says that according to Michigan law, a remote ballot drop box “must use video monitoring of that drop box to ensure effective monitoring…“

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    Now we wait to see if over 100 affidavits and Trump Campaign attorney Thor Hearne are able to persuade a Michigan judge to halt certifying Joe Biden winner the state.

  • The War Is Over… GloboCap Triumphs!
    The War Is Over… GloboCap Triumphs!

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/11/2020 – 00:05

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

    OK, so, that was not cool. For one terrifying moment there, it actually looked like GloboCap was going to let Russian-Asset Hitler win. Hour after hour on election night, states on the map kept turning red, or pink, or some distinctly non-blue color. Wisconsin … Michigan … Georgia … Florida. It could not be happening, and yet it was. What other explanation was there? The Russians were stealing the election again!

    But, of course, GloboCap was just playing with us. They’re a bunch of practical jokers, those GloboCap guys. Naturally, they couldn’t resist the chance to wind us up just one more time.

    Seriously, though, while I enjoy a good prank, I still have a number of liberal friends, many of whom were on the verge of suffering major heart attacks as they breathlessly waited for the corporate media to confirm that they had successfully voted a literal dictator out of power. (A few of them suffer from IBS or other gastrointestinal disorders, so, in light of the current toilet paper shortage caused by the Return of the Apocalyptic Plague, toying with them like that was especially cruel.)

    But, whatever. That’s water under the bridge. The good news is, the nightmare is over! Literal Hitler and his underground army of Russia-loving white supremacists have been vanquished! Decency has been restored! Globalization has risen from the dead!

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    And, of course, the most important thing is, racism in America is over … again!

    Yes, that’s right, folks, no more racism … kiss all those Confederate monuments goodbye! The Democrats are back in the White House! According to sources, the domestic staff are already down in the West Wing basement looking for that MLK bust that Trump ordered removed and desecrated the moment he was sworn into office. College kids are building pyres of racist and potentially racist books, and paintings, and films, and other degenerate artworks. Jussie Smollet can finally come out of hiding.

    OK, granted, they’re not going to desegregate liberal cities or anything crazy like that, or stop “policing” Black neighborhoods like an occupying army, or stop funding schools with property taxes, but Kamala Harris is Black, mostly, and Grampa Joe will tell us more stories about “Corn Pop,” the razor-wielding public-pool gangster, and other dangerous Black people he hasn’t yet incarcerated, so that should calm down all those BLM folks.

    In the meantime, the official celebrations have begun. Assorted mass-murdering GloboCap luminaries, government leaders, and the corporate media are pumping out hopey-changey propaganda like it was 2008 all over again. Pundits are breaking down and sobbing on television. Liberal mobs are ritualistically stomping Cheetos to the death in the street. Slaphappy hordes of Covidian Cultists are amassing outdoors, masks around their necks, sharing champagne bottles and French-kissing each other, protected from the virus by the Anti-Trump Force Field that saved the BLM protesters last Summer. It’s like V-Day, the fall of the Berlin wall, and the bin Laden assassination all rolled into one!

    All of which is understandable, given the horrors of the last four years, the concentration camps, the wars of aggression, the censorship, the CIA murder squads, the show trials, and all that other dictator stuff. On top of which, there was all that white supremacy, and that anti-Semitism, and that horrible wall that transformed America into an “apartheid state” where people were imprisoned in an open-air ghetto and gratuitously abused and murdered. (Whoops, I think I screwed up my citations … maybe double-check those links.)

    But let’s not dwell on all those horrors right now. There will be plenty of time for all that later, when Donald Trump is hauled into court and tried for his crimes against humanity, like all our previous war-criminal presidents.

    No, this is a time for looking ahead to the Brave New Global-Capitalist Normal, in which everyone will sit at home in their masks surfing the Internet on their toasters with MSNBC playing in the background … well, OK, not absolutely everyone. The affluent will still need to fly around in their private jets and helicopters, and take vacations on their yachts, and, you know, all the usual affluent stuff. But the rest of us won’t have to go anywhere or meet with anyone in person, because our lives will be one never-ending Zoom meeting carefully monitored by official fact-checkers to ensure we’re not being “misinformed” or exposed to “dangerous conspiracy theories” which could potentially lead to the agonized deaths (or the mild-to-moderate flu-like illnesses) of hundreds of millions of innocent people.

    But let’s not count our chickens just yet. As much as you’re probably looking forward to life in the Brave New GloboCap Normal, or the Great Reset, or whatever they end up calling the new pathologized totalitarianism, it isn’t a fait accompli quite yet … not until Russian-Asset Hitler has been thoroughly humiliated and removed from office, and anyone who voted for him, or didn’t believe he was literally Hitler, or a Russian asset, or who otherwise refused to take part in the mindless, corporate-media-generated Anti-Trump Hate-Fest, has been demonized as a “racist,” a “traitor,” an “anti-Semite,” a “conspiracy theorist,” or some other type of “far-right extremist.” That’s probably going to take another couple months.

    I’m pretty certain the plan is still to goad Trump into overreacting and trying to resist his removal from office. And I do not mean just in the courts. No, after all the money, time, and effort that GloboCap has invested over the last four years, they are going to be extremely disappointed if he just slinks away with going full-Hitler and starting a Second Civil War.

    As I’ve been saying, over and over, since he won the election, GloboCap needs to make an example of Trump to put down the widespread populist rebellion against global capitalism and its ideology that started back in 2016. And no, it doesn’t make any difference whether Donald Trump is actually a populist, or whether people realize that it is global capitalism and not “Cultural Marxism” that they are rebelling against.

    According to the script, this is the part where Trump refuses to respect “democracy” and has to be forcibly dragged out of office by the Secret Service or elements of the military, ideally “live” on international television. It may not end up playing out that way (Trump is probably not as dumb as I think), but that’s the Act III scenario for GloboCap: the “attempted Trump coup,” then the “perp walk.” They need the public and future generations to perceive him as an “illegitimate president,” a “usurper,” an “intruder,” an “imposter,” an “invader” … which, he is. (Being rich and famous does not make you a member of the GloboCap Power Club.)

    The corporate media are already hard at work manufacturing this version of reality, not only in the content of their “reporting,” but also with the unbridled contempt they are showing for a sitting president. The networks actually cut him off in the middle of his post-election address. The Twitter Corporation is censoring his tweets. What could possibly be more humiliating … and indicative of who is really in charge?

    Meanwhile, the GloboCap propaganda has reached some new post-Orwellian level. After four long years of “RUSSIA HACKED THE ELECTION!” … now, suddenly, “THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ELECTION FRAUD IN THE USA!”

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    That’s right, once again, millions of liberals, like that scene in 1984 where the Party switches official enemies right in the middle of the Hate-Week speech, have been ordered to radically reverse their “reality,” and hysterically deny the existence of the very thing they have been hysterically alleging for four solid years … and they are actually doing it!

    At the same time, the Trumpians have been reduced to repeating, over and over, and over, that “THE MEDIA DOES NOT SELECT THE PRESIDENT,” and “BIDEN IS NOT THE PRESIDENT ELECT,” and other versions of “THIS CAN’T BE HAPPENING.”

    I hate to rub salt into anyone’s wounds (particularly those whose faces are currently being stomped on by GloboCap’s enormous boot), but, yes, this is actually happening. Second Civil War or no Second Civil War, this is the end for Donald Trump. As Biden and the corporate media keep telling us, we are looking at a “very dark winter,” on the other side of which a new reality awaits us … a new, pathologized, totalitarian reality.

    Call it the “New Normal,” or whatever you want. Pretend “democracy has triumphed” if you want. Wear your mask. Mask your children. Terrorize them with pictures of “death trucks,” tales of “Russian hackers” and “white supremacist terrorists.”

    Live in fear of an imaginary plague (or perhaps a non-imaginary plague if that “very dark winter” comes to pass). Censor all dissent. Ban all protests. Do not attempt to adjust your telescreen. Click on the link to join the Zoom meeting. Have your password and your identity papers ready. Watch your pronouns. Get down on your knees. It’s GloboCap Fucking Über Alles!

    *  *  *

    If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Patreon page (where you can contribute as little $1 per month), or send your contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our staff up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian novel, Zone 23, or Volume I and II of his Consent Factory Essays, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive email, feel free to contact him directly.

  • In 'Game Changer' US Approves $23 Billion Sale Of F-35 Jets, MQ-9 Drones To UAE
    In ‘Game Changer’ US Approves $23 Billion Sale Of F-35 Jets, MQ-9 Drones To UAE

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/10/2020 – 23:45

    In what’s being hailed as a game-changer in the region, the United Arab Emirates will receive up to 50 F-35 advanced stealth fighter jets from the United States.

    The deal also includes 18 battle-ready MQ-9B aerial drones and air-to-air and air-to-ground munitions in a deal worth nearly $24 billion, according to the AP.

    Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the Trump administration formally notified Congress on Tuesday following its authorization by the State Department.

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    Lockheed Martin F-35 Lighting II

    It marks the most concrete major step to have followed the historic normalization of ties between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain known as the Abraham Accords, which was brokered by the White House and finalized on September 15.

    “This is in recognition of our deepening relationship and the UAE’s need for advanced defense capabilities to deter and defend itself against heightened threats from Iran,” Pompeo said in in making the announcement.

    “The UAE’s historic agreement to normalize relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to positively transform the region’s strategic landscape,” Pompeo continued.

    When rumblings of the major F-35 transfer to an Arab state first began late summer into September, a number of Congressional leaders (not to mention Israel itself) worried this could breach the US official policy of Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge (QME). Essentially this says that by law Washington must ensuring Israel has military superiority over its neighbors.

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    Pompeo addressed both the concern over QME as well as the ‘counter Iran’ angle in his statement. “Our adversaries, especially those in Iran… will stop at nothing to disrupt this shared success,” he stated. 

    “The proposed sale will made the UAE even more capable and interoperable with US partners in a manner fully consistent with America’s longstanding commitment to ensuring Israel’s Qualitiative Military Edge.”

    Meanwhile Amnesty International and other human rights groups are protesting the transfer, given the UAE’s role in executing the war in Yemen, currently considered by the UN to be the biggest humanitarian disaster on the planet.

  • Ex-CIA Chief Under Obama Urges Palace Coup Against Trump So He Doesn't "Declassify Everything"
    Ex-CIA Chief Under Obama Urges Palace Coup Against Trump So He Doesn’t “Declassify Everything”

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/10/2020 – 23:30

    Days ago amid the Trump administration’s election challenge turmoil which has resulted in over a dozen lawsuits filed in several battleground states, Donald Trump Jr. urged the president to unleash the nuclear option: “DECLASSIFY EVERYTHING!!!” he wrote in all caps on Twitter. “We can’t let the bad actors get away with it.”

    Others also picked up on the idea: “Here’s something constructive Trump could do before leaving office at noon on January 20: he could order — demand, insist — that all classified intel and other documents related to the origin of the Russia/election investigation be declassified and released to the public forthwith — unredacted,” columnist Sheldon Richman wrote.

    It didn’t take long for this distinct possibility to attract the attention of both the mainstream media and the intelligence establishment which has so long been at odds (or even at ‘war’) with the president. Reacting specifically to the ouster of Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Monday, ex-CIA spy chief under the Obama administration John Brennan essentially urged a palace coup against Trump prior to January 20th to ensure he doesn’t declassify anything sensitive or too revealing:

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    In the incredible Monday evening CNN interview, Brennan – himself responsible for stoking the now widely debunked Russiagate claims from the start of the Trump presidency – brazenly urged Vice President Mike Pence to seize power.

    He asserted that despite Biden preparing to transition into the White House on inauguration day, still two months away, at this point Trump is a threat to national security:

    “I’m very concerned what he might do in his remaining 70 days in office,” said Brennan on Monday’s edition of Cuomo Prime Time. “Is he going to take some type of military action? Is he going to release some type of information that could, in fact, threaten our national security interests?”

    Brennan took things even further and added specifics in terms of what the former longtime spy chief wants to see happen: “If Vice President Pence and the cabinet had an ounce of fortitude and spine and patriotism, I think they would seriously consider invoking the 25th Amendment and pushing Donald Trump out because he is just very unpredictable now,” he added.

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    And referencing what appears to be a post-election purge and exodus following multiple federal agency top officials either being pushed out or resigning since last Thursday even as votes were being tallied, Brennan suggested this is part of a Trump conspiracy to compromise national security. 

    “If Mark Esper has been pushed aside because he is not listening to Donald Trump, carrying out these orders, who knows what his successor, this acting secretary Chris Miller’s going to do if Donald Trump does give some type of order that really is counter to what I think our national security interests need to be,” Brennan said.

    But thankfully few actually in power are likely to listen to John Brennan, given his sour grapes and anger at Trump has clearly long been personal.

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    After all, who can forget this episode?

    John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director under President Barack Obama, struck back at President Trump on Thursday for revoking his security clearance, calling the president’s claims of “no collusion” with Russia to influence the 2016 election “hogwash” and arguing that the commander in chief was trying to silence anyone who would dare challenge him.

    So given Brennan is now openly and literally calling for an illegal overthrow of the sitting president of the United States, Trump now appears fully vindicated in having revoked his security clearance in the first place.

  • Biden Not Expected To Change US 'Tough Posture' In South China Sea
    Biden Not Expected To Change US ‘Tough Posture’ In South China Sea

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/10/2020 – 23:25

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

    One area where a Biden administration is not expected to differ from President Trump’s policies is concerning China’s claims to the South China Sea. While Joe Biden and his cabinet may cool down the rhetoric towards Beijing, experts and analysts believe actual policy will not change.

    Experts told the South China Morning Post that Biden would not soften the US’s stance on the South China Sea, pointing out it was the Obama administration that began challenging Beijing’s claims to the waters.

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    US Navy warships file image

    The experts said Biden would likely continue sailing warships near Chinese-claimed islands in the South China Sea, operations known as Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPs). FONOPs to challenge Beijing’s claims in the waters started under the Obama administration in 2015, shortly after Chinese President Xi Jinping publicly pledged not to militarize islands and reefs China claimed in the South China Sea.

    During the final presidential debate, Biden bragged about the Obama administration’s tough stance against China’s claims to the South China Sea.

    “When I met with Xi, and when I was still vice president, he said ‘we’re setting up air identification zones in the South China Sea, you can’t fly through them.’ I said, ‘we’re gonna fly through them. We just flew B52/B1 bombers through it. We’re not going to pay attention,'” Biden said at the debate.

    This year has seen a significant uptick in US military activity in the South China Sea. US aircraft carriers have regularly drilled in the disputed waters throughout the year, and a Beijing-based think tank recorded a sharp rise in US military flights in the region.

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    The South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative (SCSPI) recorded 67 flights of US reconnaissance aircraft in the South China Sea in July, compared with 49 in June and just 35 in May. In September, the SCSPI recorded 60 US flights in the region.

    Meanwhile there remains huge uncertainty surrounding the Taiwan issue…

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    In July, the US formally rejected most of China’s claims to the waters. The Trump administration has also sought cooperation from Asian countries to counter China in the region, something a Biden administration will likely continue.

  • Bill Gross Blasted Music 'Louder Than The Pacific Coast Highway And The Ocean' To Exact Revenge On Neighbor
    Bill Gross Blasted Music ‘Louder Than The Pacific Coast Highway And The Ocean’ To Exact Revenge On Neighbor

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/10/2020 – 23:05

    Bill Gross and his neighbor-turned-nemesis, Mark Towfiq, faced off in civil court for the first time this week after a dispute between the two Laguna Beach, Calif., residents exploded into the press.  The proceedings offered the public the first concrete glimpse into the feud between the two extraordinarily wealthy belligerents, and its gensis. As it turns out, the battle that drove Gross to blast Mariachi music and the theme from “Gilligan’s Island” at such intense volumes that it “drowned out the traffic from the nearby Pacific Coast Highway” all started with a multimillion-dollar sculpture purchased by Gross.

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    Bill Gross

    According to Bloomberg, the statue was a 22-foot-long blown glass sculpture by artist Dale Chihuly, and belonged to Gross. Mark Towfiq, Gross’s neighbor, was annoyed by the statue, and apparently filed a complaint with the city.

    It’s sometimes hard to feel sympathy for the megarich, and the way Towfiq handled this particular problem – by whinging to the town about his billionaire neighbor’s ugly statue – doesn’t reallly do him any favors in the PR department. The complaint infuriated Gross, who immediately responded by frequently blasting loud music from his $32 million home. It started with pop music – rap, hip hop – before escalating to mariachi and finally TV show theme songs.

    The tactics only escalated after Gross received a citation for the alleged violations from the town. Here’s what one town officer said during her testimony.

    Laguna Beach Police Officer Ashley Krotine testified Monday that she arrived at Gross’s home about 9 a.m. on Oct. 22, responding to a complaint about loud music. “When you say there was ‘loud Spanish music,’ was it louder than the ocean?” Jill Basinger, a lawyer for Gross, asked the officer.

    “Yes,” Krotine said.

    “How much louder?” Basinger asked.

    “I couldn’t tell you,” the officer said.

    “Louder than PCH?” Basinger asked.

    “Yes, louder than PCH,” Krotine said.

    Towfiq and his wife are suing Gross for harassment and emotional torment, with Towfiq’s lawyer claiming Gross and his girlfriend, former Tennis pro Amy Schwartz, had inflicted untold psychological damage and made their lives “a living hell”. Of course, Gross counter-sued, also claiming harassment, accusing Towfiq of being a “peeping Tom” who installed security cameras in an effort to sneak peaks at Schwartz when the two are out skinny dipping in their pool.

    “Enough is enough,” Gross said in a court filing. The billionaire says he “should not have to live tormented by the presence of cameras trained” on him because of “one man’s prurient obsessions.”

    Oh, and Gross also noted that “somebody” apparently threw a rock at his sculpture, causing damage that necessitated a $50k repair bill.

    The trial will resume Nov. 16.

  • The Deep State Vs The Deep Country
    The Deep State Vs The Deep Country

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/10/2020 – 22:45

    Authored by The Saker,

    I need to begin with the obvious: in spite of all the deep state, propaganda and “deep empire” (transnational) resources being used to declare that “Biden” (i.e. Harris) has won, as of right now nobody knows who got most votes and where.

    I would even suggest that we will never really find out who won, because who won depends on a large number of local laws and regulations and because it will probably never be possible to separate the fake votes from the legal ones.

    Finally, neither side will ever gracefully admit to having lost the contest. So now the country will enter a profound crisis.

    That is the bad news.

    But there is also very good news.

    First, it has now become clear to the entire planet that the US “democracy” is anything but: the USA is an oligarchic plutocracy, plagued with a myriad of antiquated laws and corrupt to the bone. The special “trick” of this US oligarchic plutocracy is that is masquerades as an ochlocracy: there is *pretend* mob rule which serves as the microscopically small fig leaf hiding the real nature of the regime.

    Second, while the Dems did their best to hide this, and they still are, it is now becoming evident that the sheer magnitude of the fraud made it impossible to conceal it. Now if we think of how the AngloZionist Empire has handled equally non-believable nonsense (9/11, Syrian gas attacks, Skripal, Navalnii, etc.) we know what they are going to do next: double down, which will reassure the brainwashed zombies, but will even further infuriate those still capable of critical thought.

    Third, the behavior of the US media in this entire operation is so obviously disgraceful that nobody will ever take them seriously again (at least amongst the thinking people, the zombies glued to the Idiot Tube are beyond any rational arguments anyway). This is particularly important in regards to FoxNews who has shown that it was a pseudo-conservative propaganda outlet which, in reality, is completely committed to the political agenda of Rupert Murdoch and his family.

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    At this point in time, it is impossible to predict what will happen next, but the murder of JFK or the 9/11 false flag strongly suggest that the US deep state will win.

    There seems to only be one way for Trump to stay in power and it will probably look similar to this:

    Giuliani, who I was told won over 4’000 lawsuits in his career, is a very tough guy (look at what he did to the mob in NY!) and he must realize that the lawsuits he will file this week will be the most important ones in his career. They will even probably define his legacy. The notion that he would go to the courts with no solid evidence in his files is simply ridiculous. I don’t see any mechanism which can stop Giuliani now, so the ball will now go to the state and federal courts next and, after that, to the Supreme Court. There the situation is hard to predict.

    In theory, Trump probably has enough conservative Justices, especially with Ruth Bader Ginsburg gone and Amy Coney Barrett replacing her. That’s only in theory. In reality, things are much more complex. On one hand, the pressure of the deep state on the Justices will be immense, but on the other hand, once you are a SC Justice you cannot be attacked, at least not legally. Amy Coney Barrett will also face immense pressure to “prove” her “independence” (meaning, if she sides with Giuliani’s side she will be called a Trump shill and even much worse than that!). One thing is certain, any Justice siding with Giuliani will face immense pressures followed by a vicious denigration campaign. Who knows how many Justices would have the courage to face this?

    However, there is also the possibility that any Justice siding with Giuliani’s conclusions will go down in history as yet another “profile in courage”, so I would not completely discard that possibility either.

    [Sidebar: during my student years in the USA I had the chance to meet, and study with, such US officials as Paul Nitze or Admiral Zumwalt and I was always amazed at how candid former US officials were, but only once they retired. USSC Justices are not retired, of course, but, like retired officials, they are beyond the reach of any legal reprisals, and that might strengthen their willingness to honestly follow their conscience and speak their minds]

    Giuliani will certainly fight hard, but looking at the political correlation of forces I can’t see an outcome where Trump would successfully defeat a much stronger opponent. Think about it, the only possible ally for the Trump campaign would be the Supreme Court: the GOP, Congress, the Deep State, the legacy ziomedia, and even members of the Trump Administration (think Bolton or Esper here) all hate him with a passion. And now that Trump appears to be losing, they are not shy about it.

    Still, as the proverb says, we need to hope for the best but prepare for the worst.

    That is, obviously, a Harris Administration in control of the Executive.

    So what can we expect from these folks?

    First and foremost, a sustained campaign to completely negate the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution. Considering how truly sacred these two cornerstones of the US Constitution are for millions of US Americans, we can expect a lot of resistance from the “deplorables”, both legal and violent.

    Second, the control of both the Executive and all the major IT giants will mean that free speech will be driven even further underground. This new reality will require a lot of thinking in the development of a strategy to protect the voices which the regime in DC will now openly try to silence.

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    [Sidebar: possibly the dumbest mistake made by Trump was not to create his own TV channel. He had the money, he could have found allies, but he simply lacked the intelligence to see the danger. Instead, this narcissistic fool thought that Twitter was the way to bypass the legacy media. Is there a possibility that if he is thrown out of the White House we might finally understand that what the USA now so urgently needs is, at the very least, a free TV channel and at least one free social media option? Maybe, but I am not holding my breath, Trump always had this ability to disappoint…]

    Third, on the international front, we can expect even more hysterical Russia bashing (the Dems all hate Russia with a passion, especially since they have brainwashed themselves for four years that “Putin” had “attacked” the US elections). But there is really nothing the USA can do to Russia, it is way too late for that. So I would expect even more hot air than from the Trump Administration, and probably not much more action, although that is by no means certain, since a braindead nominal President like Biden would not have Trump’s intelligence to understand that a war against Russia, China or Iran would end in a disaster: Dems always start wars to try to convince the public that they are “tough” (Dukakis in his M-1 tank). Now that they not only appears as weak, but also illegitimate and even senile (did you see Biden trying to run to the podium?), they will have to prove their “virility” and send some cruise missiles flying somewhere (that kind of attack is what these cowards always use first).

    As I mentioned in the past, the outcome of this election will not have much of an impact on US foreign policy: first, the US elites more or less all agree on continuing a policy of violent imperialism; but even more crucial is the fact that the Empire is as dead as the Titanic was when it hit the iceberg: not all passengers realized what was taking place, but that did not affect the outcome in the least.

    Furthermore, as those familiar with Hegelian dialectics know, each action eventually results in a reaction and the notion that 70’000’000+ voters will simply accept what is self-evidently a coup against not only Trump, but also the US Constitution itself, is ridiculous. If anything, these people will now come to realize that while the US is facing no real foreign threats at all (except those it created itself), there is most definitely an internal threat, in the sense of the United States Uniformed Services Oath of Office, and that this reality gives them the right, and even duty, to “resist tyranny”.

    You have probably heard Joe Biden declaring that he wants to heal the wounds, restore unity, rule for all US Americans and the like. I don’t think that this is only empty political rhetoric, though that is part of it too. Mostly, I believe that the Dems are terrified because they know for a fact that they stole the election and this is why after four years of the most divisive and irresponsible rhetoric against Trump, “the racist system” and all the rest of the crap, they are now making a 180 (they are experts at that!) and pleading for calm, peace and unity.

    That ain’t going to happen.

    Finally, a word to those who like to say that there is no difference between the Dems and the GOP, that this is all a fake conflict: friends, you are both right and massively wrong. You are right when you say that the DNC and the RNC are like indistinguishable twins. But what you are missing are two crucial things:

    1. Factions inside one party can actually go after each other much harder than against their common enemies. I think of the SS vs the SA in Nazi Germany or the Trotskysts vs the Stalinists in the Soviet Union and during the Spanish Civil war.

    2. But, even more crucially, this is not a contest between the Democrats and the Republicans, it is a contest between a “rejected outsider” and both the DNC and RNC!

    Conclusion: not the RNC vs the DNC but the Deep State vs the deep country

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    A quick look at a map tells the story: this struggle is most one of the deep state vs the deep (real) country. Yeah, I know, Trump is hardly a miner from West Virginia or a farmer in Alabama. But that doesn’t matter one bit.

    What does matter is that the deplorables from the “overfly country” felt that Trump speaks for them and that he is all that stands between them and the (pseudo-) Liberals of CNN, the Antifa/BLM thugs and the destruction of the United States as we all knew them.

    And yes, this is a simplistic view, but it is fundamentally correct one nonetheless.

  • 70% Of Republicans Say Election 'Was Not Free And Fair'
    70% Of Republicans Say Election ‘Was Not Free And Fair’

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/10/2020 – 22:25

    A vast majority of Republicans – 70% – believe the 2020 election was not ‘free and fair,’ according to a new poll by Morning Consult.

    Broken down further, 48% of Republicans polled say the election was “definitely” not free and fair, while 22% say it “probably” was not – over twice the percentage of Republicans who thought it wouldn’t be fair when polled just before the election.

    ​

    Morning Consult also found:

    • Republicans are most skeptical of the Pennsylvania results: Just 23 percent of Republican voters say they believe the results in the Keystone State are reliable, and no more than 3 in 10 say the same about the results in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin. Additionally, even for states like Texas and Florida, where Trump is projected to safely win, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say the results are reliable. 
    • Overall trust in elections plummets among Republicans: Prior to the election, 68 percent of GOP voters said they had at least some trust in the U.S. election system. Post-election, that dropped to 34 percent. Democratic trust, meanwhile, jumped from 66 percent to 78 percent.

    ​ 

    • Among voters who doubt the 2020 election’s validity, mail-in voting is seen as the main culprit: Nearly 4 in 5 voters who say they don’t believe the election was free and fair cite widespread voter fraud caused by mail-in voting as a reason why. Additionally, 72 percent cite ballot tampering as a reason and 51 percent say the media gave the candidates unequal attention. 

    ​

    • Despite outstanding concerns, most voters don’t expect the results to be overturned: 63 percent of registered voters, including 75 percent of Democrats and 45 percent of Republicans, say it is unlikely that the election results will be overturned.

     
    ​

  • Will The Blockchain Economy Run On Bitcoin, Ethereum, Or Central Bank Digital Currency?
    Will The Blockchain Economy Run On Bitcoin, Ethereum, Or Central Bank Digital Currency?

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/10/2020 – 22:05

    By The Fintech Blueprint

    Welcome to the new world.  The symptoms have shifted. What we see prioritized now is different. We welcome the return of respect for expertise, the love of rigor and curiosity, and a pursuit of dignified equity. A lot of calories have gone into this transformation. Our mental map of the territory is remade. Let’s mark things to market so that we are able to walk forward again.

    Yet, underneath it all is still the human swirl of chaos, organized only briefly into flashes of coherence and structure. The virus gorges on the social animal. The sovereign beasts continue to threaten each other with geopolitical, economic, and technological dominance. Markets still reflect financial constructions and schemes decoupled from the experience of the average person. High tech firms continue to build into software their addictive digital nation states. The vectors of change for software and money remain deeply anchored to the fractal of blockchain.

    The election’s end – and perhaps its reminder of the fragility of political governance – has reinforced the value of Bitcoin. When the old world wobbles, the new one seems more safe by comparison. The price of the cryptocurrency rose to over $15,000, breaking again the $250 billion market capitalization barrier. You can compare that $250 billion to the M1 money supply of a number of countries (link here) — Poland, Belgium, or Austria.

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    Perhaps this was also driven by the much discussed move from PayPal, the payment processor, to finally incorporate Bitcoin into its currency options. PayPal connects to something like 25 million merchants and 350 million users. Reminder that Ant Financial has 80 million merchants and 1.3 billion users — more on that later. We think the PayPal news is interesting and promising, but still in early stages. Allowing the purchase and sale of a commodity using a third party trust company (Paxos) is quite different from using a currency for economic activity. But we are getting there.

    For comparison, Visa today sits at about $420 billion in market capitalization, representing the discounted cash flows of owning a payment network. Its deal with Plaid, the data aggregation company, is on the rocks as the US Department of Justice files an anti-trust lawsuit to prevent the acquisition. Our prior write-up on the deal (link here) agreed with the logic of monopoly as it relates to Visa taking out a black-swan competitor. But we find the concept of blocking this deal on those grounds fairly absurd. A $100 million revenue data aggregation company is many steps away from offering a global payments network.

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    Let’s think about industry structure for a moment. The card network provides the payments infrastructure in the sense that it allows for money to move around on its network of nodes. Those nodes are financial or economic in nature, and speak in the language of money — banks, card issuers, e-commerce sites, point of sale terminals, regulators, and so on. You can send a little bit of messaging around, but primarily you are sending a financial instrument. And you don’t ask questions about the financial instrument. It simply is sovereign fiat. Value accrues to the network shareholder due to the small rent you take across all transactions.

    Therefore, your incentive as Visa is to maximize the organizational share of all transactions by broadening the network across the world and into every technological sphere. Through scale, your network gets better for participants. You start saying “network of networks” and paying $5B for start-ups. A naturally occurring monopoly, like Facebook and Google.

    PayPal is one layer higher up the stack. It is the check-out experience for a meaningful portion of the Internet. Square is the check-out experience for a meaningful portion of terrestrial small business. And so on. You can talk about payment processing and payment gateways and points of sale until everyone is confused. What’s nice about PayPal, and Stripe, and Square and generally that footprint of modern payments companies, is that they are software-native and have APIs and UIs. They integrate into things, and are part of the modern world. Most still ride the Visa or Marstercard “rails” and all prioritize the financial instrument of sovereign money. Their value accrues from aggregating the consumer or merchant footprint, and giving economic activity a way to flow in novel patterns.

    So what comes next, and how does it relate to the above?

    Central Bank Digital Currencies

    ConsenSys has been on a tear recently announcing 4 different CBDC projects on Ethereum infrastructure. Let’s briefly highlight those:

    The discussion of CBDCs is often a stark reaction to the development of Facebook’s Libra private stablecoin / USD network, and the Chinese deployment and expansion of their national digital currency. The discussion often splits into (1) wholesale CBDCs, which largely reinforce and optimize the role of banking institutions relative to the central bank’s money management authority, (2) retail CBDCs, which would bypass the banks and go directly into the wallets of consumers. The first option is about efficiency and industry cost mutualization. The second is more deeply transformative, and analogizes more closely to owning Bitcoin and using it to transact.

    In many of the projects above, there is a combination of a financial institution, a technology consulting firm, and a blockchain company coming together. ConsenSys brings forward enterprise Ethereum, which is a variant of the open source programmable blockchain optimized for a permissioned deployment with large transaction throughput. Unlike public Ethereum, which just launched the first phase of its scalability upgrade (Eth2), private permissioned networks scale more easily because you do not start with an open adversarial environment. Other examples of such enterprise networks would be IBM and Hyperledger Fabric, or R3 and its Corda technology, as the chassis for digital value transfer and settlement.

    How should we contextualize Ethereum-based CBDCs relative to Bitcoin, Visa, and PayPal?

    First, there is the actual network itself. Much of the current thinking is about the software protocol as the ledger. Where does the information actually live? Who hosts it? Who processes it? In the previous world, data centers and servers run by some firm (e.g., Visa or a cloud-provider like Google / AWS) hold a copy of the information and run software which performs computation about the transactions. In the current world, the blockchain is itself a set of some large number of duplicates of the data set, held by each of the network participants. In the case of programmable blockchains, those network participants are also each executing software programs, which are then synced across the entire system.

    Making sure this network functions and reflects the requirements of a central bank, or other constituents, is a key part of standing up a CBDC. This is, we think, what most industry participants are really thinking about. But it is missing a large part of the story.

    Take China. Its digital yuan has over 20 companies involved in development and launch, with a preferred spot given to the state-run banks (a detailed overview here). The state has been giving out free money to citizens in the form of the new currency to prove the viability of the concept. Yes, there can be discussion about the software architecture, centralization, and trying to combat the dollar. But the part that stood out most to us is a defensive posture towards WeChat and Alipay.

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    The digital yuan is the money — when it sits in a wallet on the phone, it is *merely* a financial instrument. When you transfer it around between participants, you are reconciling financial data with the data hosted by the central government. Financial institutions hold accounts at central banks and do this all the time, already. Don’t get us wrong, it is certainly disruptive. You could build taxation directly into consumer transaction flows, or implement universal basic income, or deliver Covid-related distributions with ease.

    Still, it is an instrument.

    The Smart Money Economy

    Let’s come back to Ant Financial. The world’s largest IPO of $34 billion was 870x oversubscribed. Ant is a fantastic story of innovation, global technology and payments progress, and the digital growth of Chinese small business. And yet, the Chinese authorities shut it down and are forcing the company to return money to investors.

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    Quite the surprise! Perhaps it was Jack Ma, the country’s wealthiest private business man ($50+ billion net work), not sufficiently following the party line about regulation.

    Or, perhaps, as the country tries to launch a national digital money, one must flex against the largest digital storefront in which that money must be used. As a reminder, Ant opened up its platform to many third parties across the banking, wealth management, and insurance industries in order to position itself as an impartial distributor (while taking distribution fees). An example of this open approach would be Western asset manager Vanguard coming in to offer its roboadvisor to the Ant audience. If the Chinese government is trying to close down competition related to its digital yuan, removing stablecoins and other cash equivalents in order to scale out its national solution, having Tencent and Ant under clear instruction becomes paramount.

    This brings us back to Ethereum. Public Ethereum already has a money on it — it is the digital dollar. And there is now $22 billion of it on the Ethereum chain.

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    What is interesting about money supply is not the money, but what you can do with it. Bringing back the discussion of the card networks and payment processors, we find that a programmable chain is able to incorporate into its software stack the gateways and business logic that used to sit outside of the network. Instead of adding PayPal on top of Visa, you can run all the software you need onchain — assuming scaling works out of course. This is why the “layer 2” developments for Ethereum, whether as part of Ethereum or adjacent to it, merit continued research and watch.

    Further, the applications with which the money would interact eventually live on the network as well. Today, that primarily points to decentralized finance, crypto art, and various virtual worlds. Over time and with deeper maturity, more commerce can become incorporated into the digital network itself.

    Remember that this happened to the Internet on a 20 year time horizon. The trillion dollar valuations supported by emergent business models — the operating system of the iPhone (30% on all commerce) and the shopping footprint of Amazon (the digital value chain) — give us the necessary patience and proof. Neither commercial path was yet available when people were trying to figure out the protocols to stitch together the Web. And who could have imagined that proprietary media production, like the Amazon exclusive “The Boys”, would be the axis for competition that locks users into a subscription for the walled gardens. You couldn’t even stream an MP3!

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    What is a CBDC really?

    Ant Financial succeeded by aggregating 80 million merchants on a payment rail with an operating system. PayPal succeeded by pulling together 25 million merchants across the Web. Apple succeeded by keeping a share of economic transactions across the mobile applications that it powered. What matters is not just the money, but what people do with it. And what they do with it is creativity, and the free exchange of goods and services.

    The CBDC projects today ask the question of how to move money around. Bitcoin has answered this question, and perhaps an applied architecture like permissioned Ethereum will solve this for national currencies.

    The deeper question is — what does an economy connected to a CBDC look like? What is the shape of merchants and applications that accept digital currency? Where do they perform their economic functions? If we think the venue for computing will increasingly be on blockchains, that suggests that CBDC rails should come not just with pre-installed national money, but also pre-installed applications for the use of that money. A payment rail will only be adopted if it is useful, and if it is applicable to a meaningful portion of human economic activity.

    Would you rather store value, or create it?

  • Vaccine Effectiveness: 90% vs 44%
    Vaccine Effectiveness: 90% vs 44%

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/10/2020 – 21:45

    Some traders were confused by the market’s volcanic response to yesterday’s news that Pfizer has a covid vaccine with 90% effectiveness. Well, as DB’s Jim Reid explains today, “it’s easy to see why there is so much excitement over Pfizer’s news yesterday. When we compare the average 10 year effectiveness of the flu vaccine (44%) with vaccines for other diseases it falls well short and expectations were benchmarked around trying to beat this rather than compete with the most successful vaccines.”

    However, the early Pfizer number – which one must take with a ton of salt as it appeared not in a peer reviewed journal but in a corporate press release, and was oddly timed to hit just after the election – puts the vaccine effectiveness up there with that seen for Chickenpox, Mumps, Polio and Whooping Cough, which as Reid notes, is “a long way to go but very encouraging.”

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    Or said otherwise, of the 94 cases of covid contracted by participants in the Pfizer study, 86 occurred in the control group. If you tossed a coin 94 times, the chances of getting 86 or more heads is infinitesimally small so its safe to say the vaccine works.

    Of course, Pfizer is just one of many companies rushing to come to market with a working vaccine (whether the population will voluntarily take it is an other matter entirely). However, one thing is certain: as vaccine news permeates over the coming weeks and months the world will move on to discussing how to rebuild the world post covid; in this context any future push by administrations to enforce more mandatory quarantines and shutdowns will not be greeted well by the broader population.

  • What Happens If Puerto Rico Becomes A State?
    What Happens If Puerto Rico Becomes A State?

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/10/2020 – 21:25

    Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

    In late 2018, after more than seven fantastic years of living in Chile, I decided to move to Puerto Rico to take advantage of the island’s incredible tax incentives.

    By moving to Puerto Rico, I traded my right to vote in US federal elections for a 4% tax rate. And I’m pretty confident I got the better end of that deal.

    I’ve written about this quite extensively– but stick with me, because there’s a new twist to the story.

    As we’ve covered before, Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States.

    This means that the island falls under the jurisdiction of the US government for certain matters, like immigration and national defense.

    But it operates independently in other matters– like taxes.

    In fact, taxes is probably the most important one: Puerto Rico has its own tax system that’s completely independent from the United States.

    So residents of Puerto Rico can disconnect entirely from the US tax system, as long as their income is generated from Puerto Rican sources.

    This is a critical point: what constitutes Puerto Rican income?

    According to the tax code, this includes dividends paid by a Puerto Rican business, as well as capital gains from certain investments like stocks and bonds.

    So if you live in Puerto Rico and make most of your money from your Puerto Rican business, or you trade stocks, commodities, crypto, etc., then in most cases your income would be considered Puerto Rican in origin.

    If that’s the case, you are generally no longer required to pay US federal taxes on that income. In fact you might not even have to file a federal tax return at all.

    Instead, you would pay Puerto Rican taxes. And that’s where the incentives come in.

    Several years ago the Puerto Rican government established a number of extraordinary tax incentives, specifically targeted at those two cases–

    Traders, whose primary source of income is capital gains from their financial investments, literally pay ZERO tax.

    And entrepreneurs with qualifying businesses are only required to pay a 4% corporate tax rate (plus a tiny municipal rate that’s just a fraction of a percent, depending on which city you live in.)

    Plus, any dividends that your company pays to you are tax free as long as you live in Puerto Rico.

    This is an enormous benefit.

    If you live in the US mainland and operate an LLC, you’d pay, say, a 25% to 40% average tax rate on business income, not counting self-employment tax.

    If you run your business through a corporation, you’d pay 21% corporate profits tax, plus an additional 15% to 20% dividend tax, plus the 3.8% Obamacare surtax, plus state and local tax.

    In Puerto Rico it’s just 4%. Call it 4.5% to account for the local municipal tax. But that’s it. No extra dividend tax. No Obamacare surtax.

    You put more than 95% of your earnings in your pocket.

    This isn’t some obscure loophole or shady tax shelter. It’s the law.

    Section 933 of the United States federal tax code specifically exempts US citizens from federal tax on their Puerto Rican sourced income, as long as they are bona fide Puerto Rico residents .

    (Note that if you have US-sourced income, or income from foreign countries, that income would still be taxable by the IRS. Section 933 only excludes Puerto Rican income from US federal tax.)

    And in Puerto Rico, the incentives are also codified by law.

    In fact, once your tax incentive application is approved, you actually sign a contract with the government and are issued an individual tax decree.

    So even if they change the law later, you’d still be grandfathered in under the old rules, and continue to enjoy your current tax benefits.

    Now, here’s the twist: there are very, very few events that could trigger a problem with your tax incentives. But one of them just became more likely:

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    Puerto Rico is currently a US territory. But there’s been a movement for quite some time for Puerto Rico to become a state… similar to how there’s a statehood movement for Washington DC.

    Just like DC, Puerto Rico tends to skew quite liberal politically. So the blue party in the US is very much in favor of Puerto Rico and DC becoming states.

    (I hate breaking down the world into red and blue, but in this case, it’s relevant.)

    It means they would likely pick up 2 more senate seats for each one, nearly guaranteeing the Democrats control of the United States Senate.

    Several months ago, in fact, the House of Representatives passed a bill authorizing DC to become the 51st state. It was killed in the Senate.

    But it shows the movement is real.

    Last week, Puerto Ricans had their own election. And statehood was on the ballot.

    The final tally showed that a majority of Puerto Ricans want to become a state. The Democratic party wants them to become a state.

    And if that happens, the benefits would go away. Sure, your company would still be subject to a 4% tax rate in Puerto Rico. But then you’d have to pay US federal income tax on top of that.

    So statehood pretty much kills the deal.

    But does last week’s vote mean that Puerto Rico will become a state?

    No, not necessarily.

    Statehood would require approval by the US House of Representatives. Then the Senate would have to approve it.

    And in order for that to happen, the Democrats would need to take control of the Senate AND agree to eliminate the filibuster.

    Then the President would need to sign it into law.

    So, it’s possible this could happen, but it’s not especially likely.

    And even if it did happen, there would still be several years of a transition process.

    So, bottom line, the tax incentives in Puerto Rico are still valid and extremely valuable.

    And even if they only exist for another 3-5 years, they’re still definitely worth considering.

    *  *  *

    On another note… We think gold could DOUBLE and silver could increase by up to 5 TIMES in the next few years. That’s why we published a new, 50-page long Ultimate Guide on Gold & Silver that you can download here.

  • NJ Gov. Murphy Urges Spending For Hudson River Tunnel Despite State's Second Credit Downgrade In 2 Years
    NJ Gov. Murphy Urges Spending For Hudson River Tunnel Despite State’s Second Credit Downgrade In 2 Years

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/10/2020 – 21:05

    Despite the fact that the MTA and NJ Transit can’t seem to get their acts together with the infrastructure they already have, why should we let that stop us from doling out more cash to them for more projects?

    That seems to be the thought process of first term New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, who took to Bloomberg yesterday to tell the world he is “highly optimistic” that a Biden administration would approve funding for a new Hudson River rail tunnel.

    He said the tunnel is more likely to move forward under a Biden administration after the plans failed to materialize under the Trump administration.

    Perhaps offering some insight as to his acumen when it comes to financing such a project, he also said he “expects the Biden administration to flood the U.S. with cash” to fight Covid-19. There was nary a mention of where this magic cash is going to materialize from – though, we can take a guess. Brrr. 

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    Meanwhile, Murphy’s state is about to issue $4.28 billion in debt, representing 13% of its fiscal 2021 budget, to deal with a revenue shortfall that saw New Jersey hit with its second credit rating downgrade since Murphy has been in office in 2018. 

    Murphy said: “I’m highly optimistic that will get green-lighted — President-elect Biden knows this project very well. Literally it is shovel-ready. You could envision putting a shovel in the ground, first quarter of next year.”

    Murphy has hinted about imposing new Covid restrictions heading into the winter. Last week, he suggested that Thanksgiving meals on November 26 should be limited to “small groups of family”. Murphy said: “It’s hard for us to find a huge set of outbreaks in schools or restaurants or gyms. It’s really overwhelmingly private settings.”

    He then hilariously concluded: “The big plea is to not let your hair down. That’s exactly what this virus wants us to do, including when you’re at your house with your own family.”

    That’s some rock solid reasoning there, Phil. Thanks.

  • Ten Attorneys General Join Supreme Court Case Against Pennsylvania Mail-In Ballot Deadline
    Ten Attorneys General Join Supreme Court Case Against Pennsylvania Mail-In Ballot Deadline

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/10/2020 – 20:45

    As Republicans across the country escalate efforts to investigate credible allegations of fraud during the 2020 election,  a group of ten Republican Attorneys General have filed an ‘amicus brief’ with the US Supreme Court in a case challenging the legality of late mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania.

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    AGs from Missouri, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Texas filed in Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Boockvar, which challenges the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s late October decision to allow ballots arriving after Election Day to be counted – despite, as The Federalist  notes – state laws mandating otherwise.

    “Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of our Republic and it’s one of the reasons why the United States is the envy of the world,” said Missouri AG Eric Schmitt in a Monday press conference. “We have to ensure that every legal vote cast is counted in that every illegal vote cast is not counted.”

    Associate Justice Samuel Alito Jr. already granted the Republican Party of Pennsylvania’s request and temporarily ordered all counties segregate mail-in ballots that arrived after 8 p.m. on Election Day from others, but the lawsuit is still pending petition in the highest court.

    …

    The attorneys’ hope is that by filing as “friends of the Court” and demonstrating a “strong interest” in the ramifications of the Supreme Court’s potential decision that SCOTUS may be more willing to take up the case. –The Federalist

    “The actions taken by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court are one of the most breathtaking abuses of judicial authority that I’ve seen in my four-plus years as attorney general,” said Oklahoma AG Mike Hunter.

    Plaintiffs argue that the PA Supreme Court exceeded its authority and violated the Constitution’s Election Clauses which give state legislatures, not the courts, the power and “unique role” to decide various election procedures.

    “Our system of federalism relies on separation of powers to preserve liberty at every level of government, and the separation of powers in the Election Clauses is no exception to this principle,” reads the amicus brief.

    They also believe the decision handed down by the Pennsylvania Court expanded the potential for voter fraud. This decision, the attorneys general argue, may have affected the weight of votes in states outside of Pennsylvania which is in direct violation of previous Court rulings stating that every vote must be “fairly counted without its being distorted by fraudulently cast votes.”

    “Regardless of the election’s outcome, only legal ballots should be counted,” the brief continues, citing Anderson v. United States from 1974. –The Federalist

    “We as attorneys general and we, as the chief legal officers of our state have a responsibility to address that kind of judicial abuse of authority because of the precedent that that decision represents can affect the outcome of elections, not only in Pennsylvania but national elections,” said Oklahoma AG Hunter.

    Things are heating up when it comes to investigating the integrity of the election. On Monday, Attorney General William Barr authorized DOJ officials to open inquiries into potential irregularities – a move which led to the swift departure of the agency’s top voter fraud investigator, Richard Pilger.

    Shortly after meeting with Barr on Monday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered a floor speech asserting that President Trump is “100% within his rights” to challenge the results of the election.

    Democrats – who have notably changed their language from ‘there was no election fraud’ to ‘there was no widespread election fraud’ are now asserting that the DOJ may be trying to change the results of the election by investigating.

    Former Vice President Joe Biden, meanwhile, is acting like the election is settled. In addition to insisting Trump concede, Biden is expected to name a chief of staff as early as this week.

  • Bank of Japan Will Pay Banks To Consolidate, Fire Workers
    Bank of Japan Will Pay Banks To Consolidate, Fire Workers

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/10/2020 – 20:45

    After more than half a decade of disastrous monetary policy which not only failed to stimulate inflation, boost exports or crush the yen, but has brought Japan’s banks to near collapse, in August we reported that the Bank of Japan came up with an “ingenious” new plan to flood the system with liquidity: it is paying banks hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to boost lending, a move analysts say was aimed at easing the side-effects of its negative interest rate policy.

    And while record bank lending in the summer months suggested the BOJ’s plan is working – a very rare success of late in its losing battle to revive the economy – it was also a sign that policymakers’ focus is now more on supporting banks, rather than keeping rates low, according to Reuters.

    To be sure, the literal wall of money printed by the BOJ in recent years has kept a lid on bankruptcies and job losses as the economy tips into a deep recession, although it has also meant that banks can not survive without continued life support from the central bank. And the prolonged battle with COVID-19 has only added strains on regional banks.

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    Needless to say, the local bankers were delighted with this latest indirect transfer from taxpayers to the top 1%: “This is one of the most effective policy moves the BOJ has made in recent years,” said Takehiro Noguchi, senior economist at Mizuho Research who personally stands to benefit from this “effective policy move.” We found his second comment far more illuminating:

    “The BOJ will likely continue to take steps to alleviate the side-effect of its monetary easing… The BOJ thinks negative interest rates is something it should not have done.”

    Fast forward 3 months when the validity of that statement was confirmed overnight when the Bank of Japan unveiled on Tuesday yet another scheme allowing banks to circumvent te catastrophic NIRP policy, one aimed at incentivizing regional bank to consolidate and help revitalize regional economies, the latest move which hints at growing concern over the health of the country’s banking system.

    In the latest reversal of the country’s NIRP policy, Kuroda established over 7 years ago, the central bank said it will introduce a special deposit facility under which it will pay – not collect – 0.1% interest on current account balances held by regional lenders that meet certain criteria. Of course, in Japan interest rates are mostly flat or negative, and is one of the main reasons why Japan’s banking system, like that of the EU, has been on the verge of collapse for nearly a decade.

    “The business environment surrounding regional financial institutions is becoming more severe due to the impact from the coronavirus pandemic, structural factors like dwindling population and continued low interest rates,” the BOJ admitted.

    As a result, “the BOJ decided to create a system that assists financial institutions in making efforts to underpin their regional economies.”

    And that system effectively reverses the central bank’s negative rate policy.

    Under the three-year scheme lasting until March 2023, regional lenders that opt for mergers or business integration will be remunerated, the BOJ said in a statement. Regional banks that also improve their financial health – which ironically was sapped by the BOJ’s previous idiotic policies – such as by cutting operating costs, i.e., firing workers, will also be applicable for the scheme, the central bank said.

    The move reflects a growing concern, shared even by some BOJ policymakers, over the rising cost and diminishing returns of its ultra-loose monetary policy.

    Under a policy dubbed yield curve control (YCC), the BOJ guides short-term rates at -0.1% and long-term yields at zero as part of efforts to revitalize the economy. The policy, however, has added to strains for regional banks as it makes net interest income virtually impossible.

    Japan’s new Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has loosely pulled an Amadeus, and said there were “too many regional banks” in Japan, signalling his desire for some weak lenders to consider mergers or consolidation. Even before the BOJ’s latest move, some regional banks had already started the groundwork for consolidation.

    Bottom line: the central banks is now aggressively encouraging banks to become too big to fail, and to reward them it will allow them to skirt the provisions of Japan’s negative rate policy which, we remind readers, was launched precisely to help banks and boost Japan’s economy. Instead both find themselves on the edge of collapse.

  • "I Did Not Recant": USPS Whistleblower Stands By Backdated Ballot Claim
    “I Did Not Recant”: USPS Whistleblower Stands By Backdated Ballot Claim

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/10/2020 – 20:25

    On Tuesday evening, the Washington Post wrote that USPS whistleblower Richard Hopkins ‘admitted to fabricating’ allegations of voter fraud, when he claimed in a Project Veritas video that he overheard a postmaster in Erie, Pennsylvania instructing postal workers to collect and backdate ballots received after election day.

    Citing “people who spoke on the condition of anonymity,” the Post now says that Hopkins – a Marine combat veteran – “signed an affidavit recanting his claims.“

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    Hopkins, however, says he did not recant.

    In a Tuesday night interview with Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, Hopkins says he was intimidated and coerced by federal investigators with the USPS Inspector General’s office.

    “They were grilling the hell out of me,” says Hopkins, adding “I feel like I just got played.”

    Hours after the Post‘s claim, O’Keefe tweeted a recording of Hopkins’ interview with IG employee Russel Strasser.

    “I am trying to twist you a little bit, believe it or not, because in that – your mind will kick in,” said Strasser.

    “Okay,” says Hopkins.

    “We like to control our mind,” Strasser continues. “And when we do that, we can convince ourselves of a memory. But when you’re under a little bit of stress, which is what I’m doing to you purposely, your mind can be a little bit clearer and we’re going to do a different exerciser too, to make your mind a little bit clearer. So, but this is all on purpose.”

    “Roger,” replies Hopkins.

    “I am not scaring you. But I am scaring you,” he continued.

    At the end of the interview with O’Keefe, Hopkins says that he stands by his original claim. Meanwhile, O’Keefe says there is more coming tomorrow on this.

    Watch:

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsAttorney and conservative commentator Mike Cernovich suggested the Strasser was employing ‘an interrogation technique where the federal agent tries to use stress tactics to implant a false memory into the interview subject.’

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    Earlier in the evening, Veritas posted a video of Hopkins explicitly saying “I do not recant.”

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    Hopkins, meanwhile, has been placed on administrative leave without pay.

    O’Keefe said in a Tuesday night email “We are going to release such concrete evidence exposing your lies that you will all have eggs on your faces,” adding “Stay tuned, these people have no clue what’s coming their way.”

  • "Shredding The Fabric Of Our Democracy": Biden Aide Signals Push For Greater Internet Censorship
    “Shredding The Fabric Of Our Democracy”: Biden Aide Signals Push For Greater Internet Censorship

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/10/2020 – 20:05

    Authored by Jonathan Turley,

    We have been discussing the calls for top Democrats for increased private censorship on social media and the Internet.  President-elect Joe Biden has himself called for such censorship, including blocking President Donald Trump’s criticism of mail-in voting. Now, shortly after the election, one of Biden’s top aides is ramping up calls for a crackdown on Facebook for allowing Facebook users to read views that he considers misleading — users who signed up to hear from these individuals. 

    Bill Russo, a deputy communications director on Biden’s campaign press team, tweeted late Monday that Facebook “is shredding the fabric of our democracy” by allowing such views to be shared freely.

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    Russo tweeted that “If you thought disinformation on Facebook was a problem during our election, just wait until you see how it is shredding the fabric of our democracy in the days after.” Russo objected to the fact that, unlike Twitter, Facebook did not move against statements that he and the campaign viewed as “misleading.” He concluded. “We pleaded with Facebook for over a year to be serious about these problems. They have not. Our democracy is on the line. We need answers.”

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    For those of us in the free speech community, these threats are chilling. We saw incredible abuses before the election in Twitter barring access to a true story in the New York Post about Hunter Biden and his alleged global influence peddling scheme. Notably, no one in the Biden camp (including Biden himself) thought that it was a threat to our democracy to have Twitter block the story (while later admitting that it was a mistake).

    I have previously objected to such regulation of speech. What is most disturbing is how liberals have embraced censorship and even declared that “China was right” on Internet controls. Many Democrats have fallen back on the false narrative that the First Amendment does not regulate private companies so this is not an attack on free speech. Free speech is a human right that is not solely based or exclusively defined by the First Amendment.  Censorship by Internet companies is a “Little Brother” threat long discussed by free speech advocates.  Some may willingly embrace corporate speech controls but it is still a denial of free speech.

    This is why I recently described myself as an Internet Originalist:

    The alternative is “internet originalism” — no censorship. If social media companies returned to their original roles, there would be no slippery slope of political bias or opportunism; they would assume the same status as telephone companies. We do not need companies to protect us from harmful or “misleading” thoughts. The solution to bad speech is more speech, not approved speech.

    If Pelosi demanded that Verizon or Sprint interrupt calls to stop people saying false or misleading things, the public would be outraged. Twitter serves the same communicative function between consenting parties; it simply allows thousands of people to participate in such digital exchanges. Those people do not sign up to exchange thoughts only to have Dorsey or some other internet overlord monitor their conversations and “protect” them from errant or harmful thoughts.

    Russo’s comments mirror the comments of other Democrats who are seeking greater censorship. Indeed, in the recent Senate hearing on Twitter’s suppression of the Biden story, Democratic senators ignored the admissions of Big Tech CEOs that they were wrong to bar the story and, instead, insisted that the CEOs pledge to substantially increase such censorship. Senator Jacky Rosen warned the CEOS that “you are not doing enough” to prevent “disinformation, conspiracy theories and hate speech on your platforms.”

    Again, as someone raised in a deeply liberal and Democratic family in Chicago, I do not know when the Democratic party became the party for censorship. However, limiting free speech is now a rallying cry for Democratic members and activists alike. At risk is the single greatest invention for free speech since the printing press.  Russo’s comments reaffirms that the Biden Administration will continue this assault against Internet free speech.  What is most unnerving is that Russo is denouncing such free speech as “shredding the fabric of our democracy.” There was a time when free speech was the very right that we fought to protect in our democratic system.  It was one of the defining principles of our Constitution system. It is now being treated as a threat to that system.

  • Illinois, Utah & Montana Break COVID-19 Records As US Death Toll Nears 240k: Live Updates
    Illinois, Utah & Montana Break COVID-19 Records As US Death Toll Nears 240k: Live Updates

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/10/2020 – 19:52

    Summary:

    • Illinois, Utah and Montana break COVID records
    • Illinois fifth state to top 500k cases
    • Maryland enters “red zone” COVID restrictions
    • Spain daily cases jump 30%
    • Dr. Fauci says Pfizer vaccine EUA one week away
    • Italy reports 35k+ new cases
    • US cases top 100k for 6th day
    • Hospitalizations match April records
    • Pfizer vaccine to be offered at below-market rates
    • Global cases near 51 million
    • New study shows COVID patients could be at higher risk of mental-health issues
    • Denmark warns of mink farms’ threat to human health

    * * *

    Update (1930ET): Utah, Illinois and Montana all broke records on Tuesday as the US topped 10.2 million cases and deaths exceeded 239,000. Illinois reported its highest number of daily cases with 12,623 infections, along with 79 more deaths. It has also become the fifth state to surpass 500,000 cases, per JHU, with 511,183 confirmed. Of course, as we noted earlier, with case numbers soaring, some are arguing that the state might already be well on its way toward herd immunity.

    Montana announced 1,101 new Covid-19 cases Tuesday, a new record high for the state, meanwhile, Utah, which imposed new emergency measures over the weekend, recorded a new high for its 7-day average.

    * * *

    Update (1700ET): Maryland Gov Larry Hogan has just confirmed that the state has returned to ‘red zone’ status – the strictest COVID-19 settings available – as the state’s ‘case rate’  (the number of infections per 100k) has climbed.

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    The state has confirmed just over 150k total cases, but its positivity rate, which is supposed to show whether higher case numbers are due to virus spread instead of just more testing, is now 5.24%.

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    Watch Hogan’s live update below:

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    * * *

    Update (1255ET): Following in the footsteps of Italy, Spain just recorded 7,552 virus cases over the last day, up significantly from 4,441 on Monday, enough to send a surge of anxiety through the Spanish government, which has so far been relatively happy with the results from the country’s most recent lockdown.

    * * *

    Update (1215ET): After the US reported a new record number of daily cases yesterday, squeaking above Saturday’s record as new cases remain stubbornly above 100k a day earlier, Italy on Tuesday reported another 35k+ new COVID-19 cases, just days after the government tightened COVID-19 restrictions by elevating six regions to code “orange”, among other restrictions.

    Meanwhile, Dr. Fauci, speaking with the press, said that he expects the emergency use approval from the FDA for Pfizer’s vaccine to arrive “in a week or so”. At this point in the process, the good doctor anticipates few problems. He also confirmed that he attended a recent White House coronavirus task force meeting.

    * * *

    The trajectory, and potential, of COVID-19 vaccine projects remained the biggest COVID-19 story of the day on Tuesday following Monday morning’s blockbuster Pfizer announcement (which was scooped by WSJ) about its vaccine candidate being 90% effective, as hopes for improved COVID-19 treatments were stoked again last night by news of the FDA’s emergency-use approval for Eli Lilly’s antibody therapy, Bamlanivimab.

    The rush of optimistic news post-election, combined with the jubilant media reaction, prompted President Trump to speculate about the timing of the rollout.

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    But circling back to the numbers, the situation in the US is growing even more dire. Bloomberg reported Tuesday morning that the US appears on track to hit a record number of new COVID-19 hospitalizations, thanks largely to Texas – particularly the border city of El Paso – and the Midwest.

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    El Paso alone has more people hospitalized with COVID-19 than 29 US states, according to local officials. After the latest increase, the present nationwide number for hospitalizations was 56,768, a number that is presently rising at about 1,321 cases a day over the past week.

    That pace puts the US on track to top its April 15 record of 59,940.

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    Source: mSightly

    Positivity rates, that is, the percentage of those tested daily who come back positive, has been climbing across the country, but the numbers across the Midwest have really soared over the past couple of weeks.

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    Source: mSightly

    Bloomberg has produced a helpful chart showing the breakdown of COVID-19 hospitalizations that clearly illustrates the trends in Texas, the Midwest and elsewhere.

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    Source: Bloomberg

    Measuring by hospitalizations per million residents, South Dakota and Illinois take the lead.

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    To be sure, Bloomberg pointed out that the situation still isn’t as dire as the springtime outbreak in New York and New Jersey. Back in April, hospitalization data wasn’t yet available for every state so it can be difficult to compare. But health-care officials stressed that hospitalizations are indeed worse than at any time since April.

    Out of Brazil, we got some less-than-welcome news for China’s leading vaccine, throwing the Chinese effort into stark relief with the western projects.

    Speaking on CNBC Tuesday morning, Alex Azar, the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, said that the White House task force is “absolutely” in discussions to potentially deploy field hospitals and other resources to the Midwest and Texas, in areas where the hospital system truly is at risk of being strained.

    Meanwhile, in the US, the number of new cases has topped 100k per day for the last six days, while in Europe, deaths are following case numbers higher, a trend that is currently vexing national authorities.

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    Source: JPM

    Here’s some more news from Tuesday morning and overnight:

    US cases +105,142 (prev. +93,811) and deaths +490 (prev. +1,072), while hospitalizations rose to nearly 59k patients (Source: newswires).

    BioNTech Chief Strategy Officer says the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine will likely be priced well below typical market rates, with different prices for different locations. Italy will get 13.6% of the first 200mln doses of the  vaccine made available to Europe, possible by January. Germany looks to sign a final agreement shortly for up to 100mn doses. (Newswires).

    UK Health Minister Hancock says it will take some time for a vaccine to be rolled out; central expectation for the bulk of the deployment of a vaccine is H1-2021; does not know when we will hear on the Oxford University/AstraZeneca.

    New study shows that COVID-19 patients more likely to suffer long-term psychiatric issues (Source: Bloomberg).

    Mink farms threaten human health and will likely continue to do so in the pandemic, according to Denmark’s top epidemiologist, who said the industry represents “far too high” a risk to human health and safety (Source: Bloomberg).

  • Communist Party Expands Crackdown On China's Tech Billionaires After Spoiling Ant Financial IPO
    Communist Party Expands Crackdown On China’s Tech Billionaires After Spoiling Ant Financial IPO

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/10/2020 – 19:45

    Jack Ma might be China’s richest man (for now, at least), but in the span of a week, Beijing’s decision to postpone the planned IPO/spinoff of Alibaba’s Ant Financial unit offering in Shanghai, preceded, according to reports, by onerous new regulatory measures (which, analysts say, could cut the company’s value in half) has brought Ma to heel.

    What could Ma, whose membership in the Communist Party is a matter of public record, have possibly done to provoke such a painful rebuke? He had the audacity to criticize China’s financial regulations during an appearance at a high-profile industry conference in October. Ma’s comments didn’t make waves at the time, but nothing escapes the CCP.

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    Following a year where China has delivered perhaps its biggest repudiation yet to international hopes for economic and political liberalization (the Hong Kong natsec law and brutal COVID lockdowns are probably the two most vivid examples), it appears President Xi and the Politburo are launching a full-on campaign to rein in the power of China’s tech/fintech billionaires (a group that also includes Tencent founder Pony Ma).

    Why? Because, as we first explained the other day, Beijing has probably long been uncomfortable with the growing global power, influence and visibility of China’s private-economy billionaires. Ma’s insouciance, likely seen as an act of profound disrespect, however obtuse, was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back.  So, we were hardly surprised Tuesday morning when Bloomberg reported that the crackdown on China’s fintech giants appears to be expanding, rattling China’s domestic equity market, as the new “regulations” Beijing promised earlier this month have finally been unveiled.

    One Beijing-based lawyer told the foreign press that this is nothing short of a “watershed moment” for China’s tech industry, the world’s biggest, after the US.

    Xi Jinping’s Communist Party is stepping up efforts to rein in some of China’s most powerful companies, jolting investors and dealing a blow to the country’s richest entrepreneurs.

    Beijing on Tuesday unveiled regulations to root out monopolistic practices in the internet industry, seeking to curtail the growing influence of corporations like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. The rules, which sent both stocks tumbling and sparked a wider selloff in Chinese equities, landed about a week after new restrictions on the finance sector that triggered the shock suspension of Ant Group Co.’s $35 billion initial public offering.

    While Xi’s government has been steadily tightening its grip on the world’s second-largest economy, it has until recently taken a relatively hands off approach toward businesses that dominate China’s burgeoning internet, e-commerce and digital finance industries. Authorities are concerned the companies have become too powerful, according to Ma Chen, a Beijing-based partner at Han Kun Law Offices.

    “This is a watershed moment,” said Ma, who specializes in antitrust.

    Beijing has, not entirely unreasonably, couched its new regulations as intended to break up a private-market monopoly, a narrative that will imagine would be much easier for the public to accept.

    China’s antitrust watchdog is seeking feedback on a raft of regulations that establish a framework for curbing anti-competitive behavior such as colluding on sharing sensitive consumer data, alliances that squeeze out smaller rivals and subsidizing services at below cost to eliminate competitors. They may also require companies that operate a so-called Variable Interest Entity – a vehicle through which virtually every major Chinese internet company attracts foreign investment and lists overseas – to apply for specific operating approval.

    The latest proposal follows heightened scrutiny of technology companies worldwide, as regulators investigate the extent to which internet giants from Facebook Inc. to Alphabet Inc.’s Google can leverage their dominance. Consumers in China – home to some of the world’s largest corporations from e-commerce giant Alibaba to WeChat-operator Tencent – have in recent years protested against the gradual erosion of their privacy via technology from facial recognition to big data analysis.

    Notably, as BBG reminds us, the crackdown isn’t completely out of the blue: It began last year with an investigation into Tencent’s music arm and its exclusive agreements with publishers.

    “There seems to be a broader China government sentiment that internet platforms are becoming too powerful,” said Hoi Tak Leung, a Hong Kong-based lawyer specializing in Chinese internet companies at Ashurst LLP. “This would be consistent with worldwide developments as well.”

    These latest new rules – according to the government, anyway – build upon a new Anti-Monopoly Law passed in January, which included broad language allowing the state wide latitude to target Internet companies, an issue that’s also playing out in the US.

    Ironically mirroring the Trump Administration’s drive to hold the biggest American tech firms accountable for allegedly monopolistic practices, Beijing’s crackdown, which is expected to have the biggest impact on Tencent (which owns the ubiquitous payments app WeChat) and Alibaba, could also create new opportunities by giving smaller Chinese tech firms more space to compete.

    Alibaba and Tencent now dominate e-commerce and gaming, but are also key backers of leaders in adjacent businesses such as Wang Xing’s Meituan and car-hailing leader Didi. They’ve together invested billions of dollars in hundreds of up-and-coming mobile and internet companies, gaining kingmaker status in the world’s largest smartphone and internet arena by users. Companies like ByteDance and Tencent-rival NetEase Corp., controlled by William Ding, that have risen to prominence without backing from either of the pair are viewed as rare exceptions. In other areas, Robin Li’s Baidu Inc. dominates online search.

    “The Party is faced with the conflicting desires to empower domestic tech companies to be internationally competitive, while keeping their market activities firmly under control at home,” said Kendra Schaefer, head of digital research at the Trivium China consultancy in Beijing. “The horizontal spread of Chinese big tech makes anti-monopoly regulation that much more urgent for Chinese regulators.”

    Han Kun Law’s Ma said the specific regulation pertaining to VIEs requiring approval should be of concern to much of the industry as well. The model has never been formally endorsed by Beijing but has been used by tech titans such as Alibaba to list their shares overseas. Under the structure, Chinese corporations transfer profits to an offshore entity with shares that foreign investors can then own. Pioneered by Sina Corp. and its investment bankers during a 2000 initial public offering, the VIE framework rests on shaky legal ground and foreign investors have been nervous about their bets unwinding overnight.

    “It will not only have a huge impact on Alibaba but also all the companies that use a platform business model and a VIE structure,” Ma said.

    Anybody who doesn’t immediately recognize the irony in the notion that the CCP is merely trying to make its markets fair and competitive for the “little guy” probably doesn’t truly understand the nature of the relationship between the Party, and the Chinese economy. Fundamentally, before everything else, it’s about control, not fairness.

  • Election 2020: Choking On The Political Red And Blue Pills
    Election 2020: Choking On The Political Red And Blue Pills

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/10/2020 – 19:25

    Authored by Wendy McElroy via The Mises Institute,

    Presidential election 2020 is the same as every other, except in the ways it isn’t. Allow me to expand on this…

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    What is the same?

    The purpose of all elections is to allow a band of people called the state to legitimize their claim of control over everyone and everything within a given jurisdiction. In his book The Rise and Fall of Society, the Old Right libertarian Frank Chodorov defines the state as “a number of people who, having somehow got hold of it,” use “the machinery of coercion to the end that they might pursue their version of happiness without respect to the discipline of the market place” (italics added).

    The two somehows of getting and holding political power are to use institutionalized violence or to convince people to respect state authority. Statists usually pursue some combination of both. Violence is rarely preferred, however, because it can backlash into a resistance that threatens state power. It is far better for the state if people oppress themselves through willing obedience. It is even better if they express enthusiasm for their own oppression. Thus politicians and the media applaud the rah-rah attitude of cheering crowds who characterize elections. Thus voting is deified as the voice of “the people,” a fundamental right, and the best way to change society.

    The situation is the opposite of what the state claims. The anarchist author Albert Jay Nock divided power into two categories: social and state. Social power is the freedom individuals exercise over their lives; when people gather for mutual benefit and when a society forms, this is also social power. State power is the control government exercises over individuals and society; it preys upon them—through taxation, for example—to enrich itself. An inverse and antagonistic relationship exists between the two types of power, with the state expanding only at the expense of society and vice versa. Freedom does not and cannot come from elections that strengthen the state’s perceived legitimacy; freedom depends on weakening this authority, preferably down to zero.

    The popular celebration of the “right” to vote puzzled Nock and Chodorov. In his book Out of Step, Chodorov writes,

    Why should a self-respecting citizen endorse an institution grounded in thievery? For that is what one does when one votes….Perhaps the silliest argument, and yet the one invariably advanced…is that “we must choose the lesser of two evils”. Under what compulsion are we to make such a choice? Why not pass up both of them?

    The answer: people do so because they believe elections and the state are necessary evils. Despite the presence of far more effective strategies—education and agorism are only two—people see no other effective alternatives for social change or stability.

    So far in the analysis, election 2020 is the same as every other election; only circumstances like voter turnout are unusual.

    What is different?

    The state’s mask of legitimacy is slipping. Election 2020 is rife with Republican cries of “Fraud!” As early as April, Trump was ringing alarm bells about the mail-in ballots demanded by Democrats, calling them “horrible” and “corrupt,” with “tremendous potential for voter fraud.” Democrats counterattacked by accusing Republicans of destroying democracy by delegitimizing the election.

    The Democrats are correct about Republicans damaging democracy but wrong about their glorification of mob rule and blind to their own role in the political carnage. Like the state, democracy is accepted only in the minds of people who believe in the system. A flood of news stories about electoral abuse have shaken this faith, whether or not the stories are true; discarded ballots, dishonest counts, lack of oversight, slack verification, ballot harvesting, and voter suppression have caused lawsuits and protests to erupt across America.

    But is election 2020 any more rigged than some past ones? A 2016 article in the Daily Signal, “Rigged Election? Past Presidential Contests Sowed Doubt and Nearly Led to Violence,” lists five presidential races that are viewed as having been won through fraud. And the problem is not confined to the Oval Office. A recent article, “Don’t Forget LBJ’s Election Theft,” by Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation, recounted the incredible corruption of Lyndon B. Johnson’s senatorial race. Nevertheless, the iniquities of this election seem to be unusually widespread and transparent.

    Several factors undoubtedly contribute to the more conspicuous abuse.

    • Many on the left and in the media passionately hate Trump, whom they view as a woman-bashing, homophobic racist. Racism is the worst sin in our culture, which leaves Trump haters free to shed all pretense of fairness toward him. For his part, Trump stokes the fire through caustic tweets and comments.

    • Some campaign veterans on the left may have sensed the Democrats’ weakness: Biden is a terrible candidate who is mentally deteriorating, hides in his basement, and cannot draw a crowd. To these Democrats, cheating may seem necessary.

    • Others on the left probably believed the polls, which made them cocky and careless. They shouldn’t have been. Journalist Glenn Greenwald states concisely in two tweets, “You have an incumbent President with a massive recession, an unemployment, rent and foreclosure crisis, and an out-of-control pandemic, and this is what the Democrats are able to do with it… Assuming that Biden ekes out a victory, that the Democrats managed to *lose* seats in the House with everything going on might be the most shocking and pathetic part of what happened.”

    • Trump vows to dismantle the deep state. Whether he is sincere or capable of doing so is debatable. There is no question, however, that he has exposed some formidable deep state enemies and wants them punished. The accused, like former director of national intelligence James Clapper, want blood, and they do not play by the rules.

    • A Trump administration would pursue the Hunter Biden–Burisma scandal, which is making other prominent figures very nervous. A Biden administration would make it go away.

    • The political storm reflects what is happening on the streets and in the culture. Constant protests and riots seem to fill the streets with tension and crime. In the last two decades, a take-no-prisoners culture of moral outrage has spilled from campuses into the mainstream, using tactics of intimidation, rage, and violent confrontation.

    • Identity politics is a surging political approach. It defines human beings by secondary characteristics like race and pits different groups into nonnegotiable conflict that blocks the possibility of civil discussion or action.

    Election 2020 did not provide a clear winner. The contest de facto continues through lawsuits and court decisions. Here this election could be different from most others, although, again, not unprecedented. If a tie or disputed ballots prevent both candidates from reaching 270 electoral votes, then the House will decide who will be president.

    Chad Pergram, the congressional correspondent for Fox News, explains, “Congress must approve certificates of election from all 50 states.” The “crucial date is December 14, dictated by an obscure, 1887 law…The Electoral Count Act dictates that states choose electors no more than 41 days after the election. This is partly why the Supreme Court rushed to complete Bush v. Gore on December 12, 2000. The decision halted the count of ballots in Florida, handing the presidency to George W. Bush.” Legal challenges to state elections may result in the same for Trump.

    If Congress cannot certify the electoral college votes, Pergram describes the next steps. “If Congress determines there’s a stalemate, the 12th Amendment directs the House to elect the President. This is called a ‘contingent election.’” A delegate from each state casts one ballot. The process would probably advantage Trump, as Republicans have fewer representatives but they cover more states.

    “At this point,” Pergram writes, “we expect House Speaker Nancy Pelosi…presuming she is re-elected,…and Vice President Pence, in his capacity as President of the Senate, to co-preside over the Joint Session. Pence’s term doesn’t expire until January 20. And, the 12th Amendment…mandates that ‘the President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall be counted’.” Unfortunately, this wording raises another difficulty over which constitutional scholars have debated for years; it does not specify how the votes are to be counted. Pergram points to yet another possible obstacle. “The 12th Amendment also says ‘the person having the greatest number of votes for President shall be President’. But Congress must agree to all of this. And remember, Pence is the one running the show at this stage.”

    In short, an incredible mess might well be followed by another incredible mess—one that could set a constitutional precedent. Nonvoters should feel pleased and proud to have played no part in the ugly fiasco of presidential election 2020. “A curse on both your houses” is the sound libertarian position.

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Nov 10

Today’s News 10th November 2020

  • Escobar: First Comes A Rolling Civil War
    Escobar: First Comes A Rolling Civil War

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/10/2020 – 00:00

    Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

    Biden is on a double precipice of the worst-ever economic depression coupled with imminent explosions of social rage…

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    The massive psyops is ongoing. Everyone familiar with the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) knew how this would imperatively play out. I chose to frame it as a think tank gaming exercise in my Banana Follies column. This is a live exercise. Yet no one knows exactly how it will end.

    US intel is very much aware of well-documented instances of election fraud. Among them: NSA software that infiltrates any network, as previously detailed by Edward Snowden, and capable of altering vote counts; the Hammer supercomputer and its Scorecard app that hacks computers at the transfer points of state election computer systems and outside third party election data vaults; the Dominion software system, known to have serious security issues since 2000, but still used in 30 states, including every swing state; those by now famous vertical jumps to Biden in both Michigan and Wisconsin at 4am on November 4 (AFP unconvincingly tried to debunk Wisconsin and didn’t even try with Michigan); multiple instances of Dead Men Do Vote.

    The key actor is the Deep State, which decides what happens next. They have weighed the pros and cons of placing as candidate a senile, stage 2 dementia, neocon warmonger and possible extortionist (along with son) as “leader of the free world”, campaigning from a basement, incapable of filling a parking lot in his rallies, and seconded by someone with so little support in the Dem primaries that she was the first to drop out.

    The optics, especially seen from vast swathes of the imperial-interfered Global South, may be somewhat terrible. Dodgy elections are a prerogative of Bolivia and Belarus. Yet only the Empire is able to legitimize a dodgy election – especially in its own backyard.

    Welcome to the New Resistance

    The GOP is in a very comfortable position. They hold the Senate and may end up picking up as may as 12 seats in the House. They also know that any attempt by Biden-Harris to legislate via Executive Orders will have…consequences.

    The Fox News/ New York Post angle is particularly enticing. Why are they suddenly supporting Biden? Way beyond internal family squabbles worthy of the Successionsaga, Rupert Murdoch made it very clear, via the laptop from hell caper, that he has all sorts of kompromat on the Biden family. So they will do whatever he wants. Murdoch does not need Trump anymore.

    Nor, in theory, does the GOP. Former CIA insiders assure of serious backroom shenanigans going on between GOP honchos and the Biden-Harris gang. Trade-offs bypassing Trump – which most of the GOP hates with a vengeance. The most important man in Washington will be in fact GOP Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.

    Still, to clear any lingering doubts, a vote recount would be absolutely necessary in all 6 contested states – WI, MI, PA, GA, NV and AZ. Through hand counting. One by one. The DoJ would need to act on it, immediately. Not gonna happen. Recounts cost a ton of money. There’s no evidence Team Trump – on top of it short of funds and manpower – will be able to convince Daddy Bush asset William Barr to go for it.

    While relentlessly demonizing Trump for spreading “a torrent of misinformation” and “trying to undermine the legitimacy of the US election”, mainstream media and Big Tech have declared a winner – a classic case of pre-programming the sheep multitudes.

    Yet what really matters is the letter of the law. State legislatures decide whose electors go to the Electoral College to appoint the President.

    Here it is – Article II, Section 1, Clause 2: Each state shall appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature Thereof May Direct.”

    So this has nothing to do with governors, not to mention the media. It’s up to GOP state legislatures to act accordingly. The drama may roll out for weeks. The first step of the Electoral College procedure takes place on December 14. The final determination will only happen in early January.

    Meanwhile, talk of a New Resistance is spreading like wildfire.

    Trumpism, with 71 million + votes, is firmly established as a mass movement. No one in the GOP commands this kind of popular appeal. By sidelining Trumpism, the GOP may be committing seppuku.

    So what will Deplorables do?

    The always indispensable Alastair Crooke hits the nail on the head in a powerful essay: Trump is the President of Red America. And depending on how the scripted (s)election tragicomedy develops next, the Deplorables are bound to become The Ungovernables.

    Crooke references a crucial parallel evoked by historian Mike Vlahos, who shows how the current American saga mirrors Ancient Rome in the last century of the Republic, pitting the Roman elite against the Populares – which today are represented by Red (Trumpist) America:

    “This was a new world, in which the great landowners, with their latifundia [the slave-land source of wealth], who had been the ‘Big Men’ leading the various factions in the civil wars, became the senatorial archons that dominated Roman life for the next five centuries — while the People, the Populares, were ground into a passive — not helpless — but generally dependent and non-participating element of Roman governance: This sapped away at the creative life of Rome, and eventually led to its coming apart.”

    So as much as the Dem machine had wanted it, Trump is not yet Imperator Caesar Augustus, whom the Greeks called Autokrator (autocrat), but was a de facto monarch. The American Augustus, Tiberius and most of all Caligula is still further on down the road. He will definitely be a benign, humanitarian imperialist.

    In the meantime, what will imperial Big Capital do?

    The West, and especially the American Rome, is on the edge of a double precipice: the worst economic depression ever, coupled with imminent, myriad, uncontrollable explosions of social rage.

    So the Deep State is reasoning that with Biden – or, sooner rather than later, Supreme shakti and Commander-in-Chief Maa Durga Kamala – the path gets smoother towards the Davos Great Reset. After all, to reset the chess pieces, first the chessboard must be knocked over. This will be one step beyond Dark Winter – which not accidentally was evoked by teleprompter-reading Biden himself on the final presidential debate. The script gets ominously closer to the Rockefelller Foundation’s 2010 Lock Step.

    Meanwhile, Plan B is kept in ready, steady, go mode: the lineaments of a global rampage, focused on “malign” Russia’s sphere of influence to satisfy a “revived” NATO and the military-industrial complex, which selected the now media-appointed President-Elect in the first place because he’s no more than a pliant cardboard figure.

  • Climate 'Experts' Demand Tax-On-Meat To Fight Global Warming
    Climate 'Experts' Demand Tax-On-Meat To Fight Global Warming

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/09/2020 – 23:40

    The UK Health Alliance on Climate Change (UKHACC) urges the UK government to impose a climate tax on food producers by 2025 – unless private industry takes voluntary measures to limit their carbon emissions. 

    In the report published on Nov. 4, titled “All-Consuming: Building A Healthier Food System For People And Planet,” UKHACC outlines that the climate crisis cannot be resolved without reducing food that causes high emissions, such as red meat and dairy products.

    “In particular, red meat consumption will need to be cut by half if the food system is to stay within sustainable environmental limits,” UKHACC wrote in the report. 

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    Adding that, “changing our diets in this way will not only help to mitigate climate change but will also improve our health: there is also clear evidence that is replacing animal protein with plant-based protein results in lower rates of stroke, heart disease, diabetes, and overall death rates.”

    UKHACC represents doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals from ten Royal Colleges of medicine and nursing, the British Medical Association, and The Lancet. The report makes several recommendations besides levies on food, such as ending buy-one-get-one-free offers for supermarket products that are harmful to the environment. 

    “If we are to hope to limit dangerous climate change and improve health outcomes, governments – including our own – will have to do far more to improve the sustainability of the food that we eat,” UKHACC said. 

    UKHACC said a future tax on meat and dairy products could easily work. They point to changing consumer behaviors that have been observed around a “Sugar Tax” to limit the consumption of junk foods. 

    Figures have it that food production is responsible for at least a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. What appears to become is that, in the name of climate change, a war on the food system will be waged and the foods we eat that are deemed too dangerous for the climate will either be taxed or banned completely. 

    “We can’t reach our goals without addressing our food system,” said Kristin Bash, who led the Faculty of Public Health’s food group and was a co-author of the UKHACC report, who was quoted by The Guardian. 

    Bash said, “the climate crisis isn’t something we should see as far in the future. It’s time to take these issues seriously now.” 

    The coronavirus appears to be ushering in a new world order to transition the old economic system into a more sustainable world economic order. As for this case, if we chose to follow down the path – we’re all going to be eating plant-based products from Beyond Meats.  

  • Iran's Rouhani Invites Biden To Return To Nuclear Deal Commitments
    Iran's Rouhani Invites Biden To Return To Nuclear Deal Commitments

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/09/2020 – 23:20

    Authored by Jason Ditz via AntiWar.com,

    In weekend comments, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani called on President-elect Joe Biden to return to fulfilling commitments under the P5+1 nuclear deal, saying Iran would continue its resistance to the US until they return to the deal.

    There have been indications that Biden wants to return the US to the deal, though some other top Democrats suggested that the US intends to impose another tougher deal on Iran. It’s not clear that Iran is going to be interested in that.

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    Rouhani says he wants those nations sanctioning Iran to recognize their method has failed and try a new approach. That might include talks, but it’s key for the US to suggest that they really are looking for a break from the old strategy.

    “We hope that the experience of these three years has been a lesson to them that will make the next US administration follow the law and return to all its commitments,” Rouhani said in televised comments.

    With the defeat of Trump, FM Javad Zarif is urging all of Iran’s neighbors to cooperate, saying they could come together on their common interests going forward.

    There is no word any of them has accepted this overture yet, but the election is still being processed by many, and nations will likely come through with reactions in the weeks to come.

    Trump’s demand that the world reflect his own hostile stance on Iran clearly did fail, and the rest of the world will be looking for a new approach with or without the US. With Biden, the chances are that diplomacy is a realistic option.
     

  • China CPI Tumbles To 11 Year Low After First Drop In Pork Prices Since Feb 2019
    China CPI Tumbles To 11 Year Low After First Drop In Pork Prices Since Feb 2019

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/09/2020 – 23:00

    In the latest confirmation that China can not be relied upon to reflate the world out of the covid crisis the same way it succeeded to pull the global economy out of the 2009 depression, moments ago Beijing reported that in October, China’s CPI inflation rose just 0.5% Y/Y in October, below the 0.8% market expectations, and declined 0.3% sequentially failing to post the expected 0.2% increase, primarily on lower food price inflation and in particular the rapid decline of pork prices which posted their first decline since 2019.

    Meanwhile, PPI inflation – one of the core inputs for Chinese industrial profits – sank -2.1% Y/Y in October, also missing the -2.0% expectation, and unchanged from September. Lower price inflation in food processing related industry was offset by higher price inflation in other industries such as metal pressing and smelting and textile.

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    Looking at the component, in year-on-year terms, food inflation rose just +2.2% Y/Y in October from +7.9% Y/Y in September, driven by a 2.8% decline in pork prices, the first annual decline since February 2019, lowering year-over-year CPI inflation by 0.13%.

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    Egg prices tumbled by 16.3% Y/Y, lowering the headline CPI by 0.11%. Fresh vegetable prices rose but at a slower pace: in October, fresh vegetable CPI was +16.7% Y/Y vs 17.2% in September, adding 0.38% to headline CPI inflation.  Meanwhile, non-food CPI inflation was unchanged at +0.0% yoy in October, driven by a 17.2% plunged in fuel costs vs -14.7% yoy in September.

    Core inflation (headline CPI excluding food and energy) was unchanged at +0.5% yoy in October.

    Looking at gate inflation, year-on-year PPI inflation was at -2.1% yoy in October, unchanged from September, and a modest improvement from the summer, but not nearly enough to explain the surging industrial profits which, at least according to the government, are trending far higher than where PPI suggests they should be.

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    In month-over-month annualized terms, PPI declined by 1%, vs -5% in September. Price declines narrowed for producer goods in October (-2.7% yoy vs -2.8% yoy in September) but price decline for consumer goods widened (-0.5% yoy in October, vs -0.1% yoy in September) mainly on lower food price inflation.

    By major industry, PPI inflation declined on a year-over-year basis in agricultural food manufacturing (from 3.9% yoy in September to 1.9% yoy in October); on the other hand inflation rose in ferrous metal smelting and pressing, and deflation moderated in textile and telecom industries.

    The latest numbers confirm that despite the recent surge in China’s credit impulse…

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    … this has to translate into a sustainable and benign increase in prices, one driven by higher wages not jumping commodity costs.

    Looking ahead, Goldman predicts that headline CPI inflation will moderate further in coming months in our view, on continued decline of pork prices and a very high base in coming months.

    Meanwhile, despite the continued decline in CPI and PPI, China bond yields rose to the highest level in a year just ahead of the price data and are poised to keep going according to Bloomberg. This is the result of today’s inflation scare following the Pfizer news, although judging by the sharp reversal in futures, the surge to all time highs may end up being the biggest reflationary headfake in recent history.

  • Robert Gore: "It's Perfectly Clear…"
    Robert Gore: "It's Perfectly Clear…"

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/09/2020 – 22:40

    Authored by Robert Gore via Straight Line Logic blog,

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    Making the vote irrelevant makes secession relevant.

    If he gets anything approaching an honest vote count Trump will win in a landslide.

    “The Corruptocracy,” Robert Gore, October 25, 2020

    I stand by my statement. It’s obvious that Trump didn’t get “anything approaching an honest vote count.” One of the better crime scene investigations I’ve seen is “The 2020 Election: Fuckery Is Afoot,” by blogger Correia45, and I’ve posted others as well. As the litigation-filled days go by, we’re sure to find out more about the Democrats’ electoral fraud.

    I won’t venture a guess as to whether such disclosure and litigation will ultimately lead to awarding Trump the election, but I have my doubts. The corruption runs too deep. If Biden wins, his camarilla will try to explain away the obvious with talk of glitches and anomalies, all of which mysteriously broke their way. They shouldn’t bother; they’ll be fooling no one and it just adds to the rage.

    Good often emerges from even the worst situations. The good emerging from this one is that the veil is completely lifted, the election provides transcendent clarity. Many have already peaked under the veil. Those who refuse to grasp what is now appallingly obvious are too dense, deluded or corrupt to be of concern, and should be left to whatever ignominious ends fate has in store for them.

    This election has made it made perfectly clear that we live in a corruptocracy. We can’t vote corruptocracy out any more than the people of the Soviet Union could have voted out communism (also a corruptocracy) and for the same reason: the vote itself is fundamentally corrupt. If Trump loses, it clearly discredits the notion embraced by the losers of every election: wait til next time. Next time is likely to be even more corrupt.

    What’s clear to those of us who voted for Trump is if we want to get back what we cherish about America, we’re going to have to fight for it. Freedom is not free, and neither are individual rights, the rule of law, capitalism, peace, or the opportunity to build a better life.

    Although I and others have suggested some sort of semi-amicable divorce for our bitterly divided country, that’s not going to happen because of the nature of the division. As I said in “The Corruptocracy,” the division is between the productive class and those it supports.

    After this election there are undoubtedly millions of disgusted Trump supporters who would embrace a split in a heartbeat, but peaceful secession is precluded by the fundamental flaw at the core of every collectivist ideology: governments don’t produce, they steal. Leaches never desires separation. The blue needs the red; man cannot live on high tech, media, crony capitalism, and finance alone.

    The battle is joined, collectivists versus producers. Tactically, there’s no dumber strategy than waging war against those who support you, but their pretensions notwithstanding, collectivists are never all that bright.

    If Biden is declared the winner, Covid-19 restrictions are no longer necessary to hamstring the economy, discredit Trump, and justify mail-in voting fraud. The precedents have been set and a scary germ story can always be concocted when needed to frighten and subjugate those who are easily frightened and subjugated. If the collectivists have a brain in their collective head they’ll quickly lift all the restrictions to resuscitate economies so their collectivist governments will have something to steal. On any honest accounting for pension and medical liabilities, most of them are already bankrupt.

    SLL reader SW Richmond recently commented:

    if one looks at this map:

    2016 Electoral Map by county. “Centralia” states are predominantly red.

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    …one can see the geographic answer to our problem: “Centralia”.

    Centralia includes the entire South except Virginia, extends north and west to the mountain states, Midwest and Arizona. “Centralia” has copious access to ports and harbors, energy, food, internal transportation, manufacturing, fresh water, military assets including nukes. Centralia does not include VA, MD, PA, NY, etc, nor CA, OR, WA. MN, IL, WI and MI can choose. We may desire to include Jefferson. A not-so-great migration would ensue much like during the dust bowl. Voter registrations could be reviewed before migrants were accepted.

    This is not a drill. It is about survival.

    This most definitely is not a drill, it is about the paramount issue that defines human history and philosophy: who decides the terms of an individual’s survival, the individual or those who rule by violence in the name of divine right, the collective, some other vicious justification, or naked force?

    The idea of individual rights protected by the government was the foundation of the American experiment. It was and has been imperfectly realized; it is an ideal and humanity rarely attains its ideals. Government is and always will be the antithesis of that still revolutionary ideal. The US government’s massive expansion has been at the cost of the people’s liberty and has destroyed most of their rights. That destruction has been ongoing since the beginning of the republic and Trump has done nothing to stop or reverse it. Philosophical insight and consistency are not among his virtues.

    Nevertheless, a Biden administration will be worse, much worse. The Democrats now openly aspire to the collectivist ideal—the complete subjugation of the individual to the state. We’ve gotten a preview of coming attractions with coronavirus totalitarianism, which has obliterated the few freedoms and joys left to Americans. For the millions of Americans who voted for him, including me, Trump represented the last, best hope for what we consider the American way of life.

    There’s no going back, and the way forward is for those who cherish the American ideals of individual rights, freedom, limited government, the rule of law, and equality before that law to break away from Washington’s and it’s aligned states’ corruptocracy and sunder the ties that bind us. Nations and governments are not cast in stone for time and all eternity.

    Certainly the bankrupt dis-United States and its government aren’t. The bill is coming due for the debt orgy and an unprecedented and catastrophic global economic cataclysm will take down whomever is unlucky enough to be the president. A defeated Trump would dodge that bullet. The resulting chaos will be unmanageable by a government that produces only debt, can steal little or nothing from a bankrupt economy, cannot borrow at anything but ruinous interest rates, and which must cover its soaring budget deficits with scrip it either prints or creates via computer entries, whether or not it outlaws real money (gold) or forces its increasingly worthless scrip to stay in the banking system.

    At that time, an organized secession movement has a real chance. A house divided against itself cannot stand. Collapse will be freedom’s staunchest ally if the moment is seized. It won’t be easy and it won’t be without blood. Until it happens, prepare for the worst, it is assuredly coming and coming soon, but work towards a brighter future in a nation that does not yet exist.

    For those who don’t want to wait, almost six years ago (January 7, 2015) I published “Revolution in America,” which presents a nonviolent way to take down the government by attacking it at its weakest point. It requires the collective action of millions of people and at that time I believed the recommended course of action would remain hypothetical. Things change. Although the hour is late, any significant fraction of Trump’s rightfully enraged 71 million voters could still put the plan into effect. The article merits a second look. Please pass it, and this article, on.

  • "Transportation History" – First Humans Travel Through Virgin Hyperloop
    "Transportation History" – First Humans Travel Through Virgin Hyperloop

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/09/2020 – 22:20

    Virgin Hyperloop has completed a historic passenger ride of a levitating pod system that zoomed through the Nevada desert, the company said in a statement on Nov. 08. 

    Josh Giegel, CTO and Co-Founder, and Sara Luchian, Director of Passenger Experience at Virgin Hyperloop, were the world’s first humans to ride in the new form of transportation. 

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    Here’s the video of Giegel and Luchian riding in a pod in a vacuum environment as it travels across a 500-meter test track in Nevada, reaching speeds around 100 mph. 

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    “I had the true pleasure of seeing history made before my very eyes,” said Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem, Chairman of Virgin Hyperloop and Group Chairman and Chief Executive of DP World.

    Despite low speeds, Hyperloop envisions a future where the pods will allow people to travel across California, or even the country, at more than 600 mph. Hyperloop views the test as a significant milestone and another step towards commercialization. 

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    The test comes one month after we reported a former coal mine in West Virginia would be the site of Hyperloop’s new Hyperloop Certification Center and test track. Construction of the facility will begin construction in 2022 on a former coal mine site in Tucker and Grant Counties, West Virginia, with safety certification by 2025 and commercial operations by 2030. 

    Sir Richard Branson, Founder of the Virgin Group, said, “for the past few years, the Virgin Hyperloop team has been working on turning its groundbreaking technology into reality.” 

    Branson continued: “With today’s successful test, we have shown that this spirit of innovation will in fact change the way people everywhere live, work, and travel in the years to come.”

  • It's Already Started: "We Have A List…"
    It's Already Started: "We Have A List…"

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/09/2020 – 22:00

    Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

    On September 18 of the year 96 AD, a fairly obscure and elderly politician named Marcus Cocceius Nerva was proclaimed Emperor of Rome by the Senate.

    Rome was in chaos at the time; the empire had suffered from years of turmoil, economic decline, and oppression.

    Most of the last several emperors– going back before the suicide of Nero in 68 AD– had been extremely destructive… plundering the treasury, waging expensive wars, and dismantling individual liberty.

    The government was also extremely unstable; it was not uncommon at that point for emperors to be deposed or even assassinated.

    In fact, Nerva’s predecessor– the emperor Domitian– had literally been murdered that morning.

    Nerva was seen by many Senators as the ‘safe choice’ to take over the government. He was old, frail, and sick… so he wasn’t expected to last very long.

    Most of all, Nerva was completely unremarkable.

    He had spent his entire professional life in the service of the Empire, yet his name is barely mentioned in any historical record or associated with any major achievement.

    But ‘unremarkable’ was exactly what Romans felt like they needed at the time: Nerva would be a break from the chaos. Or so they thought.

    We know now with the benefit of hindsight that Rome would never fully recover.

    There would be a few ‘good’ emperors along the way– people like Marcus Aurelius who were able to temporarily hold back the decline.

    But the long-term trends were unstoppable.

    Rome was slowly going bankrupt, destroying its currency, and rejecting the basic principles of its civilization that made it so powerful and prosperous to begin with.

    And no politician was able to put the brakes on those big trends and reverse the inevitable decline.

    This is a common theme throughout history: empires rise and fall, not because of a single individual, but from decades of major trends that gradually cause an inevitable decline.

    These same trends keep surfacing over and over again across the centuries.

    Economic mismanagement is an obvious one: empires in decline almost invariably hold an arrogant belief that they are exempt from the natural laws of finance.

    In other words, they believe they can spend as much as they want, accumulate infinite amounts of debt, and debase their currency without limit, and somehow there won’t be any consequences.

    Another trend is that the empire abandons its core values. Integrity, civic-mindedness, and hard work give way to corruption and entitlement.

    And perhaps the biggest trend of empires in decline is that society frequently turns on itself. Civility ends, and rage takes over.

    It goes without saying that these trends are alive and well in the West today, especially in the Land of the Free.

    US finances have been in disarray for decades. Just this year alone, the national debt has grown by $4 trillion and the Federal Reserve has conjured another $3 trillion out of thin air.

    And even before Covid struck when the economy was firing on all cylinders, the government was still adding more than $1 trillion each year to the debt.

    Now there are entire factions of politicians that want to take those numbers to the next level.

    In fact, there’s an entire school of economics now called “Modern Monetary Theory” which poses that governments can simply print as much money as they want without consequence.

    This is pretty classic empire arrogance.

    But, again, the even more powerful trend now is the growing rage that’s so prevalent.

    We’ve seen it unfold in front of our very eyes– violence, arson, assault, looting, vandalism, intimidation.

    And if the this angry mob isn’t out in the streets causing mayhem, they’re on social media trying to destroy someone’s life who committed the thoughtcrime of intellectual dissent.

    The election results last week proved that this angry mob is still a numerical minority.

    Unfortunately they are a very powerful minority that has taken over a number of important institutions.

    They already control the media. Objective journalism doesn’t exist anymore– it’s just activism and propaganda.

    (And if anyone needs any proof, look no further than a prominent CNN ‘reporter’ weeping tears of joy over the weekend on live television. How can these people expect to be taken seriously as objective journalists??)

    The mob has also taken over education too.

    Schools and universities are now filled with enraged Marxists who spend dozens of hours each week indoctrinating our children with their new woke religion.

    They’ve even reinvented science, history, and mathematics to conform to the principles of critical race theory.

    The mob also exerts extreme influence over major corporations.

    You can’t watch a Disney movie, or an NFL game, or even a commercial for men’s razors anymore, without having identity politics shoved down your throat.

    They also hold extreme influence over Big Tech, whose one-sided censorship policies have become so absurd they’re starting to rival the Chinese Communist Party.

    Over the weekend, for example, Twitter was ablaze with activists who launched an ‘accountability project’ to create a database archiving every supporter, donor, staffer, etc. who supported the current Presidential administration.

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    The project’s tagline is “Remember what they did,” and “We must never forget. . .”

    And they’re targeting “those who elected him,” and “those who funded him,” referring, of course, to the President and the 70 million people who voted for him.

    One reporter from the Washington Post deemed that everyone archived “should never serve in office, join a corporate board, find a faculty position, or be accepted into ‘polite’ society.”

    She concluded her thinly-veiled threat by saying, “We have a list.”

    Twitter, of course, did not see fit to censor this shining example of objective journalism, which now has 40,000 likes.

    It’s a pretty blatant sign of decline when people start keeping ‘lists’ of political opponents they want to punish. And this madness is just getting started.

    *  *  *

    We think gold could DOUBLE and silver could increase by up to 5 TIMES in the next few years. That’s why we published a new, 50-page long Ultimate Guide on Gold & Silver that you can download here.

  • Silence From China & Russia On Recognizing Biden Win
    Silence From China & Russia On Recognizing Biden Win

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/09/2020 – 21:40

    It’s been over 48 hours since Joe Biden was declared in a consensus of US media networks the president-elect of the United States, and amid a flurry of congratulatory messages from world leaders, there remains deafening silence out of Russia and China. 

    The Kremlin indicated Monday that Russian President Vladimir Putin intends to actually wait until the results are certified by courts, which wouldn’t be until at least after Dec. 8, also determinant on legal challenges. 

    “Anticipating your possible question about Putin’s congratulations to the US president-elect, I want to say the following: we consider it proper to wait for the official results,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said during a press conference on Monday. 

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    Via AP

    He further said Putin wishes to hold-off on any official pronouncements related to the next US president until results are official, as Politico summarized of his statements:

    In his comments on Monday, Peskov cited “certain legal procedures” as the basis for Putin withholding his congratulations from Biden, unlike in 2016 when the Russian leader swiftly sent good wishes to Trump after his victory over Hillary Clinton.

    “The difference is quite obvious,” Peskov said, according to Interfax. “You see that there are certain legal procedures ahead, which were announced by the incumbent president. This is the difference. Therefore, we consider it correct to wait for the official announcement.”

    Peskov emphasized that “There are no official results yet.”

    China meanwhile has taken a similar position, with its foreign ministry on Monday saying it had “taken note” of Biden’s declaration of victory yet President Xi will wait for “US laws and procedures” to finish before issuing a formal congratulations. 

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    “I noticed that Mr Biden has declared victory of the election,” Foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a daily briefing. “We understand that the presidential election result will be determined following US laws and procedures.”

    However, during the 2016 election President Xi Jinping had sent Trump a formal message of congratulations by November 9.

    Though Beijing officials are hoping for restoration of greater stability under a future Biden presidency, it’s not expected a new administration will “go soft” on China, thus Beijing is bracing for more tumultuous relations to come.

    Additional countries like Mexico and Brazil have lately said they plan to hold off on issuing any messages to the Biden camp before results are made official.

  • Senators Ask DOJ To Investigate Segregation At Colleges
    Senators Ask DOJ To Investigate Segregation At Colleges

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/09/2020 – 21:20

    Authored by Ben Zeisloft via Campus Reform,

    Senators Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) and Kelly Loeffler (R-Georgia) sent a letter to US Attorney General William Barr, asking him to investigate instances of racial segregation on college campuses.

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    Citing numerous examples of an “alarming trend of apparent racial segregation” at American universities, the Senators asked Barr to “investigate these and similar cases.” Sen. Cotton and Sen. Loeffler note that the incidents appear to violate Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which “prohibits discrimination on the basis of race in federally funded programs or activities.”

    The Senators mentioned the University of Michigan’s “virtual cafes,” whichsplitparticipants and moderators on the basis of race. Participants were encouraged to view the world as “members of a particular racial group.” The authors compared this phenomenon to instances addressed by the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education.

    The authors also mentioned an RA training at the University of Kentucky, which segregated trainees into white and non-white groupings. Campus Reform reported on the incident in October.

    One individual who was subjugated to the training told Campus Reform that trainees “were told how privileged we were and how we needed to do everything we could to make the staff of color feel accepted and welcome.” However, the training “never mentioned racism towards White people.”

    Campus Reform has reported on the incidents at the University of Michigan and the University of Kentucky, as well as several others. The authors referred Barr to a report by the National Association of Scholars, which noted hundreds of similar incidents.

    “Racial segregation is antithetical to our nation’s creed, expressed in the Founding documents, that ‘all men are created equal,’” concluded the Senators.

    Campus Reform has reached out to Sen. Cotton but did not receive a response. 

  • Here Is How Biden Plans To Move Ahead With Mandatory Mask Order
    Here Is How Biden Plans To Move Ahead With Mandatory Mask Order

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/09/2020 – 21:00

    President-elect Joe Biden apparently wrapped up public appearances for the day pretty early (there’s a lot to get to in those 5 or so hours of lucidity he gets per day), neglecting to say if he plans on mandating mask-wearing, though he has said he would be open to doing so in the past.

    But how exactly is Biden going to make sure Americans, weary of following all these social distancing rules after nine months, toe the line? By doing what Europe did: Imposing onerous fines and penalties.

    And Dr. Marc Siegel, a frequent Fox News contributor who has both examined and interviewed President Trump, said during an interview that a punitive approach to masks might have an adverse impact on wearing, stoking more public anger, rather than more compliance.

    “I think masks are quite useful, but they have a place and they’re not the be all and end all,” Siegel said. “I’m worried that mandating this with fines and such may actually lead to more of a rebellion against it.”

    Dr. Siegel added that deciding when and where masks are necessary is often a judgment call for people following the CDC guidelines, and while masks should be worn properly, both inside and, when necessary, outdoors, they are not the end-all, be-all of proper COVID-19 prevention.

    Rather than placing the focus on wearing masks, Dr. Siegel said limitations on people standing or shopping in close proximity indoors would be a more sensible approach.

    As for social distancing, Biden’s plan says it will be used as more of a “dial” approach that will determine the risk of spread using evidence-based guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a move Siegel says is a mistake.

    “I don’t think social distancing is dial. I think masks are a dial,” Siegel said. “Social distancing is something we should just be doing right now. You never know how much virus was in the community.”

    He believes physical distancing is actually more important to curbing the spread than masks are.

    “I think physical distancing is more important than masks,” Siegel argued. “If you’re 10 feet away from someone, you’re not going to get the virus. If you’re one foot away with a mask, you might.”

    Dr. Siegel’s comments come just a day after millions of Americans flooded into the streets of cities like NYC to celebrate the end of President Trump’s “fascist” rule (though the process isn’t quite over, as Sen Susan Collins noted earlier).

    While many still wore masks, the lack of social distancing raises serious concerns about encouraging spread. Meanwhile, Biden’s coordinated rollout of the Pfizer-BioNTech trial results with WSJ and the rest of the media serving as the main conduit shows that he’s already working to to convince the American people to trust the government when it comes to vaccines. And moving ahead with a dramatic shift in the strategy at this point wouldn’t exactly instill confidence in the people with their hands on the wheel.

  • Ken Starr: Pennsylvania Ballot Extension A "Constitutional Travesty"
    Ken Starr: Pennsylvania Ballot Extension A "Constitutional Travesty"

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/09/2020 – 20:40

    Authored by Simon Veazey via The Epoch Times,

    Former independent counsel Ken Starr has described the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision to allow late-arrival mail-in ballots as a “constitutional travesty,” saying that only the state legislature has the authority granted by the Constitution to set such terms.

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    Starr, a former circuit judge and former solicitor general of the United States, told Fox News’ “Life Liberty and Levin” that he believes the federal Supreme Court would now “do its duty.”

    The federal Supreme Court last month declined a plea to suspend the decision by the state Supreme Court prior to the election and is currently considering a petition to review the merits of the case.

    In total over 2.6 million mail-in and absentee ballots have been received in Pennsylvania at the time of writing—out of 6.5 million total votes tallied in the state. The ratio of Democrat to Republican votes in mail-in and absentee ballots is around three to one.

    Starr said that the actions of the Pennsylvania court in allowing mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day contradicted the demands of the Constitution which bestows only state legislatures with the right to set the terms for gifting their electoral college votes, not courts.

    The Democratic Party filed a lawsuit against the Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth, and all 67 county boards after the state legislature rejected proposals by Gov. Tom Wolf on the processing of ballots. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which has a 5-2 Democratic majority, ruled on Sept. 17 in their favor, saying that election officials can accept all mail-in ballots, including absentee ballots, up to three days after the election.

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    Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf speaks on stage during the Geisinger National Symposium in Danville, Penn., on Nov. 9, 2017. (Lisa Lake/Getty Images for Geisinger Symposium)

    “What happened in Pennsylvania over these recent weeks is a constitutional travesty,” said Starr.

    “Governor Wolf tries to get his reforms, his vision—as he was entitled to do—through the legislature of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He failed. He then goes to the state Supreme Court, which by a divided vote, accepted the substance of what Governor Wolf was doing, and then added thereon nooks and crannies as well.”

    Starr was one of the lawyers to represent Trump during impeachment hearings. He also headed the Whitewater investigation into then-President Bill Clinton. Starr says that the words of the Constitution, “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors,” make clear that only the state legislature can set such terms of the election.

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    Former independent counsel Ken Starr on May 8, 2014. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

    “What the state Supreme Court did was utterly unconstitutional, so it’s a lawless act,” he said. “At this stage, the Supreme Court has a solemn duty—in light of the nature of the issue and the stakes at hand—to take the case.”

    Starr said he agreed that the Pennsylvania court may have disenfranchised voters.

    “In fact, to count every vote may be a crime … under federal law,” he said. “It’s definitely a crime under state law, if—and here’s the keyword—illegal.”

    The U.S. Supreme Court had previously rejected two requests by Republicans in this case, one to hold the state Supreme Court decision, and the other to expedite consideration of a petition to review the merits of the case.

    U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito late Friday ordered Pennsylvania election officials to segregate ballots that arrived after Election Day.

    Alito granted a request by the state’s Republican Party to separate mail-in ballots received between 8 p.m. on Nov. 3 and 5 p.m. on Nov. 6 from those that arrived by 8 p.m. on Nov. 3, in accordance with state guidance.

    The justice, however, did not order the counties to stop counting but instead ordered that “all such ballots, if counted, be counted separately.”

    The September Pennsylvania court ruling said that ballots received on or before 5 p.m. on Nov. 6 that lack a postmark, a legible postmark, or other proof of mailing can still be counted and “will be presumed to have been mailed by Election Day unless a preponderance of the evidence demonstrates that it was mailed after Election Day.”

    Last year, Pennsylvania passed legislation that opened up mail-in voting to all-comers for the first time. However, it did not offer any extension.

    The state Supreme Court said in the ruling there was a risk of voters being disenfranchised due to the postal service being swamped.

    Justice Max Baer, writing for the majority, in the 63-page opinion said the primary elections earlier this year were rife with threatened disenfranchisement of thousands of voters as several county election boards struggled with the unprecedented volume of mail-in ballot applications.

  • Multiple States And FDA Warn Of "Careless" Rapid Antigen Testing In Asymptomatic COVID Cases
    Multiple States And FDA Warn Of "Careless" Rapid Antigen Testing In Asymptomatic COVID Cases

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/09/2020 – 20:20

    As if there wasn’t enough confusion and broad misunderstanding going around about Covid, the states of Louisiana and Oregon are now warning against using rapid, low cost antigen tests in asymptomatic people to try and determine whether or not they are positive with coronavirus. Oh, and so is the Food and Drug Administration…

    The appeal of these tests is that they can be spread widely and cheaply, giving the illusion of control over the virus to individuals and organizations that use them for quick blanket testing.

    But these tests could “miss some infections that can be picked up by costlier gold-standard assays, and can incorrectly return positive results,” according to Bloomberg. 

    As a result, the state is not recommending the tests to people without symptoms, who have not been exposed to someone with a positive test. The Louisiana Department of Health also says that people who undergo antigen tests should be made aware of its limitations. 

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    Joseph Kanter, interim assistant secretary for the state’s Office of Public Health, said: “On the one hand, we have technology and testing platforms like this one which are new and likely valuable. And everybody has an interest in getting them to people that could benefit from them as quick as possible. On the other hand, we don’t have great data on them yet.”

    The Oregon Health Authority has also warned against using the tests in asymptomatic people without confirmed Covid-19 exposure.

    Mark McClellan, director of the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy at Duke University, commented that antigen tests for one time use risks the chance of missing infections: “For people looking to one-time use of Covid antigen tests as a way to go back to normal, we’re not in that situation now. This is one more layer of protection as we try to reopen and get through the rest of the pandemic.”

    On Tuesday, the FDA also warned about the tests, saying they can produce “incorrect positive results”. Nursing homes and other care settings have reported false positives from antigen tests, the FDA noted. 

    These warnings apply to tests like Abbot’s $5 BinaxNOW test that the U.S. government is spending $750 million on. Now, state health officials are reportedly “increasingly concerned that people without symptoms should be screened with more costly but more reliable polymerase chain reaction assays”. 

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    Jeff Engel, a senior adviser at the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, said: “HHS made this purchase without any studies on the novel use in which they’re deploying these tests. I think that’s careless.”

    It’s also one of the infinite reminders that government is not only an abhorrent allocator of other peoples’ capital, but is also flailing wildly in trying to control a virus that is casually making its way across the globe regardless of what preventative measures we take. 

    HHS official Brett Giroir responded: “We do support asymptomatic testing being used. That is the only way that you’re going to screen millions of people a month.”

    Abbot responded: “Widespread, affordable rapid antigen testing helps slow the virus’s spread, and tests like BinaxNOW, when used as intended, can detect those most likely to be infectious.”

  • Top DoJ Voter Fraud Investigator Quits After AG William Barr Authorizes Probe
    Top DoJ Voter Fraud Investigator Quits After AG William Barr Authorizes Probe

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/09/2020 – 20:01

    Update (2140ET): In response to AG Barr’s decision, NYTimes reports that Richard Pilger – who oversees voter fraud investigations – has quit:

    “Having familiarized myself with the new policy and its ramifications… I must regretfully resign from my role as director of the Election Crimes Branch.”

    Does it not seem odd that when asked to investigate voter fraud, the gentleman who is in charge of investigating voter fraud chooses to resign rather than do his f**king job?

    Perhaps it was his alleged involvement in the Lois Lerner IRS targeting Tea Party groups debacle that triggered this resignation?

    *  *  *

    In a day when numerous lawsuits were filed challenging the outcome of the presidential election, and when prominent Republicans such as Mitch McConnell finally came out in support of Trump’s contention that the election was rigged, late on Monday Attorney General William Barr authorized the Justice Department to launch a probe into “substantial allegations” of voter fraud in the 2020 election, the AP first reported.

    In a letter to US attorneys across the country, Barr said they could conduct investigations “if there are clear and apparently-credible allegations of irregularities that, if true, could potentially impact the outcome of a federal election in an individual state.”

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    According to the Washington Times, this is an unusual move, since Justice Department policy prohibits any action that could influence the outcome of an election until the vote is formally certified. But the Justice Department is responsible for ensuring the integrity of federal elections.

    Barr’s memo comes days after presumptive President-elect Joseph R. Biden was declared the winner by several media outlets in the 2020 presidential election. President Trump has not conceded and has launched several legal efforts challenging the results in states where the voting margins are razor-thin. By granting prosecutors the power to pursue such cases, U.S. attorneys around the country could give Trump more ammunition for his lawsuit.

    The DOJ’s action, which many republicans will claim is long overdue, comes after Republicans in recent days turned up the heat on Barr to take some action in response to the voter fraud allegations. Earlier on Monday, Barr reportedly met with McConnell on Monday.

    On Friday, nearly 40 Republican members of Congress sent a letter to the AG asking him to get to the bottom of the voter fraud claims.

    “What are you doing to ensure the integrity of the voting and counting process right now?” the Republicans asked Mr. Barr in their letter. The lawmakers also called on the attorney general to commit to “using all the resources” at his disposal to ensure only legal votes are being counted “in a fully transparent manner.”

    Also last week, the Nevada Republican Party sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department claiming they have received reports of at least 3,062 instances of voter fraud in the battleground state. 

    “We expect that number to grow substantially,” the party said in a tweet. “Thousands of individuals have been identified who appear to have violated the law by casting ballots after they moved from NV.”

    The Trump campaign has filed lawsuits in several key battleground states that Biden won, asking local judges to either invalidate or stop counting mail-in ballots, a record number of which were cast this year amid the coronavirus pandemic.

    Earlier in the day several prominent Republicans backed Trump’s claims of voter fraud or his right to challenge the count, including Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell:  “Obviously no states have yet certified their election results. We have at least one or two states that are already on track for a recount and I believe the president may have legal challenges underway in at least five states,” McConnell said during a floor speech Monday.

    The Trump admin has also accused local election officials of not allowing their representatives to watch vote counts and claiming illegal votes were cast in states including Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

    “You don’t take these positions because you want an honest election,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said during a press conference on Monday. “What we are asking for right now is patience as we explore these equal protection claims among others.”

    As a reminder, states have until Dec. 8 to resolve election issues, including recounts and legal battles. The Electoral College members meet on Dec. 14 to finalize the outcome.

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  • Silicon Valley & 'Smart Money' Behind This Bitcoin Rally, Data Suggests
    Silicon Valley & 'Smart Money' Behind This Bitcoin Rally, Data Suggests

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/09/2020 – 20:00

    Authored by Joseph Young via CoinTelegraph.com,

    The Google Trends interest is relatively low for the keyword “Bitcoin” while on-chain data shows smart money is accumulating BTC…

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    image courtesy of CoinTelegraph

    Bitcoin (BTC) is continuing to show strong momentum even after a major rally. Key data points show that the uptrend has likely been fueled by smart money in recent months. This means retail or mainstream investors have been largely on the sidelines as BTC price surpassed $15,000 this month.

    In 2017, when the price of Bitcoin hit an all-time high at $20,000, the retail demand was at its peak. Google Trends data soared, mainstream media coverage noticeably increased, and spot exchange volumes exploded across major markets, especially in South Korea and Japan.

    This time, the Google Trends interest is relatively low for the keyword “Bitcoin” while on-chain data shows smart money is accumulating BTC.

    High-net-worth investors are buying Bitcoin

    Moreover, according to on-chain analyst Willy Woo, it has been mostly high-net-worth investors who have been purchasing Bitcoin.

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    Bitcoin mean transfer volume. Source: Glassnode

    When whales buy Bitcoin, they mostly facilitate the deals through the over-the-counter (OTC) market. Over time, spot and derivatives markets trail the OTC market as whales lead the upsurge. Woo said:

    “Who has been buying this rally? It’s smart money… High Net Worth Individuals. You can see the average transaction value between investors taking a big jump upwards. OTC desks are seeing this too. Bitcoin is still in it’s stealth phase of its bull run.”

    The trend of whales frontrunning retail investors is optimistic because it shows Bitcoin is still in its nascent bull phase. Large capital from new retail and mainstream investors is yet to enter the cryptocurrency market.

    Another Glassnode metrics paints a similar trend. The number of Bitcoin addresses holding more than 100 BTC hit a seven-month high at 16,271.

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    The number of addresses holding over 100 BTC. Source: Glassnode

    New money is pouring in

    Whales consistently buying Bitcoin over the past few months is optimistic in itself. But, Woo emphasized that the number of new whales has also increased.

    If the number of addresses containing large amounts of Bitcoin increases, analysts consider it as an overall spike in new whales.

    The rise in more high-net-worth individuals accumulating Bitcoin coincides with the start of the recent institutional frenzy around BTC.

    Following Square’s BTC purchase worth $50 million, the number of high-net-worth investors in the Bitcoin market noticeably increased. Woo explained:

    “Best of all we are not just seeing smart money flow in, it’s NEW smart money. Orange line is the rate of new investors coming in per hour previously unseen before on the blockchain. It’s seriously bullish.”

    Google Trends data shows relatively low retail interest

    Google Trends data is indicating a similar narrative as on-chain data points. The search volume for the keyword “Bitcoin” is currently less than 10% compared to the 2017 top.

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    Bitcoin search volume on Google. Source: Google Trends

    Nevertheless, while the search volume for Bitcoin remains low, there is a particularly high interest coming from states like Hawaii, California, Nevada and Washington.

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    Bitcoin search interest by subregion in the U.S. Source: Google Trends

    Interestingly, California and Hawaii rank as the third and fourth highest in per capita income by state in 2020.

    Moreover, San Jose/San Francisco in California i.e. Silicon Valley is ranked as the top metro region for Bitcoin interest. Silicon Valley is, of course, home to many high-net-worth investors and entrepreneurs.

  • ESPN Cutting 500 Jobs: Network Blames COVID, Fails To Mention Ratings Plunge Due To "Woke" Messaging
    ESPN Cutting 500 Jobs: Network Blames COVID, Fails To Mention Ratings Plunge Due To "Woke" Messaging

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/09/2020 – 19:40

    ESPN is cutting another 500 jobs as pressures from the Covid-19 pandemic are weighing on the sports network. Apparently, the restart of almost all major sports – albeit draped in political messaging for the last 6 months – hasn’t been enough to save the network from a fresh round of layoffs. 

    The network is blaming the coronavirus, naturally, because it certainly can’t blame its own politicized discussions during almost every major sporting event it has broadcast over the last few months. 

    A memo circulated on Thursday from Jimmy Pitaro, the head of ESPN, said the cuts will include 300 layoffs and the elimination of another 200 open positions. The company has 5,000 employees worldwide, according to the LA Times. 

    The memo said: “Prior to the pandemic, we had been deeply engaged in strategizing how best to position ESPN for future success amidst tremendous disruption in how fans consume sports. The pandemic’s significant impact on our business clearly accelerated those forward-looking discussions.”

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    The cuts are reportedly occurring across several departments and employees will “learn about their future” at the network next week. During the beginning of the pandemic, ESPN had lost a fair amount of its programming when Major League Baseball and the NBA both upended their seasons early. 

    Since the leagues have decided to “get woke”, embracing the political “Black Lives Matter” messaging before coming back on the air, they have seen their ratings plunge. 

    The cuts come right after ESPN’s parent company, Disney, also announced a sweeping round of more than 25,000 job cuts days ago. Recall, back in early October we reported that the network was planning “sweeping layoffs”. We noted then that the network was trying to cut “tens of millions” in salary.

    Days prior to that, we pointed out that amidst a ratings plunge, the NBA is likely going to be pulling its BLM messaging from its courts and jerseys next season. 

    Here is the full text of the memo that went out to ESPN employees, per CNBC:

    Dear colleagues,

    As you know, we value transparency in our internal dialogue, and that means in both good and challenging times. After much consideration, I have some difficult organizational decisions to share. We will be reducing our workforce, impacting approximately 300 valued team members, in addition to 200 open positions.

    Today is hard because ESPN has always been — and will always be — fortified by its fantastic people. Teamwork, dedication, spirit and grit have built this place and are what make ESPN special. Prior to the pandemic, we had been deeply engaged in strategizing how best to position ESPN for future success amidst tremendous disruption in how fans consume sports. The pandemic’s significant impact on our business clearly accelerated those forward-looking discussions. In the short term, we enacted various steps like executive and talent salary reductions, furloughs and budget cuts, and we implemented innovative operations and production approaches, all in an effort to weather the COVID storm.

    We have, however, reached an inflection point. The speed at which change is occurring requires great urgency, and we must now deliver on serving sports fans in a myriad of new ways. Placing resources in support of our direct-to-consumer business strategy, digital, and, of course, continued innovative television experiences, is more critical than ever. However, building a successful future in a changing world means facing hard choices. Making informed decisions about how and where we need to go – and, as always, in the most efficient way possible – is by far the most challenging job of any leadership team.

    And, while it must be done looking through a business lens, it also must be done with great respect and genuine concern for people. We are parting ways with some exceptional team members – some of whom have been here for a long time – and all of whom have made important contributions to ESPN. We’re very grateful for all they’ve meant to us, and I assure you we are taking steps to make their transitions easier. I am proud of the people at ESPN.

    Together, we have overcome tremendous challenges and adversity over these past several months and please know that the decisions and plans executed today were not made lightly. They are, however, necessary and I am convinced that we will move forward and effectively navigate this unprecedented disruption. Our Human Resources and Communications teams will continue to keep you posted on any updates, and you’ll be hearing more detail about our future direction in the next few weeks. In the meantime, if you have questions about anything outlined in this note, please do not hesitate to raise them with your leadership team or HR Business Partner.

    With gratitude,

    Jimmy

  • Scientists Find "Hell Planet" With Lava Oceans, Supersonic Winds, And Rain Made Of Rocks
    Scientists Find "Hell Planet" With Lava Oceans, Supersonic Winds, And Rain Made Of Rocks

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/09/2020 – 19:20

    Authored by Elias Marat via TheMindUnleashed.com,

    Life here on planet Earth often seems harsh, especially in 2020 with a pandemic, tornados and tropical storms, and out-of-control wildfires. However, none of those problems can hold a candle to the ultraviolent conditions of planet K2-141b.

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    On this brutal exoplanet hundreds of light-years away, oceans are filled with lava, rocks literally rain down on the surface, and howling winds break the sound barrier at thousands of miles per hour – making the hellish planet easily the most extreme ever discovered.

    Such are the infernal conditions depicted in a new study by scientists from McGill University, York University and the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Kolkata published on Tuesday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

    According to the study, K2-141b is one of the latest “lava planets” discovered, where this world orbits so closely to its sun that it almost grazes the star’s surface as it completes its revolution in only six to seven hours. Mercury, which is the closest planet to the sun in our own solar system, takes about 87 days to orbit the sun.

    Meanwhile, the oceans of K2-141b are comprised of pure, heaving lava steams.

    The atmospheric conditions and weather cycles of the exoplanet are unlike anything seen in our own solar system. While K2-141b is roughly the size of Earth, its surface, ocean and atmosphere are entirely made of rock –molten or otherwise.

    “The study is the first to make predictions about weather conditions on K2-141b that can be detected from hundreds of light years away with next-generation telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope,” said lead author Giang Nguyen in a press release.

    The scientists found, when analyzing illumination patterns of the planet, that two-thirds of K2-141b never see nightfall and are constantly exposed to daylight – meaning that that side of the planet is always facing its sun.

    To call that part of the planet “scalding” hardly does justice to its high temperatures that exceed 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit (3,000 degrees Celsius) – a temperature hot enough to not only melt rocks into lava, but also to vaporize them and create a brutal, unsparing atmosphere.

    While the Earth’s water cycle sees water evaporate before it rises up into the atmosphere, condenses, and falls back to the surface as rain, K2-141b only has rocks to work with – hence the constant torrential downpour of stones.

    “Our finding likely means that the atmosphere extends a little beyond the shore of the magma ocean, making it easier to spot with space telescopes,” said Nicolas Cowan, a co-author of the study.

    Meanwhile, the remainder of the planet never sees light and is constantly experiencing frigid temperatures of minus 392 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 200 degrees Celsius.

    To make matters worse, exoplanet K2-141b has winds that reach 3,100 miles per hour (5,000 km per hour), while its ocean of magma reaches depths of 86 miles (140 km), according to the study’s calculations.

    On the dark side of the planet, these horrific winds dominate the environment. On the hot side, however, the winds are completely absent. However, the winds carries the rocky “rain” into the deep magma ocean, which then flows back to the bright side to keep the cycle going.

    However, this cycle is nowhere near as stable as our own rain cycle.

    “It’s a planet that doesn’t make much sense at all. There’s nothing like it in our solar system,” said Cowan.

    The scientists hope that they can gain some insights on the formation of planets like our own that also had brutal conditions in their primeval state.

    “All rocky planets­, including Earth, started off as molten worlds but then rapidly cooled and solidified. Lava planets give us a rare glimpse at this stage of planetary evolution,” Cowan said.

  • FDA Approves Eli Lilly Antibody Drug For Emergency Use; COVID-19 Outbreak Interrupts SEC Football Schedule: Live Updates
    FDA Approves Eli Lilly Antibody Drug For Emergency Use; COVID-19 Outbreak Interrupts SEC Football Schedule: Live Updates

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/09/2020 – 19:15

    Summary:

    • SEC forced to change up schedule due to virus
    • Eli Lilly’s antibody Bamlanivimab granted EUA by FDA
    • Dr. Fauci says he wants to stay in current role
    • Cali hospitalizations spike
    • California gov hints at more restrictions
    • Trump campaign advisor David Bossie tests positive
    • Illinois reports 10k+ new cases for fourth day
    • Hospitalizations climb in the mountain west
    • Deaths drop in Illinois
    • Nebraska issues mask order
    • US cases top 10 million
    • Italy tightens restrictions
    • Joe Biden warns of “dark winter”, unveils task force members
    • NJ imposes new restrictions
    • NYC on verge of 2nd wave, mayor says
    • Shanghai reports first case in months
    • US hospitalizations back to July highs
    • Ukrainian president tests positive
    • Dr. Fauci hails Pfizer-BioNTech news

    * * *

    Update (1900ET): In yet another critical update involving a closely watched COVID-19 vaccine or therapeutic, the FDA on Monday granted emergency-use approval for Eli Lilly’s Bamlanivimab, an antibody therapy that has shown to be somewhat effective in treating mild-to-moderate COVID-19.

    Eli Lilly’s shares popped in after-hours trading on the news, which comes after a spectacular trading session where early reports about the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine candidate helped spark a massive shift back into value.

    It’s also another surprisingly timed development that again hints at some level of coordination in Monday’s post-election deluge of positive headlines about COVID-19 vaccines and treatments. Aside from the Pfizer news, the FDA also granted fast-track designation to Novavax’s vaccine candidate, as the company’s project is set to become the fifth to enter Phase 3 clinical trials in the US.

    The treatment gives doctors an important alternative to treating high-risk patients before they become seriousl ill. These types of treatments are also being studied as short-term treatments that could be given to people – say, a nurse – who was potentially exposed to the virus.

    In other news, a COVID-19 outbreak has impacted the SEC’s season schedule, now that Saturday’s game between Auburn and Mississippi State has been postponed due to COVID-19 outbreaks, with other games likely to be impacted by isolated campus outbreaks.

    * * *

    Update (1800ET): Seaking on – where else? – CNN Monday evening, Dr. Anthony Fauci one again chimed in to praise today’s Pfizer-BioNTech research, claiming we “would be giving vaccine to people very likely before the end of the year.”

    The findings from the trials of the mRNA vector vaccine bode well for other vaccine projects in the works, Dr. Fauci said. He also threw in a few supportive comments about his favorite Biotech company, Moderna (a company that received $1 billion upfront from the federal government to run its trials).

    “This shows that the mRNA platform actually does work. And there’s another vaccine candidate, Moderna, that’s using the same platform,” Fauci told CNN in a telephone interview.

    Later this evening, Dr. Fauci spoke to another reporter, offering praise for Biden’s still-vaguely defined plan, and affirming that he would like to stay on in his current role in the new administration.

    In some other troubling news from Monday afternoon, California saw its hospitalizations due to COVID-19 spiked 28.6% over the past two weeks.

    * * *

    Update (1520ET): California Gov. Gavin Newsom has just become the latest governor to hint at, or announce, more COVID-19-related restrictions in the neaer future.

    * * *

    Update (1450ET): Trump campaign senior outside advisor David Bossie has reportedly tested positive for COVID-19, joining Mark Meadows and Ben Carson in the growing number of TrumpWorld figures testing positive for the virus.

    * * *

    Update (1430ET): After the US topped 10 million confirmed cases on Monday…

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    …we’ve gotten some mixed news out of the mountain west and midwest. Wyoming reported a new record hospitaliztions Monday, while warning that 17 of 19 ICU beds at the state medical center were full. In neighboring Montana, 470 virus-linked hospitalizations were reported on Monday, a third of the total since March. 7 of 10 large hospitals in the state reported limited availability for emergency beds.

    Meanwhile, Nebraska has joined Utah in issuing a mandatory mask order. Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts announced the new health order Monday including a requirement that masks be worn when people are in close contact for at least 15 minutes at usinesses in the state, according to reports in the Nebraska local press. The reports come after the governor’s owne chief spokesman criticized the

    Illinois, meanwhile, saw daily deaths decline day over day, from 42 on Sunday to just 14 on Monday, while it exceeded 10k new COVID-19 cases for the fourth straight day.

    * * *

    Update (1330ET): Italy’s Health Minister has tightened coronavirus restrictions on six new parts of the country, bumping up the Province of Bolzano to a “red zone”, while the regions of Abruzzo, Umbria, Tuscany, Liguria, Basilicata became orange zones. The news, which comes via Italy’s ANSA newswire, comes as Reuters publishes a story noting Italians’ reluctance to abide by restrictions on movement and business like they did in the spring, when the nation “stoically accepted” a massively restrictive lockdown to beat back one of the first major outbreaks in Europe.

    Last week, Italy became the sixth country to top 40k COVID-19 deaths (confirmed deaths, at least). Northern Italy, including Lombardy and Piedmont, have been hit by the most restrictive measures involving bars, restaurants and shops (they’re in so-called “red zones”). PM Giuseppe Conte has been slowly tightening restrictions to different degrees nationwide.

    Italy, like the US and many other European countries, is seeing an alarming surge in hospitalizations as well, as some scientists warn about the second wave of the virus overwhelming the health-care system.

    Unlike the first time around, protests against the new measures have been widespread across the worst-hit areas of the Italian peninsula.

    Meanwhile, in the US, Johns Hopkins just confirmed that the total case count has passed the 10 million mark, as expected, meaning the US currently accounts for roughly 20% of the global confirmed COVID-19 tally.

    * * *

    Update (1200ET): After spending the morning with the co-chairs of his newly announced coronavirus task force, Joe Biden delivered an update where he expanded on his statement from earlier, warning Americans about the “dark winter” ahead’, as he prepares to impose mandatory mask-wearing and social distancing rules.

    “There’s a need for bold action to fight this pandemic. We’re still facing a very dark winter…infection rates are going up, hospitalizations are going up, deaths are going up,” Biden said during the video briefing, after which he did not take questions.

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    Biden also laid out his 13-member advisory panel, which is made up of doctors and other “health experts”, including Dr. Rick Bright, a former top vaccine official who was fired from the Trump administration, as a member of his COVID-19 advisory panel, which he announced on Monday.

    Biden’s task force will have three co-chairs: Vivek H. Murthy, surgeon general during the Obama administration; David Kessler, Food and Drug Administration commissioner under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; and Marcella Nunez-Smith, associate dean for health equity research at the Yale School of Medicine. Murthy and Kessler have briefed Biden for months on the pandemic.

    As the Washington Post pointed out, Biden’s picks for the panel intend to communicate to the public that he’s embracing a “science-backed” approach, which essentially means doubling down on economically harmful restrictions on business and movement, in addition to the social distancing, as New Jersey showed us earlier.

    Other members include (text per WaPo):

    Ezekiel Emanuel, chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.

    Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School who is a prolific author.

    Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

    Eric Goosby, global AIDS coordinator under President Barack Obama and professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine.

    Celine R. Gounder, clinical assistant professor of medicine and infectious diseases at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.

    Julie Morita, executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a philanthropy focused on health issues.

    Loyce Pace, president and executive director of the Global Health Council, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization dedicated to global health issues.

    Robert Rodriguez, professor of emergency medicine at the UCSF School of Medicine.

    Rebecca Katz, director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University Medical Center, and Beth Cameron, director for global health security and biodefense on the White House National Security Council during the Obama administration, are serving as advisers to the transition task force.

    Biden also plans on working closely with local officials, calling both Republican and Democratic governors to get their input.

    We imagine NJ’s Phil Murphy and NY’s Andrew Cuomo will have quit a bit of input.

    Biden’s comments come as US cases have soared to new daily records in recent days, including the 128,000 cases reported on Saturday, a daily record.

    * * *

    Update (1110ET): Phil Murphy just announced that among the latest  batch of restrictions to slow the spread of COVID-19 in the Garden State, will be an order barring indoor dining between 2200 and 0500, a strategy that has also been implemented in Asia and Europe.

    Importantly, the halt comes just after the FDA approved more rapid antigen tests for COVID-19. Manufacturers and many scientists argue the tests could be used by restaurants to safely serve customers, since they’re cheap (only a few dollars per customer).

    Of course, most family restaurants in the state won’t be impacted, it’s the nightlife industry, which, in theory, leads to more spread, that will suffer the bulk of the impact.

    It’s notable in that the bounce-back in restaurant spending was a major contributor to last quarter’s GDP print. NJ is officially back ahead of the pack in its efforts to curb the latest round of the virus.

    * * *

    Monday’s torrent of optimistic vaccine-related news, sparked early this morning by a WSJ report previewing the first batch of results from the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccine candidate, has, predictably, been followed by a statement from the Biden campaign (which, curiously, got a preview of the results around the same time as Pfizer’s own top executives, and possibly even before the sitting president himself) warning Americans that masks remain the best tool to prevent spread of the virus.

    It began Sunday evening, when Utah Gov. Gary Herbert declared a state of emergency and ordered a statewide mask mandate, blaming a surge in coronavirus hospitalizations that he said was threatening hospital capacity, CBS News reported.

    Herbert and the Utah Department of Health issued executive and public health orders requiring residents to wear face coverings in public, at work and when they are within 6 feet of people who don’t live in their households. Herbert, a Republican, had resisted a statewide mandate, even as several counties in the state went ahead with more restrictive mask rules. But apparently the election results, combined with the latest data, have been convincing enough to sway them.

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    Across the US, hospitalizations have returned to their highs from late July, with 56,768 patients in the hospital, 11,108 of those in the ICU and 2,959 on ventilators.

    On Monday morning, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy suggested that he would revive some restrictions in the wake of the state reporting about 5,000 new COVID-19 cases in two days.

    New restrictions might impact the state’s bars, restaurants and indoor youth sports may be reined in, Murphy said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” Though notably the limits wouldn’t be extended to include college sports as part of measures he said would likely be announced Monday.

    “If you sit at a bar there’s a much higher likelihood of a transmission,” he said.

    Across the river in NYC, Mayor Bill de Blasio warned that the city was coming “dangerously close” to a second wave. His warning comes as cases and hospitalizations rise, and the city health department, which has caught a lot of flack for its dysfunctional relationship with city hall (or rather, city hall has caught flack for its dysfunctional relationship with the health department, and decisions to delegate tasks like organizing the city’s contact tracing effort to others outside the department) releases a “real time” breakdown of zip-code by zip-code data.

    While daily case numbers remain uncomfortably elevated, and deaths and hospitalizations continue to climb, the number of confirmed cases is currently at 50,550,062, while 1,258,321 deaths have been recorded.

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

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy says he tested positive for Covid-19 and is self-isolating. Zelenskiy is feeling fine and will continue to work remotely, according to a statement from his office (Source: Bloomberg).

    Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious-disease expert, said the Covid-19 vaccine being developed by Pfizer will have a “major impact” on the battle against the coronavirus. The efficacy of the Pfizer drug candidate being over 90% “is just extraordinary,” Fauci said Monday on a call with reporters. Separately, he said Moderna may have similar results to the Pfizer vaccine because it is also based on mRNA technology (Source: Bloomberg).

    Shanghai reported a single domestic case of Covid-19 on Monday, according to the municipal government. The confirmed case works as a porter at Shanghai Pudong International Airport. The Chinese financial hub hasn’t reported any local cases in months, although it has seen a steady stream of imported cases (Source: Bloomberg).

  • Hedge Fund Groups Have Immediately Started Lobbying President-Elect Biden
    Hedge Fund Groups Have Immediately Started Lobbying President-Elect Biden

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/09/2020 – 19:00

    Hedge funds, who have spent the last 4 years in a paradise of sorts with President Trump slashing regulations, are now opening their arms and are eager to try and embrace what will likely be a far stricter President Biden. 

    The Managed Funds Association, which calls itself “The Voice of the Global Alternative Investment Industry”, issued a statement last week after Joe Biden was declared President-elect – to congratulate him, of course, but also to remind him exactly how important hedge funds are to the average American (pause for laughter). 

    “The hedge fund and alternative investment industry congratulates President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on their election victory. Hedge funds are a critical component in the global financial ecosystem, managing more than $3.3 trillion in assets,” the letter says.

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    It continues, hilariously trying to remind Biden how important hedge funds are to teachers and fire fighters: “In all 50 states, institutional investors like pension funds, charitable foundations, and university endowments rely on investments in hedge funds, credit funds, and other alternative investment funds to diversify their investments, manage risk, and generate attractive returns in all market conditions. Their investments help support the retirement security of more than 26 million teachers, fire fighters, and other public employees, fund college education, and enable the vital work done by foundations and charities.”

    And concludes with obligatory olive branch: “The hedge fund industry looks forward to working with the Biden administration on public policies that promote fair, efficient, and transparent capital markets.”

    As Michael Bodley noted on Twitter, there are two notable issues on the table for hedge funds with Biden at the helm of the country. The first is potential updates to an SEC advertising rule that could change how hedge funds market. It’s the first time in 60 years this rule has been looked at. Second is the potential for loosening broker-dealer registration, which could create more competition for raising money. 

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    Recall, Biden has a checkered history with hedge fund managers. Back in 2017 it was reported that hedge fund manager Bill Ackman tried to make an off-color joke about Biden’s deceased son at the SALT Conference, to which Biden replied: “Who is this asshole?”

    OK, well that’s kind of funny, actually.

    “Look, I don’t know who you are, wiseass, but never disrespect the memory of my dead son!” Biden is reported to have said.

    Regardless, the group lobbying Biden now claims it “represents the global alternative investment industry and its investors by advocating for public policies that foster efficient, transparent, fair capital markets, and competitive tax and regulatory structures.”

    It has more than 140 member firms that “collectively manage nearly $1.6 trillion across a diverse group of investment strategies.”

    The only thing not diverse about these strategies is that they all take a fee. 

  • McConnell Backs Trump In Push For Recounts, Says Shouldn't Accept Election Results "From The Media"
    McConnell Backs Trump In Push For Recounts, Says Shouldn't Accept Election Results "From The Media"

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/09/2020 – 18:49

    Although you probably won’t read much about it in the New York Times or Washington Post, support for President Trump pressing ahead with demands for recounts, or otherwise contesting the outcome of last week’s election, appears to be growing among top-ranking Republicans.

    Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz and others raised questions about various irregularities (which actually aren’t all that uncommon in American elections) earlier, and the GSA, the component of the federal government bureaucracy that oversees transfer of power and all that comes with it (moves in and out of the White House etc), said earlier that there would be no transfer of power until a “clear winner is clear based on the process laid out in the Constitution.”

    Now, Sen Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, arguably the most powerful Republican in Washington (perhaps even moreso than President Trump), has finally spoken up, and he’s backing President Trump.

    Sen. McConnell said Monday that Trump has every right not to accept the final results based on little more than media reports, and that President Trump is within his right to request vote recounts and file legal challenges to address irregularities, he said in opening floor comments.

    The Kentucky Republican, who fended off a well-financed Democratic challenger, added, with perhaps a touch of sarcasm, that last week’s election “appears to have been free from meaningful foreign interference”.

    Earlier, McConnell said before the vote that “all legal ballots must be counted, all illegal ballots should not be counted,” and McConnell said again Monday on the Senate floor that “the process must be transparent.”

    The implications of these comments are momentous, and they drive home the fact that, as we wait to hear more from President Trump and the rest of the GOP establishment, this happy-go-lucky straightforward transition being priced in by the market hasn’t been finalized quite yet. The markets now appear to agree, as US equities slipping headed into the close after what has been a wild ride higher since this morning’s vaccine news. With minutes to go, the VIX is green for the day, and small caps might be headed for one of their biggest intraday reversals ever.

    Meanwhile, the MSM is already explaining away McConnell’s comments as more aggressive rhetoric meant to fire up the base in Georgia ahead of the Jan. 5 runoffs, where two GOP stalwarts will again defend their seats.

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    McConnell needs those seats to preserve his majority, and President Trump’s legacy. All the more reason to put up a fight.

    After all, with more Republicans stepping up with criticisms and complaints, perhaps there’s more “‘there’, there” than the American people were led to believe.

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Nov 09

Today’s News 9th November 2020

  • The March Of Wokeism Is An All-Pervasive New Oppression
    The March Of Wokeism Is An All-Pervasive New Oppression

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 11/08/2020 – 23:40

    Authored by Trevor Phillips, op-ed via The Times,

    I was taking part in an online seminar with several hundred public servants recently when one of them started his question to me with an earnest apology: “I am a man of white privilege . . .”. I found it hard not to laugh out loud. Things have come to a pretty pass when people prostrate themselves in public for having a prostate gland, not to mention dumping on their parents for being the wrong colour.

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    I’d been introduced as someone who had spent more than 40 years trying to ensure people weren’t judged by their race or gender. My idealistic questioner seemed to have missed that bit. I assured him — maybe a little too brusquely — that I wouldn’t hold his colour or his sex against him. His question turned out to be a reasonable one about how to recruit more women but it sounded as though this thoughtful young man was too consumed with angst about his own ethnicity and gender, probably reinforced by some spectacularly bad diversity training, to apply much logic to the problem.

    Personally I find the appeal of this brand of ethno-masochism hard to fathom, but then I’m not white. Yet increasingly, such “woke” thinking is flooding our workplaces, schools and universities. It is two centuries since this country abolished the Test Acts under which people were required to make a pledge of religious observance to qualify for public office or the civil service. But once again employees are being required to sign up to statements of belief or face denunciation, demotion and dismissal. Arcane arguments about white privilege and Pythonesque disputes about whether men can be women are no longer confined to warring left-wing sects or social media; they are eating away at the heart of leading institutions, corporations and government itself.

    Much of this turmoil began with the best of intentions: a long overdue focus on ethical behaviour in corporate and public life. In 2018 more corporate chief executives lost their jobs for misconduct than were fired for poor performance; the #MeToo movement has left its mark. But the drive for decency is steadily being hijacked by extremists, bringing a dark edge of censoriousness to the quest for better workplace behaviour. JK Rowling, infamously, has been threatened with “cancellation” for sardonically pointing out that there is such a thing as a woman. Kevin Price, a Labour councillor, resigned from Cambridge city council and faced pressure to leave his post as a porter at the university because he refused to sign a statement that “trans women are women”.

    The intolerant aspect of wokeism has become plainer than ever. Its strictures against “offensive” language brought some of its adherents close to apologising for the massacre at Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris, suggesting that the journalists bore some responsibility for the Islamist attack by declining to censor themselves. The beheading last month of Samuel Paty, a French teacher who had shown Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of Muhammad to his class, left woke activists awkwardly trying to distance themselves from the killer while implying that Paty should have placed the right to free speech second to the sensitivities of some Muslim parents.

    In Scotland, the SNP government plans to outlaw speech “stirring up hatred”, even in private homes; if I lived in Edinburgh I imagine that reading my own columns on race or religion out loud in my kitchen would provoke a visit from the police, ready with the handcuffs. Last week the BBC published new editorial guidelines on the use of “racist language”. The first question journalists are told to ask themselves is “Does the identity of the individual using the language make a difference to its acceptability?”, implying that George Alagiah or Clive Myrie might be permitted to use language that Huw Edwards and Fiona Bruce are not, a kind of creeping speech apartheid, and a whole new chapter in censorship.

    Sex — “the trans debate” — remains a hot issue but race was the principal battleground, even before the Black Lives Matter movement was reinvigorated this year.

    According to Ibram X Kendi, the author of How to be an Antiracist, “the original sin is racism”. Bari Weiss, the New York Times writer who quit in July over its wokeism, says that “the beating heart of this new ideology is critical race theory”. This theory holds that whites are uniquely insulated from poverty and injustice, and that even poor whites would be worse off if they happened to be another ethnicity — confronted constantly by police brutality, discrimination and the legacy of transatlantic slavery. This view ignores the inconvenient truth that people of Indian origin in this country (and in the US) outsmart the white majority educationally, outshine them professionally and outearn them by more than 15 per cent. The notion of white privilege would be baffling to the families of white boys who have fallen to the bottom of education attainment league tables, and who are staring at a lifetime of sweeping the streets occupied by their affluent Indian-heritage classmates. But critical race theory is the ultimate guilt trip; it works on the liberal elite because it’s true of enough people, enough of the time.

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    Protesters demonstrate outside a former museum in east London, demanding the removal of a statue of Sir Robert Geffrye, a merchant, slave owner and former lord mayor of London RAY TANG/GETTY IMAGES

    The advance of wokedom is made even more unsettling by the fact that the rules are a moving target, driven by a bewildering array of changing sensitivities and shifting language: should we talk about BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic — so yesterday), BIPOC (or Black, Indigenous and People of Colour, as they say in California) or people of colour (so whites are some kind of transparent creatures?). Confusion abounds. But for the past four years wokeists worldwide have at least been able to define themselves by asking a simple question: what would Donald Trump say? And whatever the answer, the reverse would be woke. But with the Great Orange Yardstick on his way out, the movement’s gurus are having to come up with new guidelines.

    Ibram Kendi argues that the test of woke purity should be evidence of active antiracism, judged by an independent group of antiracists, presumably with equivalent commissars for gender, sexual orientation and so forth. However, for one group, Kendi is uncompromising: if you’re white, failure is certain because your hideous whiteness is in itself part of the problem and, with the best will in the world, there’s not much you can do about it.

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    Ibram X Kendi JASON MENDEZ/GETTY IMAGES

    I suspect that the man who asked me that question in the seminar had been reading White Fragility, the magnum opus of sociologist Robin DiAngelo, darling of the white self-flagellators, whose bleak remedy for being born the wrong colour is to strive to be “less white”, which she says means “less racist”. She recently told TV viewers that “white privilege is the automatic, taken-for-granted advantage bestowed upon white people . . . it takes us literally seeing a man being murdered in front of our eyes to wake us up”. I’m not sure that the family of George Floyd, whose death at the hands of US police in May triggered protests around the world, will appreciate him being spoken of as a kind of moral alarm clock for white people.

    In her excoriating resignation letter from the New York Times, Bari Weiss defined woke as “a mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality and the therapeutic mentality”. But it’s hard to pin down a movement which so far has no leader, or even a single cause, other than to condemn pretty much anything that somebody, somewhere, considers offensive.

    Perhaps the easiest way to see the world as wokeists do is to imagine society as an elaborately wrought cage of history, language, laws and customs, whose bars are so tightly intertwined that it would be almost impossible for anyone to break free. According to the gurus of wokedom, only one caste holds the key to escape: white men. Even white women never truly shake off their disadvantages. To misquote Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “The white man is born free, but everyone else is in chains.”

    I couldn’t care less if middle-class white men stopped saying sorry for having all the money, power and luck, as long as they did a little to redistribute their privilege to people who do not share their sex and race. But practical remedies don’t seem to be on the woke agenda. To a woke activist, victory is getting a white man to admit to his intrinsic awfulness. Sadly, it seems that an increasing number of them are willing to genuflect.

    A senior Whitehall mandarin told me with great enthusiasm that his eyes had been opened to his own racism by a bestseller somewhat inaccurately entitled Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge. It explains to white readers that anyone citing competence as a factor in giving a white person a job ahead of a person of colour must be “defending whiteness”. Actually, the recruitment firm I chair puts hundreds of people each year into top jobs. Last year a third of our board appointments were people of colour who made it on merit. Depressingly for anyone who has spent time trying to take racial preference out of recruitment, wokedom seems bent on restoring it.

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    Reni Eddo-Lodge DAVE BENETT/GETTY IMAGES

    Serious people on both sides of the Atlantic are drinking deep at the well of racial self-abasement. A much-lauded course at the prestigious Duke University in the US teaches that there are 15 characteristics to white supremacy culture, including perfectionism, a sense of urgency, worship of the written word and, amazingly, objectivity, all of which, it is argued, need to be jettisoned. If this is the sort of thing our mid-level public service leaders are imbibing, it’s hardly surprising we’re having trouble getting a reliable test and trace system off the ground. Dismayingly, essays of this kind have become sacred texts for otherwise thoughtful white folk who seem to enjoy being told that they are irredeemably racist. Yet the epiphany has not led many converts to move over and let some not-white and not-male people have a go at the top jobs. The most recent appointments at the pinnacle of our civil service and top corporations have seen white men replaced by mostly more white men.

    The one place in which wokedom seems to have made least progress is in non-black minority communities. Mr Trump’s strong showing among Hispanics, taking almost a third of their vote in the presidential election, prompted a senior black journalist at The New York Times to say: “We are surrounded by racists.” Another decreed that Latinos should be stripped of their minority status after Miami’s anti-communist Cubans voted heavily for Trump. Here, British Asian voters supported the Tories in huge numbers last year, yet Rishi Sunak, Priti Patel, and the equalities minister Kemi Badenoch provoke fury among the woke, who demand conformity to type when it comes to black and brown people.

    Some woke taboos are risible. The head of a fee-paying girls’ school was forced to apologise for using the word “negro” during an assembly explaining the origins of Black History Month, which lay in Negro History Week a century ago. It seemed to matter little to her protesting students that, back then, the alternative to negro would have been a truly ugly epithet beginning with “n”, or that “negro” was the word Martin Luther King would have used.

    But the woke crowd display little interest in the opinions of those they claim to be defending. In Bristol the statue of the 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston was brought down without consulting the city’s mayor, the only black elected boss of a big British city. Marvin Rees wryly reflected last week that the woke protesters had a very different set of priorities to those of black Bristolians: “We can get caught up in events . . . but no one turned up to my office the next day with a memo telling me anything had changed on [the topic of] school exclusions, criminal justice, poverty, mental health, educational outcomes, unemployment levels — nothing.”

    The march of the woke movement through our institutions is helped by a humiliating collapse of the British establishment’s authority in the face of its young accusers. At a recent meeting of cultural organisations, a number of senior leaders admitted that pressure to declare solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement did not come from black people, who are less likely than average to show up in their institutions, and rarer than hens’ teeth among their senior staff. Demands for the removal of statues and “decolonisation” of their displays came largely from their own staff, most of whom were young and white.

    This perfectly sums up the gap between the woke self-image and reality. The woke affect to care for the excluded, yet cannot find room for talented people of colour in their own ranks. They present themselves as passionate campaigners for justice, yet they are ready to yield to the whims of the mob and dole out summary retribution to anyone deemed a heretic. They claim to be the allies of the oppressed, yet have no time to listen to their real priorities. They purport to seek greater diversity, yet require all women or all ethnic minorities to share their view or be branded quislings.

    The greatest tragedy in all of this is that the gurus of wokedom have persuaded thousands of idealistic young people who rightly want to change the world into supporting what is actually a deeply reactionary movement. The trans activists can only realise their aim of being able to enter spaces reserved for women by erasing the female sex. Critical race theory remains credible only so long as black and brown people continue to fail. In the end, the woke movement is turning into an echo of the very oppressors it claims to be combating. After all the statues come down, and women’s prisons are opened to all and sundry, the celebrities and social media warriors will move on to the next fashionable cause — and minorities will still be less likely to win the top jobs, and women will still be the victims of violence. The only thing that will have changed is the bitterness of a generation whose idealism was betrayed.

  • Australia On Edge Over "Deeply Troubling" Reports China Placed Import Bans On 7 Commodities
    Australia On Edge Over "Deeply Troubling" Reports China Placed Import Bans On 7 Commodities

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 11/08/2020 – 23:15

    Australia says it’s continuing to monitor what top officials have said are “deeply troubling” signs that China is actively initiating trade disruptions as retaliation amid downward spiraling relations between the two major trade partners.

    Since last week regional reports have said Chinese buyers were warned by Beijing not to purchase seven categories of Australian goods, which has set Canberra and firms across the continent on edge given China is recipient of nearly one-third of all Australian exports.

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    Via Reuters

    Australia’s Trade Ministry last month began protesting the delays and significant rumors of further import bans, with Trade Minister Simon Birmingham last Monday charging that Chinese authorities were implementing targeted “discriminatory actions”.

    Starting Friday Australian media reported the following commodities will be subject to increased inspections upon reaching port in China:

    • copper ore
    • barley
    • sugar
    • timber
    • lobster
    • coal
    • wine

    This after last month a ban was placed on some timber and barely shipments, commonly used in animal fodder and beer production. Beijing subsequently vehemently denied the charge of discriminatory actions. As Reuters summarizes of where things stand, there’s little that can be “confirmed” of the rumors and allegations:

    Trade minister Simon Birmingham said Chinese officials had publicly and privately denied any coordinated effort was being taken against Australia, and said he hoped Beijing “is true to its word”.

    “They deny any discriminatory actions that are being taken. But that doesn’t seem to be what industry is seeing and hearing at present,” he said on radio station 5AA.

    A Chinese source briefed on the matter said that trade in the goods was effectively halted for now, and other products such as beef could be affected in future.

    “It was not an absolute order, but a suggestion,” the person said, declining to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter.

    It appears for now that China is leveraging the ability to blame nebulous ‘delays’ on mere bureaucratic inspections procedures. 

    The Morrison government has urged China to “play by the rules” as billions of dollars are on the line. However, Beijing is clearly in the driver’s seat.

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    For example over a week ago Australian media documented at least one instance of tons of premium shellfish apparently left on a Chinese airport tarmac to spoil. 

    And in another more recent example:

    A Beijing-based wine importer and distributor told Reuters his customs agent in Shanghai was called to a meeting last week and warned that Australian wine would no longer be processed by customs after Nov. 6.

    An employee at the company was also called to a meeting in Beijing on Monday and told that Australian wine would not be processed “until other issues were addressed,” he said.

    It remains unclear as to what the “other issues” were, according to the report.

    Via Trading Economics: Australia exports to China was US$103 Billion during 2019, according to the United Nations COMTRADE database on international trade. 

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    Prime Minister Scott Morrison has recently slammed Australia’s biggest trading partner as practicing blatant “economic coercion” with regard to an increasing array of its exports. 

    Things took a more intense turn when Beijing recently began discouraging tourists and students from visiting Australia, also as China detained some high profile Aussie media figures working in the country. 

    Prior to the pandemic, Chinese travelers made up by far the largest source of tourism for Australia, according to one industry report accounting for $12.4 billion of the $45.4 billion tourism brought into to the country each year.

  • This Election Is Not Over… And The Media Knows It
    This Election Is Not Over… And The Media Knows It

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 11/08/2020 – 22:50

    Authored by Jay Valentine via AmericanThinker.com,

    Like many, I spent the last few nights waking up at 2:03 A.M., no reason, then looking at my phone for news, any news, that might be positive for President Trump.  I survived on Rush, Bongino, Mark Levin.  When the news continued to be ugly, I even checked in on ridiculous bloggers promising that ballots were watermarked and D.J. (our household name for a president we love) was actually launching a sting on the Deep State.

    Enough already.  Stop the madness.  

    Hey, I have a degree in statistics, and I have some level of critical thought.  If there is such pessimism in my tribe, I am not going along.

    So today, I started to dig into the numbers, and as I did, I fought my confirmation bias at every step.  

    I realized that I, like millions of others, had been numbed into despondency by the overwhelming press, media, social media push to certify President-Elect Biden.  (I put that in there so you can see how repellent it is.)

    Hey guys, this thing is not only not over; it is scary for Biden.  I mean really scary, and most of all, the media know it.  Thus, the rush to get everyone in line with the narrative that a 78-year-old, early-dementia former V.P., who could not draw a crowd larger than a dozen, just beat D.J. in a fair election.

    Process that for a moment.

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    Start with Pennsylvania.  Biden, as of this writing, is at 290 electoral votes.  Pennsylvania is 20.

    I read the Justice Alito opinion, and it is pretty clear that he wants the after election night at 8:00 P.M. votes separated for a reason.  Biden is going to lose at the Supreme Court, and they know it.  Four justices already said the Pennsylvania Supreme Court cannot adjust voting rules.   A new arrival, Justice Barrett, says she is there to apply the rules in the Constitution.  OK, wanna bet she does?

    Remove the after 8:00 P.M. ballots, and Biden loses Pennsylvania.  Biden 270.

    Let’s visit Nevada.  I have lots of friends in California who have condos in Nevada to evade state taxes.  There are not a couple of people doing this; there are tens of thousands.  Everyone knows it, and California seeks them out.

    Our old pal Harry Reid knows it as well, and he apparently has them voting in droves in this election.  Probably not a big D.J. constituency.  Within 72 hours of the election, the Trump team found, validated over 3,500 of them.  I do not suspect that Trump’s people stopped counting.

    Every one of these is a ballot reduction for Biden

    Nevada, as of now, is well within reach for DJ and the Trump team — particularly when the California crowd is reduced.  And a few of them may testify since a false vote is a very bad thing, with jail time if convicted.  Maybe a bigger story here.

    Remember where we are, people.  Biden is at 270 after a highly probable Supreme Court decision (read Alito and concurring opinions).

    Lose Nevada, lose the election.

    But wait: it gets better.

    Let’s visit Wisconsin.  Right now, it is 20,000 votes in Uncle Joe’s direction.  Lots of stories out there, well below the Google fold, that there are way more Wisconsin votes than there are registered voters.  OK, maybe the dead can vote up there — probably a Midwest thing.

    Well, last night, we found that Wisconsin election clerks were told, and followed the direction, to modify mail-in ballots and fill in the blanks where witnesses left out critical info.

    I am sure it was just a good customer service thing and they meant no harm.  The problem is every such ballot is now toast.

    There were “thousands” of such prima facie wrongful votes.  Oops.  Biden up 20,000 — now that number is in question.  No more truckloads of votes coming in, so every ballot D.J.’s team eliminates gets President-Elect Biden on step closer to former V.P. Biden who lives in a basement.  Not good here.

    North Carolina.  That one pretty much looks like as though it is over and D.J. won it.  Fox News is rumored to call it for Trump around April 2021.

    Remember where we are here.  Biden is probably going to lose Pennsylvania, so if he loses even one state, even one Electoral College vote, ouch! 

    Either D.J. wins outright, or it goes to the House, which means that D.J. has four more years.

    We’re not done yet.

    Michigan.  Oh, yes, the land of the “glitches” in the voting machines.  Six thousand votes for Trump given to Biden in one of 47 counties where that software is used.  About 150,000 votes in Biden’s favor right now.  

    Google the 130,000 Biden votes that showed up in the middle of the night, and you can see how the wonderful people at Google are fact-checking this “debunked” story.  In fact, for fun, Google “Michigan voter fraud,” and you get literally three pages of “this was fact checked and proven to be false.”  Why would Google be so assiduous?

    They too see that if Amy votes with the four, Biden is one vote away from the basement.

    Lawsuits in Michigan and the other states are being launched, and discovery will take place.  Google will not be there.  

    Voter fraud is kind of like larceny.  A little is OK.  It is even kind of entertaining.

    Dead people have been voting for a hundred years in Democratic cities.  It is such a constant that one would think the Republican Party would consider a Dead Voter Outreach program to get their share.

    But voter fraud on this scale is just not sustainable.  It does not pass the common sense test. 

    We have bloggers with lots of time on their hands going through voter rolls and showing that person after person who voted in a swing state also fought in the Civil War or maybe the War of 1812.  It was funny at first, but the overwhelming number now goes beyond humor and rubs our faces in it.

    I think D.J. has to swing one state.  Actually, one electoral vote.  Not only is this thing not over, but the Biden team must be sweating bullets.

    Voter fraud at scale seemed like a really cool idea until D.J. went to the mattresses.  Now that he is fighting it out one voter at a time, with the Supreme Court likely to create the starting point at Biden 270, Biden has everything to lose.

    Perk up!

  • Man Banned From Yellowstone After Cooking Chicken In Hot Spring
    Man Banned From Yellowstone After Cooking Chicken In Hot Spring

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 11/08/2020 – 22:25

    Living on the west coast of the US, or better yet- the Pacific Northwest, hot springs are abundant, similar to the ones found in the country of Iceland.

    Did you know researchers at MIT and the University of Alcala in Spain, released a study in September, indicating strong evidence of ancient hominids using geothermal hot spring pools for cooking whole animals?

    Well, you see where this is going… An Idaho man, usually stories like these start with “Florida man,” was banned from Yellowstone National Park for attempting to cook chicken in a hot spring.

    Yellowstone park rangers found the man on Aug. 7 near Shoshone Geyser Basin with cooking pots, attempting to cook two whole chickens in a burlap sack sitting in a hot spring, reported East Idaho News.  

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    Rangers cited the Idaho Falls man and two others for trespassing in a thermal area. 

    On Sept. 10, the man pleaded guilty to the citation and was ordered to pay $600 fine and will serve two years of unsupervised probation. He was also banned from the park for two years. 

    Over the years, park ranges have slapped people with fines for cooking or at least attempting to cook food in the thermal spring areas. Yellowstone is super strict about its thermal areas because people have been injured and or killed. 

    For some more insight on geothermal hot spring cooking, Zac Efron’s new web documentary series on Netflix, Down to Earth, shows how eggs can be boiled in a hot spring.

  • The Democratic Facade
    The Democratic Facade

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 11/08/2020 – 22:00

    Authored by Gilad Atzmon,

    On election day, countless progressive and liberal commentators throughout the entire mainstream media were foolish enough to admit that the battle at stake wasn’t really about ‘Trump or Biden’ but about the ‘American way,’ the future, so to say, of the public discourse and public life in the USA. Progressives and liberals were confident enough to believe that with nearly 100 million ballots given in before election day, Americans had already cast an unprecedented spectacle of rejection of everything that may even mildly resemble ‘conservative values.’

    They were convinced that America had made its choice already. For them, I must assume, the election was just an act of formality. The battle was basically won already.

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    But then just a few hours later, it became clear that the pollsters failed them completely once again. The ‘Trumpsters’ refused to evaporate. They grew substantially and even expanded demographically into some ‘unexpected’ electoral territories traditionally associated with Democratic politics.

    The clear meaning of the election is that America, like most other Western states, is divided in the middle into two opposing societies that have very little in common.  Far more worrying is the clear fact that the two sides of the divide cannot tolerate each other. 

    As much as the Left, Progressives and Liberals are convinced by the absolute validity of their way of thinking, to the point that they insist to dictate them by authoritarian and tyrannical measures, at least as many people do not buy, follow and even reject those values.   Many Americans do not accept the identiterian shift. Many Americans are not convinced at all that gender isn’t binary.

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    I assume that most disappointing and worrying for the DNC is the fact that members of ‘diverse minorities’ as the Democrats call them, have switched sides.

    They became vocal Trump supporters.

    Watch a Cuban fusion band sings “I will Vote for Donald Trump”

    This is very easy to explain. 

    The Democratic Party offers Blacks, Gays, Latinos and so called ‘diverse minorities’ to be marginalized forever in an amalgam of ‘Others United’.  The GOP is offering those people an immediate integration as ordinary people into the American realm. All you need to do is get yourself a red Trump baseball cap and join your next local Trump rally. It is this most basic existential togetherness that was so vivid within the Left revolutionary discourse, but only materialized into a populist sustained tsunami of political resistance within the contexts of right-wing populist politics. 

    In the upside-down world in which we live, the Republican party has become the party of the American working-class people. People who are defined by their adherence to family values, the church, hard work and see themselves as the ‘Americans.’  The Democratic party that claimed to be the voice of those working people, has gradually morphed into an urban identiatrian conglomerate.  A collective of ‘as a’ people: humans who insist to identify with their biology:  ‘as a Woman,’ ‘as a Gay,’ ‘as a Trans,’ ‘as a Black,’ ‘as a Jew.’

    In the upside down world in which we live, the Left ended up adopting the most embarrassing and problematic Hitlerian ideological aspect: Unlike Italian fascism that adhered to the concept of ‘socialism of the Italian people,’ or early Nazism that pushed for the idea of ‘equality of German speaking people,’ Hitler insisted upon ‘socialism of one race.’ Hitler believed that people’s politics is intrinsic to their biology. As opposed to traditional inclusive Left thinking that was class oriented, the contemporary Left pushes people to identify politically on biological terms: ‘as a woman,’ ‘as a black,’ ‘as a gay,’ ‘as a trans’ etc. The GOP on the other hand, is coming closer and closer to universal class politics.  

    On the morning of the 3rd of November, the liberal press was ready to announce that the ‘as a’ philosophy had won. But as things stand right now, this  battle between the ‘as a’ people  and the ‘Americans’ may escalate into a real violent conflict as there is no one in America or anywhere else who knows how to unite the people into a simple concept of peoplehood. Again, this is hardly an American phenomenon. The exact same division and the lack of a political unifying prospect is currently apparent in every Western State.

    On Thursday, Wall Street rose substantially. Naturally, many commentators believed that our oligarchs and financial tycoons were excited by Biden’s likeliness to win the American election. But it may also be possible that Wall Street was way more thrilled by the prospect of a possible civil war. When people fight each other, capitalism, mammonism and usury can be celebrated mercilessly and boundlessly. This is exactly what Wall Street is after.   

    It may as well be possible that in the global universe in which we live, in a world where all existential concerns reintroduced themselves as ‘global threats’ to do with: global warming, global financial turmoil, global pandemics etc., a state of bitter civil war is exactly where global capitalism wants us the people to be. Democracy and the fantasy of political choice, as such, are just a camouflage. It is there to convey the image that the current chaos is merely our own choice or fault.  

    To understand ID politics and its disastrous impact on contemporary society read  Being in Time

  • Outgoing US Secretary Of State Holds One Last Twitter War With Iran's Ayatollah 
    Outgoing US Secretary Of State Holds One Last Twitter War With Iran's Ayatollah 

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 11/08/2020 – 21:35

    Outgoing US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this weekend apparently thought it time to engage in one last Twitter battle with Iranian officials. Over the past year both Pompeo and his Iranian counterpart Foreign Minister Javad Zarif have been very active on Twitter, sometimes hurling insults and competing claims at each other. 

    But on Saturday Pompeo directly engaged Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei just hours after major US networks in unison declared Joe Biden winner of the presidential election, which Trump is contesting. Khamenei declared the “decline of the US regime” in a tweet.

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    Perhaps Iran’s continued public mockery and gloating in the Trump loss finally got under Pompeo’s skin. Here’s what Ayatollah Khamenei put out Saturday just as results were called by the media: “The situation in the US & what they themselves say about their elections is a spectacle!” he wrote. 

    “This is an example of the ugly face of liberal democracy in the US. Regardless of the outcome, one thing is absolutely clear, the definite political, civil, & moral decline of the US regime.” And Pompeo was quick to lash out:

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    An angry Pompeo – who has been seen as a key Trump administration architect behind the most far-reaching sanctions on Iran in history – called Iranian elections “a joke” and charged the Supreme Leader with personally stealing “hundreds of millions of dollars from your people” while they “starve because you spend billions on proxy wars to protect your kleptocracy”.

    Not only is Iran gloating at this point because a Biden presidency opens up the likelihood of the softening of sanctions, but tensions are still high after the White House ordered the assassination of IRGC Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani. 

    Pompeo followed his initial response to Khamenei with the following:

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    Likely this will be the last big ‘twitter battle’ between the Trump White House and officials of the Islamic Republic.

    It’s also likely that Biden White House officials will be much less active in such belligerent Twitter ‘engagements’.

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    It’s expected that US-Iranian tensions will be greatly subdued under a Biden presidency, given he’s indicated he’ll restore America’s participation in the 2015 Obama-brokered Iranian nuclear deal so long as Tehran returns to its agreed upon uranium enrichment caps.

  • "There's Lots Of Shenanigans" – Lindsey Graham Urges Trump, Republicans Not To Concede To Biden
    "There's Lots Of Shenanigans" – Lindsey Graham Urges Trump, Republicans Not To Concede To Biden

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 11/08/2020 – 21:10

    Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

    Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called on President Donald Trump not to concede and to “fight hard” in the current legal battles that ensued as Democrat nominee Joe Biden declared victory.

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    While a number of news organizations called the presidential race for Biden, the Epoch Times will not declare a winner of the election until all results are certified and any legal challenges are resolved. State legislatures and the Electoral College are the bodies that certify presidential elections.

    “We will work with Biden if he wins, but Trump has not lost,” Graham told Fox Business on Sunday.

    “Do not concede, Mr. President. Fight hard.”

    The Trump campaign has not conceded and has launched legal challenges in several states over allegations of voter fraud and software glitches. Both Trump and his campaign have remained defiant, with the backing of a number of other Republicans.

    Graham, who recently won his reelection campaign, called on GOP colleges to “fight back, or we will accept our fate.”

    “I want Pennsylvania to explain to the American people how six people, after they die, can register and vote in Pennsylvania. I want the computer systems in Michigan that flip votes from Republicans to Democrats to be looked at, and the software was used all over the country,” Graham said.

    “There’s a lot of shenanigans going on here, and if I were President Trump, I would take all this to court, I’d fight back, and from a Republican point of view, mail-in balloting is a nightmare for us.”

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    President Donald Trump (L) visits his campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va., on Nov. 3, 2020. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images); Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden (R) speaks in Wilmington, Del., on Nov. 5, 2020. (Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo)

    Graham also said that John James, a GOP Senate candidate, should not concede in Michigan.

    He added:

    “The post office is now the new election center. It’s the Wild Wild West when it comes to mail-in balloting. Everything we worried about has come true, so if we don’t fight back in 2020, we’re never going to win again presidentially. A lot is at stake here.”

    The longtime lawmaker remarked that mainstream news outlets are not the ones who determine an election, urging Americans to “fight back” against their hegemony.

    “Do not accept the media’s declaration of Biden. Fight back,” Graham said.

    Georgia officials stated that a recount will be carried out in the state, while the Trump campaign told news outlets over the weekend that it will push Wisconsin for a recount.

    On Saturday, Trump’s team filed a lawsuit in Arizona, alleging Maricopa County of rejecting in-person voters on Election Day.

    Biden on Saturday declared victory and said he would try to unite Americans.

  • Iran Unveils New Ballistic Missile 'Magazines' For Rapid Underground Launches
    Iran Unveils New Ballistic Missile 'Magazines' For Rapid Underground Launches

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 11/08/2020 – 20:45

    More evidence has emerged from Iran that its ballistic missile capabilities as well as concealment methods have grown immensely in the past years. In a new report The Drive details that ‘ready-fire’ ballistic missiles have been filmed in an underground bunker that are capable of being moved from various underground locations into succession fire position quickly via large sophisticated missile launch “magazines”. The report describes:

    Video and photos have emerged showing for the first time an underground Iranian ballistic missile facility in which groups of missiles ready to fire are moved around massive tunnels using an automated railway-type system. The vertically-stowed missile “magazine” appears to bring groups of missiles into position for rapid, consecutive launching from the cavernous subterranean bunker.

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    Screenshot from the semi-official “Iran’s Military Achievements Media”

    State-linked media touted that “Wagons carrying ballistic and long-range missiles can create continuous shooting conditions in this platform.”

    It described further “the quantity and continuity of the missile fire will increase impressively in a safe atmosphere” protected from above-ground attack.

    The ready-to-launch ballistic missiles are placed on a railway-type system which acts as a rapid rotating magazine, seen starting at the 1:20 mark below:

    Iran had earlier this year showcased the successful firing of ballistic missiles fully hidden in camouflage deep under the ground, dubbed in Western media reports as “missile cities”.

    It’s believed that the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) established the network of underground silos and weapons transport passageways, which stretch for miles, to repel any sudden air assault by Israel, the United States or allies.

    The Drive report explained of the newly revealed bunker launch magazines:

    The thinking behind the system seems to be to allow launches of ballistic missiles in quick succession. Since the missiles on their individual platforms are ready to fire, there is no need to reload individual launchers using a crane or trans-loader. The magazine method would potentially allow many more missiles to be fired from a single bunker while increasing the chances of the outbound missile strike overwhelming anti-ballistic missile defenses.

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    This along with Iran’s recently unveiled long range anti-air missile defense system called the Bavar-373, which is said to rival Russia’s S-300 system, would make any external attack a potentially very difficult one, even with the superior aerial and radar evading technology possessed by the US and Israel.

  • Morgan Stanley: With Little Or No Stimulus Coming, Pandemic Developments Become Critical For Markets
    Morgan Stanley: With Little Or No Stimulus Coming, Pandemic Developments Become Critical For Markets

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 11/08/2020 – 20:20

    By Andrew Sheets, chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley

    It’s been a year of dramatic swings, and the 2020 US election was no exception. Prediction markets put former Vice President Joe Biden’s chances at about 70% on Tuesday afternoon, 25% at 10pm Eastern Time, 50% by midnight, 35% by 3am Wednesday and 80% by 10am. It was a roller-coaster night (and week) to cap a roller-coaster year, and the election may yet provide a final twist.

    For markets, the irony is that this roller-coaster of an election has meant relative tranquillity. Implied volatility has dropped sharply, and equities and credit have rallied back near local highs. Part of the reason may be that markets were already braced for uncertainty (the VIX ended October near 40), making it easier for them to follow the ‘usual’ pattern of struggling ahead of an election and improving afterwards. We saw the same in 2016.

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    A second key development is that ‘tail’ outcomes did not materialize. Before Tuesday, scenarios of a large sweep by Democrats seemed plausible. So did a surprise upset, given what happened in 2016. Either tail could have catalysed a large (and probably painful) adjustment to consensus positioning, but neither came to pass. Markets were left with a scenario that suggests fewer legislative changes and thus fewer portfolio changes, with one very important caveat I’ll address at the end.

    With it looking likely that Democrats will control the White House, but congressional power will remain divided, the chances of a larger and more proactive fiscal stimulus have fallen. ‘Proactive’ is the operative word here, as our US public policy team sees divided power leading to increased risk that more fiscal help wouldn’t arrive until economic problems worsen.

    It could mean that foreign policy sees more action than fiscal policy. We think that a Biden administration would be less open to a US-UK trade deal and more committed to the Good Friday Agreement than the current administration. Both factors would tilt the balance towards closer UK alignment with Europe and increase the chances of a ‘deal’ on Brexit. This is bullish GBP.

    Reactive fiscal stimulus (or none at all) also means that developments relating to the pandemic become more critical for markets. We’ll be closely watching COVID-19 case numbers, which are rising again in the US and Europe, and announcements on a vaccine, which our biotechnology team expects later this month. While we’re hopeful on the latter, mounting case numbers and no new fiscal relief have created some downside risk to the economic data in the near term.

    For US equities, this is one reason why my colleague Mike Wilson believes that the S&P 500 will stay in a 3100-3550 range as markets digest these overlapping narratives. We were at the low end a week ago and closer to the high end recently, but think that more time is needed before a ‘breakout’. This election doesn’t change our story of a sustainable economic recovery and an ongoing bull market for global equities and credit. We think that both remain intact in a divided government scenario.

    What about other markets? At the moment, our bullish cross-asset exposures are concentrated in owning global credit and selling equity volatility. We think that both remain attractive, even if major fiscal support isn’t forthcoming. In emerging markets, our strategists are more constructive on EMFX and credit than equities. We remain cautious on oil, given weak fundamentals, but have turned more constructive on several large EU energy majors.

    And we may see one final twist. Senate control is currently split 48-50 between Democrats and Republicans, but two Senate seats in Georgia, a state with a razor-thin margin in the presidential contest, are set for a run-off on January 5. These run-offs will determine whether we have a united or divided government, with enormous implications for policy outcomes. What we’ve just said about the election and the markets may need to be revised based on these results. We will let political experts opine on the probabilities, but expect these races to get an outsized amount of market attention. Stay tuned.

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    The 2020 election isn’t quite done, but as the vote count has worn on slowly, one result looks clear. The United States of America looks set to get a new president, with important implications for foreign and fiscal policy. But it’s also important to step back and pause. Markets, like politics, are fickle. The winds change, and much conventional wisdom regarding a change of government in 2000, 2008 and 2016 turned out to be decidedly wrong.

    This election isn’t a ‘game changer’ but simply one more step on America’s journey. Keep an open mind, and wish it the best.

  • Bill Gates-Funded 'Child Labor Is Good' Article Triggers Internet Outrage 
    Bill Gates-Funded 'Child Labor Is Good' Article Triggers Internet Outrage 

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 11/08/2020 – 19:55

    While the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has routinely strived to support people in extreme poverty by improving their health and economic mobility through various programs, the foundation may have gone off the deep end by bizarrely sponsoring an article that promotes child labor. 

    The article in question was published in The Guardian’s “Global Development” section on Friday is titled “Child labour doesn’t have to be exploitation – it gave me life skills.” Underneath the header, a logo of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is visible with text that says, “Global development is supported by” the foundation. 

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    Written by Elizabeth Sibale, the deputy chief of party at global impact firm Palladium, praises her childhood experience in Malawi, doing hard work for her family – such as food prepping, carrying water, and babysitting her siblings – as an example of the hard work she did to mold her into the women she is today. 

    “However, where do you draw the line between what has internationally deemed a crime and a natural process of transferring skills? Is international concern on child rights relevant to Africa?” Sibale said. 

    She said, “contrary to popular belief, most child labourers are employed by their parents rather than in manufacturing or the formal economy.” 

    Adding that “in Africa, where many areas have no social security or social services to support the vulnerable, families are responsible for educating and training the next generation to become capable adults.” 

    RT News points out that her opinion piece “was apparently built on discussions at a seminar held last month by Palladium. The point that cultures have different norms on what work should be considered appropriate for a child is hardly debatable.”

    RT, quoting the International Labor Organization, says child work that impeeds education or is hazardous is a form of child labor. 

    “The crux of the issue is how to treat dirt-poor parents, who keep their kids out of classrooms because they are needed to support the household. Sibale and her colleagues argue that westerners should mind their cultural biases when looking at domestic chores,” RT said.

    Apparently, some on Twitter were not pleased with the article, saying: “billionaire-funded ‘child labor is good’ takes has to be a new stage of capitalist dystopia.” 

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

    Someone tweeted: “Bill Gates is one of the good billionaires”.

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    Another person said, “Being a child soldier doesn’t have to be a negative experience. I learned a lot about discipline and psychological manipulation.” 

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    This Twitter handle makes a good point.

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  • Ilargi Meijer: Biden 'Is' The Swamp
    Ilargi Meijer: Biden 'Is' The Swamp

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 11/08/2020 – 19:30

    Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

    Since the US has no official institution to call an election soon after the polls have closed, and people want a result fast, it has befallen on the media to make the announcement. And by and large, this hasn’t been that big a deal. But when those same media have for 4 years relentlessly hounded one of the two candidates, it should be obvious that this “system” should not be applied. If only because it has no legal status whatsoever.

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    However, people both in the US and abroad don’t appear to be aware of this. So when the New York Times et al declare a winner, this is seen as an “official” announcement. It is not. That won’t come until the Electoral College gathers in December (8-14th?!). And at least until then, Trump will have every right to contest the election in court. Still, “world leaders” are congratulating the “next president”. Do they really not know how this works?

    The idea behind it all is obvious, of course: to make Trump look like a sore loser, and Biden the president-elect, a title the media claim they can bestow upon him. Do remember that both Biden’s and Kamala’s campaign were considered dead in the water at one point, before they were magically resurrected by the party machine, which ensured that =two people very unpopular in their own party now lead the ticket. Be careful what you wish for.

    In that light. I found this intriguing. Twitter adds a warning to this Trump tweet: “Official sources may not have called the race when this was Tweeted”. I haven’t seen one instance where they attached the same warning to tweets about Biden winning and being President Elect. But wouldn’t that be the same thing?

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    No, I don’t particularly mind Biden winning, Washington is a shit hole whoever occupies the White House and other posts, but this is not about Biden. It’s about the people behind him. About the people who elected him to be a candidate, and that’s not his voters; it’s the DNC, the FBI and media that made him possible.

    Everyone in the MSM is talking about Trump’s alleged lies, as they have for 5 screeching years, main news networks on Thursday even cut off/short a speech by the President of the United States -that must be a first-, but nobody reflects on the 5-year neverending constant lies they have all told ABOUT Trump, on the entire Russiagate episode, the Mueller report based on only lies, the whole shebang.

    The DNC that paid for the Steele dossier without which there would never have been a Mueller special counsel, commissioned by Rod Rosenstein when he was Deputy Attorney General, which was based on lies, exclusively, the FBI that used the Dossier to falsify FISA applications, people like Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler and Nancy Pelosi who kept on lying about having evidence of Russian collusion.

    And still these are the people accusing Trump of lying. And they feel they can get away with it, because their media also incessantly repeated their lies, and is still doing that. Forget for a moment about what you think about Donald Trump, and tell me how you feel about an attempt to unseat an elected American president with nothing but lies.

    Do you think that will be a one-off? If so, you’re blind. If Joe Biden and his handlers ever get into the White House, respect for the Office of the Presidency will still be gone, and it will be for a long time, decades. That’s the price the American people pay for the attempt to unseat Trump based on lies only. Do you really feel that’s a price worth paying? I suggest you give that some serious thought.

    With Biden you don’t just get Biden, you get the entire cabal that went after Trump: the Democratic Party, the media, the intelligence agencies. And yes, Biden was and is very much part of that cabal.

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    How people do not find that a whole lot scarier than Donald Trump is beyond me.

    If -and no that is not when- Joe Biden is inaugurated on January 20 2021, that cabal will take over the country. And we’ve seen plenty indications that they intend to make it impossible for the Republicans to ever get one of their own elected as president again. Moreover they will not be investigated for what they concocted over the past 4-5 years.

    How the Hillary campaign and the DNC leaked things to the FBI, and the FBI to the MSM, how they lied in courtrooms to get FISA applications on Trump campaign people like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. How they set up Lt.-Gen. Michael Flynn so he wouldn’t be Trump’s National Security Adviser, because Flynn knew too much.

    It’s a scheme so full of illegal actions that it will be devastating for the entire American political system if it is never investigated, or even if it isn’t investigated very very thoroughly, by an impartial party. And it won’t be if Biden becomes president.

    The cabal wants you to think this is about Trump, and any given way to get rid of him is justifiable no matter what, but that is a very dangerous way of thinking. If crimes have been committed, they must be brought into daylight and before a court.

    Problem is, of course, that at least half the nation has no idea of what’s been going on. Because they get their news and information from those media that are in on the whole deal. They won’t know that the DNC paid for the Steele Dossier, or that is was just a bunch of lies, or that the FBI knew this even before Rosenstein appointed Mueller as Special Counsel. All that has been kept away from them.

    And yes, 4 years ago Trump said he would fight the swamp, but landed right in the middle of it. Early in his presidency he found himself surrounded by the likes of McMaster, John Kelly, Tillerson, and many other swamp creatures, and today he still has people like Mike Pompeo. But at least Trump is an outsider, and if anything can ever be done to drain the swamp, it will have to come from an outsider. That it may take more than 4 years is something we have to take for granted.

    The swamp has fought back, and they may yet win. Joe Biden is the face of that. But people who celebrate that victory should think again, whether they like Trump or not. The swamp is not good for you, and it’s not good for your country, your rights, your freedoms. Its entire MO is to take all these away from you. This is not a partisan thing; the fat ass of the swamp easily fits and sits across the divide.

    Joe Biden is not Joe Biden, the man doesn’t stand for anything other than holding on to power while getting richer off that power. He’s done it for 47 years. Term limits are desperately needed in Washington, but the only people who can make that decision are those who profit most from not having term limits. If there’s one area where McConnell and Schumer and Pelosi and Lindsey Graham agree, it’s that.

    And meanwhile, Trump, unlike Joe Biden, is just Trump. He doesn’t represent a cabal, or a swamp. Even if he’s surrounded by them. Trump is not the biggest threat to America, that’s just something they’ve been wanting you to think for the past 4 years. Successfully, too, for millions of Americans.

    The swamp is the biggest threat, whether their handpuppets come in a Democratic or Republican disguise. But to recognize that, you would have to be able to think for yourself, and if you read or watch the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, you simply can’t do that. You just think you can.

    *  *  *

    We try to run the Automatic Earth on donations. Since ad revenue has collapsed, you are now not just a reader, but an integral part of the process that builds this site. Support the Automatic Earth in virustime, election time, all the time. Click at the top of the sidebars to donate with Paypal and Patreon.

  • US Futures Are Soaring, JPM Says 'Nasdaq Whale' Is Back
    US Futures Are Soaring, JPM Says 'Nasdaq Whale' Is Back

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 11/08/2020 – 19:19

    After the best post-election week since FDR, US equity futures are extending gains in the early Asia trading session…

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    Nasdaq is now up over 10% from the close the previous Friday…

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    The driver? A media-announced Biden win? Or is it simpler than that?

    As JPMorgan notes, the big vol player in TMT is back in the market…

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    But, as the chart shows above, JPMorgan warns that the last time this pushed Tech lower after activity died down, underperforming RTY & SPX in September.

    Given the move in NDX spot, JPMorgan says that a lot of the call spread buyers in early Oct are not back in play. It matters for price as the gamma produced is meaningful. Additionally, JPMorgan’s desk has seen upside buyers of IWM/RTY…

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    While stocks are storming higher, bonds are unchanged and the dollar is marginally lower.

  • NY Bar Association Recommends Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccine With No Exemptions
    NY Bar Association Recommends Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccine With No Exemptions

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 11/08/2020 – 19:05

    The New York State Bar Association is urging the state to adopt mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations once they become available – if ‘voluntary measures fail to protect public health’ – and has recommended following ‘current New York law‘ – including exemptions for “religious, philosophical or personal reasons,” according to the New York Law Journal.

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    “The authority of the state to respond to a public health crisis is well-established in constitutional law,” said Mary Beth Morrisey NY Bar association Health Law Section Task Force chair, in a Saturday statement.

    “In balancing the protection of the public’s health and civil liberties, the Public Health Law recognizes that a person’s health can and does affect others,” she continued. “It may become necessary to require that certain individuals or communities be vaccinated, such as healthcare workers and students, to protect the public’s health.”

    According to the Bar Association’s recommendation, “To protect the public’s health, it would be useful to provide guidance, consistent with existing law or a state emergency health powers act as proposed in Resolution #1, to assist state officials and state and local public health authorities should it be necessary for the state to consider the possibility of enacting a vaccine mandate.“

    They also recognize that the public needs to believe that the vaccine is safe and that it works.

    “A vaccine must not only be safe and efficacious; it must be publicly perceived as safe and efficacious.”

  • Pulling A Rosie Ruiz: The Risky Business Of Calling American Presidential Elections
    Pulling A Rosie Ruiz: The Risky Business Of Calling American Presidential Elections

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 11/08/2020 – 18:40

    Authored by Jonathan Turley,

    Being a legal analyst often makes you a killjoy at a party.  As millions broke out in celebration over the calling of the election for Joe Biden (including most of my immediate family), I watched with a mix of shared excitement and silent apprehension. It does appear that Biden won this election and his speech last night was the perfect pitch and message for a divided nation.  However, there are still legal challenges being filed in a half dozen, new affidavits containing troubling sworn allegations, and relatively close state contests. As someone who has covered presidential elections for networks going back to 2000, those challenges are like live torpedoes in the water – you do not know if one could actually hit below the water line. The issue for legal analysts is that, with the tabulations still occurring, there is little ability to judge allegations of voting irregularities.

    We still do not know if there is evidence of systemic fraud or irregularities. Indeed, I am getting the feeling that the Trump campaign does not know. Thus far, the Trump legal team has not submitted hard evidence as opposed to heated allegations.

    However, as millions celebrate at what they believe is the finish line, the greatest danger is a Rosie Ruiz election.

    Forty years ago, Ruiz became an infamous figure when she was declared the winner of the 84th Boston Marathon in 1980 as the fastest woman. After all, she was seen crossing the finish line before any other woman. The problem was that eight days later, she was found to have crossed the finish line by way of the subway.

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    The difference between the Boston Marathon and the presidential election is that the latter is designed to avoid a short-cut president-elect. First there is tabulating of ballots, followed by the canvassing of ballots, and then certification of the results. Challenges can continue through the certification stage that should end on December 8th.

    There is a certain Rosie Ruiz strategy that is used in elections, particularly in orchestrating a splashy finish and a victorious celebration.

    That was the case in 1960 with the election of John F. Kennedy.  Many historians believe that Kennedy actually lost the race to Richard Nixon. Instead he was declared the winner with 49.80% of the popular vote.  Widespread voting fraud was reported in Illinois and Texas that put Kennedy over the top. 

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    Much of those allegations were hashed out after the media declared Kennedy the winner and the campaign set the narrative with celebrations and transition announcements.

    After Bush led in Florida by only 1,784, his campaign rushed him out for a victory lap to create the image of the presumptive president elect. Thus, when the Democrats challenged the results and filed a flurry of lawsuits demanding recounts, they were viewed as fighting to reverse the will of the voters in seeking to strike ballots. The recount led to a change of only roughly 900 votes before, 41 days later, the election was effectively ended by the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore.

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    What happened next is often overlooked. Multiple studies found that Gore likely won Florida.  However, by that time, George Bush was already sworn in as the 43rd President of the United States. The point is clear.  The important thing is not whether you were in fact victorious but whether you were victorious when you passed the line of certification.

    Nevertheless, Mayor Kenney was demanding a concession “just as Al Gore did.” In reality, Gore did challenge that election and forced a recount that lasted 41 days. It turned out that the recount may not have identified the true vote count.

    To the credit of Joe Biden, he showed admirable restraint in claiming victory. The question is whether he will now show even greater leadership in supporting a full and open review of key state races.

    For its part, the Trump legal team will have to ramp up its game. Thus far, there has been a lack of focus and discipline . . . and a notable lack of real evidence. On Friday, a challenge in federal court in Las Vegas fizzled out for lack of such evidence in front of a clearly exasperated federal judge.

    In fairness to the Trump campaign, it is difficult to produce evidence if you have not been allowed access to balloting or key records. Moreover, there is some skepticism over claims that this election was effectively flawless, even in cities with long and checkered histories with voting irregularities. We have never had an election based on such massive numbers of mail-in balloting and there are obvious concerns over authentication of ballots.  The primary concern is not that tabulation workers are filling out ballots or burning ballots. Rather the concern is how mail-in ballots were sent out, authenticated, and processed.  There are many accounts of people receiving multiple ballots, groups filling out ballots on behalf of voters, and even some cases of votes filed for deceased individuals.

    In truth, the current allegations are more difficult to track than those in 2000. The Florida recount was largely mechanical and obvious. You had a bizarre “Butterfly ballot” and hanging chads on punch voting cards. The 2020 election involves questions of the authentication of ballots and calibration of tabulation equipment. If such standards are set too low, there would be virtually no instances of irregularity because the threshold standards are too low.  We simply do not know and would not know until there is greater access to information.

    All elections have such problems even without the use of tens of millions of mail-in ballots. The question is whether such irregularities are systemic or merely episodic. The current margins in states like Pennsylvania are not likely to be overcome by aggregating small pockets of challenged ballots.

    The Democrats have sought to ignore recounts or judicial review, the opposite position taken in 2000. The concern is that we still have had no meaningful access to the underlying evidence and, while the odds are not high, it is still possible that challenges could find traction in the courts. If there proves to be a real problem in a key state, the massive celebrations could change in character dramatically.

    Again, there is currently no evidence of systemic fraud in the election but there is ample reason to conduct reviews. Biden himself should tell the Democratic Party to support such scrutiny and transparency now that the initial tabulations are being completed. That is not easy for any politician, but it would be the ultimate presidential act by the presumptive president-elect. Biden is no Rosie Ruiz. Biden has shown a respect for the process and this was a hard fought victory. He can cross the line without mass transportive assistance. This is the way to show it.

  • Kerry For Climate Chief, Buttigieg For Veterans, Yates For DOJ: An Early Look At The Biden Cabinet
    Kerry For Climate Chief, Buttigieg For Veterans, Yates For DOJ: An Early Look At The Biden Cabinet

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 11/08/2020 – 18:30

    While Trump is still far from conceding the election, whose outcome is called not by the media, but by the Electoral College on Dec 14…

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    … Joe Biden is already busy forming his cabinet, where he need to draw a fine line between the hard-left progressive in the Democratic party (AOC has already been quite vocal in her criticism of how the Squad has been ignored) and centrist elements. Also, in addition to rolling out such new policies as fighting climate change and aggressively promoting women and minorities, Biden will focus on an economic team that will confront the surging unemployment and business slowdown touched off by the coronavirus pandemic. In total, as he builds out his economic team Biden will need to fill out the nearly two dozen cabinet-level positions in his administration.

    Starting at the very top, Bloomberg reports that Biden will look for a Treasury secretary and other key officials “to negotiate with Congress on more stimulus, roll back some of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts and mend relations with U.S. trading partners.” Among the contenders that have emerged to fill the top economic-policy job are Fed Governor Lael Brainard for Treasury and economist Heather Boushey as director of the National Economic Council.

    Other crucial jobs include naming the secretaries of Defense, State and Homeland Security, together responsible for carrying out administration policy and overseeing a federal bureaucracy with more than 2 million civilian employees.

    While Biden will be mindful of the possibility that a Republican-controlled Senate would almost certainly scuttle nominees for top posts who belong to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, liberal groups will be policing Biden’s choices closely, fearful that he won’t reach into their ranks for top positions but will instead choose “moderate” Democrats in his own mold. Biden may try to tamp down that sentiment by putting a liberals in jobs that don’t require Senate confirmation.

    Most importantly, this means that “the swamp” which Trump vowed to fight – and lost – is back, because in forming his cabinet, Biden will rely on an inner circle of longtime veterans from the Obama administration as well as Wall Streeters.

    Finally, while Biden could make history by naming the first women to lead the Defense and Treasury departments, his key White House advisers are likely to be White men.

    * * *

    With that in mind, here are some of the names being mentioned for the top jobs in a Biden administration according to Bloomberg:

    Treasury Department

    Lael Brainard, a member of the Fed board since 2014, is the clear favorite to become Treasury secretary. She has resisted loosening bank regulations at the Fed board, dissenting on several measures. On monetary policy, she has been a team player, going along with the majority in every vote. Her experience serving on the Fed board has given her a relationship with Fed Chair Jerome Powell, who plays an important role in orchestrating with Treasury on the response to a faltering economy in the pandemic.

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    Lael Brainard

    Brainard was undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs during the Obama administration. The Harvard-educated economist said in a speech last month that the biggest downside risk to her outlook would be “the failure of additional fiscal support to materialize,” which she said risks longer-term scarring to the economy’s growth potential. The Harvard-educated economist has highlighted some more progressive policies recently, such as the Community Reinvestment Act. In January, she gave a speech highlighting reform efforts necessary to encourage more lending in low- and moderate-income markets.

    The Biden team is also said to be looking at Jeff Zients, who was director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama. He was widely praised for his work to salvage the website associated with the Affordable Care Act, healthcare.gov, after a  disastrous initial rollout, and was then dubbed “Mr. Fix-it” in the administration. Also on the list are Sylvia Mathews Burwell, who was secretary of Health and Human Services under Obama, as well as Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former Fed governor and Treasury official.

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    Jeff Zients

    Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, one of Biden’s progressive rivals for the Democratic nomination, is said to want the job, but she would be a tough sell for confirmation if Republicans control the Senate and is deeply distrusted on Wall Street and in the business community.

    Fed Chairman

    While Biden is reportedly also working with ex-Fed official Roger Ferguson and Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic, both Black men, for the Treasury position, Bloomberg writes that Bostic is also being considered as a replacement for Powell, whose term is up in 2022. Ferguson was widely praised for his role coordinating the Fed’s response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when then central bank injected billions of dollars into the economy.

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    Rafael Bostic

    Council of Economic Advisers

    According to Bloomberg, Jared Bernstein, Biden’s chief economic adviser when he was vice president, has seen his name in contention.  A labor economist, Bernstein helped draft a rule almost doubling the salary threshold for overtime pay. Now a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, he is considered left of center and could be a bridge to the progressive wing of the party. He also was an informal adviser to the campaign.

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    Jared Bernstein

    Boushey is also a possibility. She is the president and chief executive officer of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a think tank launched in 2013 that focuses on inequality. She has focused on promoting policies such as paid sick days and child care.

    National Economic Council

    Boushey is also being considered for NEC director. She served as chief economist for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential transition team and was widely expected to have a prominent economic policy role had Clinton been elected.

    State Department

    Biden has two top candidates for secretary of state: longtime aide Antony Blinken, who served as Biden’s national security adviser. Blinken is a veteran Washington foreign policy hand. He worked as the Democratic staff director on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was deputy secretary of state from 2015-2017, when he helped implement the Obama administration’s policy pivot to Asia.

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    Antony Blinken

    He also worked in the Obama White House as special assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser. Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser who was on Biden’s short list for vice president, is also being mentioned but Rice would likely not be confirmed by a Republican-controlled Senate.

    Defense Department

    The odds-on favorite is Michele Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defense who was seen as Clinton’s pick for the job if she’d won in 2016. Flournoy was the highest-ranking woman in Pentagon history when she was the top adviser to then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates in 2009, and would be the first woman to run the Pentagon.

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    Michele Flournoy

    Another potential candidate is Jeh Johnson, who led the Department of Homeland Security under Obama and would be the first Black Defense secretary. Another name being mentioned is Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois. She served in the Army Illinois National Guard in Iraq, where she lost both of her legs in combat.

    Justice Department

    Sally Yates, a career federal prosecutor who was named deputy attorney general by Obama is among those being chatted about. She served as acting attorney general for 10 days at the beginning of the Trump administration until Trump fired her for insubordination after she refused to defend the ban on travelers from several Muslim-majority countries.d

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    Sally Yates

    Others under consideration are Senator Doug Jones of Alabama, who lost his re-election bid, and Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York who was fired by Trump.

    Homeland Security

    The top candidate is Lisa Monaco, who served as Obama’s homeland security adviser. He reportedly gave her the nickname “Dr. Doom” because of her dark assessments of the terrorism threat. She worked for the Biden campaign running what it called a “network” of teams vetting potential vice-presidential candidates. She also served on the committee advising Biden on a response to the coronavirus.

    Intelligence

    The leading contender to head either the CIA or be Director of National Intelligence is Avril Haines. She served as deputy national security adviser in the Obama administration. She was also deputy director of the CIA under Obama, the first woman to hold the position. In a top intelligence role, she would take the lead on rebuilding the intelligence community, aka the “deep state”, which has been at odds with Trump.

    Coronavirus Czar

    Biden has proposed creating a special position to oversee the response to the pandemic. Members of the coronavirus task force Biden assembled during the campaign could be considered, including Vivek Murthy, a former surgeon general under Obama, and David Kessler, who led the Food and Drug Administration in the Obama administration.

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    Vivek Murthy

    Biden has also said he wants Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases who has become a contrary voice to Trump about managing the pandemic, to have a role in his administration.

    Climate Chief

    Biden is considering establishing a new climate czar to coordinate efforts to fight global warming. Top candidates include former Secretary of State John Kerry, who helped broker the landmark Paris climate accord. During his more than a quarter-century representing Massachusetts in the Senate, Kerry led an unsuccessful push for a carbon cap-and-trade program. Another potential pick is Jay Inslee, the newly re-elected governor of Washington and self-styled “climate candidate” for the Democratic presidential nomination who has argued for a “full mobilization of the United States” to fight global warming. Inslee, who spent two terms in the U.S. House, also left an imprint on Biden’s climate plans, including the president-elect’s marquee plan to make U.S. electricity carbon-free by 2035. John Podesta, former President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, has also been mentioned.

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    John Kerry

    Environmental Protection Agency

    The EPA administrator post will be crucial to advancing Biden’s aggressive plans for fighting climate change. The top candidates are California air regulator Mary Nichols and Mississippi’s Heather McTeer Toney, a regional EPA administrator for several Southern states under Obama. For more than 50 years, Nichols has been at the vanguard of American environmentalism, pushing clean air and climate policies in California that are a model for the nation and the 13 states that specifically adhere to them. But the so-called “queen of green” could face opposition in a Republican-controlled Senate because of her high-profile status as an environmental leader and chief foe of Trump’s climate policy rollbacks. Toney was the first Black, female, and, having been elected at age 27, the youngest person ever to serve as mayor of Greenville, Mississippi. Now, she’s the national field director for the Mom’s Clean Air Force, a grassroots group dedicated to fighting air pollution. Also under consideration are former Delaware regulator and National Wildlife Federation Chief Executive Officer Collin O’Mara; former Connecticut regulator Dan Esty; former Washington State Governor Christine Gregoire; and Inslee.

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    Mary Nichols

    Health and Human Services

    The leading contenders are two women who Biden also considered for vice president: Representative Karen Bass of California, head of the Congressional Black Caucus, and New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham. Bass, who was a physician assistant before coming to Congress, has made health care a focus of her career. Her support Medicare-for-All legislation, which Biden has rejected, could make her a tough sell for confirmation to lead the agency that administers the health care system.

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    Michelle Lujan Grisham

    Before becoming governor, Grisham was New Mexico’s secretary of health and helped build up the state’s public health system. She was the first Democratic Hispanic elected governor of a U.S. state and the first female Democratic governor of New Mexico. She has led her state’s response to the coronavirus pandemic since the outbreak worsened in the spring.

    Housing and Urban Development

    Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who was also on the short list as a vice-presidential candidate, is under consideration. As a Black woman and the mayor of a majority Black city, she was praised for her response to the civil unrest last summer.

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    Keisha Lance Bottoms

    Transportation

    Phillip Washington, the head of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority is under consideration, as is Sarah Feinberg, the interim president of the New York City Transit Authority and former administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration.

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    Phillip Washington

    Veterans Affairs

    Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who ran against Biden in the primary is a distinct possibility. He was on Biden’s transition team and was a prominent surrogate for the nominee on the campaign trail. Buttigieg served as in the Navy Reserves in Afghanistan. He would be the first openly gay head of the agency.

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    Pete Buttigieg

    Duckworth was head of the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs. She was the first female double amputee elected to the Senate and first senator to give birth while in office. A Thai-American, she would be another Asian-American woman at the top of the Biden administration, along with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, whose mother was born in India. Duckworth, who was a lieutenant colonel in the Illinois Army National Guard, has ancestors who have served in every major U.S. conflict since the Revolutionary War.

    UN Ambassador

    Buttigieg has also been one of the names circulating for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Serving in this post, which has been a cabinet-level job in some administrations, would serve several purposes for Buttigieg. It would allow him to practice the seven languages he says he speaks –Norwegian, Spanish, Italian, Maltese, Arabic, Dari and French — and would burnish his foreign policy credentials should the 38-year-old decide to run for the presidency again.

    National Security Adviser

    Blinken, who is also being considered for the State Department, has worked with Biden since he was in the Senate. He said recently that the next administration’s foreign policy would aim to reverse the U.S.’s withdrawal from global affairs under Trump. “We’d actually show up again, day-in, day-out,” he told Axios in October. Rice is also a possibility for this job, which doesn’t require Senate confirmation. But she may not want it, since she had the same job in the Obama administration.

    Another strong candidate for a senior foreign policy position is Jake Sullivan, who served as Biden’s national security adviser when he was vice president and and was an adviser to Clinton when she was secretary of state.

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    Jake Sullivan

    Colin Kahl, who also served as Biden’s national security adviser when he was vice president, has also been considered.

    Agriculture Department

    Former Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota is most frequently mentioned. She has led a Democratic rural outreach group, the One Country Project, and has been active as a surrogate for Biden in rural areas.

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    Heidi Heitkamp

    Other candidates include Representative Cheri Bustos of Illinois, who leads the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee; California Agriculture Secretary Karen Ross, a former chief of staff to Obama Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, and Krysta Harden, a former Obama deputy agriculture secretary who now works with Vilsack as chief operating officer at the Dairy Export Council, are also often mentioned.

    Interior Department

    Retiring Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico is the top contender to be secretary of Interior. His father, Stewart Udall, was Interior secretary from 1961 to 1969 and is credited with a major expansion in federal land protection, including the creation of dozens of wildlife refuges, national parks and recreation areas. Udall, who says conservation is in his DNA, has laid out plans to enlist federal lands in the fight against climate change and has driven efforts to block drilling near the sandstone mesas and ruins of northwest New Mexico’s Greater Chaco region. Representative Deb Haaland, another Democrat from New Mexico, and Representative Raul Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona who leads the House Natural Resources Committee, also have won praise from environmental groups and been recommended to head the Interior Department.

    Chief of Staff

    The leading candidate is Ron Klain, who was Biden’s vice presidential chief of staff and led the Obama administration’s economic recovery and Ebola crisis response. Those experiences would be particularly relevant, given that Biden would be tackling coronavirus and the resulting economic downturn upon taking office.

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    Ron Klain

    Steve Ricchetti is also a former Biden vice-presidential chief of staff, and was chairman of Biden’s 2020 campaign. Also being mentioned is Zients, a co-chair of Biden’s transition team and a former director of the National Economic Council under Obama. Close associates such as Ted Kaufman, Biden’s longtime chief of staff in the Senate who led the transition team, and Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, could also play big roles in the inner circle.

    Other candidates:

    According to Politico, Meg Whitman is a likely frontrunner for the Commerce position, Ernest Moniz is seen as the most likely head of the Department of Energy.

    What about Republicans?

    According to Bloomberg, the close and bitter end to his fight with Trump will increase pressure on Biden to pick a Republican for his cabinet in a nod at bipartisanship, as Obama did with his first Defense secretary. Possible contenders include two Republicans who spoke at the Democratic convention: former Ohio Governor John Kasich and Meg Whitman, a tech executive who ran for California governor. He is also said to be considering the late Senator John McCain’s wife, Cindy McCain, for a role, along with Governor Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, former Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona and former Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania.

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    John Kasich

     

  • Exodus Coming? Four Trump Officials Left Posts As Ballots Were Counted
    Exodus Coming? Four Trump Officials Left Posts As Ballots Were Counted

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 11/08/2020 – 18:15

    Since election day on November 3rd three top officials have departed the Trump administration, and one other was demoted. All resignations were described as ‘sudden’ and unexpected, suggesting there could be more to come. 

    While there’s no significant evidence they were directly related to the election, it caused some media outlets to begin speculating that “a last-minute shake up” was on the immediate horizon, also as rumors persisted last week that Trump was set to fire CIA Director Gina Haspel as well as Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. 

    Either some didn’t want to serve in what was a possible four more years of the Trump administration, or alternately knowing that Trump was not going to concede in the event of defeat perhaps didn’t want to stick around for the spectacle of Trump digging in for the legal fight.

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    Via AP

    Below is a quick rundown of the latest administration departures in order of their exit.

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    James Jeffrey, US Special Envoy for Syria Engagement and the Global Coalition To Defeat ISIS

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    On Saturday a top State Department official appointed directly by the White House who oversees engagement with Middle East countries in the Levant announced that he is retiring. James Jeffrey, who for the past two years has been US Special Envoy for Syria Engagement and the Special Envoy to the Global Coalition To Defeat ISIS, is stepping down.

    The 74-year old career diplomat took over the post after the resignation of Brett McGurk. Jeffrey has been criticized as being too pro-Turkish and is seen as a Syria hawk, being among past foremost voices desiring regime change in Syria. Pro-Kurdish lobbying groups further see him as too much in Erdogan’s pocket.

    Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)

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    On Friday, Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, the official who oversees the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile unexpectedly resigned, or as Bloomberg White House correspondent Jenifer Jacobs reported, it appears she was pushed out. 

    Lisa Gordon-Hagerty was been head of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) since 2018, the first woman to ever serve in that position, which is a semi-autonomous arm of Department of Energy (DOE) charged with overseeing the safety and security of America’s nuclear weapons.

    Few details were confirmed by DOE as to the reasons behind the sudden resignation, though as Bloomberg’s Jacobs noted it remains that “some admin officials are unhappy politics are being played with semi-autonomous arm of Energy Dept.”

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    Bonnie Glick, Deputy Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development 

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    Getty Images

    And further deputy administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Bonnie Glick was pushed out Friday. Her post is the second highest at USAID which she held from 2019 through 2020.

    CNN noted that “Glick’s removal from the deputy administrator post came the same day that John Barsa’s term as acting administrator of the agency expires under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, and sources believe that she was fired so he could remain at the helm.”

    The administration subsequently confirmed that USAID has named Barsa to her now-vacant post. “[The] President has designated Mr. Barsa as the Acting Deputy Administrator of USAID, and he will begin those duties this evening and continue to lead the Agency in this new capacity,” USAID indicated Friday.

    Neil Chatterjee, Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission 

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    Also Thursday Trump demoted the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Neil Chatterjee.

    According to MSN Chatterjee “may have been demoted because of his support for clean energy”:

    “I knew when I embarked on this path that there could be blowback,” he told CNN on Friday. “I’m speculating, but if in fact this demotion is the result of blowback, I’m completely at peace with it. I did the right thing. I’m proud of it. I slept great last night.”

    But the biggest departures could come soon this week, given the past rocky relationship between Trump and key defense and intelligence chiefs, namely Haspel and Esper.

  • COVID-19 Is Not As Deadly As We Were Told… But Now What?
    COVID-19 Is Not As Deadly As We Were Told… But Now What?

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 11/08/2020 – 17:50

    Authored by Bruce Wilds via Advancing Time blog,

    In some ways, much of the election became about the handling of Covid-19. One thing we have learned since this monster out of China has spread across the world is that Covid-19 is not nearly as deadly as we once thought. Because of how things were handled in China fear exploded. This resulted in many people getting the image of Covid-19 hitting on the level of the black plague. We were presented with the idea trucks might roll down our streets with loudspeakers blaring, “Bring out your Dead!”.

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    On March first of this year, I published my fifth article on Covid-19. It seems I was early to the table claiming it had the potential to be a big deal. At the time some of those reading my articles criticized me for writing about a disease that didn’t exist. Like many people, I never would have predicted much of what has unfolded since. Whether it is because Covid-19 has become so politicized or because those in the scientific and medical community simply cannot agree as to the answers, so far many questions about Covid-19 have not been fully addressed. 

    Back in March, I put forth the following questions stating,” What we really need to know about the corona-virus is how it will affect us as individuals. At the time, the picture presented by governments was sketchy at best. Driven by agendas such as preventing panic and spinning the ramifications to lessen their toll on financial markets made what we were told unreliable. The big issue facing those interested at the time was what to expect and how to prepare. Below is a list of what I saw as the five most five crucial issues before us.

    • Just how deadly is this thing and what are the odds you will get it?

    • Are we looking at citywide lock-downs such as those that have been instituted in other countries?

    • Is it expected to return time and time again and how long before we know? 

    • If I or someone I know appears to start showing symptoms, what is the best course forward?

    • What are the long and short-term economic consequences of this outbreak?

    Covid-19 Is Not As Deadly As Thought

    In the minds of the public several concerns and issues remain unresolved. Whether it is because Covid-19 has become so politicized or because those in the scientific and medical community simply cannot agree on the answers the fact is many of these questions have not been fully addressed. Today, with it clear Covid-19 is not the “get it you die” killer we thought, the questions above have been replaced with several others. Most of us are not panicked but slowly becoming resolved to the fact we are living in a world that will never be the same. Our lifestyles have undergone some rapid social adjustments as the concerns of being stalked by such a virus have unsettled in.  

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    The public has good reason to be skeptical of what we are being told when the so-called experts can’t agree on how long a person should be quarantined and continue changing how long the virus can live on different surfaces. In truth, we have no idea how far this virus has spread. Remember, not everyone that has been infected has been tested. Many countries have few health care facilities and still suffer from a shortage of test kits. While this virus is particularly dangerous because many carriers of the infection show no symptoms the big question is whether it merits such stringent measures as to locking down the movement of people in large areas to stop its spread.

    Other issues revolve around when and how a vaccine will be received.  Most vaccines have very long study periods that most likely won’t be done before a vaccine is hastily rushed through development. This has led to growing questions and fear about whether it will be safe or how it effective it will be mean many Americans are not enthusiastically ready to be vaccinated. Talk about it being required or mandated does not sit well with a large part of the population. Of course, the bill for all of this will be massive and we the taxpayers will get stuck with all of it. All of this is truly an incoherent mess in which both social media and a bias media with an agenda have worked extremely hard to spin and politicize.  

    The mainstream narrative is that  Covid-19 remains a quite deadly and novel disease and there are no effective treatments. This means that society must do all it can to help the brave health authorities that care about saving lives including surrendering our liberties and shutting down the economy. with a second and possibly third wave ramping up across the U.S. and Europe and there’s nothing we can do to limit it except shut down businesses and halt the ability to travel and gather. Much of this narrative and hype is based on the idea every life is precious and equal. It discounts the fact quality of life matters. Keeping a ninety-five-year-old person with Covid-19 alive could be seen as not saving a life but merely extending it at great cost.

    Deaths Did Meet Predictions 

    Some covid skeptics might go as far as to argue this has become just as much about money as health, and we are talking trillions of dollars. Slow-moving incompetent overpaid bureaucrats within governments with strong agendas generate and control both the data and the narrative. Whether the goal of a government is to limit panic, deflect criticism from its failings, or simply generate the impression they have control of the situation we pay the price. When we step back and look at what has so far occurred we find that perhaps locking down societies doesn’t do much to combat the disease while it does do a lot to ruin people’s lives and livelihoods? 

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    The alternative narrative is very different. it is based on the idea that while covid-19 is a dangerous disease, it is not novel. Some people argue a combination of mostly OTC supplements could reasonably be expected to drop the severity of illness and the already low mortality rate by 90% or more. Common sense an assortment of very effective, inexpensive widely-available methods of preventatives exist that lessening its impact. Still, we are told health authorities have shown either zero interest in the results of such studies mainly conducted in poorer nations or they have actively run studies indicating these cheap, effective therapies could be dismissed.

    It appears someone is bending the truth when we hear or are told that in Sweden, where virtually nobody outside hospital settings uses masks, the 7-days rolling deaths per capita has been lower than in the U.S. for months. It is also lower than in the U.K. which is in a mask-wielding and lockdown craze. Even Germany is said to have more people dying with Covid-19 than Sweden does. Infection rates and spread trends since the height of summer now are beginning to look similar if you’re a massively mask-wearing country or not. In many ways, the ramifications of the media, big tech, and Orwellian governments using this virus to increase their control over a docile populace is even more threatening than the pandemic itself. 

    Today, just like months ago the long and short-term economic consequences of Covid-19 remain uncertain. Certain sectors of the economy are destined to continue taking it squarely on the chin. Businesses involved in things where people gather or move about remains in peril. The disruption of production and deliveries will continue to have a massive effect on business. Many small businesses without the financial resources to absorb losses and weather this storm have already failed and as this rolls on jobs will be lost and inequality will grow. Expect companies to continue shortening and reducing the weakest links in their supply chains. It is impossible to deny these long-term consequences will stay with as the threat of Covid-20 and 21 linger in the shadows just out of sight.

  • Yang Slams Democrats As Party Of 'Coastal Urban Elites'
    Yang Slams Democrats As Party Of 'Coastal Urban Elites'

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 11/08/2020 – 17:25

    Former Democratic Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang says his party needs to do some serious soul searching if they want to connect with working-class Americans, even if Joe Biden is elected president.

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    During a discussion panel on CNN this week, Yang said that Democrats are out of touch

    “You have to ask yourself, what has the Democratic Party been standing for in their minds?” said Yang, adding “And in their minds, the Democratic Party, unfortunately, has taken on this role of the coastal urban elites who are more concerned about policing various cultural issues than improving their way of life that has been declining for years.”

    Earlier in the discussion, Yang said that while campaigning “I would say, ‘Hey! I’m running for president!’ to a truck driver, retail worker, waitress in a diner, and they would say, ‘What party?’ And I’d say ‘Democrat’ and they would flinch like I said something really negative or I had just turned another color or something like that.”

    As the New York Post notes, Yang cautioned Democrats not to underestimate the size of Trump’s base in a Thursday tweet.

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  • Watch Live: Trump Campaign Press Conference After Giuliani Warns Of Election-Changing Evidence In PA
    Watch Live: Trump Campaign Press Conference After Giuliani Warns Of Election-Changing Evidence In PA

    Tyler Durden

    Sun, 11/08/2020 – 17:24

    Following earlier comments by Rudy Giuliani that the Trump campaign has evidence that may change the results of the presidential electoral map, the Trump campaign is holding a press conference from the Clark County Elections Department in Nevada.

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    Those in attendance include former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt and Chairman of the American Conservative Union Matt Schlapp.

    Trump supporters are holding a prayer vigil.

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    The campaign press conference is due to start at 1430ET:

    As PJMedia’s Matt Margolis reports, in an interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business, Giuliani said as many as 900,000 invalid ballots were cast in Pennsylvania, and that the Trump campaign will reveal this evidence in court.

    “These are facts of fraud,” Giuliani told Bartiromo.

    Bartiromo asked Giuliani if the Trump campaign believes it has enough evidence that it could alter the apparent results of the election.

    “Well, I think we have enough to change Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania election was a disaster,” Giuliani replied.

    “We have people that observed people being pushed out of the polling place. We have people who were suggested to vote the other way and shown how to do it. I’m giving you the big picture.”

    President Trump has insisted that the media has called the race for Biden prematurely. 

    “Joe Biden has not been certified as the winner of any states, let alone any of the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts, or states where our campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor,” President Trump said in a statement on Saturday.

    Additionally, Trump tweeted this afternoon:

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Nov 08

Today’s News 8th November 2020

  • Livid Luongo Lashes Out At Democrat "Depravity" Playing Out In Real-Time
    Livid Luongo Lashes Out At Democrat “Depravity” Playing Out In Real-Time

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 11/07/2020 – 23:15

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

    It is one thing to know your opponents have no soul. It is quite another to watch in real time their depravity play out with gleeful disdain.

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    Anyone saying that what is happening right now in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan etc. is not a conscious effort to rig an election is either a victim of propaganda or being willfully obtuse.

    Because they told us this is what would happen. Through the Transition Integrity Project and bread crumbs left throughout the campaign, we knew it would come to this.

    For weeks I’ve been saying I hope Trump’s performance is strong enough and his coattails long enough to preclude the Democrats and The Davos Crowd from trying to pull off the theft of the election.

    That they would see the magnitude of the problem in front of them and be stopped short by little things like math.

    And then realize that even if they did try and cheat it would be so transparent that nothing good for them would be gained by it. But they didn’t listen.

    Trump almost pulled it off. His numbers across the board were excellent, stunning even given everything that’s happened.

    He may yet pull this out and I support any and all efforts to do so, but it is looking quite grim today.

    The potential is there for the Republicans to pick up as many as twelve seats in the House while holding the Senate if not picking up a seat, depending on how the courts rule on the already well-documented fraud.

    Coattails that long are prima facia evidence that what’s happening with the presidential election is fraud. I won’t go into the list of red flags here, others have done a far better job (and are, frankly, more entertaining), but they are big enough and red enough to get even the laziest, porn-besotted bull in the world angry.

    And that’s what should be scaring the crap out of everyone on ‘the Left’ today. Because as we heard yesterday, with coattails that long and the amount of obscene behavior on display, the remaining members of the Democratic caucus in the House are scared… and not just for their political lives.

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    Speaker Nancy Pelosi was in damage-control mode, saying “but we held the House” — which they were supposed to expand their majority in — and are “on track to win the presidency,” which no one will take even remotely seriously.

    I’ve had visions of seeing Pelosi dragged out of the Capitol by her expensive dyed hair choking on her dentures while being arraigned for sedition, but her getting beaten with the ‘awesome power of the Speaker’s gavel’ and lynched by her own caucus for incompetence will be even more delicious.

    At around 2am Tuesday evening I realized that they were actually going to do this and I texted a friend the next morning. His response?

    “Civil war it is then.”

    There can be no other response to this from men and women of character. Exhaust every legal means possible, certainly, but remember that the courts are as corrupt as the county governments. Fear of reprisal makes men weak.

    The one thing Trump said in his post-election remarks that rang so true and with me and should ring true with every libertarian-leaning person (left or right) alive, that the process itself is corrupting. It corrupts everything it touches.

    Four years of the Democrats and the Media screaming about Russian collusion and undermining the legitimacy of Donald Trump inspired thousands of people to become corrupt poll workers, mailmen, supervisors of elections, party operatives and the like.

    And they obviously feel justified in this. They are, after all, the heroes of their own stories whose motives are pure and whose hearts are in the right place.

    If we just get rid of Orange Man Bad, everything wrong with America will be gone. Scapegoating is as old as mankind but it doesn’t work anymore now that we’ve internalized the story from the scapegoat’s point of view, Christ.

    So, all they have now is the unquenchable envy of Marxism which burns until it consumes everyone in retribution or they are put down like rabid dogs. That’s what is on display in these counting centers.

    On the other hand, even Trump’s detractors had to admit the guy did inspired work to try and bring as many people under his tent as possible. To right the wrongs they see in the most non-violent way possible, voting.

    But if that’s not good enough, if the message sent wasn’t strong enough through the ballot box, then that lesson will be taught in a far uglier way.

    This is why I excoriated the libertarians the other day. I could see this coming. Either cooler heads prevail or the grievances get settled with violence. It’s our job to be the voice in between, not sit on the sidelines like high school band nerds sitting through a football game.

    From a market perspective the threat of a marginally-empowered Harris presidency with he slimmest House majority any party has held in decades and a divided Senate means nothing gets done until the mid-terms.

    And any attempt by Harris and Obama to legislate through Executive Order will result in even more dramatic events than we’ve seen to date, including secession.

    This is why Bitcoin, gold, silver and U.S. Treasuries exploded to the upside. Big money moved into the most liquid assets, UST’s, while the marginal flow piled into safe havens and those worried about cross-border capital controls are running into Bitcoin and cryptos.

    Everyone is holding their collective breath while we grind towards the Great Reset with most of the first world either under lockdown over last year’s flu or paralyzed by political shenanigans which makes the U.S. look like Venezuela.

    The rising euro is a function of the lockdowns and the local need for liquidity. The spasming bonds markets blew out a lot of carry and interest rate trades this week. While the dollar looks like it’s getting killed, what’s really happening is trades betting on Harris destroying capital have reversed.

    And the focus now turns to the wholesale destruction of European economies. Oh well, Europe was a good thing while it lasted. Enjoy the return of feudalism, folks, maybe there will be something left for me to visit before I die.

    We still have our guns, FYI.

    And this is why Trump isn’t going anywhere. The Deplorables now have to become The Ungovernables. No more negotiations, discussions, turning the other cheek, etc.

    Ungovernable. Just say no to Commies.

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    Hey man, don’t let the midwit, white women off the hook there… in this Civil War race has nothin’ to do with it.

    Because no matter what vote totals you manufacture or political/judicial arms you twist no one can rule for long without the consent of the governed.

    This is not a LARP nor a drill. It is a simple statement of fact.

    If the men who keep the engine of the world running refuse to show up one day, the God of Power the Marxists all worship will vanish like Hillary’s emails.

    Ayn Rand wasn’t wrong about everything, folks.

    This is particularly true when nearly all of those men are armed and are the ones that grow the food, treat the water, patrol the streets and keep the lights on.

    The legal case is being built now to go to the State Legislatures, who are the ones who actually decide whose electors go to the Electoral College, and invalidate the votes in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan, at a minimum.

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    Getting those Republican-controlled legislatures to throw out the suggested results of a tainted election is exactly why the Electoral College exists. It is the last defense against mob rule and the corrupting nature of politics. The commies in the DNC and The Davos Crowd don’t like to hear that and frankly don’t care but that is the reality of it.

    That’s Trump’s path to the presidency at this point, because the votes will be tallied to ensure that he not only loses but lose by a large enough ‘electoral vote’ majority to nullify any rulings by the Supreme Court.

    Pelosi is prepared to invoke the 20th Amendment if there is no resolution on Inauguration day, January 20th through an act of Congress. This is why many House seats have not been called even though they are over.

    She made her choice. So did the all the people currently engaged in this theft. Now the nature of the State is clear for a majority of people to see.

    Civil War it is, then. Molon Labe.

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    Join My Patreon, you know the drill. Install Brave, ditto

  • You Can Now Pay $125,000 A Ticket For An Underwater Expedition To The Titanic
    You Can Now Pay $125,000 A Ticket For An Underwater Expedition To The Titanic

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 11/07/2020 – 22:45

    Today in “proof that the wealth gap is widening further and that people have too much money on their hands” news…

    The Titanic, more than 100 years after sinking while traveling from England to New York in 1912, is once again being turned into a tourist destination. Hopefully, this time around it works out a little better. 

    Yes, for $125,000 per ticket, you can now go back and re-live the world’s most famous maritime disaster, according to Sputnik News. In fact, there may be something fitting about re-living a massive disaster in 2020, but we digress. 

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    US civilian undersea exploration company OceanGate Expeditions is planning the trips for May 2021. The company is reportedly planning on six different dives to the wreck. They aim not only to cash in from tourists, but also to “conduct scientific research on sea life around the Titanic and create a 3-D model of its debris”.

    Stockton Rush, president of OceanGate Expeditions, told Bloomberg: “All the bones are gone. There are no bodies down there. There are boots and shoes and clothes that show where people were 100 years ago, and that is very somber.” 

    Actually it sounds kind of refreshing, relative to 2020 so far. 

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    He continued: “If this was just another money-losing wealthy person’s activity, I don’t see how it scales. We don’t take passengers, we don’t do trips, we don’t do rides. We’re doing an expedition.”

    Those who pony up the cash for the trip will have to pass an interview process, the company’s dive chief said: “We don’t want someone who is used to being catered to—a prima donna. We don’t have chocolates on the pillow.”

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    Rush also said that half of the people who have already booked tickets are also already booked as tourists for Virgin Galactic’s $250,000 per person journey past the borders of space (because of course they have). Two ticket holders have even scaled Everest. “We have others who have not done a lot of adventure travel or have done minimally—a safari, or they have been to Antarctica,” he said. 

    The trip will begin in Canada and will then sail 8 days to the Titanic’s wreckage. From there, there will be a 6 to 8 hour dive of the wreck.

  • Gridlock – Biden May Or May Not Win, But Trump Remains 'President' Of Red America
    Gridlock – Biden May Or May Not Win, But Trump Remains ‘President’ Of Red America

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 11/07/2020 – 22:15

    Authored by Alastair Crooke via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    One clear outcome of the U.S. election was the collapse of the promised ‘Blue Wave’ – an implosion that marks the ‘beginning of the end’ to a powerful spell enthralling the West. It was the delusion which Ron Chernow, the acclaimed U.S. presidential historian, gave credence, as he contemptuously dismissed America’s “topsy-turvy moment” as purely ephemeral, and a “surreal interlude in American life”:  No longer can it be said that there is one ‘normal’.  Win or lose the White House, Red Trumpism remains as ‘President’ for half America.

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    Biden, by contrast, served as the prospect for Restoration – a return to a hallowed consensus in American politics – to a reassuring ‘sanity’ of facts, science and truth. Biden, it was hoped, would be the agency over-lording a crushing electoral landslide that would terminate irrevocably Trump’s rude interruption of the ‘normal’.  Biden supporters were rallied, Mike Lind, the American academic and author has observed, around the idea of America moving toward a ‘managed’ society – based on ‘science’ – that would be essentially finessed and controlled by a managerial, expert class.

    Over time, Lind suggests, American society would begin to depart more, and more easily, from its republican roots, through a process already underway: via attempts to alter the Constitutional order, and other rules, to bring about a change in the way America is governed.

    The notion however, of what America – as Idea – now constitutes, has fractured into two tectonic plates, moving apart in very different directions – and likely to move even further apart as each ‘plate’ remains convinced that ‘it won’ – and the sweetness of victory has been stolen.

    The fracturing of the ‘One Normal’, by contrast, provides some kind of respite to much of the globe.

    The fact remains that the election has produced a result in which it is abundantly clear that one half of the American electorate precisely voted to oust the other half. It is gridlock – with the Supreme Court and Senate in the hands of one party, and the House of Representatives and White House (possibly) in the hands of the other.  As Glenn Greenwald warns:

    No matter what the final result, there will be substantial doubts about its legitimacy by one side or the other, perhaps both. And no deranged conspiracy thinking is required for that. An electoral system suffused with this much chaos, error, protracted outcomes and seemingly inexplicable reversals will sow doubt and distrust even among the most rational citizens.

    Though the maths and maps suggests Biden will likely reach 270 Electoral votes, the old saying ‘It ain’t over ’till it’s over’, holds true. The electoral vote scenarios in the key ‘swing states’ would only apply if there is no litigation, fraud or theft.  However all three are in play – If you are stuffing the ballot box, you first wait to see what the regular vote is, so that you know how many votes you ‘need’ (mathematical anomalies aside) to push your candidate over the top.  Trump, somewhat rashly, gave out the GOP vote calculations at 02.30 on Wednesday, and hey-presto, loads of absentee ballots suddenly arrived at certain polling stations at around 04.00.  That seems to have happened in Wisconsin, where over 100,000 Biden votes appeared seemingly out of nowhere on a flash drive delivered by hand from a Democratic district. That put Biden ahead in Wisconsin – but litigation is in process. Likewise, it appears that a huge “absentee ballot” dump appeared in Michigan that heavily favored Biden.

    This is just the beginning of a new and more uncertain phase that could go on for weeks. It may be that ultimately Congress will have to certify and make the final determination in late January. Meanwhile, there are some things we know with much higher certainty: The Republican majority in the Senate may hold until the 2024 election. So, even if Biden wins, his agenda will not hold through 2024.

    A President may emerge, but it will not be, as it were, a settled one:  He or she cannot make claim to the ‘will of the majority’.  Whomsoever is certified by Congress cannot truthfully say they represent ‘the nation’.  Consensus is fractured, and it is difficult to see any leadership that can bring Americans together as a ‘united people’.

    “There is not a single important cultural, religious, political or social force that is pulling Americans together more than it is pushing us apart,” David French notes in a new book Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.  French — an anti-Trump conservative — argues that America’s divisions are so great, and the political system so poorly designed to handle them, that secession may eventually be the result: “If we keep pushing people and pushing people and pushing people, you cannot assume that they won’t break”, he writes. (A 2018 poll found that nearly a quarter of each party – Democrat and Republican – characterized the opposing party as “evil”).

    An ideological split, and the concomitantly contested America as Idea has huge geo-political implications, reaching well beyond America itself –  and principally for Europe’s élites.  European leaders did not see it coming when Trump was elected in 2016. They misjudged Brexit. And this year, they misread U.S. politics once again. They yearned for a Biden win, and they (still) fail to see the connection between the popular rebellion of Red under Mr. Trump, and the angry protests occurring across Europe against lockdown.

    Separating tectonic plates – more strategically – usually signal a kind of dualism that betokens civil conflict.  In other words, their separation and moving apart turns into an ideological struggle for the nature of society and its institutional fabric.

    Historian, and former War College Professor, Mike Vlahos warns (echoing Lind), that, “there is, here: more of a hidden – and thus in a sense, occult struggle – by which over time, societies begin to depart more, and more easily, from their roots.  The western dominant élites presently are seeking to cement their hold over society [moving towards a ‘managed’ society]: To have full control over the direction of society, and, of course, a framework of rule that protects their wealth.”

    “Quite to the surprise of everyone, and given that the Republicans are being represented by a billionaire who has a great many friends in Manhattan – the Wall Street donors to the two campaigns, outnumber Trump’s donors for Biden by 5-to-1”.

    Why, Vlahos asks, would Wall Street invest in a man – Biden – and in a Party, ostensibly seeking to move America toward this ‘managed’ progressive society?  Is it because they are convinced of a need radically to restructure the world’s economy and geopolitical relations?  Is this then Vlahos’ occult struggle?

    Many of the élite hold that we are at that monumental inflection point at this moment –  In a nutshell, their narrative is simply this: the planet is already economically and demographically over-extended; the infinite economic expansion model is bust; and the global debt and government entitlement expenditure bubble too, is set to pop at the same moment.

    Mike Vlahos notes that in a curious way this American story mirrors that of ancient Rome in the last century of the Republic – with on the one hand, the élite Roman class, and on the other, the Populares, as Red Americans’ equivalent:

    “This is in fact the dual story of Rome in the last century of the Republic, and it tracks very well — with the transformation going on today [in the U.S.] — and it is a transformation … The society which emerged at the end of the Roman Revolution, and civil war … had too, a totally dominant élite class.

    “This was a new world, in which the great landowners, with their latifundia [the slave-land source of wealth], who had been the ‘Big Men’ leading the various factions in the civil wars, became the senatorial archons that dominated Roman life for the next five centuries — while the People, the Populares, were ground into a passive — not helpless — but generally dependent and non-participating element of Roman governance: This sapped away at the creative life of Rome, and eventually led to its coming apart.

    “… today American inequality is as great as in the period right before the French Revolution, and is mirrored in what was happening to Rome in that long century of transformation. The problem we have right now, and which is going to make this revolution more intense, is I think, the cynical conclusion and agenda of Blue to just leave behind the Americans they do not need [in the New Economy] – which is to say all of Red America, and to put them into a situation of hardship and marginalization, where they cannot coalesce, to form a rival — as it were — Popular Front.

    “What I think what we are seeing here [in the U.S.] is profound: American society – emerging from this passage, is going to be completely different.  And frankly, it already feels different. It already feels – as it has felt for the past four years – that we are in a rolling civil war norm now, in which deep societal strife is now the normal way in which we handle transfers of power.  Issues will be [momentarily] resolved, with the path of society [painfully] staked out through violent conflict. That is likely to be our path for decades ahead.

    “The problem with that in the shorter term, is that there is still enough of the nation aroused and ready to fight this process. The problem: Can the last energies of the Old Republic still be harnessed against this seemingly inevitable, transformation?”

    A ‘fourth industrial revolution’ is the only way by which to ‘square this circle’, according to this mindset. The Reset is purposefully aimed to disrupt all areas of life, albeit on a planetary scale.  Shock therapy, as it were, to change the way we humans think of ourselves, and our relationship with the world.  The Great Reset looks to a supply-side ‘miracle’, achieved through full-spectrum automation and robotics.  A world where the money is digital; the food is lab-grown; where everything is counted and controlled by giant monopolies; and everyday existence is micromanaged by ever-monitoring, ever-nudging AI that registers thoughts and feelings before the people even get a chance to make those thoughts.

  • China Leapfrogs US With World's First 6G Satellite Amid Raging Tech War 
    China Leapfrogs US With World’s First 6G Satellite Amid Raging Tech War 

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 11/07/2020 – 21:45

    As the US’ tech war with China continues to rage, China has leapfrogged the US in satellite telecommunication technology with the successful launch of the world’s first sixth-generation satellite into space. 

    The experimental satellite containing advanced telecommunications technology was launched Friday into low Earth orbit from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in China’s northern Shanxi Province, reported Asia Times. 

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    A Long March-6 carrier rocket’s payload consisted of the 6G satellite and 13 other satellites. A video of the launch was published on Twiter via the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.

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    The satellite, developed jointly by Chengdu Guoxing Aerospace Technology and Beijing MinoSpace Technology, will be used in a pilot testing program to trial 6G technology in space.

    According to Yicai Media Group, 6G is more than 100 times faster than 5G – enables seamless transmission, longer distances, faster speeds, and smaller power output from space to land-based communication devices. 

    6G technology is still in the beginning stages, but Friday’s launch appears to show China has moved ahead of the US in space-based testing. Many hurdles are still expected with the technology as testing will start near term. 

    The launch comes as the US and China are locked in a heated tech war. In 2019, President Trump tweeted the obvious: America must step up its efforts to develop and deploy cutting edge tech or face getting “left behind.” 

    “I want 5G, and even 6G, technology in the United States as soon as possible. It is far more powerful, faster, and smarter than the current standard. American companies must step up their efforts, or get left behind. There is no reason that we should be lagging behind on………”

  • Trump Campaign To Challenge Mail-In Ballots Counted In Absence Of GOP Observers In Battlefield States
    Trump Campaign To Challenge Mail-In Ballots Counted In Absence Of GOP Observers In Battlefield States

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 11/07/2020 – 21:15

    Authored by Allen Zhong via The Epoch Times,

    President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign will launch a lawsuit in Pennsylvania to challenge the mail-in ballots that have been counted without Republican poll watchers onsite.

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    Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney announced Saturday the lawsuit during a press conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with several Republican poll watchers who were prevented from entering the poll sites or the rights of poll-watching were blocked.

    A federal lawsuit will be filed on Monday in Pennsylvania and more expected in other states.

    “We’re going to file a federal lawsuit that will cover here [Philadelphia] and Pittsburgh, and we will have as many witnesses as the court needs. Right now, it could be as many as 90 witnesses,” Giuliani said.

    Several witnesses joined Giuliani during the press conference, all are local Philadelphia residents.

    Lisette Tarragano, one of the witnesses, said she was never allowed to enter the polling site along with other five to six Republican poll watchers.

    “I was never brought in. Actually, I never got past the first identification stage, they kept saying that mine as well as five or six other Republicans, their names hadn’t been entered into the system,” she said.

    Two other poll watchers, Darrell Brooks and Matt Silver said they were kept 15 to 20 feet away from the ballots.

    Silver also alleged that some unusual ballot boxes were witnessed inside the polling site.

    “There seem to be at least certain boxes seem to be in the same unusual pen, and seem to have very similar handwriting. Some boxes were normal, some boxes were like that,” he said.

    The Biden campaign, the Office of Philadelphia City Commissioners, the election division of Allegheny county government, and the Pennsylvania Department of State didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from The Epoch Times.

    It was reported that a Republican poll watcher was temporarily blocked on Election Day in Philadelphia.

    Kevin Feeley, a spokesman for the Philadelphia City Commissioners, admitted that the one poll watcher was prevented from entering the polling site on Nov. 3.

    “The mistake was corrected, and the guy was admitted,” he said, claiming it was an isolated incident.

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    During the election night, Trump led when the ballot canvassing started in several swing states including Pennsylvania. But the lead was diluted by the lately-counted mail-in ballots. In Pennsylvania, Democratic party presidential candidate Joe Biden took a slight lead after the mail-in ballots were counted.

    Because the results are very close and several lawsuits are ongoing over the election outcome in several battlefield states, it’s more and more clear that this election will be settled through the judicial system.

    The expected lawsuit by the Trump campaign will start another battle line over the outcome of the election in some swing states: mail-in ballots counted without Republican observers.

    Over the past few days, Trump has been vocal over the need to protect the sanctity of the ballot box while claiming that Democrats are trying to “steal” the election from him due to efforts to count late-arriving ballots, which he alleges are “illegal.” He and his legal teams have been arguing that mail-in ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 but received after election day should not be counted and that votes that were counted without Republican observers present in the ballot-counting centers should also be considered “illegal votes.”

    The U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito late Friday ordered Pennsylvania election officials to segregate ballots that arrived after Election Day.

  • China Deploys Trash-Collecting Robots Amid Automation Wave 
    China Deploys Trash-Collecting Robots Amid Automation Wave 

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 11/07/2020 – 20:45

    A “smart garbage sorting robot” was recently launched on the streets in eastern China, able to pick up and sort trash for an entire workday. 

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    China’s national newspaper, the People’s Daily, published a video this week showing the robot cruising down the sidewalk in the city of Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province on Oct. 28, identifying trash, then using its robotic arm to pick up the debris. It was reported the robot could operate for eight hours before the next charge, with the ability to pick up a total of 38.5 pounds of trash. 

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    Trash picking robots in China is just more evidence of how automation and artificial intelligence will displace millions of jobs, not only in China but worldwide by the end of the decade. 

    The World Economic Forum (WEF) released a report in October warning that robots could displace an estimated 85 million jobs by 2025. 

    “Automation, in tandem with the COVID-19 recession, is creating a ‘double disruption’ scenario for workers,” WEF wrote.

    “In addition to the current disruption from the pandemic-induced lockdowns and economic contraction, technological adoption by companies will transform tasks, jobs, and skills by 2025.”

    A future ruled by robots would likely result in policymakers worldwide enacting some form of People’s QE. 

  • The Kafka Election: Finding A Way Out Of The Maze
    The Kafka Election: Finding A Way Out Of The Maze

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 11/07/2020 – 20:15

    Authored by Frank Miele via RealClearPolitics.com,

    The 2020 election is a nightmare from which I — along with millions of others — am trying to awake.

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    Like many dark dreams, it is uncertain exactly what is happening. Phantasmic ballots come and go. Seemingly insurmountable Republican victories disappear into the mouth of a vote-munching machine and come out the other side as excremental — oops, I mean incremental — Democratic leads just beyond the reach of a recount. And as in any nightmare worth its salt, just when you think it’s about to end, a new trap door opens and you fall into yet one more level of confusion and chaos in a maze with no exit in sight.

    But this is America. It’s not supposed to be a Kafka novel.

    So how did we get to a place where, days after the election was held, despite many proclamations by news organizations to the contrary, we still don’t know who won, we don’t know who voted, and we don’t know for sure whether the rules were followed in either voting or counting?

    Various irregularities have been reported in five big cities, all in strategic states, and particularly in Detroit, Mich.; Philadelphia, Pa.; Atlanta, Ga.; Milwaukee, Wis.; and Las Vegas, Nev. The allegations range from mysterious ballot drops that seem to show tens of thousands of votes for Joe Biden and zero votes for President Trump, inexplicable record turnouts in late-counting counties (all Democrat-dominated) that far surpass turnouts in counties in other states where the votes were counted on a timely basis; and of course the illegal banning of election observers in those very counties where the most outrageous anomalies are reported.

    Democrats tell us that there is nothing to see here, and the compliant media dutifully moves along, unwilling to investigate on its own or even express any concern about potential wrongdoing. Even Fox News has turned into a lapdog for the Democrat Party, calling Arizona for Joe Biden long before anyone could know for sure which way the state would turn.

    On Thursday night, as Fulton County was just about to swing Georgia into the Biden column, CNN’s John King arrogantly lectured Donald Trump:

    “Guess what, Mr. President? We’re gonna count the votes, and if they favor you, we’re gonna show that. And if they don’t, we’re gonna show that. That’s how democracy works. We’re just counting the votes.”

    Um, no, that’s not the way it works. News channels don’t count a damn thing. They just report numbers shipped out by election offices in various counties across the country, and if CNN or any other news outfit were actually doing their jobs, they would be alert for patterns suggesting fraud in the numbers they report. If “just counting the votes” were all that it took to have a democracy, then Vladimir Putin’s Russia would be a glorious example of democracy, as would the Islamic Republic of Iran.

    But CNN and the New York Times see it differently. Here’s what the Times tweeted on Election Day:

    “The role of declaring the winner of a presidential election in the U.S. falls to the news media. The broadcast networks and cable news outlets have vowed to be prudent.”

    Well, yeah, I guess that’s better than vowing to be venal, egotistical, elitist, and dangerously biased, but that’s what the news outlets in the U.S. really are. I can’t think of a less qualified set of judges with whom to invest the power of judging winners and losers in the democratic process than Jake Tapper and Rachel Maddow.

    Yet they — and their Big (Tech) Brothers at Twitter and Facebook — have set themselves up as the moral authorities on election law. They insist that there is nothing improper about the election because, well, because it ended with the result they wanted. Anyone who disagrees with them, including the president of the United States, they label as a conspiracy theorist.

    But let’s think about it. Despite the total lack of curiosity exhibited by the mainstream media, there are many questions about both the casting and counting of votes in multiple states, and it all starts with the amorphous monster Trump has warned us about for months — mail-in balloting. Sadly, there is no way to verify the results of the election as accurate because no matter how many times you recount the votes, you will not be able to ascertain which ones are legal and which are illegal.

    When you vote in person, you first make an active choice to vote, confirm your identity as a registered voter to a poll worker, then mark your ballot privately but in the presence of other people, and finally hand it off to a poll worker who scans it directly into a vote-counting machine while you watch.

    In other words, you establish your legal right to vote and have a secure chain of custody of your ballot until it is scanned, which you yourself participate in.

    None of those steps is present in mail balloting. You are a passive recipient of a ballot, your identity is assumed rather than confirmed, you may be marking your ballot under pressure of either family members or strangers, and you send the ballot to an anonymous election worker through any number of insecure methods of transmission. You have no assurance that your vote has been counted, and what’s worse, you may not even be a participant in your own vote being cast in your name.

    The most important thing to remember about mail ballots is that once they are separated from their secrecy envelope, they are completely unidentifiable. They may have come from legal voters, or they may not have. They may have come in the mail, or they may have come in the soda delivery truck. They may have come one at a time, or they may have come 100,000 at a time.

    And no one will ever know.

    But the boobs on cable news say there is no reason to worry about mail ballots. They say we should just trust the folks who count the ballots because, well, why would anyone cheat to elect the most important public official in the world? Just move along, there’s nothing to see here.

    And that is what makes it so frustrating for not just the president but for his supporters who think there may have been deception in the vote-counting process. Because if there is fraud, how the hell do you prove it?

    There are only two avenues for a candidate who thinks he has been cheated out of a rightful victory, and both of them have the potential to make him look like (as Jim Acosta accused Trump of being) a “sore loser.” One is the judicial process, which is where we are now, and the other is a constitutional process, about which I will say more in a minute.

    The judicial process allows a candidate to go to court to present evidence of fraud or violations of law in the casting or counting of ballots, but then what? Trump’s lawyers have already proven that their election observers were illegally blocked from watching vote counting in Philadelphia. They are also making the case that illegal votes have been cast in Nevada, and raising serious concerns about why vote counting halted mysteriously in big Democrat-run cities during the small hours of the morning the day after the election. But if Republicans prove wrongdoing, what exactly is the solution? Remember, you can’t distinguish a legal vote from an illegal vote once they have been counted, so what can a judge do? What could the Supreme Court do?

    Well, in one small part, the Supreme Court is actually well-positioned to act. That’s because the court has already heard one case based on the constitutional provision that federal elections are the sole province of state legislatures. The court split 4-4 on a ruling that would have prohibited Pennsylvania from counting ballots received for three days after Election Day because that rule was implemented by a Pennsylvania court, not the Pennsylvania legislature. The federal judges ruled it was too late to change the lower court mandate, but ordered Pennsylvania to keep the late votes segregated in case the matter ripened into a controversy.

    Well, controversy it is. So it is expected that the full court — now including Amy Coney Barrett — will revisit the matter of those late ballots and very likely throw them out. There is little doubt that they are unconstitutional.

    But that could only reverse one small measure of mischief, and would not necessarily repair all of the errors of the election. For the rest of those — ones involving procedure or illegal ballots that cannot be distinguished from legal ballots — the courts have limited options. In fact, there really is only one certain judicial remedy, and it is so extreme that almost no one would envision it being used — namely, throwing out the results of the election and mandating a new election to be held in a particular state, be that Pennsylvania or elsewhere.

    This would obviously have to be done on an expedited basis since the Electoral College vote is scheduled on Dec. 14, but there is no reason why an election could not be held in a timely manner on a date determined by the court and administered by representatives of the court. Or perhaps I should say there is no reason why that could not be accomplished except for the lack of willingness to intervene that we can expect from either district judges or Supreme Court justices. It would be a heavy lift.

    So that brings us to the constitutional solution. This one is more elegant, but it still requires a heady dose of chutzpah. As noted, under Article II of the U.S. Constitution, the state legislatures are solely responsible for determining how each state’s electors are appointed. If a legislature were convinced that the presidential election in that state was tainted, it could convene and pass an emergency resolution declaring the election null and void and then choose to appoint a slate of electors by fiat. Since the claim of misconduct is being made by Republicans against Democrats, you can assume that it would take Republican-controlled legislatures to make such a bold move.

    Fortuitously, Republicans do control both houses of the legislature in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona. Nevada alone among the contested states has a Democratic legislature. If legislators are convinced that the presidency has been wrested out of Republican hands through chicanery or corruption, they could set the matter right by exercising their constitutional prerogative. This is a heavy lift also, but if states intend to ever exercise their authority under our federal system of government, there would be no more appropriate time to do so than when one party seeks to arrogate unto itself power that it has not earned through a free and fair election.

    The republic is at stake, and that’s not just a nightmare. It’s reality.

  • Watch Live: MSM-Annointed President-Elect Biden Makes A Statement
    Watch Live: MSM-Annointed President-Elect Biden Makes A Statement

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 11/07/2020 – 19:45

    Now that the American media have sanctified Joe Biden as President-Elect, despite ongoing lawsuits, recounts, and no state certifications, many of the world’s leaders were quick to virtue-signal their support for the Harris administration.

    “Kamala Harris is absolutely prepared to be president.” Christine Pelosi, Chair of the California Democratic Party Women’s Caucus, says the vice president-elect Kamala Harris is in a strong position to be the Democrats next presidential nominee in 2024.

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    While “declaring victory” was abhorrent just 24 hours ago, it is now apparently okay among social media giants as massive super-spreader-events swarm across the nation to celebrate the end of the virus, the end of oppression, the end of racism, the end of hitler, the end of white supremacy, and the beginning of a new blue dawn… or something like that.

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    We suspect Biden’s address will be full of the usual “unifying” themes, just as his earlier statement was:

    My fellow Americans – I am honored and humbled by the trust the American people have placed in me and in Vice President-elect Harris. In the face of unprecedented obstacles, a record number of Americans voted. Proving once again, that democracy beats deep in the heart of America. With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation. It’s time for America to unite. And to heal. We are the United States of America. And there’s nothing we can’t do, if we do it together.

    The pre-victory-speech warm-up…

    If only him and his AOC-following entourage really believed that.

    Watch Live (due to start at 2000ET):

  • The Mystery Of Taiwan
    The Mystery Of Taiwan

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 11/07/2020 – 19:15

    Authored by Amelia Janaskie via The American Institute for Economic Research,

    In 2020, most countries in the world locked down their societies with the goal of controlling the Covid-19 pandemic. There were some outliers. Sweden, Belarus, Tanzania, and some US states deployed little in the way of “nonpharmaceutical interventions.” 

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    Another fascinating outlier – often cited as a case in which a government handled the pandemic the correct way – was Taiwan. Indeed, Taiwan presents an anomaly in the mitigation and overall handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

    In terms of stringency, Taiwan ranks among the lowest in the world, with fewer controls than Sweden and far lower than the U.S.

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    The government did test at the border and introduce some minor controls but nowhere near that of most counties. In general, Taiwan rejected lockdown in favor of maintaining social and economic functioning. 

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    Source: Oxford University (stringency index) and Lancet 

    How did Taiwan fare in terms of cases? Taiwan has seen 573 cases, which is remarkably low for a country with a population of close to 24 million and a population density of 1,739 people per square mile. 

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    Source: Worldometer 

    In terms of death, the numbers are even more striking. Throughout the entire pandemic, Taiwan experienced only 7 deaths. Of the deaths, the individuals were in their 40s to 80s, the majority with preexisting health conditions.

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    Source: Worldometer 

    To put this in perspective, in a stringent terrority with similar demographics, LA County’s population is 10 million and population density is 2,500 per square mile – meaning slightly denser but less populated – but by contrast, it has had 309,000 cases and 7,000 deaths. 

    How did Taiwan maintain such low numbers?

    A paper from the Lancet aims to answer this question by providing a few explanations. The authors’ main claim is that Taiwan’s rapid mobilization is ascribed to pre-Covid medical institutions, which include the Taiwan CDC, established in 1990, and the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC). In addition, Taiwan’s outbreak of SARS in 2003 allowed them to create plans for managing a similar disease later on. 

    For example, a 2005 study of SARS in Taiwan already discussed preparation measures in the case of a new outbreak, explaining that focus must be directed towards the older and immunocompromised populations and hospitals should be managed vigilantly. 

    Drawing on previous experience, Taiwan created a culture in which masks are worn widely and implemented advanced contact tracing technologies and early screening of international travelers. However, masks were not worn by all citizens and were rather valued for its protection from air pollution. The Lancet authors attribute these strategies to Taiwan’s low cases and deaths.

    But here is a puzzle. Usually when public health intellectuals speak of a good handling of a pandemic, they express the need for widespread testing. That is followed by an exhortation to track and isolate. Again, Taiwan did some of this at the border. Taiwan did have a wide availability of tests – unlike the US – and did have an open testing approach so that anyone could get tested, symptomatic or not. 

    Even then, Taiwan had one of the lowest scores on tests per thousand of any country in the world. Only one person in 100,000 undertook a Covid-19 test. 

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    The government maintained open communication and transparency with its citizens. For example, the Taiwan CDC produced daily reports on the state of coronavirus in the country. Taiwan’s reports are not politicized attempts to generate hysteria (as in places like the US and other European countries), but are straightforward and concentrated on the actual numbers. 

    This same strategy was also at work in places that did not impose lockdowns, including South Dakota and Sweden. Although one could argue that top-down approaches to information are flawed, there is something to be said for a country that values transparency because it allows for the public to have greater trust in the information provided to them. 

    As former Taiwanese Vice President Chen has stated:

    “I would like to point out a critical element of the Taiwan Model: transparency. From the very beginning of the pandemic, the Taiwanese government has spared no effort in ensuring that the general public has open access to COVID-19 information.”

    Another explanation for Taiwan’s proactive approach is that it possesses first-hand information on coronavirus management from its SARS-CoV-1 experience in 2003, which has informed its response and mitigation plans. The fact that Taiwan has dealt with another coronavirus outbreak previously has allowed it to alleviate devastating effects in later years. 

    Taiwanese health authorities shared information with other countries. Former VP Chen explained why this was crucial, given the Taiwanese SARS experience in 2003:

    “International cooperation is the only way to fight a global outbreak….We are more than happy to share our knowledge, experience, and expertise with the international community. Taiwan can help, and Taiwan is helping.”

    Nevertheless, other countries and NGOs fail to recognize Taiwan’s unique knowledge and thus do not consider it in the competing market of information that could ultimately inform policy decisions. Perhaps one of the reasons for this issue is that the WHO refuses to acknowledge Taiwan’s independence from China, thus excluding the country from participating in discussions surrounding the pandemic. This stubbornness prevents the dissemination of useful information that could protect people from illness and economic affliction, thus only serving to create harm.

    We are still left with a mystery. Taiwan did not lock down. It did not widely test. And yet it had the lowest death rate per million of any populous country in the world. It experienced 0.3 deaths per million and ranks 189th in the world. 

    What, then, is the explanation? As much as public health authorities in the West want to consider policy as a decisive factor in the success or failure of pandemic response, the Taiwanese case might have nothing at all to do with the public policy response. 

    The real explanation deals with innate immunities from other vaccines or virus exposures. For example, a study found SARS-CoV-1 reactive T cells in patients who were infected with SARS 17 years ago. Even though about 680 people in Taiwan were infected with SARS in 2003, the study shows a possibility that enduring T cells could influence the effect SARS-CoV-2 has on people with certain preexisting immunities. A different study found that there were strong differences in mortalities between Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Western countries, suggesting that genetic factors may also play a role in these disparities.

    Although the extent of Taiwan’s governmental overstep and tracking could be viewed as constituting an infringement on individual rights and privacy, its lighter hand to Covid-19 management has proven wise. The country has seen extremely low cases and – more importantly – low death rates. 

    Its economic performance is projected to fare better than other countries. Taiwan is expected to experience a 0% growth rate in 2020 GDP – neither losing nor gaining in wealth – while US GDP is expected to contract by 3.5% in 2020. 

    The Lancet article draws on a significant conclusion regarding Taiwan, “While some aspects of the Taiwan approach might not be acceptable in other jurisdictions, the potential social and economic benefits of avoiding lockdown might alleviate some objections.” 

    This statement gets at the heart of Taiwan’s strategy: although the government may have overstepped relative to what was necessary, it was able to minimize costs by not shutting down or preventing all people from carrying on a normal life.

    There are undoubtedly other reasons accounting for Taiwan’s success, such as its low poverty levels. Still, Taiwan presents an important case study that warrants further investigation. In 2003, Taiwan faced one of the highest SARS infection rates in the world. Now, the Covid-19 infection rate in Taiwan is one of the lowest despite the country not locking down. 

    The Taiwanese case reveals something extraordinary about pandemic response. As much as public-health authorities imagine that the trajectory of a new virus can be influenced or even controlled by policies and responses, the current and past experiences of coronavirus illustrate a different point. The severity of a new virus might have far more to do with endogenous factors within a population rather than the political response. 

    According to the lockdown narrative, Taiwan did almost everything “wrong” but generated what might in fact be the best results in terms of public health of any country in the world.

  • Tesla Is Now Selling $250 Bottles Of Tequila
    Tesla Is Now Selling $250 Bottles Of Tequila

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 11/07/2020 – 18:45

    Tesla, which has now somehow been bestowed with a $407 billion market cap, has decided to go into the tequila business.

    The car company disruptive technology company launched its own brand of tequila on Thursday after CEO Elon Musk had joked about doing so back on April Fool’s Day in 2018. Musk said then that the company was looking to launch “Teslaquila”. Now, they have something with a different, but similar, name. 

    The bottles of “Tesla Tequila” are going for $250 each and appeared to have sold out within hours of the product going live on Tesla’s website, according to Reuters. 

    The product comes in bottle shaped like a lightning bolt, held up by a small stand. 

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    When Musk first tried to trademark the name “Teslaquila” in Mexico back in October 2018, the Tequila Regulatory Council argued that the name was too similar to “tequila”, which is a protected word.

    Mexico’s Tequila Regulatory Council approved of the new name, however, stating: “Tesla is now a certified brand of tequila under the strict regulations regarding our national drink.” The council said it would be made by Destiladora del Valle de Tequila, a major producer of tequilas.

    Tesla says the drink is being made by Nosotros Tequila, one of Destiladora del Valle de Tequila’s brands. The producer also makes bourbon, vodka and Canadian whisky. Tesla’s website says the tequila is only available in New York, California and Washington.

    Hey, it beats having to go through the trouble of conjuring up a new product reveal to take in extra cash, doesn’t it? Maybe Musk can send the NHTSA a bottle…

  • "I Am Done, I'll Not Vote Again" – One Middle-American Mom Rages At 'Real-Life Idiocracy'
    “I Am Done, I’ll Not Vote Again” – One Middle-American Mom Rages At ‘Real-Life Idiocracy’

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 11/07/2020 – 18:15

    Authored by ‘OHMama’ via The Burning Platform blog,

    I was born at the end of Gen X and the beginning of the Millennial Generation, and grew up in a middle class town. Life was good. Our home was modest but birthdays and Christmas were always generous, we went on yearly vacations, had 2 cars, and there was enough money for me to take dance classes and art lessons and be in Girl Scouts.

    My 1940s born Dad raised me to be patriotic and proud, to love the war bird airplanes of his era as much as he does, and to respect our flag and our country as a sacred thing. I grew up thinking that being an American was the greatest gift a person could have. I grew up thinking that our country was as strong, and honest and true as my Dad. I grew up thinking I was free.

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    As an adult, I have witnessed the world I grew up in fall to ruin. I have watched as our currency and our economy have been shamelessly corrupted beyond redemption. Since we’ve been married, my husband and I TWICE had our meager investment savings gutted by the market that we were told to invest in, now that pensions no longer exist and we working stiffs are on our own. We will be working until we die, because the Social Security we’ve been forced to pay into has also been robbed from under us.

    I have watched as our elected officials enter Congress as ordinary folks and leaves as multi millionaires. I have watched my blue collar husband get up at an ungodly hour every day and come home with an aching back that we pray will hold out long enough to get him to old age in one piece. Outside of shoes, socks and underwear, almost everything my family wears was bought used. We’ve been on one vacation in 12 years.

    We don’t have cell phones, or cable, or any sort of streaming services, just a landline and internet. We hardly ever eat out. Our house is 1400 square feet, no air conditioning. I cook from scratch and I can and I garden and I raise chickens for eggs and meat and I moonlight selling things on Etsy. Still it is barely enough to pay the bills that go up every year while service quality and the longevity of goods goes down. What I just described is the life you can live on 60K a year without going into debt.

    At last calculation, when you consider all of the federal, state and local taxes plus registration and user fees, Medicare and SS payroll taxes, almost a third of what my family earns is stolen by the govt each year. What’s left doesn’t go far, just enough to cover the basics and save a little for when the wolf howls at the door.

    I watched as my family’s health insurance was gutted and destroyed. Our private market insurance, which we had to have because my husband’s employer is too small to have a group plan, was made illegal. We were left with the option of either buying an Obamacare plan with unaffordable deductibles and insanely ridiculous out of pocket maxes, or paying the very gov’t that destroyed our healthcare a fine for not buying the gov’t mandated plan that we cannot afford. We now have short term insurance that isn’t really insurance at all, and I live in fear of one of us getting injured or sick with anything I can’t fix from the medicine cabinet.

    I have watched as education, which was already sketchy when I was a kid, became an all out joke of wholly unmathematical math, gold stars for all, and self-loathing anti-Americanism. My family has taken an enormous financial hit as I stay home to home school our child. At least she’ll be able to do old-fashioned math well enough to see how much they are screwing her. A silver lining to every cloud, I guess.

    I’ve sat by and held my tongue as I was called deplorable and a bitter clinger and told that I didn’t build that. I’ve been called a racist and a xenophobe and a chump and even an “ugly folk.” I’ve been told that I have privilege, and that I have inherent bias because of my skin color, and that my beloved husband and father are part of a horrible patriarchy. Not one goddamn bit of that is true, but if I dare say anything about it, it will be used as evidence of my racism and white fragility.

    Raised to be a Republican, I held my nose and voted for Bush, the Texas-talking blue blood from Connecticut who lied us into 2 wars and gave us the unpatriotic Patriot Act. I voted for McCain, the sociopathic neocon songbird “hero” that torpedoed the attempt to kill the Obamacare that’s killing my family financially. I held it again and voted for Romney, the vulture capitalist skunk that masquerades as a Republican while slithering over to the Democrat camp as often as they’ll tolerate his oily, loathsome presence.

    And I voted for Trump, who, if he did nothing else, at least gave a resounding Bronx cheer to the richly deserving smug hypocrites of DC. Thank you for that Mr. President, on behalf of all of us nobodies. God bless you for it.

    And now I have watched as people who hate me and mine and call for our destruction blatantly and openly stole the election and then gaslighted us and told us that it was honest and fair. I am watching as the GOP does NOTHING about it. They’re probably relieved that upstart Trump is gone so they can get back to their real jobs of lining their pockets and running interference for their corporate masters. I am watching as the media, in a manner that would make Stalin blush, is silencing anyone who dares question the legitimacy of this farce they call democracy. I know, it’s a republic, but I am so tired of explaining that to people I might as well give in and join them in ignorance.

    I will not vote again; they’ve made it abundantly clear that my voice doesn’t matter. Whatever irrational, suicidal lunacy the nanny states thinks is best is what I’ll get. What it decided I need is a geriatric pedophile who shouldn’t be charged with anything more rigorous than choosing between tapioca and rice pudding at the old folks home, and a casting couch skank who rails against racism while being a descendant of slave owners.

    I’m free to dismember a baby in my womb and kill it because “my body my choice”, but God help me if I won’t cover my face with a germ laden Linus-worthy security blanket or refuse let them inject genetically altering chemicals into my body or my child’s. I can be doxed, fired, shunned and destroyed for daring to venture that there are only 2 genders as proven by DNA, but a disease with a 99+% survival rate for most humans is a deadly pandemic worth murdering an economy over. Because science. Idiocracy is real, and we are living it. Dr. Lexus would be an improvement over Fauci.

    I am done. Don’t ask me to pledge to the flag, or salute the troops, or shoot fireworks on the 4th. It’s a sick, twisted, heartbreaking joke, this bloated, unrecognizable corpse of a republic that once was ours.

    I am not alone. Not sure how things continue to function when millions of citizens no longer feel any loyalty to or from the society they live in.

    I was raised to be a lady, and ladies don’t curse, but fuck these motherfuckers to hell and back for what they’ve done to me, and mine, and my country. All we Joe Blow Americans ever wanted was a little patch of land to raise a family, a job to pay the bills, and at least some illusion of freedom, and even that was too much for these human parasites. They want it all, mind, body and soul. Damn them. Damn them all.

    *  *  *

    The corrupt establishment will do anything to suppress sites like the Burning Platform from revealing the truth. The corporate media does this by demonetizing sites like mine by blackballing the site from advertising revenue. If you get value from this site, please keep it running with a donation.

  • "The Market Could Flip Again": Goldman Warns A "Blue Wave" May Still Be Coming
    “The Market Could Flip Again”: Goldman Warns A “Blue Wave” May Still Be Coming

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 11/07/2020 – 17:45

    “Election Surprise!”

    That’s the start of David Kostin’s latest Weekly research report, in which he writes that while online polling markets ultimately correctly predicted the outcome of the presidential election (absent an unprecedented overturning by the Supreme Ciurt of an election that the MSM has already called on behalf of Biden), the polls were way off in their broad pro-Democrat bias, and the result has been a dismal showing for Democrats who not only lost seats in the House, but failed to gain control of the Senate. As he explains, “a Blue Wave did not materialize early on election night as many pollsters had predicted. Almost as shocking to investors as Trump’s improbable victory in 2016 (just 22% on the day before the election) was the fact Democrats failed to capture a Senate majority and actually lost seats in the House.”

    Yet while Wall Street had pivoted to making a Blue Sweep the best possible outcome for risk assets ahead of the election, the eventual outcome showed not only how clueless financial strategists are, but how it is always price that makes the narrative: as Goldman reminds us, the equity market responded to the November 3rd outcome with a powerful rotation.

    On the day after Election Day, many of the popular Democratic sweep trades fell while positions likely to benefit from a divided government rallied sharply. For example, a basket of infrastructure spending beneficiaries fell by 5%, renewable energy stocks fell by 2%, and 10-year US Treasury yields fell by 14 bp. The Pharmaceutical industry and the NASDAQ-100 index each rallied by 4%.

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    This comes from the same Goldman which in November said that a Blue Sweep was great for stocks, writing that a blue wave would “likely prompt us to upgrade our forecasts. The reason is that it would sharply raise the probability of a fiscal stimulus package of at least $2 trillion shortly after the presidential inauguration on January 20, followed by longer-term spending increases on infrastructure, climate, health care and education that would at least match the likely longer-term tax increases on corporations and upper-income earners.”

    So, will Goldman now downgrade its forecasts?

    Underscoring Wall Street’s revisionism, on Friday JPMorgan’s Marko Kolanovic wrote that the election outcome “likely eliminates the Blue Wave scenario” which suddenly is “one of the most favorable scenarios for the market. A GOP senate majority should ensure that Trump’s pro-business policies stay intact (tax code, deregulation), and if Biden is confirmed we should be able to expect an easing of the trade war (which should boost global trade and corporate earnings growth).”

    He continued:

    Which we think would have been a more detrimental outcome for the market given a planned increase of corporate taxes (negative impact on earnings) and capital gains taxes (immediate selling of momentum/growth stocks), and potential for more progressive policies that would have negatively affected the market. Finally, there is also the potential for less market volatility (e.g. no more market disrupting tweets). Lower volatility could result in inflows to risk assets (e.g. inflow in volatility sensitive strategies like vol targeting, etc).

    Well, yes: with stocks enjoying a nearly 8% increase in the election week, it would be rather foolish of Wall Streeters to go back to their original thesis that a Blue Wave is bad for risk, and so we observed the greatest pivot in history since… 2016, when everyone predicted that a Trump victory would crash the market. The opposite happened, and we witnessed a similar case of unprecedented “thesis drift.”

    However, the greatest irony would emerge if after being written off for dead, a Blue Wave ultimately does emerge: as Kostin writes, “our client discussions since the election indicate that most investors believe a divided government is the most likely situation for the next two years. But what if the “Blue Wave” outcome has only been delayed by two months?”

    Here’s why: as we explained last week, the 117th Congress begins on January 3rd, but Senate control will not be known until after Jan. 5, 2021. Based on the latest information, the Senate split appears 50 Republicans and 48 Democrats. Neither the regular nor special Georgia Senate races had a candidate capture more than 50% of the votes, so a run-off will take place between the two leading candidates in each race.

    So if the Democrats win the presidency and both Georgia seats, Vice President Kamala Harris would break the tie, giving Democrats control of the Senate. Here, it’s worth noting that the odds of Democrats winning both races are very slim, with Republican David Perdue well ahead of his Democrat challenger Jon Ossoff in the first race…

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    … while the second one will see two GOP candidates, Kelly Loeffler and Doug Collins combine to take on Democrats Raphael Wornock and Deborah Jackson, with the republicans comfortably leading their democratic challengers.

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    In any case, assuming there is yet another shock outcome, Kostin notes that the policies of a Biden administration would differ dramatically depending on the results in Georgia.

    So what would be the equity implications of such an event, however unlikely it may be?

    Before we get into the details of Goldman’s explanation, we’d like to point out the obvious: stocks will continue ripping higher, because as we have said repeatedly, to markets it does not matter who the president is, as long as the Fed and central banks keep injecting liquidity, which as we showed yesterday, they’ll keep doing.

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    Going back to Kostin, he writes that since markets generally do not like uncertainty, the 6% rally in equities since Election Day suggests investors now expect a divided government, reducing the uncertainty associated with the potential for major policy changes.

    To be sure, since 1928 the median 12-month equity return during periods of divided federal government (12%) has typically exceeded the typical return when one political party controls Washington, DC (9%). Indicatively, Goldman’s unchanged S&P 500 year-end 2020 target remains 3600 (+3%) which would result in a calendar year return of 11.4%.

    So while there still remains some confusion as to what Trump will do now that the election has been called for Biden, according to Goldman, in 2020 the big source of uncertainty is control of the Senate rather than the White House.

    One more point here: looking at betting markets, Kostin notes that although the likelihood that both Georgia Senate seats flip from Republican control to Democratic appears very low, markets indicate that those probabilities are rising. As shown in the chart below, while prediction market odds of a Democratic sweep plummeted from 51% to 9% on Election Day, but have since risen to 23%. Policies that just a few days ago were the base case outlook for many investors, including over $2 trillion in virus-related fiscal spending, a potential infrastructure package, and the prospect of higher corporate tax rates, could suddenly again become possible. This, as Goldman previously explained, “could potentially lead to a higher level of corporate profits and equity prices, but they would also increase investor uncertainty.”

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    Ultimately, if we have yet another dramatic reversal in January and a Democratic Senate majority materializes after all, the Blue Wave/Divided government trades should reverse once again.

    Here, Goldman’s advice is that “portfolio managers should at least consider the prospect that Cyclicals could benefit from huge stimulus and more government borrowing could lead to a steeper yield curve that would benefit Financials and be less friendly to long-duration, high-growth Tech stocks.”

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    He concludes that beneficiaries of Trump’s 2017 tax reform might be exposed to higher corporate rates, parts of the Health Care sector could face regulatory scrutiny, and some Energy firms could be forced to contend with strengthened environmental regulations.

    So is a Blue Wave only a figment of Goldman’s imagination? Perhaps, but consider this: stock prices, like prediction markets, appear to be reflecting a rising risk of this outcome: as Kostin concludes, “at the end of this week, infrastructure stocks and rate-sensitive Financials recovered some of their post-election decline, while Tech stocks slipped.”

  • Information War? Internet Archive To Rewrite History With Alerts For 'Fact-Checked' Sites
    Information War? Internet Archive To Rewrite History With Alerts For ‘Fact-Checked’ Sites

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 11/07/2020 – 17:15

    Authored by Aaron Kesel via Activist Post,

    According to an Archive.org blog post, you will now know if a page was pulled down or received an alert over what “fact-checkers” consider “misinformation.”

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    This also includes “dead” web pages that were archived. The Internet Archive has started adding fact checks and context to Wayback Machine pages to explain just why the pages were removed. If a page was part of a disinformation campaign or pulled due to a policy violation, a distinct yellow banner will explain why.

    The fact checks will come from a variety of mainstream outlets, including FactCheck.org, Politifact, the Associated Press, and the Washington Post. Which absolutely in no way will be manipulated, right?

    Of course, that’s obvious sarcasm, as those controlling what is and isn’t disinformation will be the wolves guarding the hen house so to speak. A good question to ask is how does Archive.org treat verifiable information like the Bush administration lying about WMDs, the Al-Nayirah testimony lie that almost sunk us into a war with Afghanistan or the validated conspiratorial facts surrounding 9/11, like the hijackers being given Visas from the Saudi Arabia consulate, as documented by Michael Springmann, who worked as the Head of the Visa Department at the CIA’s consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

    Springman isn’t the only intelligence official who alleges the attack was allowed to happen. In addition, two veteran FBI investigators, FBI Agents Wright and John Vincent were told to back off investigating the Saudis and Osama Bin Laden, who was a CIA tactician expert used against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

    If that’s not enough, what about former CIA PROMIS whistleblower Michael Riconosciuto warning Colin Powell from prison months prior that 9/11 was about to take place through a liaison, his friend and one of my former sources, former FBI senior agent Ted L. Gunderson. All of these are factual holes in a story that if dared to be peeled back will reveal shocking secrets the U.S. government would rather keep hidden. How about the recently exposed lies about Syria’s chemical weapons attack in Douma 2018 whistleblown by several members of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, revealed by WikiLeaks?

    The one thing in common all this information has is that it could harm the U.S. and what’s often reflected as “National Security” — in other words, inconvenient truths that could hurt the government’s narrative on a story.

    Guess what? It was recently revealed this year amid all the CV-1984 chaos that Saudi Arabia was involved in the attacks. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) accidentally disclosed the name of a Saudi diplomat suspected of directing support to two al-Qaeda hijackers in the September 11, 2001 attacks, Yahoo News reported.

    Of course, if you follow Activist Post, we told you that court documents had revealed the Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington may have funded a “dry run” for the hijackings carried out by two Saudi employees years ago.

    Archive.org hopes users will “better understand what they are reading” in its archives run by government stooges who would likely flag this information as disinformation on 9/11. The website also says it strives for neutrality — one banner for context explained that including a page in the Wayback Machine “should not be seen” as endorsing the content. However, if you are pushing your opinion on someone else you are effectively endorsing the ideas of one of your fact-checkers.

    Fact-checkers have seen a lot of flak lately as they are exposed for doing nothing more than pushing their bias or information spinners for clicks. For example, this author wrote for The Mind Unleashed earlier this year that a scientific phenomenon known as an “air burst” was warned by NASA for near-passing asteroids above the Earth. The fact-checker for Lead Stories then defamed this author by spinning a perfectly normal article going through what an “air burst” is, why an atmospheric explosion could occur if the asteroids came closer enough to Earth and what protections NASA was working on for the future. Which, by doing so, they made a scientific article with more citations than most of these fact-checkers can dig up for their day jobs, into a malicious article. When in reality the malicious article was actually the fact-checkers responding article which when confronted about their erroneous defamatory remarks they refused to correct it; as such, this writer lost a job.

    Giving someone the power to fact-check with no accountability to anyone is a lot like giving someone a badge and hoping for them not to abuse their power over others. Oh wait, we have witnessed a lot of that this year. While you may view the metaphor of comparing fact-checking to police brutality as silly, there’s actually no better comparison as the fact-checkers treat information and those putting out unfortunate dark truths exactly the same way that police treat civilians, by beating the shit out of them. Albeit one is physical and the other is less direct, the fact still remains that fact-checkers bully their competition and act exactly as law enforcement does with a power mentality complex that they are above everyone else.

    Implementing a fact-checking solution that is a centralized mechanism powered by journalists they could easily control is certainly the CIA’s wet dream, as a CIA director was once quoted stating that once the public’s perception is confused about what is real and what is propaganda then their mission would be complete. Now you might think the CIA owning journalists is conspiratorial, but it happened with MKultra’s Operation Mockingbird and was showcased again in 2001 after 9/11, with every media outlet and their grandmother saying Iraq had WMDs, a blatant blunt lie.

    “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”

    – CIA Director William Casey during the first meeting of President Ronald Reagan’s Cabinet, as cited by CounterPunch.

    The other issue that is less conspiratorial, and one that needs to be highly considered is, what if the human doing the fact-checking lacks the proper skills to dig up information online, as not everyone is as skilled as this author when it comes to finding documents and data.

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    Activist Post has previously shown links between one such fact-checker, NewsGuard ,and the intelligence community. The fact that anyone wants to police information like they are the Ministry Of Truth should scare the living shit out of you. However, the truth is scarier than you can even imagine. Especially when it comes to 9/11, which if you want the truth add up all the available public information to determine what really happened, an attack that was not only allowed to happen but it was helped along and you would still have unanswered questions. But of course, the fact-checkers have all the answers right? Let’s go to war fact-checkers.

  • "Meet The New Resistance" – Mark Levin Rages At Democrats' "Cloward-Piven" Chaos Plan
    “Meet The New Resistance” – Mark Levin Rages At Democrats’ “Cloward-Piven” Chaos Plan

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 11/07/2020 – 16:45

    Richard Andrew Cloward and Francis Fox Piven are two names that are largely unfamiliar to the average American, but, as Mark Levin raged last night during an appearance on Fox’s Hannity show, their historical relevance is being seen all over the country today.

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    Outspoken conservative Mark Levin fumed at the violation of the Constitution in various states’ ballot collection procedures, blasting that “there’s more evidence of voter fraud than there was ever evidence of Russia collusion… so those that keep saying, let’s see the evidence, where the hell were you for the last four years?”

    The Democrats “believed in flooding the system, create chaos, grab power, and accuse your opponent of misbehavior… this is the ideology of two marxist professors – Cloward and Piven.”

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    And now Democrats are calling for unity? Levin adds…

    “I’m part of the new resistance, God forbid if our president doesn’t win.”

    “I am not uniting around [Biden] anymore than they united around our man.”

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    By way of background, as Brandon Smith detailed previously, in the mid-sixties at the height of the “social revolution” the line between democratic benevolence and outright communism became rather blurry. The Democratic Party, which controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, was used as the springboard by social engineers to introduce a new era of welfare initiatives enacted in the name of “defending the poor”, also known as the “Great Society Programs”. These initiatives, however, were driven by far more subversive and extreme motivations, and have been expanded on by every presidency since, Republican and Democrat alike.

    At Columbia University, sociologist professors Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven introduced a political strategy in 1966 in an article entitled ‘The Weight Of The Poor: A Strategy To End Poverty’.

    This article outlined a plan that they believed would eventually lead to the total transmutation of America into a full-fledged centralized welfare state (in other words, a collectivist enclave). The spearpoint of the Cloward-Piven strategy involved nothing less than economic sabotage against the U.S.

    Theoretically, according to the doctrine, a condition of overwhelming tension and strain could be engineered through the overloading of American welfare rolls, thereby smothering the entitlement program structure at the state and local level. The implosion of welfare benefits would facilitate a massive spike in poverty and desperation, creating a financial crisis that would lead to an even greater cycle of demand for a fully socialized system. This desperation would then “force” the federal government to concentrate all welfare programs under one roof, nationalize and enforce a socialist ideology, and ultimately, compact an immense level of power into the hands of a select few.

    Cloward and Piven claimed that this could be accomplished at a grassroots level through community activism, and, that it would facilitate a more compassionate federal authority, however, there are numerous problems with these assertions.

    The Cloward-Piven Strategy has nothing to do with grassroots activism, and accomplishes nothing tangible for the downtrodden poverty class. In fact, I would dare to say that Cloward and Piven as well as most social engineers are well aware that the concept ultimately only serves to give even more dominance to the establishment and pilfer even more freedom from the masses.

    Cloward-Piven is not limited to the destabilization of state and local welfare programs. It can easily be used against federal level entitlements, and in reality, is much more effective against an entity with the proven tendency towards exponential debt spending. Though the federal government may be able to borrow fiat dollars through the Federal Reserve to prolong welfare rolls while the states cannot, a more volatile threat arises when debt monetization begins to wear down the purchasing power of the currency. Weakened purchasing power results in reduced consumer activity, less industrial growth, less GDP, and obviously, more poverty. The dollar has lost approximately 98% of its purchasing power since 1972, and after 50 years of the so-called “War on Poverty”, nearly one third of the American population now repeatedly slips under the official poverty line.

    In the past decade alone, the number of people dependent on food stamps and EBT for their survival in the U.S. has doubled from 25 million people to nearly 50 million people. Those who receive some kind of payment from the government, including those on social security, disability, and veterans benefits, are approximately 100 million. Americans on social security do not consider themselves welfare recipients because they paid into the system, however, the point remains that if the federal money tap shuts down due to overwhelming participation, the checks will stop whether you paid into the system or not.

    In the end, it is the Federal Government itself that is most vulnerable to the Cloward-Piven Strategy, and I believe the goal is to set fire to ALL social structures in the U.S., then assimilate them into a new globalist system.

    But, as ominous as that all sounds, we need to back a little further since it was Saul Alinsky, an American community activist and political theorist in Chicago, that was the inspiration for Cloward and Piven.

    Alinksy grew impatient with the new leftist activists in the 1960’s. In his book ‘Rules for Radicals,’ (which is dedicated to Lucifer), he states, “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules” (Alinsky, 1972).

    When forced to do that, human agendas inevitably fall short. This gives the opportunity to replace the capitalist ‘rule book’ with a socialist one.

    The strategy was to mobilize people in poverty en/mass to overwhelm the government agencies with a flood of demands beyond these agencies’ capacity.

    This creates gridlock, and the aim was to bring the system down.

    Alinsky had contact with Hillary Clinton. You can see her letter to him in 1971(freebeacon.com). Clinton wrote her college thesis on ‘Alinsky and His Organizing Plan.’ Also, Barack Obama taught Alinsky 101 at the University of Chicago. How much Allinsky’s concepts actually influenced Clinton and Obama is open to debate. See David Horowitz’s book ‘Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model’ for more information.

    Other organizations rose up, such as Acorn, with the issue of “voting rights.” These organizations received support from people like George Soros (but that is another story).

    Now, let’s look at the playbook that developed from Cloward and Piven’s ideas.

    These steps have been incorrectly attributed by many to Saul Alinsky. While it is true that he didn’t write them, this much is true: the actual plan is real. It was inspired by Alinsky and enumerated by Cloward and Piven.

    Some people will react to this list; others will say that some of the steps are desirable goals.

    Nonetheless, you can quickly see how they fit into the socialistic goals of far-left politicians and others today.

    The 8 Steps to Create a Socialist State.

    1. Healthcare – Control healthcare and you control the people. HAPPENING NOW

    2. Poverty – Increase the Poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live. HAPPENING NOW

    3. Debt – Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty. HAPPENING NOW

    4. Gun Control – Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government. That way you are able to create a police state. HAPPENING NOW

    5. Welfare – Take control of every aspect of their lives. (Food, Housing, and Income) HAPPENING NOW

    6. Education – Take control of what people read and listen to us“ take control of what children learn in school. ALREADY DONE

    7. Religion – Remove the belief in the God from the Government and schools. ALREADY DONE

    8. Class Warfare – Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to take (Tax) the wealthy with the support of the poor. HAPPENING NOW

    Right now, as Geoffrey Grider explains, steps 1-5 and 8 are being executed right now in how our government is reacting to the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak, with steps, 6 and 7 already having been implemented since 2008. The American economy is being split into pieces right now by the combination of a $2 trillion dollar bailout with more coming, Americans under stay-at-home orders, and with more people right now on unemployment in two weeks of the coronavirus crisis than in the second year of the Great Depression of 1929.

    In fact, as Geoffrey Grider explains, the Cloward-Piven plan to collapse the American economy first began under President Obama.

    We thought we dodged a bullet with the election of Trump in 2016, but the last nine months of chaos in America was the rebirth of the Cloward-Piven strategy… And this does not end well… (as Brandon Smith previously noted):

    If we allow ourselves to fall into the trap of making the developing crisis about a singularly unimportant thing; then the elites get exactly what they want – an angry and desperate citizenry out for the blood of a middleman and out for the blood of each other, while they sit back, relax, and wait to swoop in as our financial saviors with strings attached.

    For those naïve enough to assume that Cloward-Piven is just a well intentioned activist method, it is important to understand that even if that were so, the effect of the Cloward-Piven Strategy will never achieve the goal its creators claimed to support. In my view, it is probable that they never really intended for it to produce wealth equality or an increased quality of life.

    The tactic can only decrease wealth security by making all citizens equally destitute. As we have seen in numerous socialist and communist experiments over the past century, economic harmonization never creates wealth or prosperity, it only siphons wealth from one area and redistributes it to others, evaporating much of it as it is squeezed through the grinding gears of the establishment machine. Socialism, in its very essence, elevates government to the role of all-pervasive parent, and casts the citizenry down into the role of dependent sniveling infant. Even in its most righteous form, Cloward-Piven seeks to make infants of us all, whether we like it or not.

    The key to achieving this is simple:

    “Don’t waste a crisis”?

    That is exactly what has happened in 2020, especially as it involved more that one crisis.

    The COVID-19 Crisis

    This pandemic has affected the lives of everyone. It has been 100 years since we have had anything like it. Tragically, people have died, and hospitals and the health care system have sought to overcome it. It has wrecked the economy, which was doing incredibly well before the pandemic. COVID-19 has been a major crisis.

    George Floyd’s Death

    The death of George Floyd, while in the custody of police officers in Minneapolis, in May, set off a firestorm of protests that have, in certain places, resulted in violence and destruction of property. In turn, this has resulted in issues related to police reform, law and order, etc. This, too, has been a major crisis.

    Now put these two crises together, and people, both in the community and in politics, have sought to promote wholesale changes in society. Not just ‘defunding the police,’ but more radical socialist goals for society.

    Remember, Black Lives Matter, which has been so easily endorsed by individuals and organizations, was founded by Marxist communists, who embraced socialist beliefs and positions.

    Simply put, that there are some who are taking advantage of the current crisis’ in America to promote far-reaching socialist goals that would change society radically for years to come.

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    Don’t believe us, here’s an interview with Frances Fox Piven from earlier this month as she discusses why disruption must be central to protests, the thorny questions of violence and property destruction…

    …this wave of protest is remarkable, and such a relief, to tell you the truth, because it really did look as though we were marching down the road to fascism.

    …

    It was the coming together of this [the killing of George Floyd] kind of inciting, outrageous act with the underlying conditions — and underlying conditions not only of hardship but also of gross incompetence on the part of the government in charge — which contributed to the sense that people could win something, that they could make an impact on their society.

    …

    Everybody seems to agree that we have to be nonviolent. I think that’s a judgment that has to be made for each movement action. I do agree that the public that we play to doesn’t like violence. But at the same time, the violent capacity of the crowd is an important way of defending its ability to exercise disruptive power.

    …

    This movement, Black Lives Matter, in particular, is very open to electoral activism. After the 1960s, activists drew a sharp line between protest activity and electoral activity, as if doing one meant you couldn’t do the other. What they did not keep in full view was the way in which protest activism affected electoral activism and the way in which electoral victories encouraged protest. We can see that pretty clearly now. I don’t think we’ll get a classical realignment, but I think we have to look forward to the destruction of the Republican Party…

    …Certainly a revolutionary transformation, yes. Something like a revolution. It’s hard to imagine a revolution in the old style, the French style, in the United States. But a revolutionary transformation in the United States, and in European countries as well.

    To be clear, this is not the majority of the protestors. The extreme left-wing is not the majority of people on the left within the Democratic Party.

    As Jason Brown notes, reflecting on the current crisis in America, we must acknowledge that there is an organized effort, by bad actors, foreign and domestic, that want to see the destruction of our republic.

    We cannot be intimidated by those that want to call us conspiracy theorists, or make fun of us and our “tin foil hats.” We have to speak truth to our elected officials and remind them that they work for us, and that we are not their subjects. 

    Putting an end to these revolutionary insurgents, is only possible if we recognize them for what they are. The first step to solving a problem, is acknowledging that you have one. We need to be united as a people because together we are strong. When we are divided along lines of race, gender, sexual orientation, and political ideology we are weak as we fight each other, rather than push back against those that are doing the damage to this country. We need to realize this and stop sabotaging our fellow Americans.

    That is America today. We are in the valley of decision, and we have to make a decision which way we want to go as a nation to become a full-blown socialist nation or hold fast to our present system as a free enterprise nation.

  • Forget GOAT, Look At GBOAT: The Greatest Bubble Of All Time
    Forget GOAT, Look At GBOAT: The Greatest Bubble Of All Time

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 11/07/2020 – 16:17

    Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

    So enjoy the GBOAT (greatest bubble of all time) but watch the clock.

    Sports fans debate who qualifies as GOAT–the greatest of all time: in hoops, Kobe, Jordan, Kareem, Magic; in boxing, Ali, and so forth.

    What we have today is GBOAT–the greatest bubble of all time That it’s GOAT is beyond doubt, as the charts below reveal.

    Bubbles have a few unique characteristics which cannot be captured by financial metrics. The most important such characteristic is that mainstream financial managers don’t see it as a bubble. For those who do admit valuations may be a bit stretched (heh), these professionals shrug and say that since the music’s still playing, they have to keep dancing, i.e. yes there may be a bubble but it won’t pop anytime soon.

    The other characteristic of a bubble is that it continues expanding far beyond historic valuation redlines, as if nothing in the real world (earnings, multiples, etc.) actually matters. Anyone proclaiming such extremes are unsustainable is laughed off the stage as extremes become more extreme, and those who bet against the tsunami of euphoric confidence that this isn’t a bubble can be found huddled in a cardboard box beneath the freeway overpass, begging for a handful of Cheetos.

    Another characteristic worth noting is the acceleration of duration, amplitude and volatility as bubbles reach their zenith. So while bulls are cheering the greatest post-election rally in 73 years (or was it 743 years? 2,743 years? Whatever…), they should be quaking in their designer boots for what increasingly manic rallies are signaling: it’s about to pop, baby.

    Jesse Felder of TheFelderReport.com succinctly summarized the case for GBOAT in This Is The Textbook Definition Of “Late Cycle” In The Stock Market (Zero Hedge).

    The charts below bolster the (painfully obvious) case for this being the greatest bubble of all time.

    Wilshire total stock market capitalization to nominal GDP: record disconnect from GDP.

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    Regression to trend: all-time high. (via advisorperspectives.com)

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    Private sector financial assets as a percentage of GDP: all-time high.

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    Every leg higher takes less time and reaches greater extremes:

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    So enjoy the greatest bubble of all time but watch the clock. Those Cinderella gains vanish at midnight.

    *  *  *

    My recent books:

    A Hacker’s Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook coming soon) Read the first section for free (PDF).

    Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
    (Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

    Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic ($5 (Kindle), $10 (print), ( audiobook): Read the first section for free (PDF).

    The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake $1.29 (Kindle), $8.95 (print); read the first chapters for free (PDF).

    Money and Work Unchained $6.95 (Kindle), $15 (print) Read the first section for free (PDF).

    *  *  *

    If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

  • Largest State-Run Chinese Newspaper Laughs At Trump In First Reaction To Biden 'Win'
    Largest State-Run Chinese Newspaper Laughs At Trump In First Reaction To Biden ‘Win’

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 11/07/2020 – 16:16

    Within mere minutes of major US networks in what appeared a coordinated effort declared Joe Biden President-Elect the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party issued it’s first reaction which took the form of gleeful mockery. 

    “HaHa,” tweeted the People’s Daily, the largest state-owned newspaper in China. Two laughing emoji were also included in the message.

    Clearly gloating as well as trolling President Trump who has waged a trade war and pressure campaign against Beijing that has plunged Sino-US relations to the lowest state since the Cold War, state-run People’s Daily retweeted Trump’s Saturday morning declaration asserting he had won “by a lot” – but with the following: 

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

    The tweet was issued just as the wires, including AP, projected Biden as winner of the 2020 presidential election. 

    Clearly Beijing is eager to not only have the “last laugh” but to rub it in as much as possible.

    The Associated Press along with others had previously reported the unsurprising view of leaders in China – that they were outright rooting for a Biden victory, pinning hopes on a change of administrations greatly easing tensions centered on trade, security, and technology.

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    The AP wrote last month that “a Biden presidency might restore a more predictable relationship after the shocks of Trump’s tariff war and his outreach to India, seen as a strategic rival, and Southeast Asian countries, with which Beijing has a series of territorial disputes, Chinese analysts say.”

    Citing one of these analysts who hopes for a ‘more stable’ situation to emerge under a Biden White House, the report said:

    At the least, Biden’s policy “won’t be as emotional and ridiculous as Trump’s,” said Yu Wanli, a professor of international relations at Beijing Language and Culture University.

    “Democrats appear less militant, so they may take more care to prevent even limited military conflicts and pay more attention to crisis management communication with China,” said Shi Yinhong of Renmin University in Beijing, one of the country’s most prominent scholars of international relations.

    Recall too that Trump while speaking from the White House and from the campaign trail in the past months had greatly increased his public references to the “Chinese virus” and “Wuhan virus” in very direct swipes at Beijing’s handling of the outbreak which originated in Wuhan late last year before spreading across the world.

    Given that public opinion polls in China revealed that more of the population expected a Trump victory, it appears they are breathing a sigh of relief today in Beijing. 

  • China Export Growth Jumps To 19 Month High, Defying Surging Yuan
    China Export Growth Jumps To 19 Month High, Defying Surging Yuan

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 11/07/2020 – 16:01

    While the global economy continues to suffer the consequences of the covid pandemic, with much of Europe entering lockdown 2.0, China’s economy is plowing ahead as if nothing ever happened. While a big part of China’s economic strength can be attributed to the record surge of total credit injected in the system in 2020…

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    … strong trade has also played a major part in the economic rebound: Overnight China reported that exports accelerated to 11.4% Y/Y in October from 9.9% Y/Y in September, the highest print since March 2019, with sequential growth up to +3.3% month-on-month (sa non-annualized) in October vs. 1.1% expansion in September. At the same time, imports moderated in October and grew 4.7% yoy compared with the 13.2% yoy increase in September, as temporary factors behind the strong imports in September – such as Huawei’s front-loading of chip imports – unwound.

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    The surge in exports to a one-and-a-half-year high took place even as the yuan has strengthened for 6 consecutive months.

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    So who was so aggressively buying Chinese goods even as they became increasingly more expensive?

    • Exports to the US accelerated to +22.5% yoy in October (vs. +20.5% yoy in September).
    • Growth of exports to ASEAN decelerated to +7.3% yoy from +14.4% yoy in September.
    • Exports to Japan improved and expanded by 5.7% yoy, vs -2.7% yoy in September.
    • Exports to EU stayed weak: exports to EU contracted by 7.0% yoy, vs -7.8% yoy growth in September.

    Broken down by category, exports of Covid-19 related products mostly slowed in October: exports of textile & fabric goods grew 14.8% yoy, vs 34.7% yoy in September; “working from home” related exports weakened as well – growth of exports in automatic data processing machines moderated to 26.7% yoy in October vs 45.3% yoy in September. Growth of exports in electronic integrated circuits decelerated to 13.9% yoy in October from 17.6% yoy in September. Exports of plastic articles remained strong however and grew 97.9% yoy in October vs 95.9% yoy in September. Housing related exports accelerated further – exports of furniture grew 32.3% yoy, vs 30.6% yoy in September. Exports of motor vehicles and parts strengthened in October. Exports of motor vehicles grew 15.1% yoy, vs 2.9% yoy in September, and exports of vehicle parts grew 31.3% yoy in October, vs 22.7% in September.

    Looking at imports, a bigger decline of crude oil imports and slower growth of integrated circuit imports are the main drivers behind the lower headline year-over-year import growth in October. In value terms, crude oil imports contracted further on a year-over-year basis by 36.0%, in comparison with the 14.1% yoy decline in September. Imports of integrated circuits slowed from +28.2% yoy to +15.8% yoy in October, largely as Huawei stopped its front-loading of chip imports. In volume terms, crude oil imports fell by 6.5% yoy, vs an increase of 17.6% yoy in September.

    In summary, while China’s export growth strengthened further in October on the back of stronger global growth and market share gains helped by stronger home related products, Import growth slowed in October on the unwinding of front-loaded chip imports by Huawei in September.

    The question is what happens in the next few months, as China aggressively halts imports from Australia, and with Europe’s economy set to contract sharply as a result of a new round of covid shutdowns.

  • US COVID-19 Deaths Top 1,000 For 4th Time This Week As World Awaits Biden Plan: Live Updates
    US COVID-19 Deaths Top 1,000 For 4th Time This Week As World Awaits Biden Plan: Live Updates

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 11/07/2020 – 15:35

    Summary:

    • US deaths top 1k for 4th day
    • Biden plans 12-member task force
    • US tops 100k new cases for 3rd straight day
    • Globally, world nears 49 million cases
    • Deaths slow after global record
    • JNJ launches new clinical trial
    • England rate of increase starts to slow
    • Norway’s capital imposes new restrictions
    • Singapore allows some bars to reopen

    * * *

    Update (1600ET): With more than 230,000 total deaths, the US death toll is rising again as deaths from COVID-19 topped 1,000 per day for the fourth day this week.

    As we noted earlier, the US saw more than 120,000 new infections for a second day on Friday and hospitalizations seemed headed for all-time highs.

    Following news earlier that President Donald Trump’s chief of staff had been infected, the world is waiting to see whether Biden’s victory will signal a turning point in the US response to the coronavirus pandemic, as he promises a newly aggressive federal effort to contain a virus that is spiking nationwide.

    On Monday, Biden is planning to name a 12-member task force, Axios reported. Italy approved a new pandemic relief package for businesses hit by the country’s second lockdown as infections hit yet another record, and Poland, Hungary and Iran also reported new daily records.

    * * *

    Update (1600ET):The US surged to a new record in cases since Thursday. Hospitalizations may be headed for all-time highs, too, and deaths are mounting as the presidency hangs in the balance. So far, COVID-19 hospitalizations have topped 100k on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday (remember, these numbers are reported with a 24-hour delay).

    Current hospitalizations rose Thursday to the highest since Aug. 5, Covid Tracking Project data show. That’s about 11% below previous peaks in April and July, although the data didn’t capture all states until shortly before the July peak. Now, the hit to the health-care system is getting worse fast: The number of coronavirus patients is up 16% in the past week.

     

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    The Midwest remains two to three times worse than every other U.S. region, with 548 daily cases per million people, based on the seven-day average.

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    States posting record cases Thursday included: New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Oregon, Idaho, Utah and Colorado.Ml

    * * *

    With the world still fixated on the US election, the US saw another 100k+ new COVID-19 cases yesterday, as testing continues to expand, the US has just become the first country in the world to post more than 100k new infections back-to-back.

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    Globally, the world reported nearly 600k new cases back-to-back in another record as European cases also continued to surge. Charts for the hardest-hit countries can all be seen below (courtesy of Bloomberg, which also relies on Johns Hopkins data). The number of confirmed cases globally has reached 48,590,825, according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The worldwide death toll has hit 1,231,616.

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    Moving back to the US, Pennsylvania coincidentally saw a record number of new cases yesterday as officials scrambled to count votes and reporters descended on the state in droves. Globally speaking, we also saw a record number of new deaths yesterday, though the number of fatalities has declined since, with 8,111 new deaths around the world.

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    Here’s some more COVID-19 news from Friday morning (text courtesy of Bloomberg):

    • Russia, Poland, Hungary, Austria and Romania reported surging cases. Meanwhile, U.S., infections increased 1.3% on Friday, with Iowa, North Dakota, Michigan and Colorado seeing the biggest single-day rises, Malaysia recorded its largest single-day increase of 1,755 infections on Friday, even as authorities impose tighter movement restrictions.
    • Singapore will allow some bars and nightclubs to re-open from next month in a pilot program as it takes another step toward normalization encouraged by dwindling coronavirus cases.
    • While the WHO is studying a mutation of SARS-CoV-2 found in an outbreak in Denmark’s mink population, it doesn’t share the European country’s view that the new strain may lessen the effectiveness of current Covid-19 vaccine candidates, WHO’s Executive Director Michael Ryan said at a briefing.
    • Norway’s capital has ordered that cinemas, training centers and swimming halls be closed and has banned the service of alcohol to slow a rise in infections. The curbs come after Prime Minister Erna Solberg on Thursday introduced tighter rules nationwide and implored people to stay home.
    • Johnson & Johnson will imminently start clinical trials of its Covid-19 vaccine in South Africa after getting regulatory approval, according to the co-chair of the study in the country. Meanwhile, scientists monitoring wastewater in the Western Cape province detected spikes of the coronavirus in the last three weeks as concerns grow among the government that a lack of compliance with health guidelines may trigger a second wave.
    • The rate of increase of Covid-19 infections in England is starting to slow, according to new figures published Friday by the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics. The total rate of infections rose to one in 90 in the week through Oct. 31 in England, according to new figures published Friday by the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics. While this up from the previous published rate of 1 in 100, the increase is less steep compared with previous weeks, according to ONS.
    • Romania topped 10,000 new coronavirus cases over 24 hours on Friday for the first time since the pandemic started, ahead of nationwide night-time curfew, shopping hour curbs, school closures and mandatory masks coming into force next week. “People will be unhappy with these measures, but they had to be taken before it’s too late,” the government’s virus task force official Raed Arafat said on Friday. “We still expect an increase in cases for now, so we insist to keep these measures in place for at least 30 days so they have an impact.”

  • Let's Take Stock Of Where We Are
    Let’s Take Stock Of Where We Are

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 11/07/2020 – 15:15

    Authored by Michael Anton via American Greatness,

    If the Democrats just ram these election results through without explaining, then the legitimacy not just of our electoral system but of our entire government may suffer a fatal blow…

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    The 2020 election in particular, and our electoral process in general, have been badly compromised.

    First there have been the successful efforts by Democrats to loosen electoral administration standards and practices by legalizing ballot harvesting (where partisan “volunteers” go out and collect ballots as well as “assist” voters in filling out their ballots), allowing same-day voter registration, mass mail-in voting, and the like. On the flipside we have Democrats tenaciously fighting any efforts to shore up the integrity of the system, such as requiring ID and proof of citizenship to vote. 

    Couple all of this with unprecedented last minute rule changes on the eve of what was sure to be the most contested election in generations, if not in American history: all changes designed to favor one side over the other.

    Theoretically, none of these measures guaranteed a compromised vote. Theoretically, it’s possible that a system designed to be gamed and abused won’t be. But a party concerned about the integrity of the system wouldn’t expend so much effort making it easier to rig elections; it would do the opposite. The other party, the one trying to do exactly that (if all too often in a desultory, half-hearted way) nevertheless gets attacked as the enemy of “democracy.”

    Second were all the ways the media, legacy and social, engaged in saturation broadcast of only one side of the story and deliberately suppressed any mention of the other. These enormous in-kind contributions massively outweighed the paltry $10 million Russians allegedly spent on pro-Trump Facebook ads in 2016. Yet we are insistently told that Trump’s 2016 victory was illegitimate owing to “the Russians” while everything Google, Twitter, Facebook, the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and the Associated Press (to name a few) did for Biden either had no effect at all or was totally aboveboard.

    Third are the hundreds of lawsuits filed throughout the land by the president’s enemies, all geared toward benefitting Democrats and harming Republicans.

    Fourth are the irregularities in the voting and counting that began in the wee hours on November 4 and continue to this minute, including but not limited to: inexplicably halting the counts in five states late on election night; the continuing, and mysterious “finding” of huge tranches of ballots overwhelmingly—and in some cases exclusively—for Biden; computer “glitches” that flipped Republican votes into the Democrats’ column; people showing up to vote in person only to be told that they had already voted absentee when they had never request an absentee ballot; Democratic-controlled states limiting access to Republican observers even in defiance of court orders; etc.

    Now, it’s possible that each of these, and many other, shady-looking events has an innocent and plausible explanation. If so, we should be told what they are.

    But mostly we’re not being told. Instead anyone who asks is either ignored or, more likely, told to shut up and called a conspiracy theorist and an enemy of democracy.

    You’d think that if state and local election officials had innocent explanations for all these instances of alleged irregularity, they’d offer them. You’d think further that it would be in their interest to explain. Does Joe Biden really want to take office with half the country thinking he stole it? They can shout in our faces all they want—and they will—but shouting will not convince. They need to persuade. They need to explain. And their explanations need to be true.

    Far from seeing any effort to explain, all I see is an enlivened and merciless push to ram through the results while censoring and slandering anyone who asks questions or points out irregularities. Either they don’t have explanations, or they don’t care what we think. Or both.

    There is something to be said—from the point of view of the powerful—for just ramming things through and explaining nothing. It’s a clear demonstration of who’s boss. It demoralizes the other side. And it’s nearly certain to change the system permanently in ways that benefit the ruling class for as long as they can keep it going.

    I have no special insight into what the president may or may not do. Based on his remarks Thursday night and the actions so far by his campaign, he clearly doesn’t believe the election was clean. He may nevertheless at some point conclude that he has no viable way to get to the bottom of what happened—especially with unfriendly state officials, agencies, and courts in charge of most of the processes. 

    Were the president eventually to concede, that will be trumpeted as “proof” that all doubts about the integrity of the election have been laid to rest, and all questions are illegitimate. It will, of course, prove no such thing.

    Richard Nixon believed he won the 1960 election but had it stolen from him in Illinois and Texas. (There is evidence, but no conclusive proof, that he was right.) Seeing no clear way to establish the truth, and wishing to avert a crisis, he declined to challenge the results. This episode, ever since, has been “explained” to the American people in two ways: there was no cheating, and Nixon was statesmanlike to concede. But if there was no cheating, conceding was simply a matter of acknowledging reality. Nixon’s action was “statesmanlike” only if he sacrificed something for the (supposed) good of the country—i.e., if cheating denied him the presidency he legitimately won.

    No matter what he does, President Trump will get no credit from his enemies, who are already demanding that he concede before the counting is even over—to say nothing of the lawsuits and potential recounts. If he does, a new standard will have been set, or an old one reaffirmed: in any close election, if the Democrat appears to be ahead, and irregularities appear to be present, they are to be dismissed as nonexistent and the Republican must go gentle into that good night.

    That may well work in securing the White House this time. But if they just ram this through without explaining what really happened, then the legitimacy not just of our electoral system but of our entire government will have suffered an extreme, and possibly fatal, blow. 

    No one will really know who won. Partisans on both sides will insist they do, but they won’t—not really. Unless all the anomalies are explained, every count and recount conducted in a fair and transparent manner, the occupant of the White House on January 20, 2021—whoever he is—will sit under a cloud. If he’s Joe Biden, that cloud will be entirely of his party’s own making.

    But far more ominously, one half the country—or to be more precise, the class that rules in the interests of (at most) half the country—will surmise that it can rule by fiat. The other half will conclude that they are subjects.

    Whether that conclusion resigns the latter to apathy or stirs them to rebellion is the question that will determine the course of our politics going forward.

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Nov 07

Today’s News 7th November 2020

  • Escobar: Banana Follies – The Mother Of All Color Revolutions
    Escobar: Banana Follies – The Mother Of All Color Revolutions

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 11/06/2020 – 23:40

    Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

    A gaming exercise of the perfect, indigenous color revolution, code-named Blue, was leaked from a major think tank established in the imperial lands that first designed the color revolution concept.

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    Not all the information disclosed here about the gaming of Blue has been declassified. That may well elicit a harsh response from the Deep State, even as a similar scenario was gamed by an outfit called Transition Integrity Project.

    Both scenarios should qualify as predictive programming – with the Deep State preparing the general public, in advance, for exactly how things will play out.

    The standard color revolution playbook rules usually start in the capital city of nation-state X, during an election cycle, with freedom fighting “rebels” enjoying full national and international media support.

    Blue concerns a presidential election in the Hegemon. In the gaming exercise, the incumbent president, codenamed Buffoon, was painted Red. The challenger, codenamed Corpse, was painted Blue.

    Blue – the exercise – went up a notch because, compared to its predecessors, the starting point was not a mere insurgency, but a pandemic. Not any pandemic, but a really serious, bad to the bone global pandemic with an explosive infection fatality rate of less than 1%.

    By a fortunate coincidence, the lethal pandemic allowed Blue operators to promote mail-in ballots as the safest, socially distant voting procedure.

    That connected with a rash of polls predicting an all but inevitable Blue win in the election – even a Blue Wave.

    The premise is simple: take down the economy and deflate a sitting president whose stated mission is to drive a booming economy. In tandem, convince public opinion that actually getting to the polls is a health hazard.

    The Blue production committee takes no chances, publicly announcing they would contest any result that contradicts the prepackaged outcome: Blue’s final victory in a quirky, anachronistic, anti-direct democracy body called the “electoral college”.

    If Red somehow wins, Blue would wait until every vote is counted and duly litigated to every jurisdiction level. Relying on massive media support and social media marketing propelled to saturation levels, Blue proclaims that “under no scenario” Red would be allowed to declare victory.

    Countdown to magic voting

    Election Day comes. Vote counting is running smoothly – mail-in count, election day count, up to the minute tallies – but mostly favoring Red, especially in three states always essential for capturing the presidency. Red is also leading in what is characterized as “swing states”.

    But then, just as a TV network prematurely calls a supposedly assured Red state for Blue, all vote counting stops before midnight in major urban areas in key swing states under Blue governors, with Red in the lead.

    Blue operators stop counting to check whether their scenario towards a Blue victory can roll out without bringing in mail-in ballots. Their preferred mechanism is to manufacture the “will of the people” by keeping up an illusion of fairness.

    Yet they can always rely, as Plan B, on urban mail-in ballots on tap, hot and cold, until Blue squeaks by in two particularly key swing states that Red had bagged in a previous election.

    That’s what happens. Starting at 2 am, and later into the night, enter a batch of “magic” votes in these two key states. The sudden, vertical upward “adjustment” includes the case of a batch of 130k+ pro-Blue votes cast in a county alongside not a single pro-Red vote – a statistical miracle of Holy Ghost proportions.

    Stuffing the ballot box is a typical scam applied in Banana Republic declinations of color revolution. Blue operators use the tried and tested method applied to the gold futures market, when a sudden drop of naked shorts drives down gold price, thus protecting the US dollar.

    Blue operators bet the compliant mainstream media/Big Tech alliance will not question that, well, out of the blue, the vote would swing towards Blue in a 2 to 3 or 3 to 4 margin.

    • They bet no questions will be asked on how a 2% to 5% positive ballot trend in Red’s favor in a few states turned into a 0.5% to 1.4% trend in favor of Blue by around 4am.

    • And that this discrepancy happens in two swing states almost simultaneously.

    • And that some precincts turn more presidential votes than they have registered voters.

    • And that in swing states, the number of extra mysterious votes for Blue far exceeds votes cast for the Senate candidates in these states, when the record shows that down ticket totals are traditionally close.

    • And that turnout in one of these states would be 89.25%.

    The day after Election Day there are vague explanations that one of the possible vote-dumps was just a “clerical error”, while in another disputed state there is no justification for accepting ballots with no postmark.

    Blue operators relax because the mainstream media/Big Tech alliance squashes each and every complaint as “conspiracy theories”.

    The Red counter-revolution

    The two presidential candidates do not exactly help their own cases.

    Codename Corpse, in a Freudian slip, had revealed his party had set up the most extensive and “diverse” fraud scheme ever.

    Not only Corpse is about to be investigated for a shady computer-related scheme. He is a stage 2 dementia patient with a rapidly unraveling profile – kept barely functional by drugs, which can’t prevent his mind slowly shutting down.

    Codename Buffoon, true to his instincts, goes pre-emptive, declaring the whole election a fraud but without offering a smoking gun. He is duly debunked by the mainstream media/Big Tech alliance for spreading “false claims”.

    All this is happening as a wily, old, bitter operator not only had declared that the only admissible scenario was a Blue victory; she had already positioned herself for a top security job.

    Blue also games that Red would immediately embark on a single-minded path ahead: regiment an army of lawyers demanding access to every registration roll to scrub, review and verify each and every mail-in ballot, a process of de facto forensic analysis.

    Yet Blue cannot foresee how many fake ballots will be unveiled during recounts.

    As Corpse is set to declare victory, Buffoon eyes the long game, set to take the whole thing all the way to the Supreme Court.

    The Red machine had already gamed it – as it was fully aware of how operation Blue would be played.

    The Red counter-revolution does carry the potential of strategically checkmating Blue.

    It is a three-pronged attack – with Red using the Judiciary Committee, the Senate and the Attorney General, all under the authority of codename Buffoon until Inauguration Day. The end game after a vicious legal battle is to overthrow Blue.

    Red’s top operators have the option of setting up a Senate commission, or a Special Counsel, at the request of the Judiciary Committee, to be appointed by the Department of Justice to investigate Corpse.

    In the meantime, two electoral college votes, one-month apart, are required to certify the presidential winner.

    These votes will happen in the middle of one and perhaps two investigations focused on Corpse. Any state represented at the electoral college may object to approve an investigated Corpse; in this case it’s illegal for that state to allow its electors to certify the state’s presidential results.

    Corpse may even be impeached by his own party, under the 25th Ammendment, due to his irreversible mental decline.

    The resulting chaos would have to be resolved by the Red-leaning Supreme Court. Not exactly the outcome favored by Blue.

    The House always wins

    The heart of the matter is that this think tank gaming transcends both Red and Blue. It’s all about the Deep State’s end game.

    There’s nothing like a massive psy ops embedded in a WWE-themed theater under the sign of Divide and Rule to pit mob vs. mob, with half of the mob rebelling against what it perceives as an illegitimate government. The 0.00001% comfortably surveys the not only metaphorical carnage from above.

    Even as the Deep State, using its Blue minions, would never have allowed codename Buffoon to prevail, again, domestic Divide and Rule might be seen as the least disastrous outcome for the world at large.

    A civil war context in theory distracts the Deep State from bombing more Global South latitudes into the dystopian “democracy” charade it is now enacting.

    And yet a domestic Empire of Chaos gridlock may well encourage more foreign adventures as a necessary diversion to tie the room together.

    And that’s the beauty of the Blue gaming exercise: the House wins, one way or another.

  • Mile-High Weddings For $28k As Struggling Aviation Industry Searches For New Cash Flows
    Mile-High Weddings For $28k As Struggling Aviation Industry Searches For New Cash Flows

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 11/06/2020 – 23:20

    Global tourism might not recover until 2025 from the virus-induced downturn. Still, already, players in the travel and tourism industries, more specifically, aviation, are reinventing or adding new business segments to drive new cash flows amid the rout in travel. 

    Take, for example, Air Charter Service, a global aircraft charter broker, is offering the “Ultimate Wedding in the Sky” on a private jet for $28,000. The packages allow 16 guests, presumably the wedding party only, to board a sleek Bombardier Challenger 850 for up to two hours to say “I do,” according to Travel Pulse. 

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    “Sadly, many couples have had to abandon their original wedding plans due to COVID-19. At Air Charter Service, we wanted to offer a solution to enable our clients to still have their dream wedding celebrations,” group private jets director Andy Christie said. 

    “Our’ Weddings in the Sky’ experiences include all food and beverages and can be tailor-made to suit couples’ needs, whether they want to celebrate with close family and friends or elope, just the two of them. The flight route can be pre-arranged, so the aircraft can fly over areas of significance to those who are celebrating their marriage,” Christie said. 

    The new service appears to be filling a void for those who have had their weddings canceled this year or cannot find venues because the virus pandemic has resulted in public health orders limiting gatherings. This could be a very lucrative new segment for Air Charter, and a move to drive new cash flows amid the severe downturn in travel tourism worldwide. 

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    Other players in the aviation industry have also become creative in finding new methods to drive business. 

    Recently, Singapore Airlines transformed some of its parked commercial airline jets into restaurants. A hopeful move to raise revenues for the struggling Asian air carrier. 

    Just days ago, we outlined which global airlines were at the highest risk of insolvency. 

  • American Election Is Not A Reset For Better Global Relations
    American Election Is Not A Reset For Better Global Relations

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 11/06/2020 – 23:00

    Via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    One contradiction about the American presidential election is this: for all the intense media attention and commentary around the world one would expect the result to perhaps portend immense consequence. The mundane reality, though, is that there will be little of appreciable consequence for US relations with the rest of the world.

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    The United States will continue to conduct itself as if it is above international law, interfering in other nations’ affairs, abusing its privileged dollar fiat currency, and unilaterally using violence and war to enforce its objective when it deems necessary.

    Every American president over the past century has engaged in all of these criminal practices. How could we expect any difference with a change of face in a system dictated to by the same corporate power? Only when the system of power fundamentally changes then can we expect to see meaningful change towards the better.

    It looks like Democrat contender Joe Biden has won enough votes to gain the White House against incumbent Republican President Donald Trump. The idiosyncrasies of the American electoral system mean that tallying of votes drags on for several days beyond the official election date on November 3. Given the closeness of the race there will also be legal contesting of the results, especially from the Trump campaign which at an early stage has made dubious claims about ballot fraud.

    However, as noted above, it hardly matters who finally wins the White House and is inaugurated as the 46th president on January 20. Trump’s past four years have amply demonstrated that any hopes for an improvement in US-Russia relations have been dashed. Trump was not merely held hostage by a revival in Cold War anti-Russian prejudices among the Washington establishment. He lent his own personal touch to deteriorating bilateral relations with such policies as undermining arms controls negotiations as well as attacking Russian energy trade with Europe through the Nord Stream pipeline.

    For his part, Biden has voiced more vehement antagonism towards Russia than Trump. There are reasons to be wary of any new White House and how US foreign policy could become marginally even more aggressive.

    What is patently clear is how bitterly polarized and divisive US domestic politics have become. This is due to the historic failing of the two-party system which has, over decades, left whole swathes of the population, in particular the majority working class, alienated from the political class. There is irreparable distrust and distortion among the American populace. To the point where it would seem impossible for any nominal winner of the election to be able to command a mandate.

    A tried and trusted mechanism for galvanizing is to “unite” the people by rallying them around the flag against some designated foreign enemy. Given the increasing unwieldy, fractious nature of American society, it is all the more imperative for the US ruling class to impose some level of coherence in order to restore the essential authority of governing power. With this paramount need to shore up a sense of authority, it can therefore be expected that American foreign policy will become more aggressive and militaristic in the next four years.

    So any notion that the presidential election might permit some kind of benign reset in US global relations is woefully misplaced.

    The US ship of state has been on a sped-up course for collision and conflict for many years, if not decades. Changing a captain figurehead in the bridge is not going to change the baleful course that is determined by the power interests of Big Business, Wall Street and the Pentagon’s military-industrial complex in the pursuit of American capitalist profits.

    That being said, however, the rest of the world should not let its wariness of Washington’s misconduct allow it to become transfixed by America’s flailing global ambitions. The world has changed dramatically from the bygone days of the US as a formidable superpower. New centers of power have emerged in a multipolar world, in particular the paradigm shift in the global economy to China and Eurasia. Russia and China are steadily solidifying their strategic economic partnership. They will and should continue on this path of co-development with other nations, and let Washington stew in its own failures.

    In a very real way, the rest of the world should stop paying so much attention to the American spectacle. It’s like watching a “reality TV show” which has little consequence except sapping the viewer’s energy. Better to get off the proverbial couch and get on with building an alternative, real world.

  • Supreme Court Orders Pennsylvania To Separate Out Late-Arriving Ballots
    Supreme Court Orders Pennsylvania To Separate Out Late-Arriving Ballots

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 11/06/2020 – 22:53

    by Epoch Times

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    U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito late Friday ordered Pennsylvania election officials to segregate and separately count ballots that arrived after Election Day.

    Alito granted a request by the state’s Republican party to separate mail-in ballots received between 8 p.m. Nov. 3 and 5 p.m. Nov. 6 from those that arrived by Election Day, in accordance with state guidance. He ordered (pdf) that those segregated ballots must be kept “in a secure, safe and sealed container separate from other voted ballots.”

    The justice, however, did not order the counties to stop counting but instead ordered those ballots to be counted separately.

    The Republican Party of Pennsylvania had filed a request (pdf) earlier on Friday asking the court for an order to log, segregate, and not take any actions over mail-in ballots received after Election Day.

    The Republicans argued that the order was necessary because it was unclear whether all 67 county boards of elections were following Boockvar’s guidance issued on Oct. 28 (pdf) on ballot segregation. The filing stated that while 42 counties confirmed that they would follow the guidance, the 25 remaining counties had not responded to whether they were segregating late-arriving ballots.

    Moreover, Boockvar’s guidances are not legally binding on the county boards of elections, which means the counties may choose not to follow the guidance, the party added.

    The Republicans also raised concerns that Boockvar had reserved the right to change her guidance or to provide further direction over the ballots. They said that the secretary had done so when it issued new guidance on Nov. 1 (pdf) directing county boards to count late-arriving ballots.

    “In short, an order from the Court is badly needed. But given some county boards’ refusal to confirm that they are segregating ballots and the Secretary’s changing guidance, an order requiring segregation of ballots may not suffice to preserve RPP’s appellate rights,” the Republicans wrote.

    “An order at this juncture is necessary to preserve this Court’s jurisdiction to resolve this matter on the merits, as well as its ability to enter an appropriate remedy for this general election,” they added.

    The Supreme Court has yet to decide on whether to review the case at hand.

    Alito said in his order that he had not been informed that the guidance issued on Oct. 28, “which had an important bearing on the question whether to order special treatment of the ballots in question,” had been modified.

    He also directed any responses to the application by 2 p.m. Nov. 7.

  • MIT Develops AI Tool To Detect COVID By Listening To Coughs 
    MIT Develops AI Tool To Detect COVID By Listening To Coughs 

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 11/06/2020 – 22:40

    MIT Researchers have developed an AI pre-screening tool that can accurately detect if someone has COVID-19 via audio of their cough. The breakthrough technology could be embedded into a smartphone app and distributed to the general population, used even before clinical testing to recognize if someone is infected. With the second coronavirus wave arriving in Europe and the US, the AI pre-screening tool could be an effective bet to screen for asymptomatic patients.

    The paper, titled “COVID-19 Artificial Intelligence Diagnosis using only Cough Recordings,” was recently published in the IEEE Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology, specifies that the AI pre-screening tool distinguishes asymptomatic people from healthy individuals through forced-cough recordings. 

    Lead researcher of the study Jordi Laguarta, and co-researchers Ferran Hueto and Brian Subirana, along with their team, used the AI tool to test tens of thousands of audio cough samples. Their AI tool had a 98.5% accuracy rating for identifying coughs from people with COVID-19, including 100% of coughs from asymptomatic people. 

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    Visual Summary: The AI model architecture shown enables a non-invasive, real-time solution for an unlimited throughput daily country-wide screening, outbreak monitoring, and viral/serology test pooling candidate selection at essentially no cost. As shown on the ROC curve, the model discriminates officially tested COVID-19 subjects 97.1% accurately with 98.5% sensitivity and 94.2% specificity, with a 100% asymptomatic detection rate and 88% accuracy on all subjects. These results are based on a dataset of 5320 subjects. h/t COVID-19 Artificial Intelligence Diagnosis using only Cough Recordings 

    According to MIT News, the researchers are planning to integrate the new AI tool into a smartphone app that would allow users to log in on a daily basis to record a cough and get real-time results of whether they’re infected or not. Upon FDA-approval, the app could be a transformative pre-screening tool. 

    The researchers said, “the effective implementation of this group diagnostic tool could diminish the spread of the pandemic if everyone uses it before going to a classroom, a factory, or a restaurant.” 

    They concluded: “Pandemics could be a thing of the past if pre-screening tools are always on in the background and constantly improved.” 

    What’s scarier than contracting the virus is the encroaching surveillance state. If the app is packaged up, cleared by the FDA, and distributed the millions, who exactly will be receiving this data?

    Will an app user who is flagged for a possible infection be monitored via the smartphone’s GPS?

    These are some of the questions readers should be asking. 

  • Scottish Man Arrested For Calling Politician A "Nazi"
    Scottish Man Arrested For Calling Politician A “Nazi”

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 11/06/2020 – 22:20

    Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

    Are you ready for this week’s absurdity?

    Here’s our weekend roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, risks to your prosperity… and on occasion, inspiring poetic justice.

    Woman in labor wouldn’t go to hospital until she voted

    Last week when a woman went into labor, she had just one thing on her mind. It wasn’t the safety of her child, or even herself. Instead, her top priority was, “I need to vote!”

    Concerned that she wouldn’t be able to vote after giving birth, she had her husband stop off at an early voting center on the way to the hospital.

    She cast her ballot amid controlled intentional breathing to ease the pain of contractions.

    The media acted like this was a cute, feel good story about the importance of voting.

    In reality, it shows what you might call election derangement syndrome.

    In what world is voting more important than receiving the most prompt medical attention to ensure you and your unborn baby are as healthy as possible?

    Click here to read the full story.

    Kentucky state police train to be “ruthless killers”

    After a Kentucky State Police officer shot and killed a suspect, a lawyer filed an open records request.

    Amid the documents was included a training presentation for new cadets of the Kentucky State Police.

    The slideshow entitled “The Warrior’s Mindset” encouraged trainees to maintain “a mindset void of emotion” and become a “ruthless killer.”

    The slideshow also quoted Adolf Hitler… three times. That made Hitler the most quoted man in the presentation.

    One quote taken from Mein Kampf stated, “the very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence.”

    And one of the closing slides of the presentation states without explanation, “Über Alles.”

    “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” means “Germany, Germany above everything,” and is part of a verse of the national anthem closely associated with the Nazis.

    Click here to read the full story.

    Scottish man arrested for calling politician a nazi

    Because of COVID lockdowns in Scotland, a man named Brian Smith was not allowed to attend his uncle’s funeral.

    In reaction, he sent a series of angry emails to the leader of the Scottish National Party, Nicola Sturgeon, who was responsible for the strict rules.

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    One of the profanity laced emails included images of Sturgeon depicted as a Nazi.

    For that, Smith was charged with “telecommunications offences” which typically involve threats and abuse… even though there were no threats made.

    Click here to read the full story.

    Hate crimes and public order bill would ban free speech in scots’ own homes

    Clearly it appears that free speech in Scotland is already dead, but the government is just getting started.

    In August we talked about a Scottish Hate Crime Bill that would outlaw “stirring up hatred.”

    The bill includes language that wouldn’t just make it illegal to use hate speech (in whatever way the government chooses to define this in its sole discretion).

    It would also make it illegal to use hate speech in a theatrical performance, or to possess “inflammatory material” which could “stir up hatred”.

    So basically the government could ban any book it wants, from “To Kill a Mockingbird” to the Bible.

    But just a few days ago, Scottish Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf whined that the legislation doesn’t go far enough.

    He testified that it should extend into the home and regulate what people say in private.

    This could make it illegal to make crude jokes, teach your children about biological gender, or even indicate your personal preference for one religion over another.

    Click here to read the full story.

    AOC pushes bill to introduce government banks across the US

    Everyone’s favorite Bolshevik member of Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has co-sponsored a bill called the Public Banking Act.

    It would create federally-funded, government-owned banks across the nation, to hand out loans at low interest rates to the “unbanked and underbanked.”

    But cities and states on the verge of insolvency could also take advantage of the easy taxpayer-funded loans provided by these banks.

    Since many of these governments shot themselves in the foot with COVID-19 lockdowns, tax revenue is down.

    This would allow them to continue irresponsible spending, and go further into debt to run basic operations, with little hope of ever paying the loans back.

    Sounds like another enormous debt bubble of bad loans to people and businesses unable to pay them back, with no collateral.

    What could possibly go wrong?

    Click here to read the full story.

    *  *  *

    On another note… We think gold could DOUBLE and silver could increase by up to 5 TIMES in the next few years. That’s why we published a new, 50-page long Ultimate Guide on Gold & Silver that you can download here.

  • Erdogan Fires Turkish Central Bank Governor, Launching Full-Blown Currency Crisis
    Erdogan Fires Turkish Central Bank Governor, Launching Full-Blown Currency Crisis

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 11/06/2020 – 22:14

    Back in July 2019, when Turkey’s economy was in freefall and its inflation was soaring following a historic currency crash in mid-2018, and shortly after Erdogan became a de facto executive and unopposed ruler of Turkey, the Turkish president had a brilliant idea: take decades of monetary orthodoxy and flip them on their head. Faced with a lose-lose situation of slowing growth, runaway prices and a slumping lira, Erdogan conceived of what is now known as “Erdoganomics” or the bizarre epiphany that in order to fight inflation and keep the currency from plunging, all Turkey had to do was the polar opposite of what any other country in its position would do and cut rates, or as he put it, totally obliterating cause and effect, high interest rates cause inflation.

    To implement this truly “unique” vision, Erdogan fired the then-governor of the Turkish Central Bank, Murat Cetinkaya, who inexplicably refused to cut rates at a time when Turkish inflation was surging, and replaced him with an obedient lapdog, Murat Uysal.

    “We fired the previous central bank governor because he wouldn’t listen and we have decided to move on with our new friend,” Erdogan said in a speech at parliament in Ankara Tuesday. Erdogan said he told the new governor that “we are going to lower interest rates.”

    It worked for a while: Uysal delivered a bigger-than-forecast cut on almost all occasions, that he’s reduced rates since Erdogan appointed him in July, bringing the cumulative easing under his watch to 16 percentage points – including a record move in his first month on the job.

    For a while it worked: having cut rates by 16% in under a year, the Turkish economy had staged a modest rebound, but most importantly, inflation did in fact collapse, sparking quiet but agitated discussions across various corners of monetary academia, if Erdoganomics was not in fact right, and everything accepted as conventional by central banks was not upside down.

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    In the end, of course, it failed, and with the Turkish economy crippled by the global pandemic, with much needed tourism in freefall and accelerating a capital account crisis, the Turkish lira started to slide, and slide, and slide some more…

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    … until it eventually surpassed the Brazilian Real as the worst performing currency in the world, losing 30% of its value in 2020

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    But worst of all, instead of further cutting rates in line with Erdogan’s visions, the central bank ended its easing cycle and back in September, it resumed hiking, rising rates from 8.25% to 10.25%.

    While that rate hike was the only thing that prevented the lira from a far greater collapse, it also turned out to be one more rate hikes than Erdogan could handle, and late on Friday, Erdogan unexpectedly fired the governor of the country’s central bank – less than a year and a half after he did the exact same thing – and replaced him with a former finance minister.

    Murat Uysal was just 16 months into his four-year term at the helm of the central bank when he was dismissed by presidential decree in the early hours of Saturday, with no reason given although the reason was clear: instead of cutting rates to “stimulate” the economy and fight rising inflation, he hiked.

    That was all the Turkish president needed to know, and so he replaced one central bank figurehead with another, even more obedient figurehead, when he appointed Naci Agbal, who served as Erdogan’s finance minister between 2015 and 2018 and is now the head of the presidential budget office.

    So what happens next?

    Well, for one, the latest firing will cement the reality that the Turkish central bank is now merely a branch of Erdogan’s executive presidency, one where the higher the inflation the lower the interest rates. More importantly for Turkey and its residents, Erdogan’s action will trigger a new and even more acute crisis for the Turkish lira, now that it is clear that Erdogan will resume another aggressive rate cut cycle. Only instead of sparking growth, the imminent rate cuts will end up destroying any “carry” currency value the Turkish lira may have had to western investors, leading to what will be a historic dump, perhaps as soon as Monday.

    In short, we expect this to be the first salvo in what ultimately culminates as a full-blown currency crisis for the Turkish nation, and while Erdogan may try to impose capital controls, it won’t last for one simple reason: the Turkish central bank is almost out of FX reserves.

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    And once those are gone, the Turkish lira will promptly go bidless and will follow in the footsteps of the Venezuela bolivar.

  • The Next Area 51? Space Force Opens New Lab For Testing 'Novel Space Vehicles'
    The Next Area 51? Space Force Opens New Lab For Testing ‘Novel Space Vehicles’

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 11/06/2020 – 22:00

    The US Air Force recently announced the opening of a new high-tech lab which it says will be used by the recently established Space Force (USSF) to test advanced materials and designs for space vehicles such as satellites and spacecraft.

    The new lab facility is located at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico and is called Deployable Structures Laboratory (DeSel):

    “I’m excited to have a facility that was specifically built for testing novel deployable space structures,” the chief of the lab’s Integrated Structural Systems team Benjamin Urioste announced Monday.

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    View of Kirtland AFB, via US Air Force

    “With the push towards hybrid architecture and smaller satellites, high packing efficiency structures and the ability to bring large satellite capability to small satellites is more important than ever,” Urioste added.

    Further according to the press release:

    “This new class of high strain composite enabled structures requires new ground test facilities,” Urioste added. “Satellite deployments are nerve-wracking, one-shot endeavors and the high-fidelity ground testing that will take place in the DeSel is critical to ensuring on-orbit success.”

    Spacecraft Technologies Division chief Mark Roverse said the structures, made possible by high strain composites, “will enable new mission paradigms for the U.S. Space Force.”

    US rival powers like Russia have recently accused Washington of seeking to “weaponize the moon” and triggering a space arms race.

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

    Space Force’s official doctrine according to its founding NASA and DoD memos include responsibilities of “developing military space systems and doctrine, as well as presenting space forces to support the warfighting Combatant Commands.”

    The new lab where experimental technologies will be developed was constructed at a bargain $4 million, and began in December 2019.

    Among the projects it’s expected to assist on includes work on eight “wide field of view” ballistic missile early warning satellites that primarily SpaceX and L3Harris Technologies will be building after they were awarded huge contracts in July.

  • Israeli Minister Warns Of War In Middle East If Biden Wins
    Israeli Minister Warns Of War In Middle East If Biden Wins

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 11/06/2020 – 21:40

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    Israeli Settlements Minister Tzachi Hanegbi warns that a Biden presidency could ignite war in the Middle East, while Egypt fears Biden would aid the resurgence of Islamists in the region.

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    Hanegbi pointed out that Biden has indicated he will resurrect America’s nuclear agreement with Iran which was cancelled by the Trump administration.

    For Israel, this would represent an existential threat to national security and drastically increase the chances of war with Tehran.

    “If Biden stays with that policy, there will, in the end, be a violent confrontation between Israel and Iran,” said Hanegbi.

    Meanwhile, other Middle Eastern countries such as Egypt are concerned that a Biden administration would mirror Barack Obama’s policies, which led to Islamists being empowered in the region.

    Obama spearheaded the disastrous interventions in Syria and Libya which led to the rise of ISIS and the international migrant crisis.

    Obama also suspended aid to Egypt after popular protests ousted Islamist President Muhammad Morsi in 2013.

    “Egyptians are likely to be concerned about a revival of Obama’s democracy agenda which meant actively encouraging political participation of Islamists,” reports Arab Weekly.

    So in other words, if Biden wins, Americans have at least four more years of disastrous foreign interventions to look forward to.

    *  *  *

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  • BET's Billionaire Founder Says Black People Get "Minimal Return" By Voting For Democrats
    BET’s Billionaire Founder Says Black People Get “Minimal Return” By Voting For Democrats

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 11/06/2020 – 21:20

    During a Thursday interview with CNBC, BET founder Robert Johnson said the Democratic Party is offering “minimal” returns for the African American community. 

    “I think Black Americans are getting a little bit tired of delivering huge votes for the Democrats, and seeing a minimal return in terms of economic wealth and closing the wealth gap, the job creation and job opportunities,” Johnson told CNBC’s Hadley Gamble. 

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    “And Joe Biden was not an inspiring candidate for many Black Americans. And some of them stay at home. Some of them voted for Trump,” he added.

    Johnson, America’s first Black billionaire, doubts that Biden and the Democratic Party will enact policies that will lift African American communities out of poverty. 

    “Black people do not embrace Biden as he never articulated a policy that went directly to the concerns of Black Americans,” he said. “I don’t think Biden has that leadership quotient that’s going to allow him to do what is critical to bring the economy back, due to the trade-off between restoring the economy and fighting the pandemic.”

    Watch The Interview Here

    Early polling data, via AP VoteCast, shows President Trump raised his standing with Black voters over four years ago. Trump won 8% of the Black vote, about a 2 percentage-point gain on his 2016 number. Maybe this lends credibility to Johnson’s point about how folks in the Black community are “tired” of the Democrats underdelivering and are willing to try something new. 

    In June, Johnson said the racial wealth inequality had crippled the Black community. He proposed $14 trillion in reparations for slavery and criticized the Democratic Party for not doing enough. 

    “Damages is a normal factor in a capitalist society for when you have been deprived for certain rights,” he said. “If this money goes into pockets like the [coronavirus] stimulus checks… that money is going to return back to the economy” in the form of consumption. There will also be more Black-owned businesses, he added.

    Johnson has also praised Trump for his economic magic that stimulated the economy before the virus pandemic. 

    “African-American unemployment is at its lowest level… I give the president a lot of credit for moving the economy in a positive direction that’s benefiting a large amount of Americans.”

    No matter who wins the US presidential election, the political party that offers solutions to close the racial wealth and income gaps will be victorious in 2024. Our thoughts on the fix is that whoever wins will want to offer quick fixes, which could be People’s QE? 

  • The COVID-19 RT-PCR Test: How To Mislead All Humanity Into Accepting Societal Lock-Downs
    The COVID-19 RT-PCR Test: How To Mislead All Humanity Into Accepting Societal Lock-Downs

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 11/06/2020 – 21:00

    Authored by Dr. Pascal Sacré via GlobalResearch.ca,

    It is time for everyone to come out of this negative trance, this collective hysteria, because famine, poverty, massive unemployment will kill, mow down many more people than SARS-CoV-2!

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    Introduction: using a technique to lock down society

    All current propaganda on the COVID-19 pandemic is based on an assumption that is considered obvious, true and no longer questioned:

    Positive RT-PCR test means being sick with COVID. This assumption is misleading.

    Very few people, including doctors, understand how a PCR test works.

    RT-PCR means Real Time-Polymerase Chain Reaction.

    In French, it means: Réaction de Polymérisation en Chaîne en Temps Réel.

    In medicine, we use this tool mainly to diagnose a viral infection.

    Starting from a clinical situation with the presence or absence of particular symptoms in a patient, we consider different diagnoses based on tests.

    In the case of certain infections, particularly viral infections, we use the RT-PCR technique to confirm a diagnostic hypothesis suggested by a clinical picture.

    We do not routinely perform RT-PCR on any patient who is overheated, coughing or has an inflammatory syndrome!

    It is a laboratory, molecular biology technique of gene amplification because it looks for gene traces (DNA or RNA) by amplifying them.

    In addition to medicine, other fields of application are genetics, research, industry and forensics.

    The technique is carried out in a specialized laboratory, it cannot be done in any laboratory, even a hospital. This entails a certain cost, and a delay sometimes of several days between the sample and the result.

    Today, since the emergence of the new disease called COVID-19 (COrona VIrus Disease-2019), the RT-PCR diagnostic technique is used to define positive cases, confirmed as SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus responsible for the new acute respiratory distress syndrome called COVID-19).

    These positive cases are assimilated to COVID-19 cases, some of whom are hospitalized or even admitted to intensive care units.

    Official postulate of our managers: positive RT-PCR cases = COVID-19 patients.

    This is the starting postulate, the premise of all official propaganda, which justifies all restrictive government measures: isolation, confinement, quarantine, mandatory masks, color codes by country and travel bans, tracking, social distances in companies, stores and even, even more importantly, in schools.

    This misuse of RT-PCR technique is used as a relentless and intentional strategy by some governments, supported by scientific safety councils and by the dominant media, to justify excessive measures such as the violation of a large number of constitutional rights, the destruction of the economy with the bankruptcy of entire active sectors of society, the degradation of living conditions for a large number of ordinary citizens, under the pretext of a pandemic based on a number of positive RT-PCR tests, and not on a real number of patients.

    Technical aspects: to better understand and not be manipulated

    The PCR technique was developed by chemist Kary B. Mullis in 1986. Kary Mullis was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993.

    Although this is disputed, Kary Mullis himself is said to have criticized the interest of PCR as a diagnostic tool for an infection, especially a viral one.

    He stated that if PCR was a good tool for research, it was a very bad tool in medicine, in the clinic.

    Mullis was referring to the AIDS virus (HIV retrovirus or HIV), before the COVID-19 pandemic, but this opinion on the limitation of the technique in viral infections, by its creator, cannot be dismissed out of hand; it must be taken into account!

    PCR was perfected in 1992.

    As the analysis can be performed in real time, continuously, it becomes RT (Real-Time) – PCR, even more efficient.

    It can be done from any molecule, including those of the living, the nucleic acids that make up the genes:

    • DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid)

    • RNA (Ribonucleic Acid)

    Viruses are not considered as “living” beings, they are packets of information (DNA or RNA) forming a genome.

    It is by an amplification technique (multiplication) that the molecule sought is highlighted and this point is very important.

    RT-PCR is an amplification technique.

    If there is DNA or RNA of the desired element in a sample, it is not identifiable as such.

    This DNA or RNA must be amplified (multiplied) a certain number of times, sometimes a very large number of times, before it can be detected. From a minute trace, up to billions of copies of a specific sample can be obtained, but this does not mean that there is all that amount in the organism being tested.

    In the case of COVID-19, the element sought by RT-PCR is SARS-CoV-2, an RNA virus.

    There are DNA viruses such as Herpes and Varicella viruses.

    The most well known RNA viruses, in addition to coronaviruses, are Influenza, Measles, EBOLA, ZIKA viruses.

    In the case of SARS-CoV-2, RNA virus, an additional specific step is required, a transcription of RNA into DNA by means of an enzyme, Reverse Transcriptase.

    This step precedes the amplification phase.

    It is not the whole virus that is identified, but sequences of its viral genome.

    This does not mean that this gene sequence, a fragment of the virus, is not specific to the virus being sought, but it is an important nuance nonetheless:

    RT-PCR does not reveal any virus, but only parts, specific gene sequences of the virus.

    At the beginning of the year, the SARS-CoV-2 genome was sequenced.

    It consists of about 30,000 base pairs. The nucleic acid (DNA-RNA), the component of the genes, is a sequence of bases. In comparison, the human genome has more than 3 billion base pairs.

    Teams are continuously monitoring the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 viral genome as it evolves, through the mutations it undergoes. Today, there are many variants.

    By taking a few specific genes from the SARS-CoV-2 genome, it is possible to initiate RT-PCR on a sample from the respiratory tract.

    For COVID-19 disease, which has a nasopharyngeal (nose) and oropharyngeal (mouth) entry point, the sample should be taken from the upper respiratory tract as deeply as possible in order to avoid contamination by saliva in particular.

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    All the people tested said that it is very painful.

    The Gold Standard (preferred site for sampling) is the nasopharyngeal (nasal) approach, the most painful route.

    If there is a contraindication to the nasal approach, or preferably to the individual being tested, depending on the official organs, the oropharyngeal approach (through the mouth) is also acceptable. The test may trigger a nausea/vomiting reflex in the individual being tested.

    Normally, for the result of an RT-PCR test to be considered reliable, amplification from 3 different genes (primers) of the virus under investigation is required.

    “The primers are single-stranded DNA sequences specific to the virus. They guarantee the specificity of the amplification reaction. »

    “The first test developed at La Charité in Berlin by Dr. Victor Corman and his associates in January 2020 allows to highlight the RNA sequences present in 3 genes of the virus called E, RdRp and N. To know if the sequences of these genes are present in the RNA samples collected, it is necessary to amplify the sequences of these 3 genes in order to obtain a signal sufficient for their detection and quantification. ».

    The essential notion of Cycle Time or Cycle Threshold or Ct positivity threshold [16].

    An RT-PCR test is negative (no traces of the desired element) or positive (presence of traces of the desired element).

    However, even if the desired element is present in a minute, negligible quantity, the principle of RT-PCR is to be able to finally highlight it by continuing the amplification cycles as much as necessary.

    RT-PCR can push up to 60 amplification cycles, or even more!

    Here is how it works:

    • Cycle 1: target x 2 (2 copies)

    • Cycle 2: target x 4 (4 copies)

    • Cycle 3: target x 8 (8 copies)

    • Cycle 4: target x 16 (16 copies)

    • Cycle 5; target x 32 (32 copies)

    • Etc exponentially up to 40 to 60 cycles!

    When we say that the Ct (Cycle Time or Cycle Threshold or RT-PCR positivity threshold) is equal to 40, it means that the laboratory has used 40 amplification cycles, i.e. obtained 240 copies.

    This is what underlies the sensitivity of the RT-PCR assay.

    While it is true that in medicine we like to have high specificity and sensitivity of the tests to avoid false positives and false negatives, in the case of COVID-19 disease, this hypersensitivity of the RT-PCR test caused by the number of amplification cycles used has backfired.

    This over-sensitivity of the RT-PCR test is deleterious and misleading!

    It detaches us from the medical reality which must remain based on the real clinical state of the person: is the person ill, does he or she have symptoms?

    That is the most important thing!

    As I said at the beginning of the article, in medicine we always start from the person: we examine him/her, we collect his/her symptoms (complaints-anamnesis) and objective clinical signs (examination) and on the basis of a clinical reflection in which scientific knowledge and experience intervene, we make diagnostic hypotheses.

    Only then do we prescribe the most appropriate tests, based on this clinical reflection.

    We constantly compare the test results with the patient’s clinical condition (symptoms and signs), which takes precedence over everything else when it comes to our decisions and treatments.

    Today, our governments, supported by their scientific safety advice, are making us do the opposite and put the test first, followed by a clinical reflection necessarily influenced by this prior test, whose weaknesses we have just seen, particularly its hypersensitivity.

    None of my clinical colleagues can contradict me.

    Apart from very special cases such as genetic screening for certain categories of populations (age groups, sex) and certain cancers or family genetic diseases, we always work in this direction: from the person (symptoms, signs) to the appropriate tests, never the other way around.

    This is the conclusion of an article in the Swiss Medical Journal (RMS) published in 2007, written by doctors Katia Jaton and Gilbert Greub microbiologists from the University of Lausanne :

    PCR in microbiology: from DNA amplification to result interpretation:

    “To interpret the result of a PCR, it is essential that clinicians and microbiologists share their experiences, so that the analytical and clinical levels of interpretation can be combined.”

    It would be indefensible to give everyone an electrocardiogram to screen everyone who might have a heart attack one day.

    On the other hand, in certain clinical contexts or on the basis of specific evocative symptoms, there, yes, an electrocardiogram can be beneficial.

    Back to RT-PCR and Ct (Cycle Time or Cycle Threshold).

    In the case of an infectious disease, especially a viral one, the notion of contagiousness is another important element.

    Since some scientific circles consider that an asymptomatic person can transmit the virus, they believe it is important to test for the presence of virus, even if the person is asymptomatic, thus extending the indication of RT-PCR to everyone.

    Are RT-PCR tests good tests for contagiousness?

    This question brings us back to the notion of viral load and therefore Ct.

    The relationship between contagiousness and viral load is disputed by some people and no formal proof, to date, allows us to make a decision.

    However, common sense gives obvious credence to the notion that the more virus a person has inside him or her, especially in the upper airways (oropharynx and nasopharynx), with symptoms such as coughing and sneezing, the higher the risk of contagiousness, proportional to the viral load and the importance of the person’s symptoms.

    This is called common sense, and although modern medicine has benefited greatly from the contribution of science through statistics and Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM), it is still based primarily on common sense, experience and empiricism.

    Medicine is the art of healing.

    No test measures the amount of virus in the sample!

    RT-PCR is qualitative: positive (presence of the virus) or negative (absence of the virus).

    This notion of quantity, therefore of viral load, can be estimated indirectly by the number of amplification cycles (Ct) used to highlight the virus sought.

    • The lower the Ct used to detect the virus fragment, the higher the viral load is considered to be (high).

    • The higher the Ct used to detect the virus fragment, the lower the viral load is considered to be (low).

    Thus, the French National Reference Centre (CNR), in the acute phase of the pandemic, estimated that the peak of viral shedding occurred at the onset of symptoms, with an amount of virus corresponding to approximately 108 (100 million) copies of SARS-CoV-2 viral RNA on average (French COVID-19 cohort data) with a variable duration of shedding in the upper airways (from 5 days to more than 5 weeks) [19].

    This number of 108 (100 million) copies/μl corresponds to a very low Ct.

    A Ct of 32 corresponds to 10-15 copies/μl.

    A Ct of 35 corresponds to about 1 copy/μl.

    Above Ct 35, it becomes impossible to isolate a complete virus sequence and culture it!

    In France and in most countries, Ct levels above 35, even 40, are still used even today!

    The French Society of Microbiology (SFM) issued an opinion on September 25, 2020 in which it does not recommend quantitative results, and it recommends to make positive up to a Ct of 37 for a single gene [20]!

    With 1 copy/μl of a sample (Ct 35), without cough, without symptoms, one can understand why all these doctors and scientists say that a positive RT-PCR test means nothing, nothing at all in terms of medicine and clinic!

    Positive RT-PCR tests, without any mention of Ct or its relation to the presence or absence of symptoms, are used as is by our governments as the exclusive argument to apply and justify their policy of severity, austerity, isolation and aggression of our freedoms, with the impossibility to travel, to meet, to live normally!

    There is no medical justification for these decisions, for these governmental choices!

    In an article published on the website of the New York Times (NYT) on Saturday, August 29, American experts from Harvard University are surprised that RT-PCR tests as practiced can serve as tests of contagiousness, even more so as evidence of pandemic progression in the case of SARS-CoV-2 infection [21].

    According to them, the threshold (Ct) considered results in positive diagnoses in people who do not represent any risk of transmitting the virus!

    The binary “yes/no” answer is not enough, according to this epidemiologist from the Harvard University School of Public Health.

    “It’s the amount of virus that should dictate the course of action for each patient tested. »

    The amount of virus (viral load); but also and above all the clinical state, symptomatic or not of the person!

    This calls into question the use of the binary result of this RT-PCR test to determine whether a person is contagious and must follow strict isolation measures.

    These questions are being raised by many physicians around the world, not only in the United States but also in France, Belgium (Belgium Health Experts Demand Investigation Of WHO For Faking Coronavirus Pandemic), France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States and the United Kingdom. in Germany, Spain…

    According to them:

    “We are going to put tens of thousands of people in confinement, in isolation, for nothing. » [22]. 22] And inflict suffering, anguish, economic and psychological dramas by the thousands!

    Most RT-PCR tests set the Ct at 40, according to the NYT. Some set it at 37.

    “Tests with such high thresholds (Ct) may not only detect live virus but also gene fragments, remnants of an old infection that do not represent any particular danger,” the experts said.

    A virologist at the University of California admits that an RT-PCR test with a Ct greater than 35 is too sensitive. “A more reasonable threshold would be between 30 and 35,” she adds.

    Almost no laboratory specifies the Ct (number of amplification cycles performed) or the number of copies of viral RNA per sample μl.

    Here is an example of a laboratory result (approved by Sciensano, the Belgian national reference center) in an RT-PCR negative patient:

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    No mention of Ct.

    In the NYT, experts compiled three datasets with officials from the states of Massachusetts, New York and Nevada that mention them.

    Conclusion?

    “Up to 90% of the people who tested positive did not carry a virus. »

    The Wadworth Center, a New York State laboratory, analyzed the results of its July tests at the request of the NYT: 794 positive tests with a Ct of 40.

    “With a Ct threshold of 35, approximately half of these PCR tests would no longer be considered positive,” said the NYT.

    “And about 70% would no longer be considered positive with a Ct of 30! “

    In Massachusetts, between 85 and 90% of people who tested positive in July with a Ct of 40 would have been considered negative with a Ct of 30, adds the NYT. And yet, all these people had to isolate themselves, with all the dramatic psychological and economic consequences, while they were not sick and probably not contagious at all.

    In France, the Centre National de Référence (CNR), the French Society of Microbiology (SFM) continue to push Ct to 37 and recommend to laboratories to use only one gene of the virus as a primer.

    I remind you that from Ct 32 onwards, it becomes very difficult to culture the virus or to extract a complete sequence, which shows the completely artificial nature of this positivity of the test, with such high Ct levels, above 30.

    Similar results were reported by researchers from the UK Public Health Agency in an article published on August 13 in Eurosurveillance: “The probability of culturing the virus drops to 8% in samples with Ct levels above 35.”

    In addition, currently, the National Reference Center in France only evaluates the sensitivity of commercially available reagent kits, not their specificity: serious doubts persist about the possibility of cross-reactivity with viruses other than SARS-CoV-2, such as other benign cold coronaviruses.

    It is potentially the same situation in other countries, including Belgium.

    Similarly, mutations in the virus may have invalidated certain primers (genes) used to detect SARS-CoV-2: the manufacturers give no guarantees on this, and if the AFP fast-checking journalists tell you otherwise, test their good faith by asking for these guarantees, these proofs.

    If they have nothing to hide and if what I say is false, this guarantee will be provided to you and will prove their good faith.

    1. We must demand that the RT-PCR results be returned mentioning the Ct used because beyond Ct 30, a positive RT-PCR test means nothing.

    2. We must listen to the scientists and doctors, specialists, virologists who recommend the use of adapted Ct, lower, at 30. An alternative is to obtain the number of copies of viral RNA/μl or /ml sample.

    3. We need to go back to the patient, to the person, to his or her clinical condition (presence or absence of symptoms) and from there to judge the appropriateness of testing and the best way to interpret the result.

    Until there is a better rationale for PCR screening, with a known and appropriate Ct threshold, an asymptomatic person should not be tested in any way.

    Even a symptomatic person should not automatically be tested, as long as they can place themselves in isolation for 7 days.

    Let’s stop this debauchery of RT-PCR testing at too high Ct levels and return to clinical, quality medicine.

    Once we understand how RT-PCR testing works, it becomes impossible to let the current government routine screening strategy, inexplicably supported by the virologists in the safety councils, continue.

    My hope is that, finally, properly informed, more and more people will demand that this strategy be stopped, because it is all of us, enlightened, guided by real benevolence and common sense, who must decide our collective and individual destinies.

    No one else should do it for us, especially when we realize that those who decide are no longer reasonable or rational.

    Summary of important points :

    • The RT-PCR test is a laboratory diagnostic technique that is not well suited to clinical medicine.

    • It is a binary, qualitative diagnostic technique that confirms (positive test) or not (negative test) the presence of an element in the medium being analyzed. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the element is a fragment of the viral genome, not the virus itself.

    • In medicine, even in an epidemic or pandemic situation, it is dangerous to place tests, examinations, techniques above clinical evaluation (symptoms, signs). It is the opposite that guarantees quality medicine.

    • The main limitation (weakness) of the RT-PCR test, in the current pandemic situation, is its extreme sensitivity (false positive) if a suitable threshold of positivity (Ct) is not chosen. Today, experts recommend using a maximum Ct threshold of 30.

    • This Ct threshold must be informed with the positive RT-PCR result so that the physician knows how to interpret this positive result, especially in an asymptomatic person, in order to avoid unnecessary isolation, quarantine, psychological trauma.

    • In addition to mentioning the Ct used, laboratories must continue to ensure the specificity of their detection kits for SARS-CoV-2, taking into account its most recent mutations, and must continue to use three genes from the viral genome being studied as primers or, if not, mention it.

    Overall Conclusion

    Is the obstinacy of governments to use the current disastrous strategy, systematic screening by RT-PCR, due to ignorance?

    Is it due to stupidity?

    To a kind of cognitive trap trapping their ego?

    In any case, we should be able to question them, and if among the readers of this article there are still honest journalists, or naive politicians, or people who have the possibility to question our rulers, then do so, using these clear and scientific arguments.

    It is all the more incomprehensible that our rulers have surrounded themselves with some of the most experienced specialists in these matters.

    If I have been able to gather this information myself, shared, I remind you, by competent people above all suspicion of conspiracy, such as Hélène Banoun, Pierre Sonigo, Jean-François Toussaint, Christophe De Brouwer, whose intelligence, intellectual honesty and legitimacy cannot be questioned, then the Belgian, French and Quebec scientific advisors, etc., know all this as well.

    So?

    What’s going on?

    Why continue in this distorted direction, obstinately making mistakes?

    It is not insignificant to reimpose confinements, curfews, quarantines, reduced social bubbles, to shake up again our shaky economies, to plunge entire families into precariousness, to sow so much fear and anxiety generating a real state of post-traumatic stress worldwide, to reduce access to care for other pathologies that nevertheless reduce life expectancy much more than COVID-19!

    Is there intent to harm?

    Is there an intention to use the alibi of a pandemic to move humanity towards an outcome it would otherwise never have accepted? In any case, not like that!

    Would this hypothesis, which modern censors will hasten to label “conspiracy”, be the most valid explanation for all this?

    Indeed, if we draw a straight line from the present events, if they are maintained, we could find ourselves once again confined with hundreds, thousands of human beings forced to remain inactive, which, for the professions of catering, entertainment, sales, fairgrounds, itinerants, canvassers, risks being catastrophic with bankruptcies, unemployment, depression, suicides by the hundreds of thousands.

    The impact on education, on our children, on teaching, on medicine with long planned care, operations, treatments to be cancelled, postponed, will be profound and destructive.

    “We risk a looming food crisis if action is not taken quickly.”

    It is time for everyone to come out of this negative trance, this collective hysteria, because famine, poverty, massive unemployment will kill, mow down many more people than SARS-CoV-2!

    Does all this make sense in the face of a disease that is declining, over-diagnosed and misinterpreted by this misuse of overly sensitively calibrated PCR tests?

    For many, the continuous wearing of the mask seems to have become a new norm.

    Even if it is constantly downplayed by some health professionals and fact-checking journalists, other doctors warn of the harmful consequences, both medical and psychological, of this hygienic obsession which, maintained permanently, is in fact an abnormality!

    What a hindrance to social relations, which are the true foundation of a physically and psychologically healthy humanity!

    Some dare to find all this normal, or a lesser price to pay in the face of the pandemic of positive PCR tests.

    Isolation, distancing, masking of the face, impoverishment of emotional communication, fear of touching and kissing even within families, communities, between relatives…

    Spontaneous gestures of daily life hindered and replaced by mechanical and controlled gestures …

    Terrified children, kept in permanent fear and guilt…

    All this will have a deep, lasting and negative impact on human organisms, in their physical, mental, emotional and representation of the world and society.

    This is not normal!

    We cannot let our rulers, for whatever reason, organize our collective suicide any longer.

    Translated from French by Global Research. Original source: Mondialisation.ca

    Dr Pascal Sacré is a physician specialized in critical care, author and renowned public health analyst, Charleroi, Belgium. He is a Research Associate of the  entre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

    *  *  *

    Professionals whose references and comments are the basis of this article in its scientific aspect (especially and mainly on RT-PCR):

    1) Hélène Banoun

    https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Helene_Banoun

    PhD, Pharmacist biologist

    Former INSERM Research Officer

    Former intern at the Paris Hospitals

    2) Pierre Sonigo

    Virologist

    Research Director INSERM, worked at the Pasteur Institute

    Heads the Virus Genetics Laboratory in Cochin, Paris.

    Participated in 1985 in the sequencing of the AIDS virus.

    3) Christophe De Brouwer

    PhD in Public Health Science

    Honorary Professor at the School of Public Health at ULB, Belgium

    4) Jean-François Toussaint

    Doctor, Professor of Physiology at the University of Paris-Descartes

    Director of IRMES, Institute for BioMedical Research and Sports Epidemiology

    Former member of the High Council of Public Health

  • GoFundMe Nukes Donation Page For Voter Fraud Investigation
    GoFundMe Nukes Donation Page For Voter Fraud Investigation

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 11/06/2020 – 20:47

    Update 2045ET: And just like that, GoFundMe has nuked Matt Braynard’s donation page, which he was using to purchase data to analyze whether dead people and invalid absentee voters participated in the 2020 election. The page had raised over $220,000 for the effort.

    According to GoFundMe, Braynard’s fundraiser “attempts to spread misleading information about the election and has been removed from the platform. All donors will be fully refunded.”

    To be clear, GoFundMe has now interfered with efforts by an independent data expert to analyze potential fraudulent voting activity, suggesting that doing so is ‘spreading misleading information.’

    People can now donate on platform Give Send Go.

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

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    We can’t imagine GoFundMe’s ‘senior risk and compliance specialist’ Zachary Bright, or Director of Communications (and former Obama White House spokesman Bobby Whithorne’s support for Joe Biden had anything do do with it?

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    The company’s former VP of Communications and Policy, Daniel Pfeiffer, was another Obama staffer who has donated to Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton and PAC ‘Swing Left.’

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    Perhaps it’s a culture thing?

    *  *  *

    Update 1655ET: Trump data director Witold Chrabaszcz is joining Braynard’s effort, according to an update on his GoFundMe page (the funds from which – now up to $217,000 – are still apparently being held hostage by GoFundMe).

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    Prior to joining the Trump campaign, Chrabaszcz worked as a strategist for the Republican National Committee for more than a decade.

    In an earlier update, Braynard said he now has a contract with a data vendor for the early voting and absentee voter data for all seven target states at a cost of $60,000. He’s trying to get a ‘big donor to float/cover until GoFundMe releases the funds.”

    He will also likely be able to run NCOA / SSDI data at a “*very good price*”

    *  *  *

    GOP political analyst and former Trump Data Chief Matt Braynard believes he can detect voter fraud by comparing absentee ballots and early voters to the Social Security Death Index and the National Change of Address Database.

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    Braynard – former analyst for pollster Frank Luntz – is the president of Braynard Group, which provides services for voter targeting, polling and fundraising.

    In order to accomplish this, Braynard will need up to $100,000 to purchase databases from data vendors. In a Thursday Twitter thread, he outlined his plan to audit the election in key states and launched a GoFundMe page which is currently under review (“Getting nuked still a possibility,” he says).

    After $100K was quickly raised, however, Braynard bumped the goal to to $250,000, with which he will establish “call centers that will run down any and all inactive/less active or moved voters who were marked as casting ballots,” adding “We’ll then get any who said they didn’t cast a ballot to sign an affidavits, and it all goes to law enforcement and the media.”

    Unfortunately, GoFundMe is currently holding the money hostage.

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    As of this writing, Braynard’s GoFundMe is up to just under $170,000. And in a Friday update, he says he’s been in touch with the Trump campaign (“but nothing more to say on that now”), has vendors lined up for Social Security and the Change of Address data, and is “Tracking down source data on Early Voters/ABS [absentee ballots]”

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    Update: GoFundMe is still holding the money hostage:

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  • The Majority Of Advertising Dollars Are Now Being Spent Online
    The Majority Of Advertising Dollars Are Now Being Spent Online

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 11/06/2020 – 20:40

    The Briefing

    • In the last decade, digital ad spend in the U.S. has surged

    • It’s estimated by GroupM that 49% of ad spend will have taken place online this year, but in 2021 that portion will surge to 54%

    • U.S. spending on pure-play internet advertising is expected to reach a whopping $151 billion by the year 2024

    • In contrast, more traditional forms of advertising have shown significant drops in popularity

    The Growth of Internet Ad Spend in America

    Ad spend in the U.S. generates billions in revenue – in 2019, the top 10 marketers spent over $41 billion on various forms of advertising.

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    While the ad industry has taken a significant hit in 2020 because of COVID-19, Visual Capitalist’s Carmen Ang notes that it’s projected to see overall growth in 2021, and a majority of this growth is expected to come in the form of internet advertising.

    Internet ads have surged in popularity over the last decade. Here’s a look at the total spend on pure-play internet ads since 2012:

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    While internet advertising has increased over the years, more traditional forms have nose-dived in percentage terms.

    For instance, ad spend on directories reached $6 billion in 2012. By 2024, they’re projected to generate merely $68 million in revenue.

    Like directories, newspaper and magazine spend have seen significant drops since 2012, with projected decreases on the horizon.

    »To learn more, read our full article: How Total Spend by U.S. Advertisers Has Changed, Over 20 Years.

  • Game-On For The Coup?
    Game-On For The Coup?

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 11/06/2020 – 20:20

    Authored by Michael Anton via The American Mind,

    Strictly speaking, a coup is an illegitimate change of government by violent means. But what if you can do it without violence? To win without fighting is best, Sun Tzu says. An ostensibly (“mostly”) peaceful ouster from power is preferable to the use of force because it can much more easily be sold as “our democracy” at work.

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    National polls consistently predicted a huge Biden blowout. That they were wrong (again) is demonstrated by the facts that (a) the 2020 popular vote is, so far (California is not fully counted), a mere two-point spread, hardly a blowout; (b) Trump got a higher share of the vote than last time; and (C) Trump received far more total votes than last time.

    But it’s the swing states that matter. Here (again) Trump was supposed to lose – if not necessarily bigly in every case, at least widely.

    But throughout election day, the president consistently outperformed the polls. He crushed his 2016 performance in Florida. He also outperformed in Iowa, Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas. Senators he was supposed to drag down with him, including Joni Ernst, Lindsey Graham, and Mitch McConnell, won handily. Even Susan Collins, who was supposed to be sure goner and lose by at least three, won by nine. A party that was “certain” to lose the Senate has kept it and gained (so far) six seats in the House.

    Looking at states no one expected Trump to lose, his overperformance is even more stark. The polling average for West Virginia was Trump +17; he won it by 39. Kansas was estimated at +9; the result was +15.

    Throughout the day the president was also outperforming his expected result in key states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He even, for a time, looked like he was within striking distance in Virginia, a state Hillary Clinton won by five points in 2016. At one point the New York Times’s “meter” had Trump’s chances in North Carolina at 92%. The needle was also sliding in the president’s direction in Arizona and Georgia, among others.

    And then, suddenly, the counting stopped in at least five states (or parts of states): Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; all but one with a Democratic governor (coincidence, surely!). When has that ever happened? Well, it happened in Broward County, Florida, in 2018, when a dodgy Democratic election official appeared to be intervening, illicitly, on her party’s behalf. The process only got back underway when the state’s (Republican) governor intervened and had her removed from the process.

    But getting back to election night, some time in the wee hours, additional ballots were “found” and added to early totals which had Trump ahead. To no one’s surprise, those votes were overwhelmingly—literally as much as 100% in some batches—for Biden. According to Nate Silver, no one’s idea of a Trumpist, one tranche of 23,277 votes that turned up in Philadelphia were “all for Biden.” Absent some kind of harvesting or fraud (or both), that’s a logical and statistical impossibility.

    Through the night, all such ballots came from heavily Democratic areas posting unusually, improbably high turnout. 85% in Milwaukee? A city that turned out at only 61% in 2016, and even with Obama on the ballot in 2012, at 71%? But 85% for Sleepy Joe? According to one report, seven Milwaukee precincts returned more presidential votes than they have registered voters. Turnout in Wisconsin overall is alleged to have been 89.25%, more than five standard deviations for the state’s mean turnout since 1960—another statistical impossibility.

    One might also wonder why this urban Blue wave materialized only in close states. Milwaukee was way up but not Cleveland? Philly but not St. Louis? Granted Ohio and Missouri are Red, but their big cities aren’t.

    How It’s Done

    We’ve seen this movie before. This is how they beat Scott Walker in Wisconsin in 2018, Tom Foley in Connecticut in 2010, and Norm Coleman in Minnesota in 2008.

    Why stop the count? Because that’s the only way to know how many votes you need to “win.” Sure, you can just brute force things by backing up a truck full of ballots. But that looks bad. You might even end up counting more votes than there are registered voters in the state. Better to eke out a narrow win. As Joseph Kennedy, Sr. allegedly said to his second son, “I’m not paying for a landslide.”

    Speaking of the Kennedys, veteran political observer Theodore H. White—in their company on election night 1960—explained how it’s done. In Illinois, the race came down to

    downstate (Republican) versus Cook County (Democratic), and the bosses, holding back totals from key precincts, were playing out their concealed cards under pressure of publicity as in a giant game of blackjack….

    The AP ticker chattered its keys once more and reported: “With all downstate precincts now reported in, and only Cook County precincts unreported, Richard Nixon has surged into the lead by 3,000 votes.”

    I was dismayed, for if Nixon really carried Illinois, the game was all but over. And at this point I was jabbed from dismay by the outburst of jubilation from young Dick Donahue, who yelped, “He’s got them! Daley made them go first! He’s still holding back—watch him play his hand now.” I was baffled, they were elated. But they knew the counting game better than I, and as if in response to Donahue’s yelp, the ticker, having stuttered along for several minutes with other results, announced: “With the last precincts of Cook County now in, Senator Kennedy has won a lead of 8,000 votes to carry Illinois’s 27 electoral votes.”

    Later that evening, Kennedy told his friend Ben Bradlee of an early call from Daley, when all seemed in doubt. “With a little bit of luck and the help of a few close friends,” Daley had assured Kennedy before the AP had pushed out the count, “you’re going to carry Illinois.”

    Is that what happened last night? Sure looks like it. Plus ça change.

    To say nothing of other considerations, it’s hard to believe that an eight-point win in Ohio would be coupled with losses throughout the rest of the upper Midwest, or that historically deep purple Florida would go strongly for Trump while Georgia and North Carolina would not. Are those states really so unrepresentative of the American electorate?

    Stop the Steal

    The thing could (but will never) be proved. Those who ran the operation are also in charge of all the potential investigating agencies. There’s zero chance they will use any of that power to uncover their own malfeasance. Think a Biden Justice Department will look into it?

    Expect instead a media typhoon of propaganda insisting that the results are all legit, that any anomaly you think you see (or saw) is a “conspiracy theory,” or at any rate innocently explainable by mundane process details too boring to get into. Twitter is already slapping warnings on the accounts of those who point out irregularities. How long before they start outright suspensions?

    Will it work? That depends on the president and his allies and what they do. The odds and the forces arrayed against them are immense.

    What would I have them do? I’m no expert but the crew at Revolver has some good ideas:

    (1) challenge the late-night “finds” in the courts;

    (2) hold rallies in contested states;

    (3) urge GOP officials in close states to expose shenanigans and, if necessary, to refuse to seat Biden electors in the event of a fake count;

    (4) mount a campaign to marshal grassroots public opinion in the president’s favor. Convince the people that if in fact the election is in the process of being stolen, the president and his allies are going to fight the steal on their behalf.

    If middle America wants to prevent this election from being stolen, it will have to be willing to act—now. I know they are willing, but they need to hear from the President and his best surrogates. I’d get Trump on Tucker, tonight, to explain his plan.

    But in another sense, the Democrats’ plan won’t “work.”

    Even if the steal can be made to stick, half the country won’t accept it. That is, they’ll accept the reality that power is now in the hands of a party that took it by fraud. But they won’t believe that the election was fair or the outcome real. They will believe, or be confirmed in a belief that’s been brewing for a long time, that the system is rigged, the process is fake, the ruling class are liars, the government is illegitimate, and that they themselves are subjects and not citizens—anything but a free people with a say over its own destiny. If the ruling class can get away with this, they will be able to get away with anything. And they will know it.

    The irony will be that those who, over the last four years, have bleated the loudest about “our democracy” will have been most responsible for killing it off.

  • Watch Live: Joe Biden Delivers A Speech
    Watch Live: Joe Biden Delivers A Speech

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 11/06/2020 – 19:58

    The Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign announced that he would be making an address this evening in prime-time but did not say where or what he plans to say.

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    Perhaps Biden and Harris were likely expecting at least one of their MSM partners to have “called it” for them by now, the count continues in Alaska, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia.

    President Trump had some advice for Joe…

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    Of course, Biden will very carefully avoid any actual declaration of victory…

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

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 11/06/2020 – 19:40

    Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,

    Ok, so, when your pally is a doorstep
    Step over him and coat
    When your mommy is a French press
    In a café called no hope
    Your belly aches
    On benches where buses never go
    Now tally up the misprints
    And tell them told you so

    – Tell Them Told You So, by Swingin’ Utters

    The Worst Job In The World

    Nothing’s shocking in 2020.  Not lockdowns.  Not pandemic hysteria.  And certainly not election chaos.  To the latter, it was expected all along.

    At the time of this writing, and perhaps with the aid of fraud, it appears Kamala Harris will be the next President of the United States.  Here we’ll pause to offer a word of congratulations.  Well done, Ms. Harris.  You’ve just signed up for the worst job in the world.

    No doubt, the rewards of being President, these days, are few and far between.  Just ask President Trump.  The work hours are terrible, the pay is far less than that of a corporate CEO, and you’re endlessly surrounded by shabby politicians.

    They laugh at all your dull jokes.  They tell you what you want to hear.  They expect to be rewarded with cushy Cabinet positions because they stumped for you in Cleveland or some other mistake of a place.

    What’s more, the hand towels aboard Air Force One have the shoddy over washed roughness of those at a turnpike Motel 6.  With the exception of being a flatus odor judge, we can’t think of a smellier job than being President of the United States.  Can you?

    There’s little privacy.  Newsrooms across the planet psychoanalyze your every facial expression; many conclude you’re mentally ill.  You can hardly wander the halls of your own home in your bathrobe – during night hours no less – without it making front page news.

    Our advice to Harris: Quit while you’re ahead.

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    More Fake Money

    By all honest measures, Harris doesn’t stand a chance.  The debt bomb ticking in Washington is past due.  No President can diffuse it.  No President even bothers trying.

    Congress hasn’t truly balanced the budget for over 50 years.  Day after day, year after year, Washington spends more than it takes in via tax receipts.  Public debt makes up the difference.  The situation is beyond reconciliation.

    The national debt in 1971, the year Nixon closed the gold window, was $398 billion.  By comparison, the deficit for 2020 alone was $3.1 trillion.  Add up the yearly deficits, and the national debt now stands at $27.2 trillion.  Add on all the unfunded liabilities promised by politicians over the years, including social security and Medicare Parts A, B, and D, and we’re facing a debt burden of $155.3 trillion.

    For many decades, annual budget deficits were financed by American and foreign investors via purchases of U.S. Treasury notes.  These days, as the empire reclines and flails, the Federal Reserve is the big buyer of Treasuries…using new credit that’s created from thin air.  These coordinated fiscal and monetary policies by the U.S. Treasury and the Fed deliver limitless government.

    Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, upon winning reelection for a seventh six-year term, said his top priority is passing a new economic stimulus bill before the end of the year.  He even wants the package to include bailouts for state and local governments.  A new stimulus bill would all but assure the 2021 budget deficit’s over $2 trillion.  The $2 trillion deficit, of course, would be financed by the Fed’s fake money.

    On Wednesday, Wall Street celebrated these fake money prospects by running the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) up over 367 points.  On Thursday, they bid the DJIA up another 542 points.  What to make of it?

    America’s Recline and Flail Goes On

    By and large, the tests facing America’s economy have little to do with markets and everything to do with central government.  Over the last 50 years, as the Fed and the Treasury colluded to rig the financial system in totality, wealth has become ever more concentrated in fewer and fewer insider hands.  The effect over the decade long expansion that ran from Q2 2009 to Q2 2020 has been a disparity that’s so magnified few can ignore it.

    This trend will be further intensified by the current depression, which most economists won’t acknowledge is already in full swing.  Bitterness and contempt for wealthy insiders is much higher than it was during prior business cycles.  Without question, this bitterness and contempt will increase to a fever pitch as the nirvana of stimulus is revealed to be a hallucination.

    Discontent throughout the broad population will take a financial crash and an economic collapse, and transform it into a complete societal breakdown.  Then the central government will fail the test of its making.

    Rather than employing small government and sound money solutions, the discord will provide Washington the perfect cover for a much larger central authority.  Harris will offer promises to fix things while delivering a much wider range of wealth inequality.

    Big government will grow bigger.  At the same time, dissatisfaction, disappointment, and discontent will simmer over into mass movements, often with little clarity of purpose or tangible objective.  Millennials, many having progressive socialist leanings, will demand big government solutions to problems of big government making.

    Yet life goes on.  America’s recline and flail goes on.  The currency debasement policies that prop up big government and zombie corporations – what is being called the reflation trade – is bullish for stocks, for now.  In practice, these policies are turning the dollar – the dollars you own – into bird cage liner.

    No.  Harris doesn’t stand a chance.  Neither does Trump.  Nor Biden.  Nor Obama.  Nor any other politician that steps into this mess.

    We don’t like it.  But we can’t deny it.  Nor can we resist it…

    There’s no stopping nature.  America’s recline and flail must run its course.

  • A Historical Divide: A 160-Year View Of The Gold-Oil Ratio
    A Historical Divide: A 160-Year View Of The Gold-Oil Ratio

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 11/06/2020 – 19:20

    2020 has ushered in a new era of prices for two historically significant assets – gold and oil.

    The market has driven the pair in polar opposite directions breaking historical patterns. This year, as Visual Capitalist’s Aran Ali notes, gold brushed above $2,000 an ounce, while oil futures even went temporarily negative in the spring. The gold-oil ratio tells us how many barrels of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) are needed to buy an ounce of gold, serving as a price-based indicator of the relative value of these two important assets.

    Historically, the ratio has averaged between 10:1 and 30:1, This year it brushed above 90:1…

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    Here’s a look at the price of gold and oil over the last 6 months:

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    The Gold Story

    Traditional investing mantra tells us gold acts as an alternative investment, a haven if you will, that appreciates in price during tumultuous economic and financial times.

    Its limited quantity and physical storage properties serve as a hedge to much of modern finance that is increasingly digital.

    The COVID-19 pandemic, a subsequent slowdown in economic activity, and the debt-driven stimulus packages by governments globally are all factors in the recent gold rally.

    The Oil Story

    At the other end are the oil markets, which face both long and short-term headwinds. Long-term demand for oil has dwindled gradually as societies buff up their alternative and green energy initiatives.

    Shrinking activity during the pandemic was the short-term shock. Combined, the outcomes include oil futures going negative in spring, Chevron reporting a net income loss of $8.3 billion in the second quarter, and Exxon’s dumping from The Dow.

    As markets adapt to the volatile nature of 2020, only time will tell what the future holds for the gold-oil ratio.

    *  *  *

    Source: Goehring & Rozencwajg: Top Reasons to Consider Oil-Related Equities report and MacroTrends. Notes: Data is as of October 2020.

  • Spirit Airlines Flight Attendant Threatens To Have People Who Don't Wear Mask Arrested, Put On No Fly List
    Spirit Airlines Flight Attendant Threatens To Have People Who Don’t Wear Mask Arrested, Put On No Fly List

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 11/06/2020 – 19:00

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    A video clip shows a Spirit Airlines flight attendant threatening to put anyone who doesn’t properly wear their mask on a no fly list for life and have them arrested and jailed for 20 years.

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    “Once the door is closed, if we have to ask you more than once to cover your nose, mouth, put your mask on – we are not gonna be rude, we are not gonna be nasty – we are gonna simply take your seat number and your name and when we get where we are going, you will either be arrested, fined, but you will also be placed on a no fly list, meaning you will not be able to fly on any airline for the rest of your life,” says the flight attendant.

    He then adds that he doesn’t want “to do the extra paperwork,” before inviting anyone who doesn’t agree to leave the plane.

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

    After referring to viral videos of passengers attacking flight attendants, the staffer, who says his name is Marrio, then claims, “Let me remind you, we are government officials, this is government property,” before threatening passengers who misbehave with 20 years in prison and a $250,000 dollar fine.

    There is no law that says people who improperly wear masks can be banned from flying for life.

    The flight attendant is clearly abusing their power and should be fired immediately.

    Meanwhile, Joe Biden wants a nationwide mask mandate, meaning such draconian behavior could be replicated on the streets of America.

    *  *  *

    New limited edition merch now available! Click here.

    In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. I need you to sign up for my free newsletter here. Also, I urgently need your financial support here.

  • Tehran Doubles Down On Biden As Preferred Candidate After Trump "Brought Iran To Its Knees"
    Tehran Doubles Down On Biden As Preferred Candidate After Trump “Brought Iran To Its Knees”

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 11/06/2020 – 18:40

    It’s no secret that Iran is pinning hopes of its escaping the dire sanctions predicament that has put the Islamic Republic’s very economic survival in question on a Biden victory. Trump and Pompeo’s ‘maximum pressure’ campaign, which reached a peak when IRGC Quds Force general Qassem Soleimani was assassinated last January, also seems destined for eventual war should Trump cinch a second term.

    Closely watching the vote count and related controversies play out from afar, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif doubled on down on prior statements expressing optimism of a Democratic victory in Washington.

    “The statements by the Biden camp have been more promising, but we will have to wait and see. What counts is the behavior,” Zarif said earlier this week when asked which candidate seems more appealing.

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    Zarif admitted Trump’s sanctions has “brought Iran to its knees” yet without even the hint of producing regime change or coming anywhere close.

    The FM explained that while Iran remains ready to rejoin the 2015 nuclear deal brokered under Obama, which the Biden campaign has strongly suggested reentering, Tehran will “under no circumstances” pursue a new nuclear deal no matter who is in the White House next.

    “We can find a way to reengage, obviously. But reengagement does not mean renegotiation. It means the U.S. coming back to the negotiating table,” Zarif emphasized in the statements. He further denied recent DOJ and FBI claims that Iran is foremost among external actors seeking to meddle in the US election by hacking voter registration information. 

    Western pundits have recently highlighted that a Biden presidency would surely mark a “new beginning” in terms of resetting relations with Iran, which since the Trump administration withdrawal from the JCPOA in May 2018 have been on a war footing.

    While it’s clear Biden has the greater political capital with Tehran given his serving under Obama at the time the nuclear deal was negotiated and cemented, it remains a big unknown whether Iran would come back to conformity to enrichment caps stipulated under its terms. 

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Nov 06

Today’s News 6th November 2020

  • War In Nagorno-Karabakh: Shadow Of Big Ottoman Brother Covers Azerbaijan
    War In Nagorno-Karabakh: Shadow Of Big Ottoman Brother Covers Azerbaijan

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 11/06/2020 – 02:00

    Submitted by SouthFront,

    The Turkish military continues to demonstrate its non-involvement in the war with Armenia in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. On November 4, the heroic defense ministry of Turkey announced that Azerbaijani forces had shot down one more Armenian Su-25 warplane in the conflict zone. Thus, the claimed number of downed Armenian warplanes has reached seven. The only issue is that Azerbaijan itself did not claim such an incident, when the Turkish defense ministry made its statement. So, it seems that Ankara knows much more than do the Azerbaijani forces themselves, who are allegedly alone in their fight against the mighty Armenian aggressors.

    Meanwhile, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev undertook another Twitter advance announcing the capture of the villages of Mirak and Kavdar in the Jabrayil district, Mashadiismayilli and Shafibayli in the Zangilan district, and Basharat, Garakishilar and Garajalli in the Gubadli district. The Azerbaijani military also reported clashes in the district of Adhere. In the last 48 hours, according to Azerbaijan, Armenian forces suffered multiple casualties and lost over two dozen equipment pieces.

    Fortified positions and settlements controlled by Armenian forces in the central and northern parts of Nagorno-Karabakh are regularly being targeted with air and artillery strikes by Azerbaijani forces. The most intense strikes hit the areas of Shusha and the Lachin corridor.

    Armenian officials kept apace with their Azerbaijani counterparts and also made several victorious statements. For example, on November 4, Armenian forces allegedly eliminated a large group of Azerbaijani soldiers in an operation code-named “Gyorbagyor.” The troops were amassing south of the town of Shusha, when they were detected by an Armenian drone and were targeted by artillery. Dozens were reportedly injured or killed.

    In another development, the Armenians allegedly eliminated an Azerbaijani sabotage group operating on the road between Shusha and Lachin. Despite this statement, as of November 5, the road remains closed to civilian traffic. This means that the situation there is more complicated than Yerevan wants to admit. This highlights the unresolved crisis. If Armenian forces fail to push the Azerbaijani units away from the road and to restore free communication along it, the position of the forces defending Shusha will seriously worsen.

    In the coming weeks, Azerbaijani forces supported by Syrian militants and Turkish special forces, who allegedly are not participating in the conflict, will continue attempts to cut off the Shusha-Lachin road, and to capture Martuni and Shushi. The Lachin area itself, due to its close proximity to the state border of Armenia, is the more complicated and protected target. Thus, the focus of clashes will likely remain on the center of Nagorno-Karabakh.

    If the Turkish Defense Ministry does not forget to inform Baku about military developments on the ground in a timely manner, Azerbaijan still has a significant chance of developing its initial success in the south of Nagorno-Karabakh and making even more gains before the start of winter, which, given the mountainous terrain, will reduce the intensity of the clashes.

  • Understanding The Tri-Fold Nature Of The Deep State
    Understanding The Tri-Fold Nature Of The Deep State

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 11/05/2020 – 23:40

    Authored by Matthew Ehret via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Not that long ago the United States came close to total dissolution.

    The financial system was bankrupt, speculation had run amok, and all infrastructure had fallen into disarray over the course of 30 years of unbroken free trade. To make matters worse, the nation was on the verge of a civil war and international financiers in London and Wall Street gloated over the immanent destruction of the first nation on earth to be established not upon hereditary institutions, but rather on the consent of the governed and mandated to serve the general welfare.

    Although one might think that I am referring now to today’s America, I am in fact referring to the United States of 1860.

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    The Trifold Deep State

    In my past two articles in this series, I discussed how a new system of political economy was established by Benjamin Franklin and his disciples in the wake of the war of independence driven by protectionism, national banking and internal improvements.

    I also demonstrated that the rise of the thing known as today’s “deep state” can also be understood as a three-headed beast which arose in its earliest incarnation under the leadership of arch traitor Aaron Burr who established Wall Street, killed Alexander Hamilton and devoted his life to the cause of dissolving the union. After having been caught in the act of sabotage, Burr escaped arrest in 1807 by running off to England where he live in Jeremy Bentham’s mansion for 5 years, only to return to oversee a new plot to break up the union that eventually boiled over in 1860.

    The three prongs of the operation that Burr led on behalf of British intelligence and which remains active to this very day, can loosely be described as follows:

    • The Anglo-Canadian establishment that arose in the wake of the “United Empire Loyalists” who left the rebelling colonies in 1776 to found English speaking Canada and who were soon labelled as the “Family Compact” by republican revolutionary William Lyon Mackenzie and which ultimately managed the eventual creation of the Rhodes Trust under George Parkin and his heirs.

    • The Eastern Establishment families sometimes known as the Essex Junto who took control of Hamilton’s Federalist Party. These were Empire Loyalists who remained within the USA under the illusion of loyalty to the constitution, but always adherent to a British Imperial world order and devoted to eventually undermining it from within. These were the circles that brought the USA into Britain’s Opium trade against China as junior partners in crime and who promoted the dissolution of the union as early as 1800 under the leadership of Aaron Burr.

    • The “Virginia Junto”, slave owning aristocracy which also worked with Aaron Burr in his 1807 secessionist plot and whose alliance with the British Empire was instrumental in its rise to power from 1828-1860. This was the structure that soon returned to power, after the civil war, under the guiding hand of such Mazzini-connected “Young Americans” as KKK founder Albert Pike and the Southern establishment that later executed nationalist presidents in 1880, 1901 and in 1963.

    Some Uncomfortable Questions

    The story has been told of Lincoln’s murder in tens of thousands of books and yet more often than not the narrative of a “single lone gunman” is imposed onto the story by researchers who are either too lazy or too corrupt to look for the evidence of a larger plot.

    How many of those popular narratives infused into the western zeitgeist over the decades even acknowledge the simple fact that John Wilkes Boothe was carrying a $500 bank draft signed by Ontario Bank of Montreal President Henry Starnes (later to become Montreal Mayor) when he was shot dead at Garrett Farm on April 26, 1865?

    How many people have been exposed to the vast Southern Confederacy secret service operations active throughout the civil war in Montreal, Toronto and Halifax which was under the firm control of Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin and his handlers in British intelligence?

    How many people know that Boothe spent at least 5 weeks in the fall of 1864 in Montreal associating closely with the highest echelons of British and Southern intelligence including Starnes, and confederate spy leaders Jacob Thompson and George Sanders?

    Demonstrating his total ignorance of the process that controlled him, Booth wrote to a friend on October 28, 1864:

     “I have been in Montreal for the last 3 or 4 weeks and no one (not even myself) knew when I would return”.

    On The Trail of the Assassins

    After Lincoln was murdered, a manhunt to track down the intelligence networks behind the assassination was underway that eventually led to the hanging of four low level co-conspirators who history has shown were just as much patsies as John Wilkes Boothe.

    Days later, President Johnson issued a proclamation saying: 

    “It appears from evidence in the Bureau of Military Justice that the … murder of … Abraham Lincoln … [was] incited, concerted, and procured by and between Jefferson Davis, late of Richmond, Va., and Jacob Thompson, Clement C. Clay, [Nathaniel] Beverly Tucker, George N. Sanders, William C. Cleary, and other rebels and traitors against the government of the United States harbored in Canada.”

    Two days before Booth was shot, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton wrote:

     “This Department has information that the President’s murder was organized in Canada and approved at Richmond.”

    Knowledge of Canada’s confederate operations was well known to the federal authorities in those days even though the majority among leading historians today are totally ignorant of this fact.

    George Sanders remains one of the most interesting figures among Booth’s handlers in Canada. As a former Ambassador to England under the presidency of Franklin Pierce (1853-1857), Sanders was a close friend of international anarchist Giuseppe Mazzini – the founder of the Young Europe movement. Sanders who wrote “Mazzini and Young Europe” in 1852, had the honor of being a leading member of the southern branch of the Young America Movement (while Ralph Waldo Emerson was a self-proclaimed leader of the northern branch of Young America). Jacob Thompson, who was named in the Johnson dispatch above, was a former Secretary of the Interior under President Pierce, handler of Booth and acted as the top controller of the Confederacy secret service in Montreal.

    As the book Montreal City of Secrets (2017), author Barry Sheehy proves that not only was Canada the core of Confederate Secret Services, but also coordinated a multi pronged war from the emerging “northern confederacy” onto Lincoln’s defense of the union alongside Wall Street bankers while the president was fighting militarily to stop the southern secession. Sheehy writes:

     “By 1863, the Confederate Secret Service was well entrenched in Canada. Funding came from Richmond via couriers and was supplemented by profits from blockade running.”

    The Many Shapes of War from the North

    Although not having devolved to direct military engagement, the Anglo-Canadian war on the Union involved several components:

    Financial warfare: The major Canadian banks dominant in the 19th century were used not only by the confederacy to pay British operations in the construction of war ships, but also to receive much needed infusions of cash from British Financiers throughout the war. A financial war on Lincoln’s greenback was waged under the control of Montreal based confederate bankers John Porterfield and George Payne and also JP Morgan to “short” the greenback.

    By 1864, the subversive traitor Salmon Chase had managed to tie the greenback to a (London controlled) gold standard thus making its value hinge upon gold speculation. During a vital moment of the war, these financiers coordinated a mass “sell off” of gold to London driving up the price of gold and collapsing the value of the U.S. dollar crippling Lincoln’s ability to fund the war effort.

    Direct Military intervention Thwarted: As early as 1861, the Trent Crisis nearly induced a hot war with Britain when a union ship intervened onto a British ship in international waters and arrested two high level confederate agents en route to London. Knowing that a two-fold war at this early stage was unwinnable, Lincoln pushed back against hot heads within his own cabinet who argued for a second front saying “one war at a time”. Despite this near miss, London wasted no time deploying over 10 000 soldiers to Canada for the duration of the war ready to strike down upon the Union at a moment’s notice and kept at bay in large measure due to the bold intervention of the Russian fleet to both Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the USA. This was a clear message to both England and to Napoleon III’s France (who were stationed across the Mexican border) to stay out of America’s war.

    Despite Russia’s intervention, Britain continued to build warships for the Confederacy which devastated the Union navy during the war and which England had to pay $15.5 million to the USA in 1872 under the Alabama Claims.

    Terrorism: It is less well known today than it was during the 19th century that confederate terror operations onto the north occurred throughout the civil war with raids on Union POW camps, efforts to burn popular New York hotels, blowing up ships on the Mississippi, and the infamous St Albans raid of October 1964 on Vermont and attacks on Buffalo, Chicago, Sandusky, Ohio, Detroit, and Pennsylvania. While the St Albans raiders were momentarily arrested in Montreal, they were soon released under the logic that they represented a “sovereign state” at conflict with another “sovereign state” with no connection with Canada (perhaps a lesson can be learned here for Meng Wanzhou’s lawyers?).

    Assassination: I already mentioned that a $550 note was found on Boothe’s body with the signature of Ontario Bank president Henry Starnes which the failed actor would have received during his October 1864 stay in Montreal. What I did not mention is that Booth stayed at the St Lawrence Hall Hotel which served as primary headquarters for the Confederacy from 1863-65. Describing the collusion of Northern Copperheads, anti-Lincoln republicans, and Wall Street agents, Sheehy writes: “All of these powerful northerners were at St. Lawrence Hall rubbing elbows with the Confederates who used the hotel as an unofficial Headquarters. This was the universe in which John Wilkes Booth circulated in Canada.”

    In a 2014 expose, historian Anton Chaitkin, points out that the money used by Boothe came directly from a $31,507.97 transfer from London arranged by the head of European confederate secret service chief James D. Bulloch. It is no coincidence that Bulloch happens to also be the beloved uncle and mentor of the same Teddy Roosevelt who became the president over the dead body of Lincoln-follower William McKinley (assassinated in 1901).

    In his expose, Chaitkin wrote:

    “James D. Bulloch was the maternal uncle, model and strategy-teacher to future U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. He emerged from the shadows of the Civil War when his nephew Teddy helped him to organize his papers and to publish a sanitized version of events in his 1883 memoir, The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe. Under the protection of imperial oligarchs such as Lord Salisbury and other Cecil family members, working in tandem with Britain’s military occupation of its then-colony Canada, Bulloch arranged English construction and crewing for Confederate warships that notoriously preyed upon American commerce.”

    The Truth is Buried Under the Sands of History

    While four low level members of Booth’s cell were hanged on July 7, 1865 after a four month show trial (1), the actual orchestrators of Lincoln’s assassination were never brought to justice with nearly every leading member of the confederate leadership having escaped to England in the wake of Lincoln’s murder. Even John Surrat (who was among the eight who faced trial) avoided hanging when his case was dropped, and his $25 000 bail was mysteriously paid by an anonymous benefactor unknown to this day. After this, Surrat escaped to London where the U.S. Consuls demands for his arrest were ignored by British authorities.

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    Confederate spymaster Judah Benjamin escaped arrest and lived out his days as a Barrister in England, and Confederate President Jefferson Davies speaking to adoring fans in Quebec in June 1867 encouraged the people to reject the spread of republicanism and instead embrace the new British Confederation scheme that would soon be imposed weeks later. Davies spoke to the Canadian band performing Dixie at the Royal Theater: “I hope that you will hold fast to their British principles and that you may ever strive to cultivate close and affectionate connections with the mother country”.

    With the loss of Lincoln, and the 1868 death of Thaddeus Stevens, Confederate General Albert Pike established restoration of the southern oligarchy and sabotage of Lincoln’s restoration with the rise of the KKK, and renewal of Southern Rite Freemasonry. Over the ensuing years, an all out assault was launched on Lincoln’s Greenbacks culminating in the Specie Resumption Act of 1875 tying the U.S. financial system to British “hard money” monetarism and paving the way for the later financial coup known as the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 (2).

    While the Southern Confederacy plot ultimately failed, Britain’s “other confederacy operation launched in 1864 was successfully consolidated with the British North America Act of July 1, 1867. The hoped-for extension of trans continental rail lines through British Columbia and into Alaska and Russia were sabotaged as told in the Real Story Behind the Alaska Purchase of 1867.

    Instead of witnessing a new world system of sovereign nation states under a multipolar order of collaboration driven by international infrastructure projects as Lincoln’s followers like William Seward, Ulysses Grant, William Gilpin and President McKinley envisioned, a new age of war and empire re-asserted itself throughout the 20th century.

    It was this same trifold Deep State that contended with Franklin Roosevelt and his patriotic Vice President Henry Wallace for power during the course of WWII, and it was this same beast that ran the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. As New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison demonstrated in his book On the Trail of the Assassins (1991), Kennedy’s murder was arranged by a complex assassination network that brought into play Southern secret intelligence assets in Louisiana, and Texas, Wall Street financiers, and a strange assassination bureau based in Montreal named Permindex under the leadership of Maj. Gen. Louis Mortimer Bloomfield. This was the same intelligence operation that grew out of MI6’s Camp X in Ottawa during WWII and changed its name but not its functions during the Cold War. This is the same British Imperial complex that has been attempting to undo the watershed moment of 1776 for over 240 years.

    It is this same tumor in the heart of the USA that has invested everything in a gamble to put their senile tool Joe Biden into the seat of the Presidency and oust the first genuinely nationalist American president the world has seen in nearly 60 years.

  • China Vows To Hit Back After 'Illegal' US Reaper Drone Sale To Taiwan Approved
    China Vows To Hit Back After ‘Illegal’ US Reaper Drone Sale To Taiwan Approved

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 11/05/2020 – 23:20

    The to be expected stern Chinese response to the recently announced MQ-9 Reaper drone sales to Taiwan came a day after the State Department’s formal approval was announced Tuesday. Beijing warned on Wednesday that any and all US arms sales to Taiwan break Chinese law and are a blatant violation of the One China principle as well as prior agreements with Washington.

    The US State Department earlier this week said it has approved four armed MQ-9 Reaper drones to Taiwan in a deal worth $600 million.

    Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a press briefing Wednesday that the sales “severely violate the one-China principle and the three U.S.-China joint communiqués,” according to UPI.

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    MQ-9 Reaper drone, via Reuters

    He said it “seriously undermines China’s sovereignty and security interests, and sends out wrong signals to ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces.” He further said at a moment that multiple defense systems sales are in progress that “China firmly opposes such acts.”

    Wang warned that “legitimate and necessary reactions to firmly safeguard national sovereignty and security interests” will follow, however, it remains uncertain whether Beijing has a big enough card to play (that is, equivalent to something as provocative as the US arming up a breakaway independent island right of China’s mainland).

    The Trump administration defended the sales as part of “continuing efforts to modernize [Taiwan’s] armed forces and to maintain a credible defense capability.” 

    Specifically the maritime monitoring outfitted drones are intended to bring the American and Taiwanese militaries into closer intelligence-sharing, and as part of ‘early warning’ systems intent on deterring any Chinese attack, according to one analyst cited in a regional report Thursday.

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    MQ-9B drone via GenAtomics_ASI

    Meanwhile, it’s expected that the Chinese PLA Army and Navy will continue to ramp up their presence around Taiwan, including in the contested waters of the Taiwan Strait. Over the past two months there’s been an uptick in active PLA military exercises to a degree that’s unprecedented.

    PLA drills in the area now seem to be conducted on a near weekly basis, dramatically increasing the likelihood of an armed confrontation with US naval patrols in the region who have also lately traversed the strait in ‘freedom of navigation’ exercises. 

  • Escobar: Russia & China Bid Farewell To America's Failing Democracy
    Escobar: Russia & China Bid Farewell To America’s Failing Democracy

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 11/05/2020 – 23:00

    Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

    Neither Trump nor Biden can stop a China-Russian partnership that is blazing new state-led paths to progress and prosperity…

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    Whatever the geopolitical and geoeconomic consequences of the spectacular US dystopia, the Russia-China strategic partnership, in their own slightly different registers, have already voted on their path forward.

    Here is how I framed what is at the heart of the Chinese 2021-2025 five-year plan approved at the plenum in Beijing last week.

    Here is a standard Chinese think tank interpretation.

    And here is some especially pertinent context examining how rampant Sinophobia is impotent when faced with an extremely efficient made in China model of governance. This study shows how China’s complex history, culture, and civilizational axioms simply cannot fit into the Western, Christian hegemonic worldview.

    The not so hidden “secret” of China’s 2021-2025 five-year plan – which the Global Times described as “economic self-reliance” – is to base the civilization-state’s increasing geopolitical clout on technological breakthroughs.

    Crucially, China is on a “self-driven” path – depending on little to no foreign input. Even a clear – “pragmatic” – horizon has been set: 2035, halfway between now and 2049. By this time China should be on a par or even surpassing the US in geopolitical, geoeconomic and techno power.

    That is the rationale behind the Chinese leadership actively studying the convergence of quantum physics and information sciences – which is regarded as the backbone of the Made in China push towards the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

    The five-year plan makes it quite clear that the two key vectors are AI and robotics – where Chinese research is already quite advanced. Innovations in these fields will yield a matrix of applications in every area from transportation to medicine, not to mention weaponry.

    Huawei is essential in this ongoing process, as it’s not a mere data behemoth, but a hardware provider, creating platforms and the physical infrastructure for a slew of companies to develop their own versions of smart cities, safe cities – or medicines.

    Big Capital – from East and West – is very much in tune with where all of this is going, a process that also implicates the core hubs of the New Silk Roads. In tune with the 21st century “land of opportunity” script, Big Capital will increasingly move towards East Asia, China and these New Silk hubs.

    This new geoeconomic matrix will mostly rely on spin offs of the Made in China 2025 strategy. A clear choice will be presented for most of the planet: “win win” or “zero sum”.

    The failures of neoliberalism

    After observing the mighty clash, enhanced by Covid-19, between the neoliberal paradigm and “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, the Global South is only beginning to draw the necessary conclusions.

    No Western propaganda tsunami can favorably spin what is in effect a devastating, one-two, ideological collapse.

    Neoliberalism’s abject failure in dealing with Covid-19 is manifestly evident all across the West.

    The US election dystopia is now sealing the abject failure of Western liberal “democracy”: what kind of “choice” is offered by Trump-Biden?

    This is happening just as the ultra-efficient, relentlessly demonized “Chinese Communist Party” rolls out the road map for the next five years. Washington cannot even plan what happens the day ahead.

    Trump’s original drive, suggested by Henry Kissinger before the January 2017 inauguration, was to play – what else – Divide and Rule, seducing Russia against China.

    This was absolute anathema for the Deep State and its Dem minions. Thus the subsequent, relentless demonization of Trump – with Russiagate topping the charts. And then Trump unilaterally chose to sanction and demonize China anyway.

    Assuming a Dem victory, the scenario will veer towards Russia demonization on steroids even as hysterical Hybrid War on China will persist on all fronts – Uighurs, Tibet, Hong Kong, South China Sea, Taiwan.

    Now compare all of the above with the Russian road map.

    That was clearly stated in crucial interventions by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and President Putin at the recent Valdai Club discussions.

    Putin has made a key assertion on the role of Capital, stressing the necessity of “abandoning the practice of unrestrained and unlimited consumption – overconsumption – in favor of judicious and reasonable sufficiency, when you do not live just for today but also think about tomorrow.”

    Putin once again stressed the importance of the role of the state: “The state is a necessary fixture, there is no way […] could do without state support.”

    And, in concert with the endless Chinese experimentation, he added that in fact there are no economic rules set in stone: “No model is pure or rigid, neither the market economy nor the command economy today, but we simply have to determine the level of the state’s involvement in the economy. What do we use as a baseline for this decision? Expediency. We need to avoid using any templates, and so far, we have successfully avoided that.”

    Pragmatic Putin defined how to regulate the role of the state as “a form of art”.

    And he offered as an example, “keeping inflation up by a bit will make it easier for Russian consumers and companies to pay back their loans. It is economically healthier than the deflationary policies of western societies.”

    As a direct consequence of Putin’s pragmatic policies – which include wide-ranging social programs and vast national projects – the West ignores that Russia may well be on the way to overtake Germany as the fifth largest economy in the world.

    The bottom line is that combined, the Russia-China strategic partnership is offering, especially to the Global South, two radically different approaches to the standard Western neoliberal dogma. And that, for the whole US establishment, is anathema.

    So whatever the result of the Trump-Biden “choice”, the clash between the Hegemon and the Top Two Sovereigns is only bound to become more incandescent.

  • October Payrolls Preview: It's About To Get Ugly Again
    October Payrolls Preview: It’s About To Get Ugly Again

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 11/05/2020 – 22:40

    With the nation transfixed by the bad game show that is the presidential election, now in its 3rd day and counting, it is safe to say that nobody, not even the algos will give a rat’s ass what October jobs data the BLS reports on Friday morning. Still, as we do every month, we will preview what the market expects of the first jobs report after the election, even if it is still unclear who the next president is, and the first report expected to shock Wall Street by how bad it is since the Covid mini-depression.

    As NewsSquawk reports, the recent data has been somewhat downbeat, with the rate of Initial Jobless Claims rising in the October survey week against expectations it would, while ADP payrolls rose in October, less than expected and a slower pace from the prior month, although it remains to be seen if it will correlate to the BLS following recent divergences.

    Goldman (which expects a below consensus 500K NFP print) agrees, noting that High-frequency labor market information indicates further deceleration in job growth, consistent with a drag from the virus resurgence and fiscal fizzle. The bank also expects virtual schooling and the accelerating shift to e-commerce this holiday season to weigh on education and retail payrolls in tomorrow’s report,respectively. The wind-down of the 2020 Census is also set to reduce payrolls by around 125k in Friday’s jobs report.

    In addition to softer signals from Big Data sources, the smaller number of workers on temporary layoff (4.6mn in September, down from 18.1mn in April) reduces the scope for the rapid pace of gains seen in the summer. And while continuing claims declined sharply during the payroll month, much of the drop reflected the expiration of program eligibility as opposed to reemployment.

    On the flipside, the manufacturing ISM survey saw employment return to expansionary territory at 53.2 after 14 months of contraction, a reading that is generally consistent with an increase in the BLS data on manufacturing employment. Philly Fed employment fell, although the report noted it still saw an overall increase on manufacturing employment. The ISM services employment report continued to grow in October, albeit at a slower pace than September. Challenger Job Cuts saw the best report in 7 months, with 80,666 layoffs, less than September’s 118k cuts.

    With that out of the way, here is what consensus expects:

    • Nonfarm Payrolls exp. +600,000 (range 0.300mln-1.221mln, prev. +0.661mln);
    • Unemployment rate exp. 7.7% (range: 7.0-8.0%, prev. 7.9%);
    • U6 unemployment (prev. 12.8%);
    • Participation (prev. 61.4%);
    • Private payrolls exp. 0.700mln (prev. 0.877mln);
    • Manufacturing payrolls exp. 50k (prev. 66k);
    • Government payrolls (prev.-216k);
    • Average earnings m/m exp. 0.2% (prev. 0.1%);
    • Average earnings y/y exp. 4.6% (prev. 4.7%);
    • Average workweek hours exp. 34.7 (prev. 34.7).

    Some more details courtesy of NewsSquawk

    INITIAL JOBLESS CLAIMS:

    Weekly initial jobless claims for the BLS survey period were above expectations (898k vs 825k expected, prior revised +5k to 845k). Continuing claims fell, however, to 10.02mln (expected 10.7mln from a revised up 11.18mln). Oxford Economics said the latest data was troubling, for a number of reasons: 1) Claims for regular initial state benefits rose to their highest level since late August and a decline in PUA claims seems largely a function of reporting issues in Arizona; 2) the positive trend in continuing claims is being offset by a rise in the number of individuals who have exhausted regular benefits, which OxEco says is further evidence of more long-lasting scarring effects from the pandemic. The situation in California, where there are a number of issues with its reporting, continue to cloud the picture, although these have since been resolved. OxEco warns that “failure to pass additional fiscal relief measures poses considerable downside risk to the economy, particularly as Covid-19 cases are on the rise and would likely lead to further job losses,” adding that a failure to provide more relief “raises the risk that some individuals will lose benefits altogether at the start of 2021.” As a caveat, it is worth noting that some analysts are questioning the usefulness of the initial jobless claims data series — notable economists like Oregon University professor Tim Duy have struggled to reconcile the positive economic momentum seen in housing and auto sales with the notion that the economy is collapsing.

    UNEMPLOYMENT RATE:

    Goldman estimates the unemployment rate declined by two tenths to 7.7%, reflecting an increase in household employment partially offset by potentially higher labor force participation. The labor force participation rate probably increased in October as the recovering labor market encouraged job searches. In interpreting the report, pay close attention to the number of unemployed workers on temporary layoff, which spiked to a record high 18.1mn in April and had retraced to 4.6mn in September. 

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    Over the last 50 years, the three recessions with the highest share of temporary layoffs were followed by the fastest labor market recoveries (both absolutely and relative to consensus forecasts at the time). However, the smaller number of workers on temporary layoff in September reduces the scope for the rapid pace of gains seen in the summer (though it remains a positive factor relative to the pre-corona paceof job gains)

    ADP:

    Headline national employment rose by 365k, albeit a slower pace from the previous 753k and cooler than the expected 650k rise, although it is worth noting the Homebase small business employment numbers were weak. Nonetheless, Pantheon Macroeconomics highlights that this is still a soft ADP print. The desk notes the Homebase numbers suggest a 500k-1mln drop due to the pressure on the services sector, while leisure and hospitality have taken a hit amid the rise in cases. Pantheon expects to see ADP slightly undershoot NFP again and thus are looking for a print of 400k on Friday’s BLS report.

    SURVEYS:

    The national ISM manufacturing survey saw the employment metric at 53.2, up from the prior month’s 49.6, seeing growth in October after 14 months of contraction. Note, an employment index above 50.8 is generally consistent with an increase in the BLS data on manufacturing employment, ISM says. The ISM services report saw growth for the second consecutive month, albeit at a slower rate than September, printing 50.1 from 51.8 in September. Comments from respondents included: “Minor increase, filling positions” and “Slowly bringing back employees and investing in some areas as business returns”. Philly Fed employment fell in October to 12.7 from 15.7, although the report noted on balance, firms reported increases in manufacturing employment.

    JOB CUTS:

    Challenger job cuts were encouraging, only seeing 80,666 job cuts, less than the prior months 118.8k, showing the best reading in 7 months. Challenger, Gray & Christmas write the lower number this month indicates “some companies impacted by shutdown orders were able to reopen and stave off cutting jobs”. However, the firm warns uncertainty is likely due to the rise in coronavirus cases, stricter restrictions and lack of stimulus funds. A downturn in demand was the reason for 25,281 job cuts, the primary reason for the layoffs, while market conditions, cost-cutting and restructuring were the reasons for the remainder of job cuts this month.

    ARGUING FOR A WEAKER-THAN-EXPECTED REPORT:

    Big Data: High-frequency data on the labor market softened on net, averaging +450k across six measures (median +160k), as shown in Exhibit 1. We also note that the Google Mobility data may have difficulty distinguishing between employees returning to work and those transitioning between work-from-home and in-office labor market activity. Such a deceleration would be directionally consistent with the resurgence of the coronavirus in the middle of the country in late September and early October—or alternatively with the impact of waning fiscal support on spending.

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    Education seasonality. We expect a second month of weakness in education categories related to the coronacrisis, with the effect worth anywhere from -50k to-250k (mom sa, public + private). Some of the janitors and other school staff who normally return to work in mid- or late-September did not this year due to virtual school reopenings in much of the country. Reflecting this, we note scope for education payrolls to rise by less than the BLS seasonal factors anticipate.

    Census hiring. Census temporary workers are set to lower nonfarm job growth by around 125k in October, as field operations wound down further.

    ADP. Private sector employment in the ADP report rose by 365k in October, wellnbelow consensus expectations. the ADP report was viewed as incrementally negative news.

    ARGUING FOR A BETTER-THAN-EXPECTED REPORT:

    Job availability. The Conference Board labor differential—the difference betweennthe percent of respondents saying jobs are plentiful and those saying jobs are hardto get — rose further into expansionary territory (to +6.6 in October from +3.3 inSeptember and -2.2 in August).Job cuts. Announced layoffs reported by Challenger, Gray & Christmas fell byn39.7% in October to 77k after increasing by 3.7% in September (mom, sa by GS).They remain 57% above their October 2019 levels.

  • Police Will Pilot A Program To Live-Stream Amazon Ring Cameras
    Police Will Pilot A Program To Live-Stream Amazon Ring Cameras

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 11/05/2020 – 22:20

    Authored by Matthew Guariglia, via EEF.org,

    This is not a drill. Red alert: The police surveillance center in Jackson, Mississippi, will be conducting a 45-day pilot program to live stream the Amazon Ring cameras of participating residents.

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    Since Ring first made a splash in the private security camera market, we’ve been warning of its potential to undermine the civil liberties of its users and their communities. We’ve been especially concerned with Ring’s 1,000+ partnerships with local police departments, which facilitate bulk footage requests directly from users without oversight or having to acquire a warrant.

    While people buy Ring cameras and put them on their front door to keep their packages safe, police use them to build comprehensive CCTV camera networks blanketing whole neighborhoods. This  serves two police purposes. First, it allows police departments to avoid the cost of buying surveillance equipment and to put that burden onto consumers by convincing them they need cameras to keep their property safe. Second, it evades the natural reaction of fear and distrust that many people would have if they learned police were putting up dozens of cameras on their block, one for every house.

    Now, our worst fears have been confirmed. Police in Jackson, Mississippi, have started a pilot program that would allow Ring owners to patch the camera streams from their front doors directly to a police Real Time Crime Center. The footage from your front door includes you coming and going from your house, your neighbors taking out the trash, and the dog walkers and delivery people who do their jobs in your street. In Jackson, this footage can now be live streamed directly onto a dozen monitors scrutinized by police around the clock. Even if you refuse to allow your footage to be used that way, your neighbor’s camera pointed at your house may still be transmitting directly to the police.

    Only a few months ago, Jackson stood up for its residents, becoming the first city in the southern United States to ban police use of face recognition technology. Clearly, this is a city that understands invasive surveillance technology when it sees it, and knows when police have overstepped their ability to invade privacy.

    If police want to build a surveillance camera network, they should only  do so in ways that are transparent and accountable, and ensure active resident participation in the process. If residents say “no” to spy cameras, then police must not deploy them. The choices you and your neighbors make as consumers should not be hijacked by police to roll out surveillance technologies. The decision making process must be left to communities.

    * * *

    Here is the response we received from Amazon in regards to this post:

    “[Amazon and Ring] are not involved in any way with any of the companies or the city in connection with the pilot program. The companies, the police and the city that were discussed in the article do not have access to Ring’s systems or the Neighbors App. Ring customers have control and ownership of their devices and videos ,and can choose to allow access as they wish.”

  • 45,000 Americans Flood New Zealand's Immigration Website During Election
    45,000 Americans Flood New Zealand’s Immigration Website During Election

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 11/05/2020 – 22:00

    Tens of thousands of Americans flooded New Zealand’s immigration website, called New Zealand Now, during this week’s presidential election, requesting information about moving to the island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. 

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    New Zealand’s Stuff reports a massive surge in Americans, more than 40,000, have visited the government’s immigration website in the last few days following the prospect of another four years under a Trump presidency. Though, maybe a sign of relief for those looking to “bug out,” as the election could go to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who is currently winning the electoral college vote on Thursday afternoon (264 vs. 214). 

    But really, at this point, some Americans could be considering the move no matter who wins, mainly because the writing is on the wall; the country is collapsing from within as socio-economic implosions induced by the virus downturn will deeply scar the economy for years. 

    Besides economic distress and alarming wealthy inequality, the virus pandemic has formed the second virus wave, with caseloads breaching 100,00 this week. Meanwhile, New Zealand’s Health Minister Chris Hipkins recently said a major milestone was reached in the country as the virus pandemic has been “squashed” because of their collective actions to mitigate spreading. 

    Stuff interviewed Texas-native Valentino Johnson, who is looking to move to New Zealand because it appears to be a “place where people care enough about each other” to follow public health rules.

    Johnson said Trump’s possible re-election win could produce a toxic environment for his family. 

    “The country is becoming so divisive,” he said. “I want to raise my son somewhere he can be respected.”

    Emergency room doctor Rob Brandt from Grand Rapids, Michigan, has been living in a pool shed for six months at his home as he isolates from his family. 

    Brandt said many Americans believe the pandemic is a hoax. He said his hospital is starting to see virus cases increase as the second wave pushes daily cases nationally above the 100,000 mark.

    Nurse Ana Carino fears for her health at a hospital in Midland, Texas. At the end of the year, she will arrive in New Zealand to take a new job in Invercargill, a city near the southern tip of New Zealand’s South Island.

    “You guys don’t have many cases. The US president has not been proactive in handling it [the pandemic],” she said.

    “I work in a hospital where people are dying from Covid-19 and it is not a joke.”

    On election night, Americans also panic searched “move to Canada.” To calm their election anxieties, they also searched “liquor store near me.” 

  • Here's Your Historical Analogy Menu: Rome, The USSR, Or Revolutionary France
    Here’s Your Historical Analogy Menu: Rome, The USSR, Or Revolutionary France

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 11/05/2020 – 21:40

    Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

    The core dynamic is ultimately the loss of social cohesion within the ruling elites and in the social order at large.

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    There’s a definite end of days feeling to the euphoria that the world didn’t end on November 3. And what better way to celebrate the victory of what passes for normalcy with a manic stock market rally?

    It’s as if everyone knows there is no returning to the good old days of a well-oiled Imperial machine chewing through any and all obstacles, and this realization is so frightening that the need to pretend everything is fine, just fine, overwhelms the last remaining ties to reality.

    And since there’s a brief intermission between gladiator battles while the Coliseum attendants remove the fallen heroes from the last entertainment, let’s play the historical analogy game: which collapse will America track most closely? Rome circa 475 AD, the USSR circa 1989, or Revolutionary France circa 1789?

    I’m tempted to include China’s Song Dynasty circa 1276 AD, but the analog of the Mongol invasion isn’t a likely fit. The Khmer Empire circa 1350-1430 AD and the Mayan Civilization in the 9th century might be excellent analogies but not enough is known about these complex declines to make an analogy more than guesswork.

    Rome, the USSR and Revolutionary France are all compelling analogies due to the hubristic cluelessness of their fractured elites as the pretensions of stability collapsed around them. Even though Nero didn’t actually fiddle while Rome burned and Marie Antoinette didn’t gush “Let them eat brioche” when notified that the peasants had no bread (or more accurately, could no longer afford it), these myths are handy encapsulations of the disconnect from reality that infested the elites in the last years before the deluge of non-linear chaos overwhelmed the regimes.

    While historians gather evidence of tipping points such as pandemics, ecological damage, invasions, droughts, inflation, etc., the core dynamic is ultimately the loss of social cohesion within the ruling elites and in the social order at large.

    As a generality, the permanence of the status quo is taken for granted by elites, who then feel free to squabble amongst themselves over the spoils of wealth and power. Distracted by their own infighting, the elites are blind to the erosion of the foundations of their power.

    As coherence in the elites unravels, the ties uniting the elites with the masses unravel as well.

    One camp within the elites recognizes the danger and seeks reforms, but the reforms are too little, too late, and in any event, the elites who cling most ardently to the past stability fight the reform movement to a standstill.

    As social cohesion unravels, systems that once seemed immutable (i.e. linear) suddenly display non-linear dynamics in which modest changes that would have made little difference in the past now unleash regime-shattering disorder.

    So take your pick, America: what’s the closest analogy? A sclerotic Politburo of elders living in the past, an elite fiddling while the nation disintegrates, or an elite so out of touch with reality that it claims inflation is zero while the populace can no longer afford bread?

    They all lead to the same destination:

    *  *  *

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    A Hacker’s Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook coming soon) Read the first section for free (PDF).

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    (Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF)

    Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic ($5 (Kindle), $10 (print), ( audiobook): Read the first section for free (PDF).

    The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake $1.29 (Kindle), $8.95 (print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

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    *  *  *

    If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

  • Soybean Prices Hit Four-Year High As China Demand Ticks Up
    Soybean Prices Hit Four-Year High As China Demand Ticks Up

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 11/05/2020 – 21:20

    Chicago soybean futures rose to a four-year high on Thursday morning, as dry weather in South America and increasing demand from China supported prices. 

    “China is actively buying beans and we are seeing additional demand emerge from Brazil,” a Singapore-based commodity trader said, who was quoted by Reuters. 

    The trader continued: “The weather is not perfect for Brazil and the crop is likely to get delayed due to the dry weather.”

    November soybean contracts trading on the Chicago Board of Trade were up more than 1% Thursday morning, trading around $10.95 per bushel, climbing to the highest level since July 2016. 

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    Reuters notes La Nina weather pattern remains a risk for crops across South America. Their commodity desk said Brazil’s soybean-growing areas recorded rain this week, but other surrounding areas need moisture. 

    Commodity traders will be closely watching the USDA Nov. 10 supply/demand reports, which some experts believe it could show “scaled-back U.S. soybean yields and increased export forecasts,” said Reuters. 

    Reuters’ Karen Braun said, “China’s strong return to the U.S. soybean market in recent months has single-handedly lifted U.S. farm exports to the Asian country to new records, and the heavy forward shipping schedule bodes well for the promises outlined in the Phase 1 trade agreement between the two countries.” 

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    Even though China’s demand for U.S. farm goods has increased late in the year – it’s likely trade commitments outlined in the Phase 1 agreement won’t be met this year. 

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    China is way behind in farm good purchases. 

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     Could soybean prices also be soaring because the prospects of a Biden presidency would be mean friendlier relations with China? 

  • Don't Forget LBJ's Election Theft
    Don’t Forget LBJ’s Election Theft

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 11/05/2020 – 21:00

    Authored by Jacob Hornberger via The Future of Freedom Foundation,

    The mainstream pro-Biden media is poking fun at Donald Trump’s suggestion that there could be fraud involved in the post-election receipt of mail-in ballots. Apparently they’re not familiar with the election-theft case of Lyndon Johnson, who would go on to become president of the United States.

    The entire matter is detailed in Robert Caro’s second book in his biographical series on Johnson. The book is entitled Means of Ascent.

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    Johnson election theft took place in 1948, when he was running for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate against Texas Governor Coke Stevenson, one of the most admired and respected governors in the history of the state.

    In the primary election, Stevenson led Johnson by 70,000 votes, but because he didn’t have a majority of the votes, he was forced into a run-off. The run-off was held on a Saturday. On the Sunday morning after the run-off, Stevenson was leading by 854 votes.

    As a New York Times review of Caro’s account stated, the day after the run-off election it was “discovered” that the returns of a particular county had not yet been counted. The newly discovered votes were overwhelmingly in favor of Johnson. Then, on Monday more returns came in from the Rio Grande Valley.

    Nonetheless, on Tuesday, the State Election Bureau announced that Stevenson had won by 349 votes. Nothing changed on Wednesday and Thursday after the election. On Friday, precincts in the Rio Grande Valley made “corrections” to their tallies, which narrowed Stevenson’s lead to 157.

    But also on Friday, Jim Wells County, which was governed as a personal fiefdom by a powerful South Texas rancher named George Parr, filed “amended” returns for what has become famous as “Box 13” that gave Johnson another 200 votes. When all was said and done, Johnson had “won” the election by 87 votes.

    It was later discovered that one of Parr’s men had changed the total tally for Johnson from 765 to 965 by simply curling the 7 into a 9.

    Where did the extra 200 votes come from?

    The last 202 names on on the election roll in Box 13 were in a different color ink from the rest of the names, the names were in alphabetical order, and they were all in the same handwriting. When Caro was researching his book, he secured a statement from Luis Salas, an election judge in Jim Wells County, who acknowledged the fraud and confessing his role in it.

    As the Washington Post reported, to investigate what obviously appeared quite suspicious Stevenson employed the assistance of Frank Hamer, the Texas Ranger who had trapped and killed Bonnie and Clyde. It was to no avail. Johnson got a friendly state judge to issue an injunction preserving the status quo, after which the Democratic executive committee, by one vote, declared Johnson to be the winner.

    Stevenson took the matter to federal court but the Supreme Court punted, declaring that it had no right to interfere with a state election.

    So, Lyndon Johnson stole the election and ended up going to Washington as Texas’ U.S. Senator. Ironically, if Stevenson had become the state’s senator instead, Johnson would never have been selected to be John Kennedy’s vice-presidential running mate and, consequently, would never have been president.

    No wonder Donald Trump is worried about those Democrats! For that matter, those Democrats should be just as worried about those Republicans! 

  • China's State Media: "Don't Be Naive, Trumpism Will Perpetuate Regardless Of Winner"
    China’s State Media: “Don’t Be Naive, Trumpism Will Perpetuate Regardless Of Winner”

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 11/05/2020 – 20:40

    In perhaps the most interesting reaction out of Beijing to the stalled election outcome, Chinese state-run Global Times on Thursday published the reaction of two of its notable foreign policy analysts and geopolitical experts. With the fate of the election hanging in the balance and the world still on edge as all look for a definitive result, Global Times posed the question:

    Even if Biden gets elected, will Trump and his doctrines disappear? Will there be another Trump from the Democratic Party? 

    As the headline to the piece underscores, officials in Beijing are fretting that Trump doctrines will exist regardless of who wins US election. Here’s how Zhang Tengjun, an assistant research fellow at the China Institute of International Studies, put it in the state publication:

    One should not be too naïve to believe that with Trump’s departure, the social environment that brews Trumpism would disappear. On the contrary, the forces represented by Trump will continue to exist and affect US politics. Trump’s ilk will inherent his doctrines. The US needs more than four years to digest the long-term destructive impact on US politics from Trump’s rule.

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    And another thinker at a major public research university in Shanghai was further cited as saying that “Trump-style” politicians will continue to emerge.

    China of course sees this as a destructive force which will likely perpetuate already severely damaged Sino-US relations for the foreseeable future, apparently regardless of the presidential outcome. Xin Qiang, deputy director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University, had this to say – again likely reflecting the view among many top Beijing officials:

    Trump proposes America First, not to pay much effort in international affairs or take unnecessary global responsibilities. As long as Trump believes a treaty or an organization does not fit US interests, he will make a quick divorce from it. Many of his measures reflect what the US public wants, at least a large proportion of them. This time, although Biden leads Trump as of press time, the election also shows that almost half of the voters support Trump. The election of Trump four years ago was never an accidental incident. Populism has already become a powerful trend in the country. 

    Qiang further said what he dubbed the “Trump Phenomenon” will not end anytime soon.

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    “As long as such a populist public trend exists, it is very likely that in the future more and more untraditional politicians will have no alternative but to step on Trump’s path in order to win more support,” he said in GT. “After all, winning elections are US politicians’ ultimate goal. Therefore, more Trumps may come into being because they will justify their approach by their goal. I call it the Trump Phenomenon.”

    This is to continue, both analysts agreed, “no matter who wins the election” and could come from within either the Republican or Democratic Party. Probably both, they said.

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    The Chinese state-affiliated analysts also made reference to Bernie Sanders, his supporters, and the popular progressive movement among young people as potentially a continued force of division for a possible Biden administration, which would be “bumpy”.

    “As for the Democrats, since its internal division is inevitable, it is likely that a politician who always thinks otherwise would emerge from the left-wing radical forces,” the analysis in GT underscored. 

  • "Racist" Trump Won More Minority Votes Than Any GOP Candidate Since 1960
    “Racist” Trump Won More Minority Votes Than Any GOP Candidate Since 1960

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 11/05/2020 – 20:20

    Authored by Rick Moran via PJMedia.com,

    Everyone knows that Donald Trump is a racist. How do we know? ‘Cause media says so, that’s how. Every single statement or off-the-cuff remark by Trump that could be deliberately misinterpreted or taken out of context, or twisted into meaning something entirely different, has been used to paint an ugly racist picture of the president.

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    With black Americans, it’s worked. A poll earlier this year found 83 percent of blacks believing Trump is a racist. How could they not with every media outlet telling them it’s so and many prominent blacks in politics, entertainment, and sports reinforcing the narrative every chance they get?

    The so-called “leaders” of the minority communities were virulently opposed to Donald Trump’s re-election. It was nearly unanimous. There were notable exceptions, but brave it was for any black or Hispanic notable to back Trump in public.

    But as it turns out, many minority voters tuned out the anti-Trump noise and made an independent decision to back the president.  New York Post:

    Team Trump and Republicans nationwide made unprecedented inroads with black and Hispanic voters. Nationally, preliminary numbers indicated that 26 percent of Trump’s voting share came from nonwhite voters — the highest percentage for a GOP presidential candidate since 1960.

    In Florida’s Miami-Dade County, the heartland of Cuban America, Trump turned a 30-plus point Hillary Clinton romp in 2016 into a narrow single-digit Joe Biden win. Texas’ Starr County, overwhelmingly Mexican American and positioned in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley, barely delivered for the Democrats. Biden’s Hispanic support in other key swing states, like Ohio and Georgia, tailed off from Clinton’s 2016 benchmarks.

    Cuban-Americans have been loyal Republican voters since the 1980s and Ronald Reagan’s strong opposition to Fidel Castro. But they were particularly energized in 2020 to vote for Trump. Conversely, Mexican-Americans in Texas had probably never voted Republican before but were drawn to Trump’s “opportunity agenda.”

    And surprisingly, young black men voted for Trump in unprecedented numbers. We won’t know the particulars of how that vote broke down for a few days, but ambitious young men who see a future in a capitalist America were no doubt repelled by the Democrats’ anti-capitalist agenda. They’re also tired of being used by Democrats as props in their little morality plays and are weary of unkept promises.

    But what does this say about the Democrat-Media information complex? Looks like someone blew a circuit or two.

    It turns out that minorities aren’t so infatuated with the brand of unrepentant progressive “woke-ism” now peddled by the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the Democratic Party. The political, legal, media, corporate and academic establishments have gone all-in on the woke agenda, peddling a toxic brew of intersectionality, socialism lite and Black Lives Matter anarchism. Latinos and many blacks aren’t buying it. As one Twitter wit quipped, Democrats may have won the “Latinx vote,” but they didn’t fare well with actual Latinos.

    The cognitive dissonance on the part of our bicoastal ruling class is, and will be over the ensuing months, astonishing. The ruling elite is incapable of processing the notion that the MAGA hat-clad Bad Orange Man is not, in fact, an avatar for racist whites and a harbinger of impending fascism.

    The bottom line is that it isn’t only white voters who don’t listen to the media about Trump’s faults. Many in the minority community can judge Trump and what he can do for them all by themselves and don’t need to be instructed on how to vote by those who really don’t have their best interests at heart.

    It takes guts to be a black or Hispanic Trump supporter in a lot of places in America. You would wish that wouldn’t be the case, but it is. Are they the harbinger of a movement by the minority community toward the Republican Party? Time will tell, but the electoral earthquake that would ensue if that were the case would be felt even among the coastal elites.

  • South Florida Prepares For Eta As It Could Reenergize Into Hurricane
    South Florida Prepares For Eta As It Could Reenergize Into Hurricane

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 11/05/2020 – 20:00

    Weather models forecast Eta, currently ravaging Central America, could reemerge over the Caribbean waters and make landfall in South Florida between late Sunday and Monday. 

    Eta, the 28th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, has weakened Thursday to a tropical depression as it dumps torrential rains and causes flash floods in Honduras. 

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    “Eta will begin to feel the influence of upper-level steering to its north, causing the storm to make a hard right turn, pushing it back over the hot northern Caribbean waters. While some intensification is likely, it will be limited, at least initially, because Eta will have to contend with some dry air, upper-level wind shear, interaction with the landmass of Cuba, and limited time,” according to CBS News. 

    National Hurricane Center’s Tropical Forecast Map Of Eta 

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    CBS notes by Saturday, Eta “will cross over Cuba, likely as a tropical storm, and then head toward South Florida.”

    “It is still uncertain how strong Eta will be and the degree to which the storm will impact South Florida. Most likely, Eta will either be a strong tropical storm or even a low-end hurricane. Some models show a direct hit, while others show a glancing blow over the Florida Keys. 

    “Regardless of exact track, Eta will bring a stretch of very wet weather across South Florida from Friday through early next week. Depending on the track, over a foot of rain seems likely in some spots.”

    Eta To Strike Key West? 

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    If Eta strikes the U.S., it would be the 12th named storm to make landfall this year, a record. 

  • This Is The Textbook Definition Of "Late Cycle" In The Stock Market
    This Is The Textbook Definition Of “Late Cycle” In The Stock Market

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 11/05/2020 – 19:40

    Authored by Jesse Felder via TheFelderReport.com,

    The following is an excerpt from a recent report featured on The Felder Report PREMIUM. 

    I like to think of markets and securities in terms of three separate but interrelated dymanics: fundamentals, sentiment and technicals. Fundamentals include things like earnings, net asset value, how those things are trending and valuation relative to them. Sentiment is simply how investors are feeling toward something and technicals are really just a way to analyze the price trend.

    Typically, a security or a market becomes expensive as a result of good fundamentals leading to positive sentiment and a strong uptrend. The valuation eventually becomes overextended, sentiment becomes too bullish and momentum begins to wane. It is at this point the trend reverses. Sentiment will start to turn as the trend turns downward. Momentum will peak roughly midway through the trend. Valuation eventually becomes reasonable or even cheap and sentiment turns sour as a result of a prolonged downtrend. Eventually downside momentum wanes and the trend reverses again, usually just as sentiment bottoms out.

    Each of these individual signals is valuable but not nearly as valuable as all three taken together.

    Fundamentals

    “The chart shows the market value of all publicly traded securities as a percentage of the country’s business–that is, as a percentage of GNP. The ratio has certain limitations in telling you what you need to know. Still, it is probably the best single measure of where valuations stand at any given moment.” –Warren Buffett, December 10, 2001

    The single best measure of valuations, according to Warren Buffett, currently sits just off its highest reading in history. In other words, the stock market has never been as expensive as it is today, largely the product of soaring valuations amid deteriorating fundamentals. Not only does this mean that forward returns will likely be exceptionally poor, it means that downside risk has also never been greater than it is today.

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    Sentiment

    “Even the most circumspect friend of the market would concede that the volume of brokers’ loans—of loans collateraled by the securities purchased on margin—is a good index of the volume of speculation.” -John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929 

    If the level of margin debt is indicative of the “volume of speculation” then we might infer that, just as we are witnessing unprecedented valuations, those extreme prices have been driven by extreme greed, the likes of which we haven’t seen in generations, if ever before.

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    Technicals

    “For me, technical analysis is like a thermometer. Fundamentalists who say they are not going to pay any attention to the charts are like a doctor who says he’s not going to take a patient’s temperature. But, of course, that would be sheer folly. If you are a responsible participant in the market, you always want to know where the market is—whether it is hot and excitable, or cold and stagnant. You want to know everything you can about the market to give you an edge.” -Bruce Kovner, Market Wizards

    In analyzing the strength of the trend we can use a very simply metric like RSI. In the case of 18-month RSI, oversold readings have proven to be good long-term entry points; Overbought, readings, however, have merely indicated a strong uptrend that may last several more years. By this measure, the strength of the current uptrend peaked nearly 3 years ago and has only been weakening since, putting in a clear pattern of lower highs.

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    Together, these three indicators paint a picture of an extremely overvalued stock market, driven by a speculative euphoria even while the price trend is running out of steam. It is the textbook definition of “late cycle” in the stock market and suggests investors ought to exercise a great deal of caution towards equities as an asset class.

  • Thai Authorities Face Blowback After Nationwide PornHub Ban
    Thai Authorities Face Blowback After Nationwide PornHub Ban

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 11/05/2020 – 19:20

    Thailand’s Digital Economy and Society Minister Buddhipongse Punnakanta, did the unthinkable Monday, he banned Pornhub and 190 URL addresses of porn sites, prompting outrage among the younger generation Tuesday, reported Reuters. 

    Punnakanta ordered internet service providers and mobile phone operators to ban porn sites for violating Thailand’s Computer Crime Act. 

    The ban comes one week after Deputy Prime Minister, Prawit Wongsuwan, said that swift action would be taken against porn sites encouraging young people to engage in “improper” behavior, Thai Examiner noted.  

    Thailand Pornhub users were greeted with the message Monday night: “This content has been suspended. Because it is guilty according to the Computer Crime Act 2007 by the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society.” 

    Pornhub and or other popular porn sites were not available for viewing as of Tuesday afternoon. 

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    Reuters, citing Pornhub stats, said Thai users, on average, spent 11 minutes and 21 seconds last year on the website, which was more time than anywhere else in the world. 

    The website’s ban could be problematic for Pornhub because Bangkok, Thailand’s capital, was its 10th largest market. 

    Google Search trends of “Pornhub” in the country have spread like an epidemic over the last three years.

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    Dozens of Pornhub supporters gathered at government buildings on Tuesday to erect signs and voice their opinion about the site’s shuttering. 

    One activist group called Anonymous Party said: “We want to reclaim Pornhub. People are entitled to choices.”

    Pornhub protesters were seen holding signs saying “free Pornhub” and “reclaim Pornhub.”  

    Thai Enquirer translates the signs held by protesters. One sign said: “Every evening there’s a horny person – find them.” Another sign said: “Do not hurt the lonely by blocking their entrance.” 

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    People in Thailand were not happy about the government blocking the porn site. 

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    More scenes from the protest. 

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    As soon as the ban went into effect, Virtual Private Networks (“VPN”) searches from within the country erupted. VPNs are used to help people circumnavigate censorship. 

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    There is chatter on Twitter about a “Pornhub Spring” in Thailand. 

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    “Turning off the porn site makes anything better?” one protester asks.

    He continued: “Can close any website Why not close the gambling website?

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  • An Election Where (Almost) Everybody Loses?
    An Election Where (Almost) Everybody Loses?

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 11/05/2020 – 19:00

    Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

    This election did not go the way that most people were anticipating.  For months, the mainstream media and many on the left insisted that the big national polls were right this time and that a Joe Biden landslide was coming.  Obviously, that did not happen.  On the other hand, many on the right kept telling us that a huge Trump landslide was coming, and that did not materialize either.  Instead, we got the very close race that I have been warning about for weeks.  I kept explaining to my readers that we would not know the winner on the night of the election, and that projection turned out to be right on the money.  At this hour, votes are still being counted in critical swing states all over the nation, and things could still go either way.  I know that the mainstream media is eager to crown Joe Biden the victor, but that hasn’t happened yet.  Trump’s campaign team still believes that the final results in Arizona and Nevada will go their way, and they are convinced that could potentially change everything.  We will just have to wait and see what happens.

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    But for now, things are not looking promising for the Trump campaign.  By the time many of you read this, more of the votes will have been counted and the mainstream media may have decided to call the race for Biden.  If that happens, this could be perhaps the first national election in U.S. history where almost everybody loses.

    Let me illustrate what I mean.  Here are some of the potential losers in this election…

    The U.S. political system – The legitimacy of our system is on the line in this election, and the rest of the world is watching us very carefully.  Sadly, the way that this election has unfolded has been a complete and utter disgrace, and close to half the country is going to believe that the election was stolen once this is all over.

    On Tuesday evening, it appeared that President Trump was cruising toward re-election.  He had huge leads in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and North Carolina, and the Trump campaign was getting ready to put on a victory celebration.  But then vote counting suddenly stopped in Democratic strongholds all over the nation.  Once it resumed, some very strange things started to happen.

    For example, a large Trump lead in Wisconsin was suddenly wiped out by a massive vote dump for Biden right at the last minute, and Biden ended up being declared the winner in that state.

    Likewise, a large Trump lead in Michigan was suddenly wiped out by a massive vote dump for Biden right at the end of their vote count.

    As I write this article, we are seeing similar patterns play out in Pennsylvania and Georgia.  Initially, it appeared that Trump had an insurmountable lead in both states, but by the time you read this article the mainstream media may have called both states for Biden.

    It may or may not have been intentional, but a lot of people are speculating that Democratic strongholds such as Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Atlanta held back on counting many of their votes until vote totals from most of the conservative areas came in, and to many people it looks extremely suspicious that Biden keeps squeaking out very tight victories in the most critical swing states.

    The polling industry – This is the second presidential election in a row when the polling industry has failed dramatically.  Last night, Van Jones almost came to tears on CNN because he was so disappointed that the “blue wave” that the national polling had suggested was coming did not materialize.  I don’t know how anyone is going to trust the national polls in future elections after how wrong they got it this time around.

    The mainstream media – Throughout this election season, the mainstream media has discarded any pretense of objectivity, and in the process they have deeply alienated a large portion of the population.  At this point, everyone can see that the mainstream media has essentially become an arm of the Democratic Party, and they are never going to be able to restore the credibility that they have lost.

    Democrats – This was supposed to be the election when Democrats finally took back the Senate and strengthened their hold on the House of Representatives.  Instead, it appears likely that Republicans will hold the Senate, and Democrats could end up losing up to 10 seats in the House.

    Republicans – Yes, Republicans performed better than expected all over the country, but losing the White House definitely cannot be considered a victory.

    Donald Trump – This is not the way that Trump and his supporters envisioned that the MAGA era would end.  As I discussed the other day, a Trump loss would be the worst emotional blow that conservatives in this country have suffered in decades.

    Joe Biden – You would think that Biden should be labeled a “winner” if he ends up becoming the president-elect.  But if Republicans hold the Senate, they will be able to block everything that Biden and the Democrats want to do.  Biden has been waiting 47 years to finally get to the White House, but when he finally gets there he will be forced to get Republican permission for any bill that he wants passed.

    The American people – When this is finally over, the American people will be left with a political system that is in shambles, a country that is more divided than ever, and a deeply corrupt politician that is no longer all there mentally as president.

    So are there any winners?

    Yes.

    Coming out of this election there will be one big winner, and her name is Kamala Harris.

    Everyone acknowledges that it is just a matter of time before Biden will have to step aside.  Personally, I expect it to happen sooner rather than later.

    Whenever that happens, Kamala Harris will become the president of the United States, and she is very much looking forward to that day.

    Of course once that day arrives, it will actually be a complete and utter nightmare for about half the country.

    In the end, it appears that nothing good is going to come out of this election, and our nation will never be the same again from this day forward.

    *  *  *

    Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

  • Here Is The Age Distribution Of Trump And Biden Voters
    Here Is The Age Distribution Of Trump And Biden Voters

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 11/05/2020 – 18:40

    Whoever wins the presidential race, one thing is certain: voter turnout is set to be the highest since 1900.

    “Did mail-ins or passion increase this”, asks Jim Reid in his daily noting that if it was the former, Covid may have shown how we can enfranchise more voters around the world by offering an alternative to the traditional ballot box.

    Reid then makes another observation, pointing out that according to an exit poll by Edison Research, 76% of Trump voters felt  rebuilding the economy now, even if it hurts efforts to contain the coronavirus” was more important than “containing the coronavirus now, even if it hurts the economy”, while 80% of Biden voters felt the opposite showing how polarized views on lockdowns etc. possibly are.

    So will the young voters win it for Biden?

    Answering this question, and assuming Biden does creep over the Electoral college line, today’s chart from Reid shows estimates of the Dems advantage over the GOP in 2020, 2016 and 2004 by age. 2004 was chosen as that seems to be the last election before there was a big intergenerational age split in voter’s party preferences.

    Among 18-29yr olds, Biden is estimated to have secured a 27% lead versus 19% for Clinton 4 years ago and Kerry’s 9% in
    2004.

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    This means that if only those 29-and-over voted, based on Reid’s back of the envelope calculations, Trump would have been ‘only’ 2% behind in the popular vote and would possibly have had enough to have won the electoral college. In other words, if the soon to be 78 year old Joe Biden does win, he have the Gen Zers to thank.

    And speaking of young vs oldwe remind readers that according to Reid, the “intergenerational divide” will be a great source of disorder in the decade ahead and potentially turn politics sharply leftwards if policies continue as they have (see “The Millennials Are Coming For The Boomers’ Money: One Bank Sees Generational Conflict Breaking Out This Decade“).

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    As Reid concludes, “the right have generally outperformed in elections over the last decade across the world. To see this continue they may need to address their falling support among the young.”

  • Watch Live: President Trump Delivers Remarks
    Watch Live: President Trump Delivers Remarks

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 11/05/2020 – 18:36

    In his first public appearance since the small hours of election night, President Trump will be delivering remarks to the nation at 630pm ET from the James Brady Briefing Room at the White House.

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    A shot across the bow of social media after having practically every tweet blocked today? A victory lap? A concession speech? An announcement of his 2024 running mate? Or an impassioned plea for transparency in our free-and-fair election counting process?

    Maybe Trump Jr.’s recent tweet is a hint: ” It’s time to clean up this mess & stop looking like a banana republic! “

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    Watch Live (due to start at 1830ET):

  • Daily Briefing – November 5, 2020
    Daily Briefing – November 5, 2020


    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 11/05/2020 – 18:25

    Managing editor, Ed Harrison, is joined by Jay Pelosky, co-founder and CIO of TPW Investment Management, to provide an update on his current outlook amid a turbulent election and uncertain future with stimulus and COVID-19. Pelosky argues that markets are getting closer to end of this period of peak uncertainty around these variables and that deep cyclicals like airlines and oil will rally sharply higher. Pelosky also explains that as the election race comes to a close, markets have been oversold in the past week and are becoming more comfortable with the idea of a split government as investors gain clarity. He digs further into the question of stimulus – a matter of “when,” not “if” – and contends that a vaccine may roll out sooner than stimulus, which would cause the markets to react aggressively, raise rates, and could set up a rotation trade out of tech and into cyclicals. Finally, he also discusses asset allocation and his thesis of a tripolar world. In the intro, Real Vision’s Haley Draznin looks at markets rallying as the U.S. presidential election outcome is still uncertain and analyzes the K-shaped recovery that continues to form as the job market remains high.

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Nov 05

Today’s News 5th November 2020

  • Watch: "The Coming War On China"
    Watch: “The Coming War On China”

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 11/05/2020 – 00:00

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone,

    “The aim of this film is to break a silence: the United States and China may well be on the road to war, and nuclear war is no longer unthinkable,” Pilger says in his 2016 documentary The Coming War on China, which you can watch free on Youtube here or on Vimeo here.

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    “In a few years China has become the world’s second-biggest economic power,” Pilger’s introduction continues.

    “The United States is the world’s biggest military power, with bases and missiles and ships covering every continent and every ocean. China is a threat to this dominance, says Washington. But who is the threat? This film is about shifting power, and great danger.”

    As we’ve been discussing for years now, the relentless quest of the US-centralized empire-like power alliance for total world domination has put it on a collision course with the surging economic powerhouse of China which refuses to be absorbed into the imperial blob. The empire’s continued existence depends upon its ability to undermine China before it grows too powerful or the empire grows too weak to stop its ascent, at which point global hegemony becomes impossible and we are living in a truly multipolar world.

    China has therefore always been the final boss fight in the global campaign of violence and domination by what Pilger calls the “empire which never speaks its name”. And the ramping up of anti-China narrative management by the US government indicates that we are being psychologically primed to accept this world-threatening confrontation, just as Pilger warned in 2016.

    “The danger of confrontation grows by the day,” Pilger says.

    The powerful film breaks down the way the USA has been encircling China with a “noose” of military bases since the Korean War, which all have massive amounts of military firepower, including nuclear firepower, pointed right at China’s cities. Pilger shows the psychopathic toll this has inflicted upon the people who live in the areas where the US war machine has set up shop in the Pacific, including an especially enraging segment on the use of Bikini Atoll natives as human guinea pigs to test the effects of nuclear radiation on people. Also deeply disturbing is the revelation of just how close the US came to launching nuclear warheads at China due to a miscommunication during the Cuban missile crisis.

    The film describes China’s recent history and explains its climb in economic power which led us to this point, and the USA’s generations-long history of provocation and hostility toward its government. It also addresses the silly projection so many westerners harbor that if the US wasn’t bullying and slaughtering the world into compliance, China would take over doing the same.

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

    Back in 2016 it was harder for people to see this escalation on the horizon, but now in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic we’re hearing a frantic, disproportionate amount of anti-China sentiment from the Trump administration and its supporters, in the same way we heard Russia hysteria amplified over the last three years by Trump’s enemies. Trump was politically pressured to dangerously escalate cold war tensions with Russia, and he’s now being politically incentivized to pass the blame for his administration’s spectacular failures in addressing this pandemic on to the Chinese government in a way which manufactures support for escalations on that front as well. Two different narratives, same agenda.

    “The new president, Donald Trump, has a problem with China,” Pilger says at the end of the documentary.

    “The urgent question now is will Trump continue with the provocations revealed in this film and take us all to the edge of war?”

    The answer to that question appears to be coalescing. It’s a good time for us all to watch this film.

    *  *  *

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics onTwitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

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  • These Are The Cities Where People Spend The Highest (Or Lowest) Share Of Their Income On Rent
    These Are The Cities Where People Spend The Highest (Or Lowest) Share Of Their Income On Rent

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/04/2020 – 23:40

    Even as apartment rents in Manhattan and San Francisco plunge for the first time in more than 10 years, millions of American millennials, burdened by debt, blinded by poor financial literacy and preoccupied with booking that first post-pandemic vacation still can’t ever imagine owning a home.

    As for what the future holds, many would greet it with a genuine shrug: having children and buying homes is now something people – or, at least, men – do in their 40. As millennials postpone adulthood to focus on paying down their student debt, 30 has become the new 20, and while some might be tempted by the favorable market conditions, signing a lease on that spacious (for New York) Manhattan pad might not be the smartest move, from a fiscal standpoint.

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    Budget-conscious renters looking to take advantage of their newfound ‘WFH’-inspired flexibility might do well to consult this latest study from Hire a Helper, which explores the cities with the highest share of renters’ income going toward rent.

    Across the US, 20% of renters spend more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities. Typically, financial planners say working people should shoot to cover that burden with 30% or less of their income.

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    One of the study’s findings is that cities with larger minority populations tend to see residents paying a higher share of their income in rent.

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    When it comes to the overall rankings, researchers used a ream of Census data to divide cities into three categories, small, medium and large.

    In the ‘Small cities’ category, Miami Beach had the highest rent-to-income ratio, and Woodlands, Texas had the lowest. 

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    In the mid-sized cities category, Springfield Mass. was No. 1, while the cheapest went to Overland Park, Kansas.

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    On the ‘Large Cities’, the top-place finisher for highest rent-to-income ratio was, surprisingly to some, New Orleans, Louisiana, where the median number was 44%.

    In San Francisco, the city with the lowest rent-to-income ratio, that number was just 22%.

    By looking at the median figures from this study, we can gain some insight into how industry can transform property values, and how many in San Francisco who earn more than the median income are still living pretty comfortably, unless they have a veritable mountain of student debt.

    See the rest of the rankings here.

  • An Honest Manifesto For Winning Elections
    An Honest Manifesto For Winning Elections

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/04/2020 – 23:20

    Authored by Egon von Greyerz via GoldSwitzerland.com,

    The US election has finally taken place. During the campaign, both candidates have totally avoided the critical issue that will bring the US down in the next four years. The election campaign has been ugly but totally avoided the monumental problem facing the American people.

    Clearly neither of them wanted to tell the voters that he will take over the running of a totally bankrupt country that is likely to collapse economically, financially and morally in the next four years.

    At the end of this article I have set out what would have been the winning election manifesto.

    A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE NEVER TELLS THE TRUTH

    Neither Trump, nor Biden has been telling the American people that the US is a totally bankrupt country that has been running deficits for 90 years. (Four small exceptions in the 1940s and 50s. The Clinton surpluses were fake.)

    What an unenviable task to preside over an insolvent nation and be hated by everyone as the country falls into perdition.

    How can anyone be willing to run a nation that needs to borrow half of its budget expenditure. The clear facts are on the table. You cannot erase 90 years of mismanagement.

    The figures tell us the truth. In fiscal 2020 spending was $6.6 trillion and tax revenue $3.4t. So the deficit was a staggering $3.2t. And as history shows us, it can only get worse. The state of the financial system, exacerbated by Covid, guarantees galloping deficits from hereon in.

    US DEBT – MORE THAN $40T IN JAN 2025

    The US federal debt by the time the new president takes over will be at least $28t. This was totally predictable based on a simple extrapolation as in my article from Feb 2018. In the same article I predicted that the debt when the next president takes over in Jan 2025 would be $40t. See graph below. I was probably much too cautious since the way things are going now $40t seems too low.

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    So why hasn’t either candidate told the truth and laid out the facts that the US will need to borrow more than the total tax revenue to pay trillions in Medicare, Social Security, Defence etc.

    DOLLAR HAS FALLEN 98%

    And why is neither candidate telling the people that the consequences of a 90 year deficit policy has led to a 98% fall in the value of the dollar, in real terms, which is against gold.

    Virtually every president in history has boasted about the strong dollar but no one has told the American people that the dollar is hardly worth the paper it is written on. And neither candidate has told the voters that in the next few years, unlimited money printing will be required in a futile attempt to save the US economy and the nation from total destruction.

    Whatever the Keynesians or the MMT crowd say, you can NEVER reach prosperity by printing worthless pieces of paper or pressing a computer button. If these theories were valid, the world could stop working and just print, print and print.

    GOLD TELLS THE TRUTH

    Only gold reflects what is happing to the value of fiat money. But not even gold shows the true situation since the massive amount of paper gold outstanding disguises the true price of gold. But the paper gold market is likely to fail within the next few years as debt explodes and the value of fiat money implodes.

    Because it is the accelerated money printing that will lead to the destruction of the dollar and all paper currencies.

    The current gold price is not even reflecting the money printing and credit creation that we have seen so far. The graph below shows that in relation to US money supply, gold today is as cheap as it was in 1970 when the gold price was $35 or in 2000 when gold was $288.

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    With the expected and required explosion in money supply in the next four years, gold will rise exponentially from here.

    IMPORTANT BUT NOT URGENT

    In his 7 Habits book, Steven Covey told us to focus on the square prioritising matters which are IMPORTANT but NOT URGENT. Sadly most people and especially the politicians and the media focus on the wrong square which says URGENT but NOT IMPORTANT.

    It is in this latter square that today’s instant gratification world spends most of its energy and time. That includes, answering a Text message when you are in an important conversation with someone or always giving a mobile phone incoming call priority over whoever you are with.

    Many business leaders tend to fight short term emergencies instead of planning for the long term strategy and prosperity of the business.

    UK SPENT 3 1/2 YEARS SQUABBLING OVER BREXIT

    Politicians are of course the worst. They seem to go from one crisis to another in their fight for survival. In the UK, the people decided in 2016 to exit the EU. Parliament, big business and the media could not accept the outcome. Nor could the Remainers who lost the vote. Not until Boris Johnson became Prime Minister in July 2019 and subsequently won an unassailable majority in Parliament, could Brexit finally be implemented.

    Before that, the UK spent 3 1/2 years debating Brexit and nothing else. The fact that the UK economy was quickly deteriorating, the government did not have time to focus on. Nor did the media which tried everything to sabotage Brexit.

    So the UK spent all this time in the wrong square, just squabbling about Brexit as the walls of Jericho were tumbling around them.

    FOUR YEARS OF SABOTAGING TRUMP

    And exactly the same is happening in the biggest economy in the world. Since Trump was elected 4 years ago, the opposition and the media have totally focused on getting him out of office with any kind of dirty tricks including Russian connections and impeachment.

    So for Trump, there have been 4 years of fighting all kinds of imaginary windmills (Don Quijote). These were windmills erected by his enemies to prevent him to deal with the important and urgent matters like a faltering economy that can only survive on printed money and debt.

    But a politician who is elected for 4 years only, must in any case, after the first 18 months, focus on how to buy votes for the coming election. And the people demand instant gratification and not the hardship necessary to put the economy right.

    A DESPERATE PLEA FROM THE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

    And that is why neither candidate has ever dared to conduct a serious discussion about the fact that the US is bankrupt. Below is what the winning candidate should have said. But who would vote for a candidate with the following manifesto:

    “Our nation is bankrupt. We cannot make ends meet and we need to eliminate Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security and Defence totally to balance the budget. That will save us $3 trillion which almost covers the 2020 deficit.

    The problem is that we expect a bigger deficit next year. Covid is paralysing major parts of the country and will be very costly. It will also have permanent negative effects. In addition, we expect major problems in the insolvent financial system. This will necessitate the printing of further trillions of dollars or even tens of trillions.

    But as we print these dollars, we get an ever bigger problem. The value of the dollar will fall precipitously and we will need to print and borrow even more. That will create a vicious circle with a lower dollar, bigger deficits and bigger debts plus inflation.

    So these are the facts. I am obviously very sorry to present these to you but I am certain that there can be no other outcome.

    I sincerely hope that you will elect me on this platform. After all, I am the only presidential candidate in history who has told his people the truth and the real state of the nation.

    And please don’t believe the fake promises of the other candidate. A liar doesn’t deserve to be president.

    Finally, I promise to do my best to manage the coming disorderly collapse of the USA to the best of my ability.”

  • Dollar-Based Businesses "Flourish" In Venezuela While The Country Starves
    Dollar-Based Businesses “Flourish” In Venezuela While The Country Starves

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/04/2020 – 23:00

    Venezuela has seen nothing short of a full collapse of its economy over the past several years, as the wonderful benefits of both hyperinflation and socialism continue working together.  

    Now, the path forward for socialist leader Nicolas Maduro seems to have turned to dollarization.

    Despite the fact that it is further widening an inequality gap in a country where its citizens barely have access to water, electricity, gasoline and food, Maduro’s embrace of dollar based businesses have also led to a swanky “dollar underground” in Caracas, complete with “a dozen new delivery services bringing to their doors everything from truffle-salmon poke bowls to electronic cigarettes and $50 gluten-free birthday cakes,” according to Bloomberg. 

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    Caracas

    The dollarization over the country has created an alternate universe of luxury businesses even while the country’s economy has shrunk from 65% over the last 5 years. This year, it’s down 20% alone. The options are “endless” for those with dollars in a country where a majority of its citizens don’t have access to basic items, the report notes:

    In southeastern Caracas, there’s Sam Adams Octoberfest at $2.45 a bottle, Spanish Manchego cheese La cueva del abuelo at $12 for 150 grams, a keto seeds bread for $20 and Omaha Steaks, including a one-pound pork tenderloin for $23.

    But even those with dollars are seeing food prices rise in Venezuela, up 23% since March. 

    Business owner Graciela Beroes, who is the general manager of Lits ice cream company, said: “With just the slightest opening in the economy, we’ve seen innovative and creative ways to create during a crisis.”

    Economist Omar Zambrano said: “The government no longer harasses the small private sector and has allowed dollarization to advance. It creates a comfort bubble that reduces the political pressure of having to maintain an economy that can supply the minimum, especially with U.S. sanctions.”

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    The stocked stores in Caracas almost exclusively take dollars. 

    This has helped some businesses boom. One motorcycle delivery service, called Ubii Go, has expanded to 15,000 users in Caracas, growing 30% every month since March. A market in the Las Mercedes neighborhood was stocked with not only with basics, but with expensive “luxury” food items like plant based meats. They only take dollars. 

    Analyst Diego Moya-Ocampos says the dollarization has been “useful” to Maduro: “In a way, it’s an escape valve so the ruling class that’s increasingly surrounded can access luxury goods and services with a certain quality of life to prevent it from starting to think about a way out. It maintains civil and military loyalty.”

    Valentina Aponte, who sells her art in Venezuela for dollars, concluded: “So much is missing in Venezuela, even something as basic as books. In a place where there’s nothing, there’s room to do pretty much anything.”

    Sure, but we can’t help but think the real question will eventually become: what happens when the U.S. dollar turns into the Bolivar?

  • A Biden Administration Would Keep US Forces In Syria To 'Counter Russia'
    A Biden Administration Would Keep US Forces In Syria To ‘Counter Russia’

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/04/2020 – 22:40

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

    According to a report from the influential London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, a senior Biden advisor met with a group of Syrians to go over what a Biden administration’s Syria policy would look like. The advisor said Biden would keep a US military presence in northeast Syria to counter Russia and keep reconstruction funds from the country unless “meaningful” political reform occurs.

    The US has a small occupation force in northeast Syria to control oil fields, estimated to be around 600 troops. The US soldiers have had confrontations with both Syrian and Russian forces. The advisor said Biden would maintain this military presence because it “is a deterrent to Russian and regime airstrikes.”

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    American forces in Syria, Getty Images

    On the other side of Syria, in the northwest Idlib province, Turkey backs opposition fighters and is preventing the Syrian government from retaking the province. Idlib is mostly controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), formally known as al-Nusra Front, or al-Qaeda in Syria.

    “At the same time, Biden’s approach will look for ways to strengthen the Turkish operations in Idlib, which currently protect nearly three million people from Syrian and Russian aggression,” the advisor said. The US is also waging a secretive drone war in Idlib against Hurras al-Din, another al-Qaeda affiliate said to be more radical than HTS. The advisor did not mention this campaign.

    Syria has been struggling to rebuild from a brutal nine-year war. US sanctions that took effect under the Caesar Act over the summer specifically target the country’s energy and construction sectors. The act allows the US to target any individual, regardless of nationality, that is doing business in Syria and discourages Syria’s neighbors from helping in the reconstruction effort.

    The advisor said a Biden administration would “make clear to Russian President Vladimir Putin that there can be no American, or European, support for the reconstruction of Syria unless political reform takes place.”

  • Companies Join Exodus To Suburbs As Cities Transform Into "Ghost Towns" 
    Companies Join Exodus To Suburbs As Cities Transform Into “Ghost Towns” 

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/04/2020 – 22:20

    People and companies are leaving American cities in droves. An urban exodus could persist for a couple of years as the virus pandemic and resulting socio-economic implosion has exacerbated quality of life problems – violent crime, homelessness, rising taxes, and high cost of living – those were some of the reasons, even before the pandemic, forcing city dwellers to rural communities.

    We’ve presented enough evidence (see: here & here & here) of city dwellers fleeing for the exits, some of which was due to the virus pandemic unleashing a technological wave of remote working, allowing these folks to work anywhere with an internet connection. 

    So what about firms? Are they also running for the exits?

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    Over the summer, firms in New York’s financial district mulled over the idea of an exit. At least one real estate company has confirmed that big and small companies are shifting to suburbia, reported Bloomberg. 

    IWG Plc, which operates Regus-branded offices in metro areas worldwide, said in a post-pandemic era, “a strong pick-up in demand” for suburban office space versus major cities has been observed. They said deals for downtown New York office spaces have fallen by 30% since the pandemic’s beginning, citing a 40% surge in southern Connecticut activity. 

    IWG notes big and small firms are moving to suburbia. They said, “sales of small offices accommodating one to two people have jumped 19% amid growing demand for working closer to home.”

    Numerous times this summer (see: here & here & here), we’ve highlighted how the once-bustling New York City has transformed into a “ghost town.” And it’s not just New York City. Major metros across the country are experiencing similar outflow trends of people and businesses. This is also happening in Europe as people and companies shift out of densely populated areas. 

    U.K. housebuilder Crest Nicholson Holdings Plc said housing developments in southern England outside of London are experiencing rising demand as a “structural change to the balance of office and home working” is underway. 

    “This shows the current trend of buyers wanting more space — inside and outside of the house,” Bloomberg’s Iwona Hovenko said while referencing the latest Crest Nicholson report. “But it will be interesting if the trend lasts once the pandemic passes. I am a strong believer in London long-term.”

    Escape from cities, no matter if its people or firms, is happening across the Western world. This is terrible news for metro home prices and will also result in slower economic recoveries for cities. 

    At least now, baby boomers in America who own McMansions and rural corporate real estate have a new wave of buyers to sell to. 

  • Michigan USPS Whistleblower Claims Late Ballots Received Backdated Postmarks
    Michigan USPS Whistleblower Claims Late Ballots Received Backdated Postmarks

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/04/2020 – 22:00

    A US Postal Service employee from Michigan has reportedly turned whistleblower, telling Project Veritas that his supervisor instructed mail carriers to collect and segregate new ballot envelopes received after the election cutoff so that they could be fraudulently back-dated with a Nov. 3 postmark.

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    Poll workers count absentee ballots for the city of Detroit

    Whistleblower: “We were told to collect any ballots that we find in mailboxes, collection boxes, et cetera, for outgoing mail, at the end of the day, we are supposed to separate them from the standard letter mail, so they can hand-stamp them with yesterday’s date—and put them through the Express Mail system—to get wherever they need to go,” said the whistleblower, adding “For clarification, today is the fourth of November.”

    James O’Keefe: “Hand-stamp them with Nov. 3’s date?”

    Whistleblower: “Yes

    James O’Keefe: “That seems wrong–“

    Whistleblower: “Yeah, that’s why I am coming forward with this information. That is a very shady—in addition to, as far as I am aware, we’re not supposed to be counting ballots that are postmarked after the third of November here in the state of Michigan.“

    The Insider said he was shocked when Barlow Branch morning supervisor Jonathan Clarke told a group of mail carriers how late ballots would be handled.

    …

    The Insider said there was a process set up for the post office workers involved in the bogus postmark scheme. –Project Veritas

    Listen: 

  • Midwestern States Thrive With Fewer Virus Rules As Second Wave Arrives  
    Midwestern States Thrive With Fewer Virus Rules As Second Wave Arrives  

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/04/2020 – 21:40

    The debate between opening and closing the economy has been heated between Democrats and Republicans. President Trump has said if a second virus wave strikes, he will not close the economy. On the other hand, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said he would close the economy to mitigate the virus spread.

    While the debate to close or leave open the economy rages on between both political parties as record daily caseloads have been seen in the last few days, we shed light on a handful of Republican Midwestern states that have defied implementation of strict coronavirus restrictions, allowing their respective economies to thwart complete economic devastation. 

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    Many of these states, run by Republican governors, have practically no restrictions to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Still, the strategy, so far, has paid off with fewer business closures and more hiring shown in the latest unemployment figures, according to AP News. 

    “For now, though, those Midwestern states have a lock atop the unemployment rankings, far below the national average rate for September of 7.9%. Nebraska leads the nation with a 3.5% unemployment rate, followed by South Dakota, Vermont, North Dakota, Iowa, and Missouri,” AP said.

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    However, there’s a tradeoff between keeping the economy open, and limited coronavirus restrictions appear to be running into significant issues. These states are now recording some of the highest surges in new virus cases in the country. 

    Take, for example, North Dakota and South Dakota, are conservative states, have had a Laissez-faire approach to mitigate the virus spread, both are now exhibiting the most cases per capita in the U.S., along with Nebraska and Iowa. 

    Despite surging cases in Midwestern states, their economies have recovered much quicker than New York or major cities in California, which are liberal-run and continue to enforce some of the strictest social distancing rules, crushing SMEs. 

    Midwestern governors were some of the first to ease lockdowns in late spring, supporting SMEs: 

    “I’ve got to believe that if you shut down harder, you’re going to see a more severe impact to your industries and the longer you’re shut down, the harder it’s going to be for those industries to rebound,” Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts said. 

    Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, who contracted the virus last month, has promoted the idea of balancing the virus and keeping the economy open. And Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds has repeatedly told residents not to let the virus dominate their lives.

    South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has said,” there are consequences to what we’ve seen happen in other states — that shutting down businesses, stopping people’s way of life has some devastating impacts. We’re taking a very balanced approach.”

    Unlike California and New York, Midwestern states are not densely populated and have mostly agriculture and industrial economies, not ones dominated by travel and tourism. 

    “The economy of a rural state has a different structure, so more of the people work in industries that wouldn’t really be disrupted by a need for social distancing like agriculture,” said Eric Thompson, who leads the Bureau of Business Research at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

    Nathan Kauffman, Omaha branch executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, said business closures in Midwestern states were not as severe as others because they’re are considered essential industries.

    Nebraska’s heavily centric agriculture and food processing economy played a major role in boosting the state’s economic rebound, said Ricketts.

    “The kinds of things that we’re strong in are agriculture, manufacturing, finance and technology. You’ve just got industries that are not going to be as impacted by a pandemic,” Ricketts said.

    AP notes, “despite the low unemployment figures, all of the states now have fewer jobs than before the pandemic hit… Still, many Midwestern business owners and leaders say they appreciate their governors’ lighter touch.” 

    Arik Spencer, president and CEO of the North Dakota Chamber of Commerce, said shutting down large swaths of the economy is not the best strategy for states. He added, every state is undergoing a tricky balancing act of managing its economy and mitigating the spread of the virus. 

    “We hope that with the thoughtful approach of decisionmakers here in North Dakota, we’re poised to recover quickly. But if there were a silver bullet for recovery, every state in the country would be utilizing that right now,” Spencer said.

    As for the U.S., a new wave of restrictions could be nearing as daily virus cases hit record highs. Liberal-run states could be some of the first to reimpose new restrictions, likely triggering a double-dip recession as it appears President Trump’s stimulus might not arrive until early 2021. 

    Midwestern states might get the last laugh as their agriculture and industrial based economies are situated in less populated areas, opposed to many Democratic states with sprawling metropolises that are already reimposing restrictions.  

  • COVID Testing: We've Been Duped
    COVID Testing: We’ve Been Duped

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/04/2020 – 21:20

    Authored by A.Castellitto via AmericanThinker.com,

    Lost in this whole pandemic hysteria are some key considerations that when carefully analyzed place the whole COVID-19 narrative in a highly questionable light.  The gatekeepers of information dissimulation are manufacturing consent at an alarming rate, but their fatigue is setting in, and their masks are falling off.  What better, albeit unlikely, source to go for some much needed illumination than the New York Times? 

    During a considerably quieter time, back in 2007, the New York Times featured a very interesting exposé on molecular diagnostic testing — specifically, the inadequacy of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test in achieving reliable results.  The most significant concern highlighted in the Times report is how molecular tests, most notably the PCR, are highly sensitive and prone to false positives.  At the center of the controversy was a potential outbreak in a hospital in New Hampshire that proved to be nothing more than “ordinary respiratory diseases like the common cold.”  Unfortunately, the results wrought by the PCR told a different story. 

    Thankfully, a faux epidemic was avoided but not before thousands of workers were furloughed and given antibiotics and ultimately a vaccine, and hospital beds (including some in intensive care) were taken out of commission.  Eight months later, what was thought to be an epidemic was deemed a non-malicious hoax.  The culprit?  According to “epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists … too much faith in a quick and highly sensitive molecular test .. led them astray.”  At the time, such tests were “coming into increasing use” as maybe “the only way to get a quick answer in diagnosing diseases like … SARS, and deciding whether an epidemic is under way.”

    Nevertheless, today, the PCR test is considered the gold standard of molecular diagnostics, most notably in the diagnosis of COVID-19.  However, a closer analysis reveals that the PCR has actually been pretty spotty and that false positives abound.  Thankfully, the New York Times is once again on the case. 

    “Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive; Maybe It Shouldn’t Be,” according to NYT reporter Apoorva Mandavilli.  Essentially, positive results are getting tossed around way too frequently.  Rather, they should probably be reserved for individuals with “greater viral load.”  So how have they’ve been doing it all this time you ask? 

    “The PCR test amplifies genetic matter from the virus in cycles; the fewer cycles required, the greater the amount of virus, or viral load, in the sample . .. the more likely the patient is to be contagious.”

    Unfortunately, the “cycle threshold” has been ramped up.  What happens when it’s ramped up?  Basically, “huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus” are deemed infected.  However, the severity of the infection is never quantified, which essentially amounts to a false positive.  Their level of contagion is essentially nil. 

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    How are they determining the cycle threshold?  If I didn’t suspect that it was based on maximizing the amount of “cases,” I would find the determination pretty arbitrary.  More than a few of the professionals on record for Times report appear pretty perplexed on this vital detail which is essentially driving “clinical diagnostics, for public health and policy decision-making.”  Considering all that’s at stake and everything that hinges on positive vs negative case tallies, it’s outrageous that these tests would be tweaked in a way that would inflate the positive rate totals and percentages.  

    According to one virologist, “any test with a cycle threshold above 35 is too sensitive.”  She went on to to say, “I’m shocked that people would think that 40 could represent a positive.” 

    Personally, I think the science is just about settled on COVID-19.  The conclusion?  We’ve been duped!

  • Mike Bloomberg Blew $100 Million In Florida, Ohio and Texas
    Mike Bloomberg Blew $100 Million In Florida, Ohio and Texas

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/04/2020 – 21:00

    While Trump may or may not remain POTUS following what can best be described as ‘malarkey’ in several states, billionaire Mike Bloomberg just blew $100 million trying to flip three states blue, following his exit from the 2020 presidential race.

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    According to CNBC, “In the months after Bloomberg dropping out of the Democratic primary, the New York business leader huddled with advisors to plot a spending blitz to help Democratic nominee Joe Biden overtake Trump. It was initially decided that most of a $100 million spend would go toward the pivotal state of Florida. Later he would add Ohio and Texas into the mix.“

    Trump won all three states soundly, however Bloomberg also sought to flip the Senate back to the Democrats, which would have allowed them – along with a potential president Biden – to actually roll back President Trump’s tax cuts, pack the Supreme Court, and carry out the rest of their legislative laundry list.

    Bloomberg has a net worth north of $54 billion and spent $1 billion on his primary run for president, so tossing another $100 million onto that dumpster fire isn’t really going to move the needle.

    Unfortunately for the billionaire news maven and his backers, the $100 million did virtually nothing.

    The respect that Bloomberg had within the party was evident in the buildup to Election Day as he plowed millions into the Sunshine State.

    Democratic leaders were privately becoming more convinced that they were going to defeat Trump there, in part on the basis that Bloomberg was flooding the airwaves with ads, according to people familiar with the matter who declined to be named. They believed that Bloomberg’s messaging machine was enough to push Biden over the edge and flip Florida back to the Democrats after losing there in 2016.

    There were even discussions that some Democratic leaders were going to try to convince Biden to offer Bloomberg a Cabinet post, these people added. Those efforts appear to be no longer in motion and it’s unclear if either Biden or Bloomberg would even entertain the idea. These people declined to be named as the discussions and plans were made in private. –CNBC

    According to data from Advertising Analytics, Bloomberg’s super PAC, Independence USA spent over $36 million in Florida between September and November, along with $6.9 million on ads in Texas and $3.3 million in Ohio. More went towards pro-Biden super PACs such as Priorities USA Action, Hawkfish – his data firm, and Schoel Cooperman Research – a firm founded by Bloomberg’s longtime pollster pal Doug Schoen.

  • Ron Paul: There's No Vaccine For Tyranny
    Ron Paul: There’s No Vaccine For Tyranny

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/04/2020 – 20:40

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

    The World Health Organization (WHO) recently admitted that lockdowns cause more harm than good. Following this announcement, one would have expected American politicians to immediately end the lockdowns. After all, the WHO ‘s pronouncements are considered infallible, so much so that social media sites silence anyone who dares challenge the great and powerful WHO. Yet, governors, mayors, and other government officials across the country are ignoring the WHO’s anti-lockdown position.

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    Instead of admitting that the lockdowns were a mistake, many in the political class, which includes a disturbing number of medical professionals whose positions and prestige depend on government, claim that we cannot return to normalcy until a coronavirus vaccine is in wide use. This suggests that people among the majority of Americans who do not wish to be vaccinated will remain under lockdown or be forced to be vaccinated against their will.

    The assault on our liberty will not end with deployment and use of a vaccine. Moncef Slaoui, the chief adviser of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, a “public-private partnership” in charge of producing and delivering a coronavirus vaccine, has said that those who receive a vaccine will be monitored by “incredibly precise … tracking systems.” Slaoui has also indicated that tech giants Google and Oracle will help the government keep tabs on the vaccinated individuals. So, the vaccine program will lead to an increase in government surveillance!

    Slaoui is just the latest “expert” to endorse forcing the American people to relinquish their few remaining scraps of privacy to stop coronavirus. Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates have urged development of a digital certificate for those vaccinated for coronavirus. People without the certificate would find their liberty severely restricted.

    Those who think that the new surveillance system will be limited to coronavirus should remember that Social Security numbers were only supposed to be used to administer the Social Security program. They should also consider that the PATRIOT Act’s expansion of warrantless wiretapping was supposed to be limited to stopping terrorists. However, these powers have been used for a wide variety of purposes. Whenever government is given power to abuse our rights for one reason it will inevitably use that power to abuse our rights for other reasons as well.

    Fauci and Gates’ digital certificate could, and likely will, be expanded to include proof individuals have received a variety of other vaccines and medical treatments. The digital certificate could even extend to monitoring a person’s lifestyle choices on the grounds that unhealthy habits make one more susceptible to diseases.

    The digital certificate could also be tied to the REAL ID program to deny individuals who have not been vaccinated the right to travel. It could also be combined with a future mandatory E-Verify system to deny unvaccinated individuals the right to hold a job. Those who consider this “paranoia” should consider Britain is already developing a covid passport.

    Liberty lost in the “war on covid” will not be voluntarily returned when the coronavirus threat ends — assuming the government ever stop moving the goal posts and declares the coronavirus threat is over. Instead, the people must be prepared to take back their liberty from the politicians. Fortunately, we still have the ability to do so by the peaceful means of educating our fellow citizens and pressuring our elected officials to reverse course. We must all do what we can to use these peaceful tools before we are in a “dark winter” of authoritarianism.

  • Goldman Warns "Frenzied" SPAC Bubble May Be Ending
    Goldman Warns “Frenzied” SPAC Bubble May Be Ending

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/04/2020 – 20:20

    One of the remarkable stories of 2020, one which has sparked many comparisons to 2007 just before the credit/housing bubble popped, has been the record surge of blank-check, or SPAC, issuance where investors – at a loss what to invest in – hand their money to a marquee investor who promises to find an appropriate investment over a given period of time or refund the money. To quantify the SPAC bubble, a record $61 billion has been raised in initial public offerings by blank-check firms in the first 10 months of the year.

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    The capital raised by 166 SPACs on US exchanges in 2020 is almost seven times that of the 38 blank-check companies at this point last year, according to Bloomberg data. In fact, this year’s $61 billion total is approaching the $72 billion raised in all prior years combined, the data show.

    The SPAC euphoria hit a peak in October, when blank check filings raised a record $17 billion in IPOs, with issuance surpassing $10 billion for the fourth month in a row. And many more are on deck, as dozens of SPACs have filed paperwork with the SEC ahead of public listings. According to Bloomberg, these include Investindustrial Acquisition Corp., which tapped former UBS Group AG chief executive officer Sergio Ermotti as chairman, and Forest Road Acquisition Corp., which counts Martin Luther King III as a director and Shaquille “Shaq” O’Neal as a strategic adviser.

    But the good times may be ending: in an interview with Bloomberg, Olympia McNerney, Goldman’s head of U.S. special purpose acquisition companies, described the U.S. SPAC market as being “perhaps too frenzied” and predicted volumes will become more “rational: as fund managers deal with what she described as indigestion.

    “There has been a very meaningful uptick in SPAC issuance and we expect the market to be more selective going forward,” said McNerney.

    One of the reasons why the SPAC euphoria is expected to ease, is that as investors allocate more capital to SPACs, some investors have hit internal limits governing their exposure to blank-check firms.

    But a far more tangible reason why the SPAC froth is likely peaking is also the simplest one: SPACs are no longer a get rich quick scheme, with 60% of October’s listings are trading below their offer price, the data show. The recently launched SPAC ETF whose ticker is appropriately SPAK, peaked one day after its break for trading, before slumping nearly 15% in following weeks.

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    And now that just buying a SPAC is no longer guaranteed to generate a quick profit, investors are starting to get cold feet.

    “Some investors have said they will be much more selective around SPACs for the remainder of this year, but I believe they’ll continue to underwrite SPACs led by high quality and differentiated management teams,” McNerney said.

  • Paul Craig Roberts: Does America Have A Future?
    Paul Craig Roberts: Does America Have A Future?

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/04/2020 – 20:00

    Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

    If the election gets close, the presstitutes will call it for Biden as that will be their way of putting Trump on the defensive. By repeating over and over that Biden has won, the presstitutes will position Trump as disputing the outcome and intending to remain in office.

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    If polls are correct that a majority of Democrats intend to vote by mail, the in-person vote of Democrats will be too small to declare a Biden victory. The strategy here will be to keep the outcome open for days while mail-in votes are counted. Some states require the votes to be in by election day (Nov. 3), but others only require a postmark by Nov. 3. In other words, many votes could be mailed today and not arrive for some days.

    By keeping the outcome open, voting-by-mail gives the Democrats time to scheme how to produce the necessary votes, and the presstitutes have time to make propaganda against Trump.

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    There are also the legal teams organized by Democrats to bring challenges, if Trump wins, to vote-counting in states that Trump wins. These challenges are likely to be heard by Democrat judges and until the cases work their way up to the Supreme Court, the issue of who is the president remains open.

    And then there is violence. What is called the left – Antifa and Black Lives Matter – have organized to shut down Washington D.C., blockade the White House, and to unleash riots in a number of cities. The presstitutes will blame the burning and looting on Trump’s refusal to step down. The weak-of-heart among Trump supporters, if any such exist, will respond to the fear that violence generates by abandoning Trump.

    The left, or so-called left, labels Trump a fascist and calls his supporters “fascist white supremacists.” But it is the so-called left—a fake left—that is fascist. Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) are the Nazi Brownshirts of our time. They are conducting their Kristallnachts breaking the windows of white businesses and looting and burning the buildings. It is the Antifa and BLM fascist thugs who are threatening white neighborhoods, and it is these Brownshirted Thugs who are beating Trump supporters just as their fellow Brownshirts beat Jews in 1930s Germany.

    There are no “Trump white supremacists” rioting in the streets, looting and burning businesses, and conducting a Kristallnacht against Democrats.

    Who will win?

    As disillusioned and as skeptical of insouciant Americans as I am, I see no indication of a Democrat win. The feminists, the university professors, whore media, and indoctrinated young will vote for Biden and for a “female of color” who hates white people. In general, Americans with university degrees are unreliable. But the working class knows better, and these “Trump Deplorables,” as designated by Hillary Clinton, will vote for Trump. They know who is on their side.

    Trump’s campaign events were overwhelmingly attended. Hardly anyone turned out for Biden’s and not even effete liberals wanted to hear Kamala. Judging by the attendance at campaign rallies, there is no possible way that Biden is ahead by 10 points as the polls say. Either the pollsters are setting up to steal the election from Trump by reporting that he could not have won as he was 10 points behind or Trump supporters withheld from pollsters their support for Trump.

    This election is critical. Four years ago Trump, a non-establishment candidate, took the nomination from the Republican Establishment and then defeated the Establishment candidate of the Democrats. The Establishment has rarely lost in American politics. The Establishment will not be happy to lose a second time to Trump.

    But after Trump what?

    America has lost its educated youth. They have been indoctrinated in their education that America is racist, sexist, imperialist, oppressive, and evil. The anti-American, anti-white New York Times teaches our youth that America was evil in 1619, 157 years prior to the creation of the US with the Declaration of Independence. In a few years when my and Trump’s generation passes, who remains to stand for America? The numbers are diminished and the country with them. How many years before the anti-American, anti-white Kamalas prevail?

    If Trump wins, can he secure America’s future from the anti-Americans amongs us?

  • World's Largest Iceberg On Collision Path With South Georgia
    World’s Largest Iceberg On Collision Path With South Georgia

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/04/2020 – 19:40

    The world’s largest iceberg, nearly the size of a small country, is headed towards the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia, according to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).

    Known as A68a, the massive iceberg broke off the Larsen C ice shelf in the northwest part of the Weddell Sea, along the Antarctic Peninsula’s east coast. 

    Comparing A68a’s Size Too Small Islands 

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    BAS warned A68a has the potential to collide with South Georgia, an island in the southern Atlantic Ocean that belongs to the British Overseas territories. They said there’s a strong possibility the berg “could disrupt the local wildlife that forages in the food-rich ocean.”

    A68a’s Path 

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    A-68a broke off the Larsen C ice shelf in July 2017 and is about the same size as South Georgia, measuring 93 miles long and 30 miles wide and has since drifted 870 miles north through “iceberg alley” and is about 310 miles from the island. 

    A68a Approaching South Georgia 

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    BAS remote-sensing and mapping specialist Dr. Peter Fretwell said satellite imagery suggests A68a could be on a direct path for South Georgia: 

    “Whether it grounds and gets stuck or drifts past the island is in the balance,” Fretwell said. “The currents should take it on what looks like a strange loop around the south end of South Georgia, before then spinning it along the edge of the continental shelf and back off to the northwest. But it’s very difficult to say precisely what will happen.”

    BAS Remote Sensing Manager Andrew Fleming said the idea that the berg “is in one large piece is actually remarkable, particularly given the huge fractures you see running through it in the radar imagery.”

    “I’d fully expected it to have broken apart by now. If it spins around South Georgia and heads on northwards, it should start breaking up. It will very quickly get into warmer waters, and wave action especially will start killing it off,” Fleming said. 

    It’s only a matter of time before Greta Thunberg and her gang of social media climate change trolls point at the massive iceberg, suggesting it has to do with climate change. 

  • "Meeting In A Storm": FOMC Preview
    “Meeting In A Storm”: FOMC Preview

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/04/2020 – 19:20

    By Philip Marey of Rabobank

    You’re fired!

    • The FOMC meeting on November 4-5 will take place in a volatile environment, just after Election Day, while the country is dealing with another resurgence of Covid-19. What’s more, we are still waiting for an extension of the fiscal stimulus.

    • The election outcome could determine whether the Fed will have to provide more monetary policy accommodation to offset any shortfall in fiscal policy support to the economic recovery.

    • For Fed Chairman Powell there is more at stake than fiscal stimulus in this election week. After all, his first term as Chair expires on 5 February 2022.

    Meeting in a storm

    The next meeting of the FOMC is on November 4-5, just after Election Day (November 3), however it appears that Trump is now contesting the election results which show Biden in the lead across most battleground states. This means that the Fed will meet in a volatile environment. In addition to the elections, the country is dealing with another resurgence of Covid-19. What’s more, we are still waiting for an extension of the fiscal stimulus that expired at the end of July. Still, the FOMC may not be inclined to take any action before the election uncertainty subsides, unless there is some kind of market panic. Instead, in his press conference Powell is likely to stress again the importance of additional fiscal stimulus, and of getting Covid-19 under control. There will be no update of the economic projections.

    Fiscal policy dependencies

    The minutes of the September meeting showed that the economic outlook (and thus the FOMC projections) assumed additional fiscal support and that if future fiscal support was significantly smaller or arrived later than expected the FOMC thought the pace of the recovery could be slower than anticipated. Participants viewed fiscal support from the CARES Act as having been very important in bolstering the financial situations of millions of families, and a number of participants judged that the absence of further support would exacerbate economic hardship in minority and lower-income communities. District contacts indicated that fiscal policy had helped support small businesses, while federal aid payments had helped support farm incomes.

    This means that the election outcome could determine whether the Fed will have to provide more monetary policy accommodation to offset any shortfall in fiscal policy support to the economic recovery. Until Tuesday, it was generally accepted that a Biden victory in combination with a Blue Wave in Congress would lead to a large fiscal policy package in the first quarter of 2021, followed by expansive fiscal policy during Biden’s first term. This would have been welcomed by the FOMC and allow the central bank to keep its monetary policy stance unchanged for now. In contrast, it now appears that we will get a “Divided Government” (the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives are not controlled by the same arty) and we are likely to see gridlock at least until the midterm elections of 2022. This would mean only limited and delayed fiscal stimulus, possibly only after the economic data start to deteriorate severely. If fiscal stimulus proves insufficient to keep the economic recovery going, the Fed will be forced to provide additional monetary policy accommodation. However, the Fed has little ammunition left.

    Yield curve control

    Given the Fed’s aversion to negative policy rates, a faltering economic recovery and insufficient fiscal stimulus could push the Fed into yield curve control. By capping rates for a sustained period some additional monetary stimulus could be provided to aggregate demand.However, given how low longer-term rates are already, this will provide only modest support to the recovery. Alternatively, yield curve control could come into play if a large fiscal stimulus pushes up longer-term rates so fast and so high that they become a threat to the economic recovery. In this case the Fed may want to cap longer-term rates to maintain the current dose of monetary policy accommodation.

    Asset purchases

    In addition to capping rates, the FOMC has the possibility to increase its asset purchases to provide monetary stimulus. In fact, much of the Fed’s plans regarding asset purchases has yet to be cleared up. From the minutes of the September meeting it was clear that the FOMC talked a lot about forward guidance on rates and very little on forward guidance on asset purchases. Some participants noted that in future meetings it would be appropriate to further assess and communicate how the asset purchase program could best support the achievement of the Committee’s maximum-employment and price-stability goals.

    Another one term Chair?

    For Fed Chairman Powell there is more at stake than fiscal stimulus in this election week. After all, his first term as Chair expires on 5 February 2022. While President Trump has become less critical of Powell after he cut rates to zero, he has a habit of replacing officials. For a President Biden the precedent of one term Chair Yellen will make it easier to change the Fed’s leadership after only four years. Keep in mind that Powell is a Republican, but more importantly there is likely to be pressure from the left to make the Fed more ‘socially activist’. In recent years the Fed appeared more concerned about limiting the downside risk of stock investors than about fostering income growth for ordinary Americans. While the ‘flexible average inflation targeting’ strategy (FAIT) that has been adopted recently is a step in the right direction, the wide dispersion of views regarding its implementation in the September statement suggests that we are heading for a chaotic exit strategy from the zero lower bound. And more importantly, it raises doubts about whether the FOMC will be able to resist the temptation to start hiking if inflation starts to pick up. Anyway, FAIT may not go far enough for the left wing of the Democratic Party. So Biden may replace Powell by a left-leaning economist who is eager to reshape the Fed’s strategy more radically.

  • US Sets New Record By Reporting 100k COVID-19 Cases In A Day: Live Updates
    US Sets New Record By Reporting 100k COVID-19 Cases In A Day: Live Updates

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/04/2020 – 19:17

    Summary:

    • US daily cases top 100k Wednesday
    • UK daily deaths near 500
    • NYC hospitals climb
    • Denmark discovers new strain
    • Barry Sternlicht on how COVID impacted US election
    • Global daily cases decline
    • Germany’s “R” rate declines back below “1”
    • BoJo set to push through more restrictions
    • Hungary minister sickened
    • Bulgaria tops 4k COVID cases
    • South Korea confirms another 118 cases
    • Indonesia reports 3,356

    * * *

    Update (1900ET): As the world waits with baited breath on the final results from the US election, which remains, unfortunately, a chaotic mess, with the vote far too close to call, the US has notched yet another COVID-19 record. For the first time since the outbreak began, the US recorded more than 100,000 new cases in a single day, according to a tally from the Washington Post. 

    The US is the first country in the world to see this many new cases in a single day, though the daily numbers of new cases can vary, sometimes significantly, between different data providers.

    The Washington Post reported that Wednesday was the first time any country reported 100k cases in a single day, and also warned that more than a dozen US states, including Kansas, Tennessee, Virginia, Oklahoma, Montana, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Ohio, Nebraska, Minnesota, Indiana and West Virginia, on Wednesday reported record numbers of patients hospitalized with COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. Nationwide, the US has counted more than 9,445,000.

    Since February, the US has suffered more than 235k deaths.

    * * *

    Update (1220ET): As we head into the afternoon, we feel it’s worth resurfacing this interview clip involving Barry Sternlicht and CNBC host Joe Kernan, who discussed the role that COVID played in the election.

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    Sternlicht said the turnout shows Americans are “over that”. “We’re done, we want to get back to work”, he said, before calling the virus a giant flu that’s mostly impacting the elderly.

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    In NYC, the total number of people admitted to hospitals with COVID-19-like symptoms jumped to 114 on Nov. 2, a 37% increase over the prior day, which triggered deep concern among the city’s health officials.

    British health authorities reported 492 additional deaths from the virus within 28 days of a positive test on Wednesday, the highest daily increase since its second surge in the disease. Meanwhile, MPs on Wednesday approved new measures to control the spread of the disease in England, but Yvonne Doyle, medical director of Public Health England, said those restrictions will take some time to have an impact.

    Finally, Denmark has found a new strain of the virus following an outbreak in the country’s mink population that led to a mutation of the virus that might hamper efforts to develop a vaccine, according to Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, who said “there is a risk that the effect of a future vaccine will be weakened or, in a worst case scenario, be undermined,” during a virtual press briefing on Wednesday. Her government has passed on the information to the World Health Organization, and now plans to cull Denmark’s entire mink population. According to Kopenhagen Fur, an auction house owned by Denmark’s mink breeders, 16 million animals are raised each year.

    * * *

    Once again, the number of new cases reported globally declined in the 24 hours to Tuesday, according to Johns Hopkins and Bloomberg. But while the rate of spread in Germany dropped back below 1 on Wednesday morning, most of its European neighbors, including the UK, Italy, Sweden, Hungary and the Netherlands have all moved to impose new restrictions this week.

    On Wednesday, Bloomberg drew attention to hospitalizations in the US, where Florida is in the lead with 16% of beds filled by COVID-19 patients.

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    Source: Bloomberg

    The biggest story on Wednesday morning was the drop in Germany’s “R” rate, which fell below 1 for the first time since Oct. 30 as the country recorded 7,533 new cases in the 24 hours to Wednesday morning, a decline from more than 17k a day earlier.

    In the UK, Boris Johnson is set to push fresh coronavirus lockdown rules through Parliament on Wednesday as he faces down rebels in his own party. The new rules will take effect at midnight, enforcing the closing of pubs, gyms and non-essential shops in England, and restricting social contact between households. The prime minister announced the month-long measures on Saturday after data showed the pandemic exceeding the worst-case projections of his scientific advisers.

    Yesterday, the FDA warned about inaccuracies tied to rapid antigen tests like the Abbott Labs test approved for emergency use, saying that the test has been shown to produce ‘incorrect’ positive results.

    Here’s more news from overnight and Wednesday morning:

    India reported 46,253 new cases, in line with a slowdown in daily infections over the past three weeks. The country reached a peak of more than 97,000 daily cases in mid-September, putting it on track to overtake the U.S., but with the slower rate of new Indian cases and resurgent numbers in America, that now looks unlikely for some time. Still, India has just kicked off its festival season — culminating in Diwali on Nov. 14 — and large-scale celebratory events planned across the country could re-ignite the spread of infection (Source: Bloomberg).

    New cases in Bulgaria jumped to a record 4,041 with the number of daily deaths rising to 63. The Balkan country’s Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, who is recovering at home from the virus himself, has said that the government isn’t planning a nationwide lockdown for now but vowed to raise the wages of medical workers (Source: Bloomberg).

    Australia showed more signs of recovery, with household spending surging by a record 6.5% last quarter, led by cafes and clothing and footwear stores as Covid-19 restrictions in much of the country were unwound. The growth was partly restrained by a 4.2% decline in Victoria state, which only released its capital Melbourne from lockdown last week (Source: Bloomberg).

    Hungary’s foreign minister has tested positive for COVID-19 after arriving in Thailand, according to AP. Peter Szijjarto and his delegation had just come from Cambodia, where he met with Prime Minister Hun Sen and other officials on Tuesday. The minister and the Cambodian leader were pictured together maskless. Cambodian officials say the delegation members all tested negative prior to their departure (Source: Nikkei).

    Indonesia reports 3,356 new coronavirus infections on Wednesday, taking its total number of cases to 421,731, data from the country’s COVID-19 task force shows. There are 113 more deaths, taking total fatalities to 14,259. As of Wednesday, 353,282 people had recovered from the virus in Indonesia, the data showed (Source: Nikkei).

    South Korea confirms 118 new coronavirus cases, up from 75 a day ago. The country’s total infections have reached 26,925, with 474 deaths (Source: Nikkei).

  • Oregon Becomes First State To Decriminalize Cocaine, Heroin, & Meth; Legalizes Shrooms
    Oregon Becomes First State To Decriminalize Cocaine, Heroin, & Meth; Legalizes Shrooms

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/04/2020 – 19:00

    While the results of the Presidential race drag on, one ballot initiative on election day has been made crystal clear: Oregon has become the first state to decriminalize small amounts of hard drugs, including cocaine, heroin and meth. 

    The “Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act” seeks to decriminalize drug usage and instead focus on a health care approach. The bill reads:

    “People suffering from addiction are more effectively treated with health care services than with criminal punishments. A health care approach includes a health assessment to figure out the needs of people who are suffering from addiction, and it includes connecting them to the services they need.”

    The ballot measure passed 59% to 41% on election day, according to Fox News. 

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    Those who are caught with hard drugs would now have the option of paying a $100 fine or attending new addiction recovery centers, paid for with taxes from retail marijuana sales.

    “It’s going to be huge,” Haven Wheelock, a drug counselor for Portland nonprofit Outside In, told VICE.

     “It’s going to allow people to get the services they need without fear of arrest. It’s going to change how people who don’t use drugs think about drug use. It’s going to allow us to move into a health-based system and hopefully be a model for other places. We have an opportunity to show the rest of the country this is how it should be.”

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    Under the new measure, possession of less than 1 gram of heroin or meth, 2 grams of cocaine, 12 grams of psilocybin, 40 doses of LSD, oxycodone or methadone and 1 gram of MDMA is decriminalized. 

    Countries like Portugal, the Netherlands and Switzerland have already implemented similar measures. In Portugal, the change saw “no surge” in new drug use. In fact, drug deaths fell while the number of people in the country treated for addiction rose 20% between 2001 and 2008. Then, the number stabilized. 

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    The U.N. Chief Executives Board for Coordination announced in 2019 that it would also “promote alternatives to conviction and punishment in appropriate cases, including the decriminalization of drug possession for personal use” in order to “address prison overcrowding and overincarceration by people accused of drug crimes.”

    The new proposed measure in Oregon had the backing of “the Oregon Nurses Association, the Oregon chapter of the American College of Physicians and the Oregon Academy of Family Physicians,” according to ABC.

    The groups contend that: “Punishing people for drug use and addiction is costly and hasn’t worked. More drug treatment, not punishment, is a better approach.” 

    Arguing against the initiative were 24 district attorneys, who claimed the measure “recklessly decriminalizes possession of the most dangerous types of drugs (and) will lead to an increase in acceptability of dangerous drugs.”

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    Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt argued last week in support of the bill, saying: “Misguided drug laws have created deep disparities in the justice system. Arresting people with addictions is a cruel punishment because it slaps them with a lifelong criminal record that can ruin lives.”

    Jimmy Jones, executive director of Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action, a group that helps the homeless, concluded:

     “Every time that this happens, not only does that individual enter the criminal justice system but it makes it very difficult for us, on the back end, to house any of these folks because a lot of landlords won’t touch people with recent criminal history.”

    Additionally, voters also made history by legalizing psilocybin or “magic” mushrooms by approving Measure 109 – the Psilocybin Mushroom Services Program Initiative – by 55.88 percent.

    Under the measure, the state will become the first in the country legalize the use of the psychedelic fungus in controlled doses within the framework of a regulated system overseen by licensed clinicians and therapists.

  • Biden Launches Presidential 'Transition Team', Trump Asks SCOTUS To Intervene
    Biden Launches Presidential ‘Transition Team’, Trump Asks SCOTUS To Intervene

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/04/2020 – 18:59

    Update (1820ET): President Trump is still reportedly up by hundreds of thousands of votes in PA, but as more absentee ballots are opened his lead appears to be shrinking. With Biden winning some key calls in Michigan and Nevada (calls that, notably, don’t reflect final vote tallies), his campaign has decided to launch its transition team website, adopting what one might call a “fake it ’till you make it” approach to the presidency. 

    Biden’s team has been planning for months for the possibility that the Trump administration won’t cooperate with his aides, and deliberately try to stonewall him, breaking years of tradition when it comes to presidential transfer of power.

    “The crises facing the country are severe—from a pandemic to an economic recession, climate change to racial injustice—and the transition team will continue preparing at full speed so that the Biden-Harris Administration can hit the ground running on Day One,” a transition official said, echoing a statement on the transition team’s newly launched website.

    As officials prepare to count votes for a third day, Fox News is calling Trump ahead in Georgia, while the NYT is saying that Biden may have squeaked ahead after appearing to take Michigan, Wisconsin (two of the three “blue wall” states) along with Nevada. Still, the final vote tallies aren’t yet in, and as we saw with Arizona, early calls risk embarrassing reversals later on.

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    Sourcce: WaPo

    Now that Trump has asked SCOTUS to intervene in PA, Axios has come forward with a deep dive into Trump’s court push, saying the Supreme Court is unlikely to decide this election, even as Trump’s team unloads with the lawsuits.

    Text courtesy of Axios…

    * * *

    The big picture: The Trump campaign has filed multiple lawsuits in the hours since the president declared that “we will be going to the Supreme Court.”

    But election-law experts say it’s still a long shot that the justices will decide the next president.

    What they’re saying: Experts say they simply don’t see strong vehicles emerging for a Bush v. Gore sequel — with the important caveat that it’s too early to reach any firm conclusions while votes are still being counted.

    Where it stands: In Pennsylvania, the biggest controversy is the state’s decision to count mail-in ballots that were mailed by Nov. 3, but arrived later.

    A challenge to that extension is already pending at the Supreme Court and in a legal filing Wednesday the Trump campaign sought to participate in that case. Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien told reporters Wednesday afternoon that they are “declaring a victory in Pennsylvania” and “have a high degree of certainty the margin won’t be close.”

    Between the lines: Four conservative Supreme Court justices have already expressed deep misgivings about extended ballot deadlines, and could take up a challenge to Pennsylvania’s extension at any time. But that’s only likely to happen, experts said, if those late-arriving votes are the tipping point in Pennsylvania — and if Pennsylvania is the tipping point nationwide.

    While the overall number of mail-in ballots this year is huge, the number of late-arriving mail-in ballots is believed to be pretty small, and that’s where the controversy is. If Biden wins the state without those ballots, then a lawsuit over them wouldn’t change the outcome.

    And depending on outcomes in Arizona and Nevada, Biden might not need Pennsylvania at all, making protracted litigation there even less meaningful.

    In Wisconsin, the Trump campaign has already said it intends to seek a recount.

    Wisconsin conducted a recount after the 2016 election; it ended up only changing 131 votes.

    There could be more than that this time because mail ballots have more opportunities for error than in-person voting.

    But finding enough irregularities to overcome a 20,000-vote deficit would be a hard road.

    In Michigan, the campaign is suing for access to vote-counting operations, and to stop the counting until then. It has filed a similar suit in Pennsylvania.

    Filing a lawsuit is no guarantee that it’ll win, that it’ll find anything scandalous if it gets that access, or that anything it does find would change the outcome in the state. The bottom line: As more votes are counted and potentially recounted, it’s possible that a controversy over a razor-thin margin in a tipping-point state will be powerful enough to propel the election all the way to the Supreme Court. But that doesn’t mean it’s likely.

    Source: Axios

    * * *

    Update (1805ET):  It looks like investors worst fears about the election’s results being subjected to a lengthy court battle may soon come to pass. The AP and NYT and others have just called Michigan and Nevada for Joe Biden. This comes on top of Wisconsin, which was called for Biden

    Trump won both states four years ago, and his campaign has already filed lawsuits demanding a recount in one, and a halt to counting new votes in the other.

    The Trump Campaign has asked the Supreme Court to intervene in the PA vote count to stop late arriving ballots from being counted. The SCOTUS has responded to the request by asking Democrats and their lawyers to deliver a response by 1700ET tomorrow.

    PA Gov Tom Wolf has denounced Trump’s lawsuit as “simply wrong” and insisted that the lengthy vote count was a positive sign.

    Wolf added that PA will fight against all efforts to throw out any absentee votes.

    * * *

    Update (1725ET): In one hilarious clips circulating on Twitter, a Trump supporter interruped a br=nreinf

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    And here we go.

    * * *

    Update (1700ET):Nevada officials now say that more results will be released this afternoon out of increased interest in the state’s results, according to Las Vegas CBS affiliate 8 News, which means the state should have an updated count shortly, which could provide far more insight into the state of the race.

    Arizona Secretary of the State has just confirmed that the state has 100,000s of uncounted ballots, but President Trump is chiming in once again to say that “we have claimed, for Electoral Vote purposes.

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    The posts have already been hit with disclaimers from Twitter, as Trump declares Michigan and PA.

    Tweets from conservative media platforms were also censord, despite the fact tht

    * * *

    Update (1615ET): Ironically, given all the hysterics raised about the possibility of President Trump refusing to concede, Joe Biden has effectively done just that, saying “I’m not here to declare that I’ve won, but I’m here to report that after the count is finished, I believe we will be the winners. After a long night of counting, it appears that we’ve won enough votes to win the presidency.”

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    While Biden insisted this wasn’t a victory speech, one Bloomberg reporter couldn’t help but point out that “this sure feels like a victory speech”

    Michigan, meanwhile, has been called for Biden by Bloomberg, though it remains a “heavy tossup” according to others, including Real Clear Politics, who have yet to make their call.

    Electoral College vote count update: Biden 264, Trump 214.

    Finally, David Shafer is tweeting about some potential Democratic skulduggery in certain parts of Georgia, where GOP monitors were sent home, then Dems continued counting ballots.

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    Meanwhile, in PA, hundreds of Dems have surrounded the building where votes are being counted.

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    Could we soon be in store for another “Brooks Brothers” riot?

    Though Twitter has mostly ignored complaints of Democratic malfeasance, it has affixed new labels to tweets from family members of the president others for violating its policies around elections misinformation.

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

    * * *

    UPDATE (1600ET):The Trump Campaign has officially declared victory in Pennsylvania, widely seen as a must-win state for the campaign, while Wisconsin and Michigan are now facing lawsuits to stop the ballot counting.

    “We also demand to review those ballots which were opened and counted while we did not have meaningful access,” campaign manager Bill Stepien said in an emailed statement about the Michigan suit. Trump’s campaign has filed lawsuits in both Pennsylvania and Michigan, trying to contest the vote counts that have been trending towards Democrat Joe Biden.

    In Arizona, more than 400k votes remain to be counted, a wide enough margin That president Trump believed could be large enough to hand him a victory.

    So far, the state has seen Biden 2,680,665 49.8% (+1.2) Trump 2,616,170 48.6% Jorgensen 58,972, Hawkins 13,333 0.3% 5,380,071 votes counted. Estimated >95% in Via @DecisionDeskHQ. That means the spread in Michigan is >1%, probably means no recount.

    As President Trump’s campaign on Wednesday said, they’re assembling an all-star legal team to file challenges to election irregularities in several battleground states, according to John Solomon, starting with a Court of Claims lawsuit in Michigan. Among the lawyers the president is activating include his private attorney Jay Sekulow, who will help campaign lawyers with matters before the Supreme Court as well as former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, officials said. Sidney Powell, the lawyer for former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, may also be called upon, officials said.

    * * *

    Update (1445ET): ABC News has removed Arizona from the ‘Biden’ column on its interactive map, prompting many observers to proclaim that the state is ‘back in play’.

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    Meanwhile, Bloomberg senior White House correspondent Jennifer Jacobs claims that Trump’s biggest supporterd are “fired up”, and they have a strategy to slog all the way back to victory.

    * * *

    Update (1345ET): The State of Maine has officially been called for Sen. Susan Collins, who fended off a difficult challenge from Democrat Sara Gideon, a well-financed challenger who drew money from big-time Dem donors from all over the country. With Collins seat safe for GOP, the only major uncalled Senate race iis Thom Tillis.

    The news comes as Biden prepares to make another statement after Wisconsin called the vote for him.

    Over in Michigan, the Trump Campaign is filing a lawsuit to try and immediately halt the counting of ballots.

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    In other news, CNN has reportedly been told by the PA registrar of voters that more than 1 million ballots remain to be counted.

    Notably, news about the lawsuit, and Biden’s victory in Wisconsin

    * * *

    Update (1330ET); Susan Collins of Maine has once again triumphed over Democratic challenger, as the moderate Republican, who has broken ranks with her party on several major issues since Trump took office.

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    Susan Collins says Sara Gideon called her to concede the race, Collins told reporters on Wednesday. Her victory is the latest win for the GOP, moving Congress closer to a tight margin between the Dems and GOP in the House.

    * * *

    Update 1250ET: President Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien has issued a statement confirming they will demand a recount in Wisconsin:

    “Despite ridiculous public polling used as a voter suppression tactic, Wisconsin has been a razor thin race as we always knew that it would be. There have been reports of irregularities in several Wisconsin counties which raise serious doubts about the validity of the results. The President is well within the threshold to request a recount and we will immediately do so.”

    On top of that, a county in the battleground state of Michigan is reviewing the Election Day vote count after the clerk “became aware of apparently skewed results.”

    Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy learned of the skewed results in unofficial tabulations, the county said in a statement.

    Since then, her office has been reviewing the results “and the multiple redundancies to search out any possible discrepancies.”

    “By this afternoon, we expect to have a clear answer and a clear plan of action addressing any issue,” Guy said in a statement. “Until then, we are asking all interested parties to bear with us while we get to the bottom of this.”

    State Rep. Triston Cole, a Republican, told a local radio station that the results were suspect.

    “There is no way that we flipped from 62 percent Trump in 2016 to upside-down this time around,” he said.

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    Additionally, Mark Levin is enraged by what is occurring right in front of our eyes…

    1. I thought about waiting until my radio show to state this, but it must be said now:

    All night and this morning, the media are playing with the electoral map and their declarations of who won what states, and in virtually every case it assists the Biden campaign.

    2. North Carolina, Georgia, Alaska should all be called now for President Trump.  There was no legitimate reason to call Arizona early for Biden with so much of the vote out.  There was no reason to sit on Florida and Ohio for hours when those outcomes were quite clear.

    3. The purpose is to make it appear that the President is not close to the 270 electoral vote number to win the presidency and to make it appear that the President was never going to be re-elected.

    4. And you can see all the delays through the night and beyond, waiting for mail-in votes — Philadelphia, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Detroit, etc.  This is followed by commentators telling us that there’s nothing unusual about all of this.  Delays in counting votes happens all the time

    5. Really, we’ve experienced this before?  In all these states?  Nonsense.  Meanwhile, the Democrats have been litigating in states for months to change existing election laws to help Biden and the Democrats.

    6. They set in place the mail-in voting chaos, some states literally a few months ago.

    This will not end well, or peacefully, unless full transparency is granted.

    Meanwhile, Fox News’s decision desk is reportedly “leaning towards” calling Nevada for Biden, as more votes trickle in, which could be a disaster for Trump.

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    To be sure, tens of thousands of votes still haven’t been counted ACROSS EUREEEE9EE.

    *  *  *

    Update (1145ET): Wisconsin has officially been called for Joe Biden.

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    Meanwhile, Arizona, which Fox News called for Biden last night, might be back in play.

    * * *

    Now that the ‘Blue Wave’ has been thwarted, and Democrats look to return in the next Congress with an even weaker hand in the House, (not to mention smaller-than-expected gains in the Senate), both team Biden and the Trump Campaign are claiming victory, as Americans wait for the final vote tallies from a handful of swing states that could once again decide the election.

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    Biden has reportedly managed to ‘flip’ Arizona, and while Wisconsin and Michigan are currently leaning Democratic, North Carolina, Georgia and PA (perhaps the most important state of them all) are still leaning red.

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    As both sides lawyer up, here’s the current state of play in the US, along with a rundown of when Americans and the rest of the world can expect the final results, depending on a number of scenarios.

    Pennsylvania:

    Pennsylvania was long expected to be under scrutiny in a close race, with both campaigns aggressively courting voters in the final days before the election.

    Trump led Biden by about 657,000 votes as of 9 a.m., but there were at least 1.4 million uncounted mail-in and absentee ballots that will determine the outcome, according to the Department of State.

    The department reported almost 1.1 million mail ballots were counted statewide, with 77% for Biden and 22% for Trump. By contrast, there were 3.9 million votes cast on Election Day, with 66% for Trump and 33% for Biden.

    Pennsylvania has tallied 44% of mail-in ballots across the commonwealth, according to a department dashboard. The outstanding ballots are expected to favor Biden because Democrats dominated the requests. Of the 2.55 million ballots reported returned as of Tuesday, registered Democrats accounted for 65% and Republicans 24%, data show.

    In Philadelphia, the commonwealth’s most populous county where 76% of registered voters are Democrats, 141,523 of an expected 350,000 to 400,000 mail-in ballots have been reported counted as the processing and counting continues. Allegheny County, the second most-populous, is reporting about half of its almost 350,000 mail-in ballots counted, according to the dashboard. Bottom Line: Philadelphia is expected to report additional mail-in votes on Wednesday morning. State officials say a final result should be ready “within days.”

    Wisconsin:

    Biden had a small lead in Wisconsin, which has 10 electoral votes, after several metropolitan areas submitted their absentee ballot counts early Wednesday morning, overturning the lead that Trump had maintained since the polls closed at 8 p.m. By late in the morning, the Biden campaign was calling it for Joe after state officials said all votes had been counted.

    Although Biden was ahead by almost 21,000 votes as of 8:40 a.m. local time, no major network had yet called the state. With the two candidates within a percentage point of each other, the loser when the final precinct’s numbers are in has the right to request a recount. Meanwhile, the state’s election commission said that clerks will be randomly selecting 5% of reporting units for voting-equipment audits. The process for official certification of results doesn’t start until Nov. 10.

    Bottom Line: Biden is penciling in a win, but the state is still in play as of late Wednesday morning.

    Michigan

    Michigan — a state Trump narrowly won in 2016 — expects to complete most of its ballot counting by the end of the day, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told CNN Wednesday morning.

    Ballots from Detroit, Flint, Grand Rapids, Warren and Sterling Heights were still being recorded. The state likely won’t have final results until later in the day because Detroit is the largest precinct and had a record turnout this year, with a large swath of absentee ballots that take longer to count than in-person votes.

    Benson, who has scheduled an update on the counting process later Wednesday morning, did say that other Michigan counties will be reporting in the coming hours, which could give election watchers an idea of where the state is headed. Biden started pulling ahead Wednesday morning as more absentee ballots were tabulated.

    Benson said that 3.3 million absentee ballots have been received and are being tabulated and another 2 million to 2.5 million voted at the polls Tuesday.

    “We’ll know much more in the hours to come and we’ll have a much more complete picture of Michigan later today,” she said.

    Bottom Line: State election officials said Wednesday morning that an ‘unofficial’ result should be known by Wednesday evening.

    Georgia

    All but one of Georgia’s counties had completely reported vote totals as of Wednesday morning. But in Fulton County, which includes most of the Democratic stronghold of Atlanta, only about 77% of the estimated vote has been counted.

    Fulton, the largest county in Georgia, suffered a setback earlier Tuesday in counting mail-in ballots, after a water leak forced officials to stop tallying and tens of thousands of ballots were left uncounted.

    Trump led Biden by about 102,000 votes on Wednesday morning, though the remaining ballots are likely to break heavily for Biden. As of late Wednesday morning, 200k votes were left to be counted.

    Bottom Line: Georgia expects all votes to be counted by the end of the day.

    North Carolina

    North Carolina’s race was tight on Wednesday morning, with Trump leading by about 77,000 votes.

    About 62% of the state’s voters cast ballots before Election Day. More registered Democrats voted early than Republicans, but one-third of the electorate is unaffiliated with either major party.

    The state Board of Elections said that 100% of precincts have reported Election Day votes, but that the state still had to count about 25% of the total ballots cast, or roughly 1.9 million votes.

    Democrats took some solace in Governor Roy Cooper winning re-election, but it’s not clear if that’s a signal Biden can flip the traditionally Republican state.

    Bottom Line: The state has as long as nine days to count mail-in ballots sent before Election Day.

    Nevada

    A final count in Nevada isn’t expected for several days as it awaits ballots mailed as late as Election Day to arrive, though it isn’t clear how many people waited that long to vote. With about 82% of votes counted, Biden was holding a lead of less than one percentage point.

    “Clerks have until Nov. 10 to receive mail ballots and until Nov. 12 to count them,” said Jennifer Russell, a spokeswoman for Nevada’s secretary of state. Bottom Line: The state began posting partial results late Tuesday, with Biden holding a slim lead over Trump. That count, which included early and Election Day voting, will continue to trickle in on Tuesday.

  • Detroit Ballot-Counters Board Up Windows, Block Republican Poll-Watchers
    Detroit Ballot-Counters Board Up Windows, Block Republican Poll-Watchers

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 11/04/2020 – 18:40

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    Windows are being boarded up at a Detroit absentee ballot counting center as poll watchers complain about a lack of transparency.

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    “The scene at Detroit’s absentee ballot counting center is growing more heated. The windows now being covered up. Allegations of violations. Sec. of State says she welcomes challenges,” tweeted Fox News’ Matt Finn.

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    The Secretary of State responded by claiming the process had been “bipartisan, transparent and open” from the beginning.

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    Sadly, some of the poll-checkers had already found numerous errors…

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    Poll watchers claim that there are an unfair number of Democrats to Republicans and that the process is not transparent.

    Trump supporters are furious at an alarming number of mail in ballot drops changing the results of closely fought swing states.

    The Biden campaign’s prediction that Trump may appear to be winning on the night but that mail in ballots would change the result over the following days appears to be coming true.

    The Trump campaign has already signaled its intent to demand recounts and challenge the outcome up to the Supreme Court.

    *  *  *

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Nov 04

Today’s News 4th November 2020

  • America After The Election: A Few Hard Truths About The Things That Won't Change
    America After The Election: A Few Hard Truths About The Things That Won’t Change

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/03/2020 – 23:45

    Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

    – George Orwell

    The American people remain eager to be persuaded that a new president in the White House can solve the problems that plague us.

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    Yet no matter who wins this presidential election, you can rest assured that the new boss will be the same as the old boss, and we—the permanent underclass in America—will continue to be forced to march in lockstep with the police state in all matters, public and private.

    Indeed, it really doesn’t matter what you call them—the Deep State, the 1%, the elite, the controllers, the masterminds, the shadow government, the police state, the surveillance state, the military industrial complex—so long as you understand that no matter which party occupies the White House in 2021, the unelected bureaucracy that actually calls the shots will continue to do so.

    In the interest of liberty and truth, here are a few hard truths about life in the American police state that will persist no matter who wins the 2020 presidential election. Indeed, these issues persisted—and in many cases flourished—under both Republican and Democratic administrations in recent years.

    Police militarization will continue. Thanks to federal grant programs allowing the Pentagon to transfer surplus military supplies and weapons to local law enforcement agencies without charge, police forces will continue to be transformed from peace officers to heavily armed extensions of the military, complete with jackboots, helmets, shields, batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, assault rifles, body armor, miniature tanks and weaponized drones. “Today, 17,000 local police forces are equipped with such military equipment as Blackhawk helicopters, machine guns, grenade launchers, battering rams, explosives, chemical sprays, body armor, night vision, rappelling gear and armored vehicles,” stated Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. “Some have tanks.”

    Overcriminalization will continue. In the face of a government bureaucracy consumed with churning out laws, statutes, codes and regulations that reinforce its powers and value systems and those of the police state and its corporate allies, we will all continue to be viewed as petty criminals, guilty of violating some minor law. Thanks to an overabundance of 4,500-plus federal crimes and 400,000-plus rules and regulations, it is estimated that the average American actually commits three felonies a day without knowing it. In fact, according to law professor John Baker, “There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime.” Consequently, we now find ourselves operating in a strange new world where small farmers who dare to make unpasteurized goat cheese and share it with members of their community are finding their farms raided, while home gardeners face jail time for daring to cultivate their own varieties of orchids without having completed sufficient paperwork. This frightening state of affairs—where a person can actually be arrested and incarcerated for the most innocent and inane activities, including feeding a whale and collecting rainwater on their own property—is due to what law scholars refer to as overcriminalization.

    Jailing Americans for profit will continue. At one time, the American penal system operated under the idea that dangerous criminals needed to be put under lock and key in order to protect society. Today, as states attempt to save money by outsourcing prisons to private corporations, imprisoning Americans in private prisons run by mega-corporations has turned into a cash cow for big business. In exchange for corporations buying and managing public prisons across the country at a supposed savings to the states, the states have to agree to maintain a 90% occupancy rate in the privately run prisons for at least 20 years. Such a scheme simply encourages incarceration for the sake of profits, while causing millions of Americans, most of them minor, nonviolent criminals, to be handed over to corporations for lengthy prison sentences which do nothing to protect society or prevent recidivism. Thus, although the number of violent crimes in the country is down substantially, the number of Americans being jailed for nonviolent crimes such as driving with a suspended license is skyrocketing.

    Poverty will continue. Despite the fact that we have 46 million Americans living at or below the poverty line, 16 million children living in households without adequate access to food, and at least 900,000 veterans relying on food stamps (mind you, these are pre-COVID numbers, which have only got worse during this pandemic), enormous sums continue to be doled out for presidential excursions (taxpayers have been forced to pay at least $100 million so that Donald Trump could visit his golf clubs and private properties more than 500 times during his four years in office).

    Endless wars that enrich the military industrial complex will continue. Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour)—and that’s just what the government spends on foreign wars. That does not include the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the globe. Incredibly, although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined. In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. Yet what most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with enriching the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense. Consider that since 2001, Americans have spent $10.5 million every hour for numerous foreign military occupations, including in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Police shootings of unarmed Americans will continue. No matter what our party politics, race, religion, or any other distinction used to divide us, we all suffer when violence becomes the government’s calling card. Remember, in a police state, you’re either the one with your hand on the trigger or you’re staring down the barrel of a loaded gun. At least 400 to 500 innocent people are killed by police officers every year. Indeed, Americans are now eight times more likely to die in a police confrontation than they are to be killed by a terrorist. Americans are 110 times more likely to die of foodborne illness than in a terrorist attack. Police officers are more likely to be struck by lightning than be made financially liable for their wrongdoing. As a result, Americans are largely powerless in the face of militarized police.

    SWAT team raids will continue.  More than 80,000 SWAT team raids are carried out every year on unsuspecting Americans for relatively routine police matters. Nationwide, SWAT teams have been employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activity or mere community nuisances including angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession, to give a brief sampling. On an average day in America, over 100 Americans have their homes raided by SWAT teams. There has been a notable buildup in recent years of SWAT teams within non-security-related federal agencies such as the Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Education Department.

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

    Government corruption will continue.  The government is not our friend. Nor does it work for “we the people.” Americans instinctively understand this. When asked to name the greatest problem facing the nation, Americans of all political stripes ranked the government as the number one concern. In fact, almost eight out of ten Americans believe that government corruption is widespread. Our so-called government representatives do not actually represent us, the citizenry. We are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests whose main interest is in perpetuating power and control. Congress is dominated by a majority of millionaires who are, on average, fourteen times wealthier than the average American.

    The rise of the surveillance state will continue. Government eyes 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. Police have been outfitted with a litany of surveillance gear, from license plate readers and cell phone tracking devices to biometric data recorders. Technology now makes it possible for the police to scan passersby in order to detect the contents of their pockets, purses, briefcases, etc. Full-body scanners, which perform virtual strip-searches of Americans traveling by plane, have gone mobile, with roving police vans that peer into vehicles and buildings alike—including homes. Coupled with the nation’s growing network of real-time surveillance cameras and facial recognition software, soon there really will be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

    The erection of a suspect society will continue. Due in large part to rapid advances in technology and a heightened surveillance culture, the burden of proof has been shifted so that the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty has been usurped by a new norm in which all citizens are suspects. This is exemplified by police practices of stopping and frisking people who are merely walking down the street and where there is no evidence of wrongdoing. Making matters worse are Terrorism Liaison Officers (firefighters, police officers, and even corporate employees) who have been trained to spy on their fellow citizens and report “suspicious activity,” which includes taking pictures with no apparent aesthetic value, making measurements and drawings, taking notes, conversing in code, espousing radical beliefs and buying items in bulk. TLOs report back to “fusion centers,” which are a driving force behind the government’s quest to collect, analyze, and disseminate information on American citizens.

    Government tyranny under the reign of an Imperial President will continue. The Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers: to serve as Commander in Chief of the military, grant pardons, make treaties (with the approval of Congress), appoint ambassadors and federal judges (again with Congress’ blessing), and veto legislation. In recent years, however, American presidents have anointed themselves with the power to wage war, unilaterally kill Americans, torture prisoners, strip citizens of their rights, arrest and detain citizens indefinitely, carry out warrantless spying on Americans, and erect their own secretive, shadow government. The powers amassed by each past president and inherited by each successive president—powers which add up to a toolbox of terror for an imperial ruler—empower whomever occupies the Oval Office to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability. The grim reality we must come to terms with is the fact that the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned. More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, the U.S. government has become a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us. This state of affairs has become the status quo, no matter which party is in power.

    The government’s manipulation of national crises in order to expand its powers will continue. “We the people” have been the subjected to an “emergency state” that justifies all manner of government tyranny and power grabs in the so-called name of national security. Whatever the so-called threat to the nation—whether it’s civil unrest, school shootings, alleged acts of terrorism, or the threat of a global pandemic in the case of COVID-19—the government has a tendency to capitalize on the nation’s heightened emotions, confusion and fear as a means of extending the reach of the police state. Indeed, the government’s answer to every problem continues to be more government—at taxpayer expense—and less individual liberty.

    The bottom line is this: nothing taking place on Election Day will alleviate the suffering of the American people. Unless we do something more than vote, the government as we have come to know it—corrupt, bloated and controlled by big-money corporations, lobbyists and special interest groups—will remain unchanged. And “we the people”—overtaxed, overpoliced, overburdened by big government, underrepresented by those who should speak for us and blissfully ignorant of the prison walls closing in on us—will continue to trudge along a path of misery.

    As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, these problems will continue to plague our nation unless and until Americans wake up to the fact that we’re the only ones who can change things for the better and then do something about it. If there is to be any hope of restoring our freedoms and reclaiming control over our government, it will rest not with the politicians but with the people themselves.

    After all, Indeed, the Constitution opens with those three vital words, “We the people.”

    What the founders wanted us to understand is that we are the government.

    There is no government without us—our sheer numbers, our muscle, our economy, our physical presence in this land. There can also be no police state—no tyranny—no routine violations of our rights without our complicity and collusion—without our turning a blind eye, shrugging our shoulders, allowing ourselves to be distracted and our civic awareness diluted.

    No matter which candidate wins this election, the citizenry and those who represent us need to be held accountable to this powerful truth.

  • RQ-180? Next-Gen Spy Drone Spotted Over California 
    RQ-180? Next-Gen Spy Drone Spotted Over California 

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/03/2020 – 23:25

    A mysterious military drone, operating near Edwards AFB, California, was photographed in broad daylight and recently uploaded to social media. 

    Instagram user Rob Kolinsky of Sundowner Studios uploaded the photograph on Nov. 1 of the drone but has since replaced the image with a graphic that reads, “[REDACTED]”, according to The Aviationist. 

    In the original post, Kolinsky wrote, “this [military drone] flew over my house several weeks ago and I still have yet to identify it! It’s shaped like a B-21 (in illustrations) but was painted white. Mystery!” 

    He continued: “I was not going to post it but I thought that if it were really classified, they wouldn’t be flying it in broad daylight like this. Can anyone lend a hand in identifying her?” 

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    While Kolinsky mentioned the photograph is from “several weeks ago,” there was no mention of the exact date, time, or specific location. Nevertheless, there was no mention of the camera used to take the photo. 

    After Kolinsky removed the photo, Aviation Week reporters Steve Trimble and Guy Norris wrote an article describing the “new aircraft generally matching Aerospace DAILY’s understanding of the shape of what is commonly known as the RQ-180 unmanned aircraft system (UAS).”

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    “Quick review of the image. there is some JPG artifacting going on around the subject but could be the compression as well. The subject it self looks pretty legit I put some similar drones aside it for comparison. B2 is out of the question because it has a double ‘saw tooth’ tail,” said on Twitter user. 

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

    Not too long ago, we reported a combat stealth drone also known as “loyal wingman” for fourth and fifth-generation aircraft was spotted in Australia. 

    Who knows if the mysterious drone was an actual RQ-180, but what this all suggests is that the US military is quickly advancing autonomous war machines as geopolitical tensions rise with China. 

  • 2020 Election: Trump Says "We're Up Big!"; Biden Urges "Keep The Faith" As Vote Set To Drag On For Days
    2020 Election: Trump Says “We’re Up Big!”; Biden Urges “Keep The Faith” As Vote Set To Drag On For Days

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/03/2020 – 23:16

    …and this is for all the marbles.

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    RESULTS (0125ET):

    TRUMP

    Total 213 – KY (8), IN (11), WV (5), SC (9), AL (9), TN (11), OK (7), MS (6), ME (1/2) FL (29), AR (6), WY (3), LA (8), ND (3), SD (3), NE (4/5), KS (6), MO (10), UT (6), ID (4), OH (18), TX (38), IA (6), MT (3)

    BIDEN

    Total 238 – VT (3), VA (13), CT (7), IL (20), DE (3), NJ (14), RI (4), ME (1/2), MA (11), MD (10), DC (3), NY (29), NM (5), CO (9), NH (4), NE (1/5) CA (55), OR (7), WA (12), AZ (11), NM (5), HI (4), MN (10)

    Only one state flipped (for now if Fox projections hold): Arizona for Biden.

    NBC News projects that Democrats will maintain their control of the House of Representatives.

    Mail-in ballot delays are hitting now:

    • WI (no way we’re announcing tonight),

    • MI (Friday),

    • PA (no count anytime soon) and

    • GA (biggest Dem county stopped counting, Trump leading by 300k).

    That’s 62 electoral votes in total. 62 is a big number in a race for 270. That’s why we might not know tonight.

    Jonathan Tamari of the Philadelphia Inquirer warned that:

    “One huge red flag for Biden in PA: He’s currently trailing in Chester County, a key suburb that Clinton won by 25.5k – and Dems were counting on for a bigger win. Still a lot of mail ballots not counted there, but Biden needs to win big there.”

    Biden addressed the nation at 0045ET:

    “Your patience is commendable. We knew this was going to go long, but who knew we were going to go into tomorrow morning, maybe even longer. But look, we feel good about where we are. We really do. I’m here to tell you tonight we feel confident we are going to win this election.”

    “We believe we’re on track to win this election,” Biden says.

    “We can know the results as early as tomorrow morning but it may take a little longer. As I’ve said all along it’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to say who wins the election, it’s up to the American people.”

    “Keep the faith guys! We’re going to win this”

    Trump replied, via tweet:

    “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!”

    Adding that he will be making a statement tonight, “a big win!”

    Twitter immediately censored it…

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    As Michael Tracey noted, “We’re approaching a nightmare scenario. They’re both essentially declaring victory.”

    *  *  *

    As Victor Davis Hanson notes, the 2020 election is not just about Joe Biden sitting on a perceived lead and trying to run out the clock against barnstorming incumbent President Trump. It is really a choice between changing rules when they are deemed inconvenient and respecting constitutional norms and long-held traditions that have served America well for many years.

    Watch the 2020 Election results (or not):

    *  *  *

    Upsets/Notable

    Big Loss For Trump – Fox calls Arizona for Biden

    Additionally, Democrat Mark Kelly is way ahead of GOP incumbent Martha McSally in the Arizona Senate race. More than 10 points ahead with 73% of precincts reporting.

    The Trump campaign is not happy at the early call from Fox. Campaign spokesman Jason Miller tweeted:

    We only need 61% of the outstanding, uncounted Election Day votes in Arizona to win.

    These votes are coming from “our counties,” and the 61% figure is very doable based on what our other Election Day votes are looking like.

    @FoxNews should retract their call immediately.

    Politico / WSJ / NYT not calling AZ for Biden

    Republicans Flip Alabama Senate Seat

    AP is projecting that Tom Tuberville, a former Auburn University  football coach, has won the Senate race in the red state of Alabama, unseating Democrat Doug Jones who won the seat in a special election in 2017. So that’s a pickup for the Republicans. The Democrats so far have picked up one Senate seat — Cory Gardner’s in Colorado.

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    Bookies Flip To Trump Favorite

    BetFair Exchange has flipped its odds to Trump (77%) and Biden (23%)

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    Meanwhile over at PredictIt…

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    Some folks are gonna be upset…

    Florida

    Decision Desk HQ has called Florida for Trump.

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    In 2016, Clinton beat Trump by about 290,000 votes in Miami-Dade. Currently Biden’s up just a bit over 90,000.

    Trump has picked up votes among black and latino Floridians over Clinton.

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    Meanwhile, we may be seeing our first House seat flip of the night as freshman Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell is losing to Republican Carlos Gimenez in Florida’s 26th congressional district with 83% of precincts reporting.

    In Colorado, Fox News projects that Democrat John Hickenlooper has defeated incumbent Republican GOP Senator Cory Gardner.

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    Expected:

    • Trump Wins Indiana: CNN

    • Trump Wins Kentucky: AP

    • Biden Wins Vermont: AP

    • Biden Wins Virginia: Fox

    • Trump Wins West Virginia: AP

    • Trump Wins South Carolina: AP

    • Trump Wins Alabama: AP

    • Biden Wins Connecticut: AP

    • Biden Wins Illinois: AP

    • Trump Wins Tennessee: AP

    • Biden Wins Delaware: AP

    • Biden Wins New Jersey: AP

    • Biden Wins Rhode Island: AP

    • Maine split

    • Biden Wins Massachusetts: AP

    • Biden Wins Maryland: NBC

    • Trump Wins Oklahoma: AP

    • Biden Wins District of Columbia: Networks

    • Trump Wins Mississippi: AP

    • Trump Wins Arkansas: AP

    • Biden Wins New York: NBC

    • Biden Wins New Mexico: AP

    • Trump Wins Wyoming: AP

    • Trump Wins Louisiana: AP

    • Trump Wins North Dakota: AP

    • Trump Wins South Dakota: AP

    • Trump Wins Nebraska: AP

    • Biden Wins Colorado: AP

    • Trump Wins Kansas: AP

    • Biden Wins New Hampshire: Networks

    • Trump Wins Missouri: AP

    • Trump Wins Utah: Networks

    • Biden Wins California: NBC

    • Trump Wins Idaho: AP

    • Biden Wins Oregon: AP

    • Biden Wins Washington: AP

    • Biden Wins New Mexico: AP

    • Trump Wins Ohio: AP

    • Trump Wins Texas: Fox

    • Biden Wins Hawaii: AP

    • Biden Wins Minnesota: AP

    • Trump Wins Iowa: Fox

    • Trump Wins Montana: AP

    *  *  *

    State of play (as of 0120ET)

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    Source: Fox News

    Leaning…

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    Source: NYT

    *  *  *

    Here are the deadlines in battleground states:

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    Axios reports when each state official has said we can expect unofficial election results:

    1. Arizona: Early ballots will have to have the signatures verified, and there’s no way to know how many voters will turn those in on Election Day, according to Sophia Solis, spokesperson for the office of Arizona’s secretary of state.

    2. Florida: Election night results will not be released at the state level until 8 pm Eastern, according to a spokesperson for the Florida Department of State. The spokesperson declined to provide any other projections for the timing of results.

    3. Georgia: Results are expected late Tuesday for non-close races. Even in the close races, Walter Jones, spokesperson for the Secretary of State office said, they will probably have it sorted out by Wednesday.

    4. Michigan: The Secretary of State’s office expects it to take until roughly Friday to process and count all the ballots, according to spokesperson Tracy Wimmer.

    5. Minnesota: “We expect that all or substantially all of in-person election day votes and absentee votes will reported election night or soon after,” said Peter Bartz-Gallagher, a spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s office.

    6. North Carolina: “Results reported by the end of election night will include 97 percent or more of all ballots cast in North Carolina in the 2020 general election,” according to the Board of Elections.

    7. Ohio: “We expect results from Tuesday evening into Wednesday morning,” said Maggie Sheehan, press secretary for the Ohio Secretary of State’s office.

    8. Pennsylvania: Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said in a recent interviewthat she expects the “overwhelming majority” of votes will be counted by Friday, Nov 6.

    9. Texas: The Texas secretary of state’s office declined to provide any expected timeline given the large size of the state and that elections are run on a county-by-county-basis.

    10. Wisconsin: “In some bigger cities, especially where they count absentee ballots at a central location instead of the polling place, we might not see all the results until the next morning,” said Reid Magney, a spokesperson for the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

    On election night itself, Michael Snyder says the most important state to focus on will be Florida.  As I discussed in a previous article, Florida is one of the states that allows mail-in ballots to be counted in advance, and we should have a really good idea of what the results are going to look like in the state by the end of the night.

    If Biden is declared the winner in Florida on election night, that is going to be a really, really bad sign for Trump.  There really isn’t a path to 270 electoral votes for Trump without Florida.

    If Trump wins Florida, or if the vote is too close to call, then Pennsylvania becomes crucially important.

    Unfortunately, Pennsylvania is one of the states that does not allow mail-in ballots to be counted in advance, and they are going to have millions of them to count.

    At this point, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf is openly admitting that “it may take longer than usual to count every vote”…

    ‘These are unprecedented times. Because of the coronavirus, there were millions of votes cast by mail so it may take longer than usual to count every vote,’ he says in a new ad for the nonpartisan group, The Voter Project.

    ‘The folks in our election offices – your neighbors, family and friends are working hard ensuring every single vote is counted,’ he says.

    Pennsylvania is supposed to have every vote counted by Friday, but we are deeply skeptical.

    Interestingly, and not exactly confidence-inspiring, Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon reportedly said this afternoon that:

    “We continue to have multiple pathways to 270 electoral votes” says they can win 270 even without PA and FL,” according to Time’s Charlotte Alter.

    *  *  *

    Or follow along with Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper as they drink and comment on the state-by-state counts (but definitely do not declare any victory).

    As Matt Taibbi writes, in life, as in cult sci-fi/adventure thrillers starring Geneva’s own Christopher Lambert, winner takes all:

    Unfortunately, there are good reasons to doubt we’ll see anyone’s head fully lopped off this evening. The enormous number of mail-in votes, coupled with a slate of conflicting state rules about when such votes are counted – added to a high likelihood of unpredictable logistical difficulties associated with the pandemic – make a delayed conclusion to the Trump-Biden electoral contest very possible.

    Usually, high in-person turnout favors Democrats. This year, because so many Democrats voted early (and Republicans have been warned away from mail ballots), the situation will likely be reversed. This means we could very well have early results that look confusing, maybe even like a wipeout for Trump, when what we’re actually seeing is just in-person votes being counted faster than mail votes. We also could see opposite scenarios.

    Overall, the likelihood is that Joe Biden will win, and comfortably, but the issue is when that result comes in. Imagine the chaos of the Iowa Democratic caucus, with all the attendant scarcely-believable explanations coming from officials and vote-counters, expanded to presidential scale. That’s the horror-movie scenario for this evening.

    Because of the fear both sides have about the results, the quantity of media spin tonight is likely to be, as rule 7 below notes, “unprecedented.” Partisans from both red and blue camps will be prepping audiences for bad news in ways that deflect blame from their own consultant pals, and also planting seeds for arguments likely to be made in contested-result scenarios. Expect Republicans to tell tales of trucks of fake ballots shipped over the Rio Grande in burlap sacks, while Democrats might counter with photos of wheelchair-bound minority voters invited to exercise their democratic covenant at ad-hoc ballot stations re-located to the top of hundred-foot climbing walls.

    DRINKING GAME RULES

    The main rule is implied: just start drinking and don’t stop for the next few years.

    As for tonight specifically, here goes:

    Drink for EVERY MENTION of:

    1) “Red mirage”;

    2) “Blue mirage”;

    3) “Path to victory” or “route to victory”;

    4) “Most important election of our lifetime”;

    5) “Still too close to call”;

    6) “Shy Trump supporter”;

    7) “Unprecedented”;

    8) “Firewall.” Double if this is accompanied by an awkward effort by an anchor to inoffensively characterize the minority voting bloc to which they’re ascribing monolithic voting tendencies;

    9) “Neck and neck”;

    10) “Broward County” or “Miami-Dade”;

    11) “It could be a big night for (whatever)”;

    12) “It all comes down to Pennyslvania.”

    Drink EVERY TIME:

    13) A commentator says “(something) is on the ballot tonight,” and that something is not the name of a candidate;

    14) John King looks visibly aroused on the way to the Magic Wall;

    15) A member of the media uses the word “we” to describe Democratic Party results;

    16) A Republican accuses Democrats of stuffing ballots. Double if the alleged plot involves use of undocumented immigrants as sham voters;

    17) A Democrat mentions voter suppression. Double if this is accompanied by a warning that this is the “only way” Trump could win;

    18) Any commentator suggests Trump will not give up power if he loses;

    19) Someone reports the possibility of results-delaying litigation over a new set of voting irregularities detected today;

    20) A commentator reacts to a result by seriously wondering aloud if Russians are meddling;

    21) There is video of Melania Trump looking a little too happy that her husband is losing;

    22) Trump ups the ante on an outrageous lie about his opponents at the 11th hour, like that Biden has already written an executive order canceling free enterprise, or has decided to grant American citizenship to everyone in Bangladesh;

    23) Biden says something incomprehensible, dozes off, or forgets whom he’s talking with in a TV appearance;

    24) Someone cuts to: shot of boarded-up windows. Double when windows are actually broken.

    25) Someone cries on set as results come in. Or, alternatively, does the political version of the Bill Simmons fist pump:

    Finally, we fall back to Buckminster Fuller’s infamous quote for some context tonight:

    If you take all the machinery in the world and dump it in the ocean, within months more than half of all humanity will die and within another six months they’d almost all be gone; if you took all the politicians in the world, put them in a rocket, and sent them to the moon, everyone would get along fine.

    Stay safe and remember that politics is all about subverting you emotionally and then reaping your production. The rest are details.

  • Wild Conspiracy Theory? The Truth Behind The Biggest Threat To The "War On Terror" Narrative
    Wild Conspiracy Theory? The Truth Behind The Biggest Threat To The “War On Terror” Narrative

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/03/2020 – 23:05

    Authored by Cynthia Chung via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    “If you must break the law, do it to seize power: in all other cases observe it.”

    – Julius Caesar

    The illegal invasion of Libya, in which Britain was complicit and a British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee’s report confirmed as an illegal act sanctioned by the UK government, over which Cameron stepped down as Prime Minister (weeks before the release of the UK parliament report), occurred from March – Oct, 2011.

    Muammar al-Gaddafi was assassinated on Oct. 20th, 2011.

    On Sept 11-12th, 2012, U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens, U.S. Foreign Service information management officer Sean Smith, and CIA contractors Tyron Woods and Glen Doherty were killed at two U.S. government facilities in Benghazi.

    It is officially denied to this date that al-Qaeda or any other international terrorist organization participated in the Benghazi attack. It is also officially denied that the attack was pre-meditated.

    On the 6th year anniversary of the Benghazi attack, Barack Obama stated at a partisan speech on Sept 10th, 2018, delivered at the University of Illinois, that the outrage over the details concerning the Benghazi attack were the result of “wild conspiracy theory” perpetrated by conservatives and Republican members of Congress.

    However, according to an August 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report  (only released to the public in May 2015), this is anything but the case. The report was critical of the policies of then President Obama as a direct igniter for the rise of ISIS and the creation of a “caliphate” by Syria-based radical Islamists and al-Qaeda. The report also identified that arms shipments in Libya had gone to radical Islamist “allies” of the United States and NATO in the overthrowing of Col. Muammar al-Gaddafi. These arms shipments were sent to Syria and became the arsenal that allowed ISIS and other radical rebels to grow.

    The declassified DIA report states:

    “AQI [al-qaeda –iraq] SUPPORTED THE SYRIAN OPPOSITION FROM THE BEGINNING, BOTH IDEOLOGICALLY AND THROUGH THE MEDIA… WESTERN COUNTRIES, THE GULF STATES AND TURKEY ARE SUPPORTING THESE EFFORTS… THE WEST, GULF COUNTRIES, AND TURKEY SUPPORT THE [SYRIAN] OPPOSITION… THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA (HASAKA AND DER ZOR), AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION WANT, IN ORDER TO ISOLATE THE SYRIAN REGIME…” [emphasis added]

    Another DIA document from Oct 2012 (also released in May 2015), reported that Gaddafi’s vast arsenal was being shipped from Benghazi to two Syrian ports under the control of the Syrian rebel groups.

    Essentially, the DIA documents were reporting that the Obama Administration was supporting Islamist extremism, including the Muslim Brotherhood.

    When the watchdog group Judicial Watch received the series of DIA reports through Freedom of Information Act lawsuits (FOIA) in May 2015, the State Department, the Administration and various media outlets trashed the reports as insignificant and unreliable.

    There was just one problem; Lt. Gen. Flynn was backing up the reliability of the released DIA reports.

    Lt. Gen. Flynn as Director of the DIA from July 2012 – Aug. 2014, was responsible for acquiring accurate intelligence on ISIS’s and other extremist operations within the Middle East, but did not have any authority in shaping U.S. military policy in response to the Intel the DIA was acquiring.

    In a July 2015 interview with Al-Jazeera, Flynn went so far as to state that the rise of ISIS was the result of a “willful decision,” not an intelligence failure, by the Obama Administration.

    In the Al-Jazeera interview Flynn was asked:

    Q: You are basically saying that even in government at the time you knew these groups were around, you saw this analysis, and you were arguing against it, but who wasn’t listening?

    FLYNN: I think the Administration.

    Q: So the Administration turned a blind eye to your analysis?

    FLYNN: I don’t know that they turned a blind eye, I think it was a decision. I think it was a willful decision.

    Q: A willful decision to support an insurgency that had Salafists, al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood?

    FLYNN: It was a willful decision to do what they’re doing.

    Flynn was essentially stating (in the 47 minute interview) that the United States was fully aware that weapons trafficking from Benghazi to the Syrian rebels was occurring.

    In fact, the secret flow of arms from Libya to the Syrian opposition, via Turkey was CIA sponsored and had been underway shortly after Gaddafi’s death in Oct 2011. The operation was largely run out of a covert CIA annex in Benghazi, with State Department acquiescence.

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    This information was especially troubling in light of the fact that the Obama Administration’s policy, from mid-2011 on, was to overthrow the Assad government. The question of “who will replace Assad?” was never fully answered.

    Perhaps the most troubling to Americans among the FOIA-released DIA documents was a report from Sept. 16, 2012, which provided a detail account of the pre-meditated nature of the 9/11/12 attack in Benghazi, reporting that the attack had been planned ten days prior, detailing the groups involved.

    The report revealed that it was in fact an al-Qaeda linked terrorist group that was responsible for the Benghazi attack. That despite this intelligence, the Obama Administration continued to permit arms-trafficking to the al-Qaeda-linked Syrian rebels even after the 9/11/12 attacks.

    In August 2015, then President Obama ordered for U.S. forces to attack Syrian government forces if they interfered with the American “vetted, trained and armed” forces. This U.S. approved Division 30 Syrian rebel group “defected” almost immediately, with U.S. weapons in hand, to align with the Nusra Front, the formal al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria.

    Obama’s Semantics War: Any Friend of Yours is a Friend of Mine

    “Flynn incurred the wrath of the [Obama] White House by insisting on telling the truth about Syria… He thought truth was the best thing and they shoved him out.”

    – Patrick Lang (retired army colonel, served for nearly a decade as the chief Middle East civilian intelligence officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency)

    Before being named Director of the DIA, Flynn served as Director of Intelligence for the Joint Staff, as Director of Intelligence for the U.S. Central Command, and as Director of Intelligence for the Joint Special Operations Command.

    Flynn’s criticisms and opposition to the Obama Administration’s policies in his interview with Al-Jazeera in 2015 was nothing new. In August 2013, Flynn as Director of the DIA supported Gen. Dempsey’s intervention, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in forcing then President Obama to cancel orders to launch a massive bombing campaign against the Syrian government and armed forces. Flynn and Dempsey both argued that the overthrow of the Assad government would lead to a radical Islamist stronghold in Syria, much like what was then happening in Libya.

    This account was also supported in Seymour Hersh’s paper “Military to Military” published in Jan 2016, to which he states:

    “Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the opposition. Turkey wasn’t doing enough to stop the smuggling of foreign fighters and weapons across the border. ‘If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic,’ Flynn told me. ‘We understood Isis’s long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the fact that Turkey was looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside Syria.’ The DIA’s reporting, he [Flynn] said, ‘got enormous pushback’ from the Obama administration. ‘I felt that they did not want to hear the truth.’

    [According to a former JCS adviser]’…To say Assad’s got to go is fine, but if you follow that through – therefore anyone is better. It’s the “anybody else is better” issue that the JCS had with Obama’s policy.’ The Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge to Obama’s policy would have ‘had a zero chance of success’. So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take steps against the extremists without going through political channels, by providing U.S. intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State [ISIS].” [emphasis added]

    According to Hersh’s sources, it was through the militaries of Germany, Israel and Russia, who were in contact with the Syrian army, that the U.S. intelligence on where the terrorist cells were located was shared, hence the “military to military”. There was no direct contact between the U.S. and the Syrian military.

    Hersh states in his paper:

    “The two countries [U.S. & Syria] collaborated against al-Qaida, their common enemy. A longtime consultant to the Joint Special Operations Command said that, after 9/11, ‘Bashar was, for years, extremely helpful to us while, in my view, we were churlish in return, and clumsy in our use of the gold he gave us. That quiet co-operation continued among some elements, even after the [Bush administration’s] decision to vilify him.’ In 2002 Assad authorised Syrian intelligence to turn over hundreds of internal files on the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Germany. Later that year, Syrian intelligence foiled an attack by al-Qaida on the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, and Assad agreed to provide the CIA with the name of a vital al-Qaida informant. In violation of this agreement, the CIA contacted the informant directly; he rejected the approach, and broke off relations with his Syrian handlers.

    …It was this history of co-operation that made it seem possible in 2013 that Damascus would agree to the new indirect intelligence-sharing arrangement with the U.S.”

    However, as the Syrian army gained strength with the Dempsey-led-Joint Chiefs’ support, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey escalated their financing and arming of al-Nusra and ISIS. In fact, it was “later” discovered that the Erdogan government had been supporting al-Nusra and ISIS for years. In addition, after the June 30th, 2013 revolution in Egypt, Turkey became a regional hub for the Muslim Brotherhood’s International Organization.

    In Sept. 2015, Russia came in and directly intervened militarily, upon invitation by the Syrian government, and effectively destroyed ISIS strongholds within Syrian territory. In response, Turkey shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 on Nov 24th, 2015 for allegedly entering Turkish airspace for 17 seconds. Days after the Russian fighter jet was shot down, Obama expressed support for Erdogan and stated at a Dec. 1st, 2015 press conference that his administration would remain “very much committed to Turkey’s security and its sovereignty”. Obama also said that as long as Russia remained allied with Assad, “a lot of Russian resources are still going to be targeted at opposition groups … that we support … So I don’t think we should be under any illusions that somehow Russia starts hitting only Isil targets. That’s not happening now. It was never happening. It’s not going to be happening in the next several weeks.”

    Today, not one of those “opposition groups” has shown itself to have remained, or possibly ever been, anti-extremist. And neither the Joint Chiefs nor the DIA believed that there was ever such a thing as “moderate rebels.”

    Rather, as remarked by a JCS adviser to Hersh, “Turkey is the problem.”

    China’s “Uyghur Problem”

    Imad Moustapha, was the Syrian Ambassador to the United States from 2004 to Dec. 2011, and has been the Syrian Ambassador to China for the past eight years.

    In an interview with Seymour Hersh, Moustapha stated:

    “‘China regards the Syrian crisis from three perspectives,’ he said: international law and legitimacy; global strategic positioning; and the activities of jihadist Uighurs, from Xinjiang province in China’s far west. Xinjiang borders eight nations – Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India – and, in China’s view, serves as a funnel for terrorism around the world and within China. Many Uighur fighters now in Syria are known to be members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement – an often violent separatist organisation that seeks to establish an Islamist Uighur state in Xinjiang. ‘The fact that they have been aided by Turkish intelligence to move from China into Syria through Turkey has caused a tremendous amount of tension between the Chinese and Turkish intelligence,’ Moustapha said. ‘China is concerned that the Turkish role of supporting the Uighur fighters in Syria may be extended in the future to support Turkey’s agenda in Xinjiang. We are already providing the Chinese intelligence service with information regarding these terrorists and the routes they crossed from on travelling into Syria.’ ” [emphasis added]

    This view was echoed by a Washington foreign affairs analyst whose views are routinely sought by senior government officials, informing Hersh that:

    “Erdoğan has been bringing Uighurs into Syria by special transport while his government has been agitating in favour of their struggle in China. Uighur and Burmese Muslim terrorists who escape into Thailand somehow get Turkish passports and are then flown to Turkey for transit into Syria.”

    China understands that the best way to combat the terrorist recruiting that is going on in these regions is to offer aid towards reconstruction and economic development projects. By 2016, China had allegedly committed more than $30 billion to postwar reconstruction in Syria.

    The long-time consultant to the Joint Special Operations Command could not hide his contempt, according to Hersh, when he was asked for his view of the U.S. policy on Syria. “‘The solution in Syria is right before our nose,’ he said. ‘Our primary threat is Isis and all of us – the United States, Russia and China – need to work together.’“

    The military’s indirect pathway to Assad disappeared with Dempsey’s retirement in September 25th, 2015. His replacement as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Joseph Dunford, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in July 2015, two months before assuming office, “If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I’d have to point to Russia.”

    Flynn’s Call for Development in the Middle East to Counter Terrorism

    Not only was Flynn critical of the Obama Administration’s approach to countering terrorism in the Middle East, his proposed solution was to actually downgrade the emphasis on military counter-operations, and rather focus on economic development within these regions as the most effective and stable impediment to the growth of extremists.

    Flynn stated in the July 2015 interview with Al-Jazeera:

    “Frankly, an entire new economy is what this region needs. They need to take this 15-year old, to 25 to 30-year olds in Saudi Arabia, the largest segment of their population; in Egypt, the largest segment of their population, 15 to roughly 30 years old, mostly young men. You’ve got to give them something else to do. If you don’t, they’re going to turn on their own governments, and we can solve that problem.

    So that is the conversation that we have to have with them, and we have to help them do that. And in the meantime, what we have is this continued investment in conflict. The more weapons we give, the more bombs we drop, that just fuels the conflict. Some of that has to be done, but I’m looking for other solutions. I’m looking for the other side of this argument, and we’re not having it; we’re not having it as the United States.” [emphasis added]

    Flynn also stated in the interview that the U.S. cannot, and should not, deter the development of nuclear energy in the Middle East:

    “It now equals nuclear development of some type in the Middle East, and now what we want… what I hope for is that we have nuclear [energy] development, because it also helps for projects like desalinization, getting water…nuclear energy is very clean, and it actually is so cost effective, much more cost effective for producing water from desalinization.”

    Flynn was calling for a new strategic vision for the Middle East, and making it clear that “conflict only” policies were only going to add fuel to the fire, that cooperative economic policies are the true solution to attaining peace in the Middle East. Pivotal to this is the expansion of nuclear energy, while assuring non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, which Flynn states “has to be done in a very international, inspectable way.”

    When In Doubt, Blame the Russians

    How did the Obama Administration respond to Flynn’s views?

    He was fired (forced resignation) from his post as Director of the DIA on April 30th, 2014. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who was briefed by Flynn on the intelligence reports and was also critical of the U.S. Administration’s strategy in the Middle East was also forced to resign in Feb. 2015.

    With the election of Trump as President on Nov. 8 2016, Lt. Gen. Flynn was swiftly announced as Trump’s choice for National Security Adviser on Nov. 18th, 2016.

    Just weeks later, Flynn was targeted by the FBI and there was a media sensation over Flynn being a suspected “Russian agent”. Flynn was taken out before he had a chance to even step into his office, prevented from doing any sort of overhaul with the intelligence bureaus and Joint Chiefs of Staff, which was most certainly going to happen. Instead Flynn was forced to resign on Feb. 13th, 2017 after incessant media attacks undermining the entire Trump Administration, accusing them of working for the Russians against the welfare of the American people.

    Despite an ongoing investigation on the allegations against Flynn, there has been no evidence to this date that has justified any charge. In fact, volumes of exculpatory evidence have been presented to exonerate Flynn from any wrongdoing including perjury. At this point, the investigation of Flynn has been put into question as consciously disingenuous and as being stalled by the federal judge since May 2020, refusing to release Flynn it seems while a Trump Administration is still in effect.

    The question thus stands; in whose best interest is it that no peace be permitted to occur in the Middle East and that U.S.-Russian relations remain verboten? And is such an interest a friend or foe to the American people?

  • New Energy Vehicles Will Be 20% Of China's Total New Car Sales By 2025
    New Energy Vehicles Will Be 20% Of China’s Total New Car Sales By 2025

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/03/2020 – 22:45

    The boom in EV stocks may not be stopping anytime soon. Recent momentum in names like Kandi Technologies, Nio, Tesla, Fisker and other electric vehicle names – already fueled by states like California vowing to ban internal combustion engine vehicles – could see a continued tailwind from the world’s largest auto market, China.

    Sales of new energy vehicles are going to make up 20% of the country’s total new auto sales by the year 2025, China’s State Council estimated early this week. 

    The “new energy” category includes battery electric, plug-in hybrid and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles. Sales will rise as the country’s “NEV industry has improved their technology and competitiveness,” according to a new policy paper reviewed by Reuters. 

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    In the country’s 5 year plan to 2025, the State Council has pushed for improvements in EV technologies, building more efficient charging and implementing battery swapping networks. The Chinese government will also adopt quotas and incentives to to “guide automakers” (i.e. force them) to make EVs after Federal subsidies end in two years.

    The government is also looking at ways to implement EVs for public uses, commercial use and mass transit. 

    While the country’s new outlook is slightly lower than the 25% goal it set for itself in a policy proposal published by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology last year, it would still mark a significant expansion in the world’s largest auto market. 

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    Recall, we noted at the beginning of September that most Chinese EV startups were being backed and bailed out by the Chinese state during the pandemic. 

    This report was just weeks after we reported that many EV manufacturers in the super-saturated Chinese market were going public as a means to avoid bankruptcy.

    For example, when NIO was under tremendous financial pressure just months ago, it was the municipal government of Hefei that stepped in to bail the company out by investing $1 billion in cash for a 24.1% stake in the company’s China’s entity – and getting the company to relocate its headquarters to its province. Hefei has “hopes of creating a powerful rival to Tesla,” according to Nikkei.

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    Similarly, other local governments have stepped into help China’s young EV names. Not unlike Elon Musk’s Tesla, China’s Nio, Xpeng Motors, Li Auto and WM Motor have also all relied on taxpayer/state money to push their visions forward. 

    Earlier this year, we wrote about the successful IPO of Li Auto on the U.S. markets. It “received investments from several entities backed by municipal governments of Changzhou and Xiamen as well as state-run investment bank China International Capital Corporation.”

    Additionally, we reported earlier this year ago that competition in China’s EV market is already starting to become super-saturated.

  • Futures Explode Higher, Nadaq Briefly Halted As Odds Of Reflation Trade, Contested Election Collapse
    Futures Explode Higher, Nadaq Briefly Halted As Odds Of Reflation Trade, Contested Election Collapse

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/03/2020 – 22:38

    It was supposed to be a Blue Wave… and if not a Blue Wave then at least a landslide victory for Joe Biden over Donald Trump. Well, not only is that not likely to happen, but suddenly it seems that Trump may be a decisive winner and not need Pennsylvania, with Betfair odds now 70% in his favor.

    So what does that mean for a market that had almost entirely priced in a Biden/Blue Wave victory? Well, as we noted on Oct 31, when we pointed out the collapse in Nasdaq shorts, we said that a surge in the Nasdaq was imminent as the so-called dumb money reversed.

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    Fast forward to today, when this expected short squeeze has unleashed a massive Nasdaq explosion which sent the tech index 4% higher…

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    … at which point it was briefly halted as circuit-breakers were triggered.

    • NASDAQ FUTURES HALTED FOR TWO MINUTES AFTER 3.9% RALLY

    Technicals aside, there are two fundamentals reasons for this explosion higher:

    1. The lack of a Blue Wave means that no massive reflation trade is coming, and so instead we will get a re-deflation rotation, which is great for Treasurys and for growth/duration stocks such as tech.
    2. The removal of concerns about a contested election, means that all of the crash protection that traders had accumulated for just such an eventuality, will be unwound and stocks surge, which is precisely what they are doing on Tuesday night as in addition to NQs, the Emini is also exploding higher.

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    Bloomberg’s Stephen Spratt notes 4 more reasons for the mindblowing explosion higher in the Nasdaq:

    1. The Democrats have pushed anti-competitive regulation for years. Just last month, a Democratic panel issued proposals to break-up tech giants. The chance of this happening just got marked down.
    2. Chance of Biden tax increases just went down, while for a Trump tax cut, they just went up.
    3. With the Ant IPO on hold, where’s that money going? Some suspect it can potentially go straight back into tech names for the short-term.
    4. Lastly, a Trump win would mean an ‘as you were’ approach to investing, allowing further Nasdaq outperformance.

    Meanwhile, since a pro-China Biden administration is not coming, the Yuan is plunging as the odds are now that we are facing 4 more years of escalating trade war with China.

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    Finally, after tumbling early as a result of the surge in the dollar, gold has recovered much of its losses, as no matter if it’s Trump or Biden, one thing is certain: much more fiscal stimulus is coming, and even more dollar debasement is just around the corner.

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  • Chang: Will America Hand Space Dominance To China?
    Chang: Will America Hand Space Dominance To China?

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/03/2020 – 22:25

    Authored by Gordon Chang vi The Gatestone Institute,

    China will be launching satellites almost every other week starting next March. In one instance the gap in next year’s frenetic schedule of launches will be only five days.

    This year, through the end of September, China launched 29 satellites, more than any other nation. The U.S. was a close second with 27.

    Beijing aims to widen its lead. Most observers worry that the Chinese regime is determined to get to the moon before U.S. astronauts return there, but another troublesome development is that China will quickly be filling up orbits with satellites.

    With a presidential candidate who has not been all that communicative, Americans may want to think more about space policy.

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    In short, there are growing concerns that a new administration will, with the best of intentions but an utter lack of common sense, hand space leadership to the Chinese.

    Observers believe that, going forward, US space policy will not differ much from the current one. Yet a new administration could make crucial differences in emphasis that will have far-reaching consequences.

    Take last December’s establishment of the Space Force, the sixth branch of the American military. No one thinks anyone will reverse that long-delayed and much-needed move.

    Yet American space warriors still worry. Brandon Weichert of The Weichert Report said in an interview with Gatestone that there might be a move to “staff the Space Force with people inimical to its mission.”

    Space Force’s mission is to fight wars in space, but are all Americans fully committed?

    Some believe the US space program should emphasize climate change research. If there is no overall increase in space spending, there will be less money for, among other things, defending American assets in space.

    There are many American assets to defend. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists Satellite Database, the U.S. owned or operated 1,425 of the 2,787 satellites in orbit as of August 1.

    This large lead — it was even larger last decade — convinced the Obama administration it was not wise to “militarize” space because the U.S. had so much more to lose should it trigger an arms race in the heavens.

    President Obama’s view sounds smart but was deeply mistaken because, among other things, it failed to take into account the fact that Beijing was already weaponizing the high ground. “China has been working hard to militarize space since the issuance of its ‘863 Program’ of 1986,” Rick Fisher of the Virginia-based International Assessment and Strategy Center told Gatestone. The 863 Program was followed by 1992’s “Project 921,” run by the General Armaments Department of the Central Military Commission. After the sweeping 2015 reorganization of the Chinese military, control of space ended up in the Commission’s Armaments Development Department.

    “Space was not then and is not now a weapons-free sanctuary, like Antarctica,” Weichert, also the author of the just-released Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, said.

    As a result of Obama’s flawed decision, the U.S. lagged in both developing weapons to kill other nations’ satellites and devising methods to protect its own.

    “Even as Obama tied America’s hands behind its back in space, the Russians and later the Chinese were developing robust counterspace capabilities,” Weichert added.

    America is therefore in many respects behind Russia and China in the ability to fight “over great distances at tremendous speeds, ” as Space Force’s General John Raymond said in September.

    Moreover, there are other policy proposals that would degrade America’s ability to defend itself. The Obama administration, for instance, announced in June 2010 a new policy stating the U.S. would “consider proposals and concepts for arms control measures if they are equitable, effectively verifiable, and enhance the national security of the United States and its allies.” Unfortunately, there are many who still believe America can come to agreement with China.

    Any such agreement, however, would be impractical. In space, almost everything has a dual purpose. Fisher, for instance, reports that China will put a laser on its upcoming space station for the announced purpose of eliminating space junk. Of course, such a laser is also capable of killing American satellites.

    Other dual use items are Russia’s co-orbital “Space Stalkers.” In peacetime, they can be used to repair satellites. In wartime, Weichert says, “they can physically push U.S. satellites out of their orbits.” That would render America’s forces, and America itself, “deaf, dumb, and blind on land, at sea, in the air, and within cyberspace.”

    In any event, neither Russia nor China honors agreements, especially arms control treaties.

    There is another disturbing policy approach for Americans to consider. The Obama administration, in May 2011, sought to enlist China as a partner in the exploration of Mars. Weichert reports Vice President Biden himself proposed joint NASA-China National Space Administration missions in orbit. “Of course,” Weichert says, “this would have been simply the greatest tech transfer ever from the United States to China.”

    There is no such thing as purely “civilian” cooperation with China, which has a civil-military fusion policy. All technical research, pursuant to that policy, gets pipelined into the Chinese military.

    So what is at stake? The next 9/11 will almost certainly occur in space.

  • Epstein's Notorious $20 Million Palm Beach Mansion To Be Demolished
    Epstein’s Notorious $20 Million Palm Beach Mansion To Be Demolished

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/03/2020 – 22:05

    Jeffrey Epstein’s $20 million Palm Beach mansion where hundreds of underage girls were trafficked and sexually assaulted by the now deceased pedophile and his visitors, and which was featured heavily in the 4-hour Netflix documentary series Filthy Rich is set to be demolished by a Florida real estate developer. 

    A developer named Todd Michael Glaser was identified in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday as having purchased the notorious property after it was put on the market for an almost $22 million asking price in July. It’s believed the closing price was about $18 million. 

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    Jeffrey Epstein’s Palm Beach home located on El Brillo Way, AP/Shutterstock. 

    However area residents have wanted it gone for some time. After the deal is finalized in the coming weeks Glaser said he’ll demolish it and erect a 14,000-square-foot Art Moderne home in its place. 

    “Palm Beach is going to be very happy that [Epstein’s home] is gone,” he commented to the WSJ.

    Epstein bought the six-bedroom home which is about 14,000 square feet in 1990 for $2.5 million. The deceased billionaire also assaulted young girls at properties across the US and the Caribbean, including a massive ranch property in New Mexico, his $88 million Manhattan townhouse, as well as what was branded ‘Pedo Island’ of Little St. James in the US Virgin Islands.

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    Via SplashNews.com/TMZ

    According to the WSJ report the New York home on the Upper East Side is still on the market at an asking price of $88 million.

    However, given the whopping price tag combined with the weirdness factor of owning a home associated with rape and sex trafficking of minors, we doubt there will be any takers. 

    The home magazine Town & Country previously summarized the shady dealings of how the New York home was acquired in the first place:

    Records show that the title for this Beaux Arts mansion was transferred to Epstein from his sometime mentor and client Les Wexner in 1996 for $0. The exact reasoning behind this generous gift is a mystery but various reports throughout the years have painted a picture of what the home was like on the inside.

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    And among the bizarre and perverse things found included “a massive mural of a prison yard, a massage table with sex toys and lubricant, a life-size female doll hanging from a chandelier, a sculpture of a naked African warrior, a room covered in leather, and a stuffed black poodle perched on a grand piano, along with the nude photographs that the FBI apparently turned up in a safe,” according to the magazine.

  • There's A Mysterious Seismic "Blip" From Deep Inside Earth That Has Pulsated Every 26 Seconds For 60 Years
    There’s A Mysterious Seismic “Blip” From Deep Inside Earth That Has Pulsated Every 26 Seconds For 60 Years

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/03/2020 – 21:45

    Authored by Jake Anderson via TheMindUnleashed.com,

    Every 26 seconds for the last 60 years seismologists have detected a ubiquitous pulse emanating from deep inside the Earth. The debate over the cause of this mysterious “microseism” has gone on for decades and produced several cogent hypotheses, but scientists still don’t know decisively what’s behind the phenomenon.

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    First observed and recorded by geologist Jack Oliver in the early 1960s, then studied more extensively in the following decades, the pulse is known to be stronger during storms. But storms don’t turn off and on every 26 seconds, nor do volcanos, which have also been proposed as the source.

    In 2005, a graduate student named Greg Bensen tracked the origin of the pulse to a more narrow location, a single source in the Gulf of Guinea, off the western coast of Africa; six years later, another team honed in even closer, pinpointing the origin in an area of the Gulf of Guinea called the Bight of Bonny.

    This team believed the waves crashing on that coast were responsible for the seismic blip. Others, however, weren’t convinced. Some believed it was caused by the sun itself. While tectonic activity, earthquakes, and volcanos regularly trigger solid seismic sounds, a more mellow soundscape of seismic static runs in near perpetuity.

    Mike Ritzwoller, a seismologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who has studied the pulse for decades, says that while the pulse is a mystery, seismic activity, in general, is not.

    “Seismic noise basically exists because of the sun,” whose energy hits the equator and the poles unevenly, creating wind, storms, ocean currents, and waves, all of which work to displace and buffet energy onto the coastline.

    “It’s like if you were tapping on your desk. It deforms the area near your knuckle, but then it’s being transmitted across the whole table,” Ritzwoller explains. “So someone sitting at the other side of the table, if they put their hand, or maybe their cheek, on the table, they can feel the vibration.” 

    With the advent more advanced tools and technologies, scientists have been able to study the pulse more closely and most generally agree that the Bight of Bonny is ground zero for whatever is happening. Currently, many researchers are beginning to think the cause may be that this specific place on the edge of the enormous North American continental shelf (far below the ocean floor) is basically the other end of the desk Ritzwoller used as a metaphor. In other words, a drum the size of a continent is somehow consolidating its reverberations into a single spot.

    Some researchers still believe volcanism is the answer and point to an active volcano on the island of São Tomé in the Bight of Bonny as evidence.

    Why any of these physical phenomena would produce such a strange clockwork pulse every 26 seconds remains a mystery.

    “We’re still waiting for the fundamental explanation of the cause of this phenomenon,” Ritzwoller says with a beat of optimism about the next decades of seismology.

     “I think the point [of all this] is there are very interesting, fundamental phenomena in the earth that are known to exist out there and remain secret.”

  • 'The Instagram Generation' – Gen Z Are Notoriously Picky House Hunters, Survey Finds
    ‘The Instagram Generation’ – Gen Z Are Notoriously Picky House Hunters, Survey Finds

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/03/2020 – 21:25

    Though many of them are probably still living in mom and dad’s basement despite being two years removed from college, Gen Zers will soon become the most dominant force in the urban rental market.

    As a result, landlords in major urban centers are trying to figure out how to cater to this new generation, particularly as their predecessors, the millennials, rotate out of housing markets like NYC and San Francisco.

    With rents on the downtrend in formerly hot urban rental markets like Manhattan and San Francisco, landlords might get stuck going the extra mile to attract tenants.

    In a recent study examining the priorities of Gen Z renters, the oldest of whom are now turning 24, researchers with RentCafe have discovered that Gen Z is far less willing to compromise on amenities and quality, unlike their predecessors. One could argue that this is in keeping with “Zoomers” behavior in other areas, like the workplace, where they are reportedly more likely to speak up for themselves, and less likely to toil relentlessly in silence, simply grateful to have a job.

    Seeing as they’re the first generation to come of the age with social media, Gen Zers do more research online before deciding on an apartment. They’re more choosy than millennials, too. As the researchers wrote, “affordable quality” is the “Gen Z mantra”.

    Read the rest of the RentCafé survey below:

    * * *

    The most culturally diverse and digital native age cohort, Generation Z, the oldest of whom are turning 24 this year, are the new must-watch generation in the housing market. Already a growing share of today’s renters, the little-known Gen Z’s accounted for 19% of respondents in a recent survey on rentcafe.com about renting preferences.

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    It’s time to pay attention to how Gen Z renting preferences differ from what older generations value. Perhaps as expected, their choices stem from the fact that they value technology more than any other generation. Embracing technology and social media as a way of living, these young adults seem to know exactly what they are looking for when it comes to renting an apartment, what they expect from their apartment communities, and how much they are willing to spend. Although they are budget conscious and still at the dawn of their earning years, Gen Z renters want the highest-quality apartments and rental communities that feature the most technologically-advanced features.

    62% of Gen Z renters believe apartment technology is extremely and very important

    One of the most important aspects for the youngest group of renters today is no doubt technology, which they value more than any previous generation. in fact, 62% of the Gen Z respondents to our survey indicated technology as being extremely or very important in their apartment and community. 28% of them said it was extremely important, more than any other generation, and 34% of them said it was very important, again, more than any other generation.

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    Gen Z respondents also reported that the most important feature to have in their apartment community was “high-speed internet”, which came in higher than all other features, including parking, gym, or laundry.

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    In their apartments, technologically advanced features like smart locks & thermostats, as well as energy-efficient appliances, were ranked as more important than extra space, such as an extra bedroom.

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    Their digital features of choice were online rent payments and maintenance requests (37%), followed by a mobile app for managing rent and maintenance (28%), which is consistent with the preferences of other generations of renters. However, what sets them apart is that Gen Z respondents were more interested in text rent payments than the other respondents.

    Where can you find the Gen Z’s? On Instagram

    For the first time ever, Instagram is the most used social media channel by a generation, and Gen Z’s are the ones to make that shift. As they indicated in our survey, 36% of Gen Z’s chose Instagram as their top media channel, followed by 17% who prefer Facebook. In fact, of all of the age groups that responded to our survey, they were the only ones that reported preferring Instagram over Facebook. All other generations are overwhelmingly Facebook users.

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    Generation Z uses Google search to find apartments more than any other generation

    Google search is the number one channel to find apartments these days, but for Gen Z more so than for others. According to our survey, 39% of the youngest of renters start their apartment search on Google. Second in popularity are apartment search websites, like rentcafe.com, which 27% of Gen Z’s use as a starting point in their search, equal to the share of Millennials, but above the other generations.

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    Property ratings and reviews are the top decision factor for Gen Z-ers

    When asked what research they do before choosing a rental property, the largest share of Gen Z’s (30%) selected property ratings and reviews. Moreover, they reported relying on property ratings and reviews more than any other previous generation. The second most important research tools were videos and virtual tours, which were selected by 24% of Gen Z respondents.

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    Although technology fans and experts when it comes to online and social media resources, in person tours are still important even for this cohort before deciding on an apartment to rent. In fact, 72% of them prefer touring apartments in person, whether that is with an agent or self-guided.

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    Affordable quality is the Gen Z mantra

    It’s no surprise that price is important to young renters when choosing an apartment, as is for everyone, for that matter. However, the quality of the apartment is not something that Generation Z is eager to give up. In fact, of all of the age groups of renters, Gen Z-ers seem to care the most about the quality of apartment finishes and the quality of the building, more than any other generation.

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    While they do demonstrate maturity in realizing that they can’t afford to spend too much money on rent (yet), Gen Z’s are indicating that they aren’t willing to give up quality and know exactly what they’re looking for in their rental. Therefore, as their financial power grows in the coming years, we might expect a new type of renter to emerge: a tech-savvy, research-focused, and confident renter.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • The Debt Monster Is Loose
    The Debt Monster Is Loose

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/03/2020 – 21:05

    Via SchiffGold.com,

    The debt monster is loose.

    S&P Global Ratings projects the global debt-to-GDP level will swell to a record 265% this year. It also expects insolvencies and defaults to rise to levels not seen since the 2009 crisis.

    Higher leverage and “a more challenging operating environment” has led S&P Global Ratings to downgrade 22% of corporate and sovereign debt issuers globally — “particularly speculative-grade borrowers and those suffering most from COVID19’s economic effects.”

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    According to the report, default rates could double by mid-2021.

    Corporate bankruptcies are already surging in the US and many overleveraged small businesses are simply shutting down.  A total of 509 companies had gone bankrupt this year as of Oct. 4, exceeding the number of filings during any comparable period since 2010.

    A recent article at ForeignPolicy.com warned, “The next US administration will likely face a global debt crisis that could dwarf what the world experienced in 2008-2009. To prevent the worst, it will need to address the burdensome debt plaguing both the United States and the global economy.”

    The report singled out the growing levels of debt in the US and called them “unsustainable.”

    A surge in spending to mitigate the health and economic impacts of the pandemic has brought the total public debt in the United States to over 100 percent of GDP—its highest level since 1946 and a hurdle that will create a considerable drag on future economic growth. Other types of debt—household, auto, and student loans, as well as credit card debt—have seen similar surges. Almost 20 percent of US corporations have become zombie companies that are unable to generate enough cash flow to service even the interest on their debt, and only survive thanks to continued loans and bailouts.”

    According to the Institute of International Finance (IIF), global debt is already well above the level S&P Global warned about. In April, the organization reported that global debt across all sectors rose by over $10 trillion in 2019, topping $255 trillion.

    At over 322% of GDP, global debt is now 40 percentage points ($87 trillion) higher than at the onset of the 2008 financial crisis—a sobering realization as governments worldwide gear up to fight the pandemic.”

    You can thank the Federal Reserve and central banks globally for this surge in indebtedness. In fact, we were warning about surging global debt long before the pandemic. In the wake of the Great Recession, central banks worldwide gave us 10 years of easy money. With loans cheap and easy to come by, households borrowed money. And governments borrowed money. And corporations borrowed money. With all of this borrowing, it should come as no shock that today the world is swimming in a sea of red ink.

    Central banks simply doubled down on their debt-producing policies in response to the pandemic. The Federal Reserve immediately took interest rates to zero and it has promised to leave them there for years to come.  It then launched “QE infinity,” and has increased the money supply at a record pace. Just last week, the Fed lowered the threshold for its “Main Street” loan program for small businesses down to $100,000.

    Despite the record levels of indebtedness, S&P Global said it’s not concerned about a debt crisis. But it bases its view on some rather rosy assumptions, including the wide-spread availability of an effective COVID-19 vaccine. It also assumes a global economic recovery.

    It seems just as likely that the debt-bubble will pop. In fact, we warned back in December of last year that it was a matter of when, not if, the debt bubble was going to burst.

    Conventional wisdom seems to be that the world can avoid economic pain simply by borrowing money that was created out of thin air by central banks. But any sane person understands you don’t borrow your way to prosperity. Borrowed money always has to be paid back. This is an unsustainable path and one to watch closely, despite the optimistic assurances of the mainstream.

  • Elon Musk Eyes Space Mining Of Asteroid Worth More Than Global Economy
    Elon Musk Eyes Space Mining Of Asteroid Worth More Than Global Economy

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/03/2020 – 20:45

    Not too long ago, NASA asked Tesla’s Elon Musk, who runs the rocket company SpaceX, to assist in a future space exploration mission of a giant metallic asteroid called “16 Psyche” that contains trillions of dollars in rare metals. 

    16 Psyche is one of the most massive objects in the asteroid belt orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. It measures 140 miles across, and in previous observations, it has been shown as a dense metallic core of a failed plant.

    A new study, published Monday by Southwest Research Institute planetary scientist Dr. Tracy Becker, provides new insight into why NASA and Musk could be interested in this space rock that’s more than 230 million miles from Earth. The reason: The asteroid is entirely comprised of iron and nickel. 

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    Some believe the asteroid is valued at around $10,000 quadrillion. For comparisons, the global economy in 2019 was worth about $142 trillion. 16 Psyche is turning out to be an astronomical treasure trove of wealth for whoever seizes it. 

    “We’ve seen meteorites that are mostly metal, but Psyche could be unique in that it might be an asteroid that is totally made of iron and nickel,” Becker said.

    She continued: “Earth has a metal core, a mantle and crust. It’s possible that as a Psyche protoplanet was forming, it was struck by another object in our solar system and lost its mantle and crust.”

    Becker’s study comes as SpaceX and NASA prepare for an uncrewed mission to the asteroid in 2022, with the spacecraft landing on 16 Psyche in 2026.

    What this all suggests is the NASA and private corporations are in the beginning stages to mine space. 

    As we’ve noted several times (see: here & here), mining space will start on the moon and likely branch out from there. 

    A Reuters story from 2019 perfectly explains why Musk is interested in nickel-heavy 16 Psyche because he anticipated global shortages of the metal in the coming years. 

  • Why Joe Biden Gets It Wrong On Foreign Policy
    Why Joe Biden Gets It Wrong On Foreign Policy

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/03/2020 – 20:25

    Authored by Mark Episkopos for The National Interest,

    The Biden campaign has worked tirelessly over the past year to channel the image of Joe Biden as a “serious person,” particularly on foreign policy matters. Biden, according to this narrative, is an elder statesman who grasps the intricacies of international politics. Trump, by contrast, is presented as an inept bull in a china shop who only speaks the language of “fire and fury.” Only Biden, we are told, can bring back stability around the globe.

    Don’t believe a word of it.

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    This carefully curated image of Joe Biden’s strategic acumen and geopolitical foresight is at odds by the former vice president’s own stated views and policy track record. His statements about a variety of countries suggest that they are based less on a strategic view of world affairs than snap judgments.

    Consider Korea. At the Third Presidential Debate on October 22, Trump touted the benefits of having “good relations” with foreign leaders like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Biden responded by invoking Hitler: “We had a good relationship with Hitler before he, in fact, invaded Europe, the rest of Europe. Come on. The reason he would not meet with President Obama is because President Obama said, ‘We’re going to talk about denuclearization. We’re not going to legitimize you and we’re going to continue to push stronger and stronger sanctions on you.’ That’s why he wouldn’t meet with us.” It should go without saying that likening Kim Jong Un to Adolf Hitler is not only wildly inflammatory but also contributes nothing to our policy understanding of either figure. The second part of Biden’s statement is even more dangerous, reflecting a failed commitment to old Washington orthodoxy at a time when a growing number of North Korea experts are quite correctly warning that a blanket insistence on denuclearization as a precondition for peace talks is futile and counterproductive.

    Biden extended a similarly brash stance toward America’s friends. At a recent Philadelphia town hall event, Biden– who has incessantly lectured Trump on the perils of spurning America’s longstanding allies– all but consigned two key US partners into a new Axis of Evil:  “And NATO is in the risk of beginning to crack because they don’t doubt — they doubt our — whether we’re there. You see what’s happened in everything from Belarus to Poland to Hungary, and the rise of totalitarian regimes in the world, and as well, this president embraces all the thugs in the world.” It bears repeating that Hungary and Poland— which have both had legitimate and competitive elections within the past several years– are not only members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but are among the two biggest military contributors to NATO’s collective security arrangement. Biden’s comments are even more tone-deaf in light of data showing that Poland and Hungary consistently rank among the most pro-American EU member states. This unprompted attack has already prompted vigorous rebuke from the government in Budapest, needlessly harming relations between a NATO ally and prospective President-elect before they began.

    Nor does Biden fare better on matters of grand strategy. At a political event in Iowa City, the former Vice-President dismissed the bipartisan consensus that Beijing poses potential economic and security threats to the United States. “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man… I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us,” he said. Biden’s reasoning? Chinese society is too divided, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) too corrupt, to mount a credible challenge to the United States: “They can’t even figure out how to deal with the fact that they have this great division between the China Sea and the mountains in the east, I mean the west.. they can’t figure out how they’re going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system.”

    In point of fact, serious ethnic cleavages and rampant corruption have not prevented China from aggressively expanding its geo-economic influence across every continent. From shoring up Venezuela’s embattled Nicolás Maduro with mercenaries and billions of dollars to systematically undercutting Washington’s economic and political reach in Africa, the CCP is actively challenging US interests across the world. This isn’t to say that those challenges are unmanageable with fresh and forward-looking strategies, but to deny their existence only serves to compound their growing threat.

    Biden’s comments unsurprisingly drew the ire of politicians from as diverse a cast as Mitt Romney and Bernie Sanders. With the 2020 presidential election looming large on the horizon, Biden jettisoned his position for an entirely new set of talking points. By the summer of 2019, Biden was arguing that Trump is the one who is blind to the Chinese threat: “While Trump is attacking our friends, China is pressing its advantage all over the world… you bet I’m worried about China—if we keep following Trump’s path.” He labeled China as a “competitor” at a September 18 CNN town hall in 2020, and again during a 60 minutes interview last week.

    It is unclear what prompted Biden’s change of heart, other than perhaps the electoral optics of being seen as soft on China at a time when millions of Chinese Uighur muslims are being ethnically cleansed in hundreds of internment camps strewn across China’s northwest. Biden’s abrupt, pre-election transformation into a China hawk has hardly been accompanied by concrete solutions for managing Sino-American competition. Instead, he continues to tout the old chestnuts of Washington’s inept bipartisan China policies: targeted sanctions for human rights abuses, multilateral action to stem China’s “illegal and unfair trade practices,” and more robust enforcement of intellectual property laws. These generic prescriptions are premised on the decades-old neoliberal article of faith that closer engagement with international institutions will inevitably bring China into the fold of liberal-democratic nations.

    But a rising China remains a secondary concern for the Democratic candidate, whose go-to campaign trail foreign policy topic remains the Russia menace. Beginning with the Obama administration’s support for regime change in Ukraine during the 2014 Maidan revolution, Biden has distinguished himself as one of the foremost advocates for a bellicose approach toward Russia. Biden’s conceit stems from a peculiar, but unfortunately popular, understanding of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s true motives: “The Cold War was based on a conflict of two profoundly different ideological notions of how the world should function. This is just basically about a kleptocracy protecting itself… I think there’s a basic decision that they cannot compete against a unified West. I think that is Putin’s judgment. And so everything he can do to dismantle the post-World War II liberal world order, including NATO and the EU, I think, is viewed as in their immediate self-interest,” said Biden during a 2018 Council on Foreign Relations appearance.

    In Biden’s view, Putin, an authoritarian kleptocrat fearful of losing his iron grip over Russia, is on a mission to divide and destroy NATO and the EU because he knows he can’t compete against a united west. Thus, concludes Biden, the thrust of Washington’s Russia policy should be to “impose meaningful costs” on Moscow for its vast and ever-growing list of transgressions against the free world. Predictably, these “meaningful costs” amount to more of the same: targeted sanctions, stationing NATO troops ever closer to Russia’s borders, corralling NATO into a united front against Russia’s global assault on democracy, and lobbying for the NATO accession of post-Soviet states like Georgia and Ukraine.

    Though certainly punitive in their effect, it is unclear what concrete strategic goals these policies are meant to accomplish. After six years of crescendoing sanctions and international measures aimed at isolating Moscow geopolitically, Russia is no closer to pro-western regime change; if anything, the economic pain from sanctions has only stoked anti-western sentiment and further consolidated the Russian masses behind Putin’s government. Nor did the Obama-Biden administration’s punitive measures induce any significant changes in the Kremlin’s behavior, partly because the sanctions arrayed against Russia are so rigid and exhaustive that the Kremlin has long since abandoned any hope they will ever be lifted. 

    If nothing else, Biden’s recent foreign policy statements are par for the course of his four-decade long political career– one that has long been characterized by intermittent attempts to seize short-term political advantages by rewriting his own policy history. Since the beginning of the 2020 election, for example, Biden has consistently portrayed himself as an avowed opponent of the Iraq War. “From the moment Shock and Awe started,” said Biden at a Democratic Presidential Debate in 2019, “from that moment, I was opposed to the effort.” But, as numerous fact-checkers have noted, Biden was not at all opposed to “the effort.” In fact, he repeatedly endorsed the invasion of Iraq from 2003 through 2004, even chiding some skeptical Democrats for not being sufficiently supportive of the war effort. Biden’s volte-face only came in 2005, coinciding with his newly revealed intention to explore a presidential run. By then, opposition to the Iraq war was no longer a particularly novel political opinion to hold.

    Biden’s track record hardly paints the portrait of a sophisticated statesman or “serious” foreign policy thinker. What emerges instead is the familiar portrait of an old party stalwart who will say anything, sign on to any position, to seize an advantage in that moment. What so many commentators and journalists have graciously dismissed as his countless ‘gaffes’ is really a reflection of a tired and outdated worldview.

    *  *  *

    Mark Episkopos is the new national security reporter for the National Interest. 

  • China State-Owned News Calls Tesla "Unreasonable And Arrogant" In Handling Model S & X Recalls
    China State-Owned News Calls Tesla “Unreasonable And Arrogant” In Handling Model S & X Recalls

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/03/2020 – 20:05

    Could the love affair between Tesla and the Chinese Communist Party be drifting toward an unceremonious end?

    From the looks of an editorial published in Xinhua on Tuesday, that could very well be the call. The country’s state owned news agency called Tesla “unreasonable and arrogant” in an article published on Tuesday that addressed Tesla’s recall of 30,000 imported Model S and Model X vehicles in the country. 

    “The automaker refused to acknowledge its defect outside China while taking the recall in the market, blaming the user behavior and pressure from regulatory bodies. Tesla needs to learn first to abide by the local regulations and protect legitimate rights of the car owners,” the editorial said, according to Bloomberg. 

    Recall, it was about a week ago we first highlighted a massive recall Tesla had to undergo in China due to lingering, years old questions about the safety of Model S and Model X suspensions. 

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    From a collection of suspension issues on InsideEVs

    Suspension issues are one of the oldest ongoing critiques involving Tesla’s manufacturing (before Musk shattered Cybertruck windows live on stage, before Model 3s had dirt collect in their bumper and before Model Ys saw their roofs fly off). Legacy complaints involving suspensions on vehciles date back years, to Tesla’s original run of Model S vehicles.

    And what the NHTSA was too blind to see, the Chinese clearly noticed. That’s why Tesla was forced into a recall of 30,000 Model S and Model X vehicles made for the Chinese market over suspension issues to begin with.

    The issue was due to “a weakness in the Model S and Model X suspension that can lead to a cracked linkage after an impact.”

    We used the term “forced” into the recall because it didn’t appear as though Tesla was “on board” with it. In fact, according to Bloomberg, Tesla found “no defect with its Model S/Model X suspension and [said] that China is basically forcing an unnecessary recall”.

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    Despite the recall supposedly being over nothing, Tesla “decided not to dispute a recall for the China market only,” the company’s managing counsel wrote to the NHTSA in a letter from early September. The same letter indicated that the NHTSA knew about the Chinese recall since the beginning of September – though we’re not sure why anybody would expect the NHTSA, who has sat idly by and watched one fatal wreck after another involving Teslas, to do anything about it.

    Recall, as far back as 2016, we were reporting about an investigation into the suspension of Tesla vehicles.

    A major lingering question is whether the Chinese recall could prompt a similar recall – that would likely affect over 200,000 vehicles – in the U.S.

    Far be it for us to tell the U.S. government that China is setting the example, but when dealing with matters of automobile safety and not accepting petulance and nonsense from manchild Elon Musk, China is drawing a nice roadmap.

    Now, if someone would just wake the NHTSA from their coma…

  • Futures, Yields Tumble With Trump Set To Win Florida
    Futures, Yields Tumble With Trump Set To Win Florida

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/03/2020 – 19:58

    Recall all our previews said that Florida is a key state for Trump: without it, it was pretty much game over for the president. Well, it appears that despite galatic-szied brains such as Nate Silver giving Trump just 31% odds of winning Florida…

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    … Trump appears set to win Florida according to both PredictIt…

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    … and the NYT, which gives Trump >95% odds of winning.

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    As a result of Trump now appearing set to win Florida, futures wiped out all their overnight gains…

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    … and yields slumped fading all earlier upside.

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    … with the offshore Yuan suddenly tumbling.

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    In 2016, Florida was the harbinger of the greatest electoral upset ever. Is it about to do so again in 2020?

  • Ant's IPO Suspension Shows It's Too Big To Fail Now
    Ant’s IPO Suspension Shows It’s Too Big To Fail Now

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/03/2020 – 19:45

    By Ye Xie, Bloomberg macro commentator and analyst

    The first shock on Election Day didn’t come from the U.S. Rather, it was the news that China suspended Ant Group’s $35 billion initial public offering.

    It’s a PR nightmare for Beijing to call Ant’s IPO off on the eve of what would be the world’s largest public listing – especially after Ant spurned New York to list in Shanghai and Hong Kong. It came just days after co-founder Jack Ma criticized regulators for being out of touch and mocked banks as pawnshops. The financial impact was big enough to cause the Hong Kong dollar to fall Tuesday.

    The direct trigger may be the recent moves by policy makers to tighten control over online lenders. On Monday, the banking regulator released draft rules that would force lenders to fund at least 30% of the loans they offer together with banks, compared with Ant’s 2% currently.

    The timing may be unfortunate, but the message is clear: Safeguarding the financial system has become China’s policy priority again, now that Beijing has managed to put the economy back on its feet even as tensions with the U.S. stay elevated.

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    At its core, it’s a debate about whether fin-tech companies should be considered financial or tech companies. Regulators think Ant’s business model – using lending and leverage to make money – isn’t so different from traditional banks. Therefore, the company should be subject to similar supervision on leverage and capital requirements.

    In other words, Ant needs to be closely watched because it is too big to fail. The numbers speak for itself. Ant’s platforms doled out 1.7 trillion yuan ($255 billion) of loans to about 500 million people in the year through June. It runs the world’s biggest digital payment system, and its Tianhong Yu’e Bao Money Market Fund is one of the world’s largest of its kind with about $173 billion in assets.

    What’s next? It is likely that Ant gets the greenlight for listing soon after it achieves regulatory and disclosure compliance. Unwinding an IPO of that size, with subscriptions from the world’s sovereign wealth funds and Chinese pension funds, would be a disaster, as Krane Funds’ CIO Brendan Ahern put it. But it’s unlikely that Ant can get the same valuation now because its expansion has been called into question.

    Jack Ma’s nickname is Papa Ma for his vast wealth and influence. On Tuesday, however, it became clear who the real Big Daddy is.

  • Iran Mocks Washington "Pirates Of The Caribbean" For Selling Seized Fuel For $40 Million
    Iran Mocks Washington “Pirates Of The Caribbean” For Selling Seized Fuel For $40 Million

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/03/2020 – 19:25

    Not for the first time Iran has slammed the United States as “the pirates of the Caribbean” after the Department of Justice announcement late last week boasting that 1.1 million barrels in petroleum recently seized from four Iranian tankers bound for Venezuela were sold for $40 million.

    The DOJ had alleged that Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) operatives were behind the clandestine shipments of fuel and weapons meant to circumvent sanctions. “We estimate that in excess of $40 million will be recouped by the United States related to the sale of petroleum from those four vessels,” acting US attorney for the District of Columbia Michael Sherwin the told reporters last week.

    In response Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh tweeted: “The Pirates of the Caribbean openly boasting about their booty…” And he added: “No one civilized brags [about] stealing.”

    Khatibzadeh attached the below headline images to the message while also claiming the fuel actually didn’t belong to Iran at the moment it was stolen.

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    “Only, as we said before: it wasn’t ours. But [somebody] else’s oil has certainly been stolen,” Khatibzadeh said further.

    According to the AFP, the DOJ indicated much of the proceeds from the sale would go to a US fund for victims of “state-sponsored terrorism”. The report detailed:

    US courts have ordered Iran’s clerical regime to pay damages over attacks, most recently in July when a judge told Tehran to pay $879.1 million over a 1996 bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 US airmen.

    Iran denies responsibility and states it has no intention of paying, saying the United States should instead compensate for past episodes including its support of Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War.

    Meanwhile there’s no doubt that leaders in Tehran will be watching the US presidential election with bated breath hoping for a Joe Biden victory.

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    A prior Iranian fuel tanker that had made it to Venezuela.

    Biden has vowed to restore US participation in the 2015 nuclear deal brokered under the Obama-Biden administration, so long as Iran comes back into adhering to uranium enrichment caps and other conditions its recently broken in protest.

    On the other hand the continuation of Trump and Pompeo’s ‘maximum pressure’ campaign could mean war would eventually be on the horizon, and a smashed Iranian economy for years given the unprecedented sanctions regimen. 

  • Election Day "Shocker": Mueller Went After WikiLeaks & Roger Stone For DNC Hacks But Found 'Lack Of Evidence'
    Election Day “Shocker”: Mueller Went After WikiLeaks & Roger Stone For DNC Hacks But Found ‘Lack Of Evidence’

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/03/2020 – 18:55

    Much belatedly and amazingly a mere hours before election day Buzzfeed News published a bombshell report late Monday night based on the DOJ newly declassifying previously secret portions of the Mueller report (following a successful FOIA lawsuit to obtain them). It’s yet more smoking gun evidence proving long after the fact that core aspects of now deflated ‘Russiagate’ that American media spent years devoting wall-to-wall coverage to were deliberate manufactured falsehoods (shocker!), specifically as regards claims of early collaboration and “collusion” between Trump staffers, WikiLeaks, and the Russian government.

    Unfortunately, like with the latest news that put the final nail in the coffin of the Steele dossier hoax, this too will fast be memory-holed given it’s now election day. We learn 18-months after the initial report’s redacted release that despite putting one of the most hyped central allegations facing Trump’s team and his past campaign adviser Roger Stone under a microscope, Mueller’s team of hundreds of FBI agents simply “did not have sufficient evidence” and thus never pursued charges, as the Buzzfeed report begins:

    Prosecutors investigated Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and Roger Stone for the hacking of Democratic National Committee servers as well as for possible campaign finance violations, but ultimately chose not to charge them, newly released portions of the Mueller Report reveal.

    Although WikiLeaks published emails stolen from the DNC in July and October 2016 and Stone — a close associate to Donald Trump — appeared to know in advance the materials were coming, investigators “did not have sufficient evidence” to prove active participation in the hacks or knowledge that the electronic thefts were continuing. In addition, federal prosecutors could not establish that the hacked emails amounted to campaign contributions benefitting Trump’s election chances and furthermore felt their publication might have been protected by the First Amendment, making a successful prosecution tenuous.

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    Recall that throughout years it was an unquestioned article of faith communicated to the American public over the airwaves of MSNBC, CNN, CBS, and others that WikiLeaks essentially ran cover for Russia in a grand DNC email hack conspiracy designed to influence the 2016 presidential election while embarrassing Hillary. We were “assured” that this played a crucial role in Trump’s victory over Clinton.

    The widespread unfounded allegations also served to permanently taint WikiLeaks as some kind of Moscow influence op, which also no doubt added pressure to UK attempts to apprehend Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, which ended up happening.

    The relevant newly unredacted section details that investigators “considered whether to charge WikiLeaks, Assange, or Stone as conspirators in the computer-intrusion conspiracy,” given WikiLeaks’ “role in disseminating the hacked materials, and the existence of some evidence that Stone played a role in coordinating” the publication of Clinton adviser John Podesta’s emails:

    “While the Office cannot exclude the possibility of coordination between Stone and WikiLeaks or that additional evidence could come to light on that issue, the investigation did not obtain admissible evidence likely to meet the government’s burden to prove facts establishing such coordination beyond a reasonable doubt,” the newly released portion said.

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    Buzzfeed presents one illuminating passage as follows:

    “While the investigation developed evidence that the GRU’s hacking efforts in fact were continuing at least at the time of the July 2016 WikiLeaks dissemination,” a newly unredacted section of the report reads, prosecutors “did not develop sufficient admissible evidence that WikiLeaks knew of — or even was willfully blind to — that fact.”

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    For comparison of how the same page looked before Monday:

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    Phrases that are deeply inconvenient to longtime Russiagate peddlers appear in the newly released sections, such as “factual…hurdles” and “proof..lacking”. Speaking of these legal hurdles the report said bluntly:

    Regardless, success [of criminal charges] would also depend upon evidence of WikiLeaks’s and Stone’s knowledge of ongoing or contemplated future computer intrusions – the proof that is currently lacking.

    And Buzzfeed continues:

    Likewise, prosecutors faced what they called factual hurdles in pursuing Stone for the hack. The report notes they lacked proof “beyond a reasonable doubt that Stone knew or believed that the computer intrusions were ongoing at the time he ostensibly encouraged or coordinated the publication of the Podesta emails.”

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    Mueller wrote that the Justice Department “did not have admissible evidence,” for conspiracy convictions to stick. This definitive confirmation comes a whopping 18-months after the original redacted report’s release.

    The DOJ tried to argue it could “compromise ongoing investigations” or possibly reveal sensitive law enforcement tactics or procedures in keeping the new information classified.

    Or perhaps given they understood it would inevitably be released one day, why not release when it’s too late for the information to make a major impact? That is… now that the election is already upon us and with Americans having voted or made up their minds. But as a reminder, this is precisely how propaganda is supposed to work after all.

  • Illinois'-Own COVID-19 Data Reveals State's COVID-19 Policy Is Upside-Down
    Illinois’-Own COVID-19 Data Reveals State’s COVID-19 Policy Is Upside-Down

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/03/2020 – 18:45

    Authored by Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner via Wirepoints.org,

    A Wirepoints review of last month’s COVID-19 data reveals just how flawed Illinois’ response to the coronavirus continues to be. The recent spike in cases has the government shutting down large parts of the state again in a brute-force approach, when its efforts should, instead, be hyper-focused on the elderly and opening up the economy for everyone else.

    Data from October shows that the elderly continue to dominate Illinois’ COVID deaths, even more than in recent months. Of the 393 increase in Illinois COVID deaths from September to October, nearly two-thirds came from those aged 80 and over. Illinois’ blanket lockdown policies have consistently failed to stem the deaths of the elderly since the pandemic began, especially those in nursing homes. 

    Meanwhile, those same blanket bans have destroyed jobs, damaged mental health and caused many other problems for Illinoisans who are far less likely to be affected by the coronavirus. The CDC’s latest projections show a survival rate of 99.98% for infected Americans aged 20-50.

    With the elderly still inadequately protected and younger Illinoisans suffering harm disproportionate to their COVID risk, it’s clear the state’s approach to taking on the coronavirus is upside down.

    Outbreaks and the elderly

    To see how the state continues to fail its elderly population, take a quick look at the average age of all COVID deaths in Illinois over the last couple of weeks. The daily average often reached 80 and on some days exceeded 82 years of age.

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    Overall, the age of Illinois’ COVID deaths for the month of October averaged 80, at least three years higher than the average over the entire pandemic period.

    The share of deaths by age group in October also reveals how elderly deaths are becoming more dominant. The 80 and older bracket made up 55% of all deaths in October, compared to just 45% from March through September.

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    Another cut at that data shows 91% of Illinois’ COVID deaths in October were in the 60-and-older bracket. That’s a major increase from the 86% figure for the period between March and September.

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    Amazingly, a large number of those elderly deaths are still linked to retirement homes, despite the massive coverage that crisis has received. More than 425 deaths were tied to Long Term Care facilities from Oct. 2 to Oct 30, over 44% of all Illinois COVID deaths in that period. 

    The fact that the state still hasn’t gotten the outbreaks in Illinois retirement homes under control shows how misguided the return to broad lockdowns is. Instead of focusing time and energy on protecting the specific population that is dying from COVID, Illinois’ efforts are hurting everyone – including those the CDC says have a very low probability of dying.

    Younger Illinoisans and risk

    The CDC recently released their estimates of COVID’s Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) for the country.

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    The IFRs show that people between the ages of 20 and 50 have a 99.98% probability of survival if they’re infected. Said in the opposite way, the chance of death after infection for those in that age bracket is at 0.02%. For those under 20, the chance of death from COVID is just 0.003%. 

    On the other hand, the CDC data also shows that the risk of death jumps to over 5% for those over 70, again making the case that it’s the elderly who are most at risk.

    The other demographic the state should focus on are the non-elderly with pre-existing conditions. There are 187 Illinoisans under the age of 40 who have died of COVID since the start of the pandemic. Most of them had one or more pre-existing conditions that include hypertension, diabetes, heart disease and obesity. We don’t know precisely because IDPH refuses to publish the numbers. 

    However, the Cook County Medical Examiner does provide them for the county. Of the county’s 66 COVID victims under the age of 40 (those which listed COVID as the primary cause of death), 54 had one or more comorbidity.

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    COVID-19 is a serious risk to a far smaller population than the number of people impacted by the state’s broader lockdowns, which we warned from the beginning would do more harm than good.

    That viewpoint is now endorsed by signers of The Great Barrington Declaration, which includes many of the world’s top epidemiologists and infectious disease experts.

    The state has spent billions on economic and other relief efforts as a result of the lockdowns, but the more effective plan would be to broadly open up the state and spend what is necessary to protect the elderly and the vulnerable. That means obsessing over safety in retirement homes as well as providing assistance to the elderly living among the general public.

    Preventing healthcare facilities from being overwhelmed is also key. The state should ensure hospitals have the resources needed to handle major spikes in cases.

    Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened, at least not judging by Illinois’ overall bed capacity (the same can be said for Illinois’ overall ICU bed capacity). Illinois’ hospital bed capacity grew to 35,000 in June and hasn’t budged since.

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    The science and data behind COVID is telling us it’s time to reopen. Until the data proves otherwise – and we should be vigilant in looking out for any changes in the virus – it’s time to flip the state’s COVID policy on its head.

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Nov 03

Today’s News 3rd November 2020

  • Huge Islamist Protests In Bangladesh & Indonesia Demand Governments Sever Ties With France
    Huge Islamist Protests In Bangladesh & Indonesia Demand Governments Sever Ties With France

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/03/2020 – 01:00

    Monday witnessed demonstrations unprecedented in size by hardline Muslims in Bangladesh as tens of thousands flooded the center of Dhaka, the capital city. The country’s largest Islamist group, Hefazat-e-Islam, is pressuring the government to sever all diplomatic and economic ties with France over accusations that President Emmanuel Macron made ‘anti-Islamic’ statements after recent terror attacks wherein he condemned “Islamist terrorism” and said that global Islam is “in crisis”. Smaller but fierce demonstrations were also reported in Indonesia Monday.

    “We are giving an ultimatum to the government to end diplomatic ties with France within 24 hours,” said Junayed Babunagari, head of Hefazat-e-Islam. “If our demands are not met, we will announce our next course of action,” he added amid shouts of approval from the crowd. 

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    Mass demonstrations have overtaken downtown capital districts in Bangladesh and Indonesia, via Reuters

    There’s been days of similar demonstrations in other capitals with large Muslim populations where rioters have sought to reach the local French Embassy, such as happened days ago in Islamabad, Pakistan when the embassy there came under attack by rioters hurling stones. 

    Another Bangladeshi protest leader on Monday was cited in AP as saying protests would not cease until Macron apologizes and recants his remarks. “I ask the French government to apologize to the 2 billion Muslims in the world,” a protest leader identified as Nur-Husain-Kashemi said.

    “I also ask the world’s Muslims to demonstrate their faith by boycotting French products and terminating diplomatic relations with France,” he added.

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    It doesn’t look like the government is ready to follow through anytime soon, particularly given France remains the fourth biggest single export destination for Bangladesh’s crucial ready-made garment industry.

    Given Monday’s horrific terrorist attack in Vienna in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, and which follows on the heels of deadly attacks in France, it appears the political Islamists are advancing a “clash of civilizations” narrative akin to the lead-up to the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre. 

    Indonesia has also seen large Islamist protests with people seen carrying signs reading “Macron is the real terrorist”.

    More than 1,000 police were reportedly deployed around the French Embassy in Jakarta, and also blocked off the road leading to it.

  • 'The Great Reset' For Dummies
    ‘The Great Reset’ For Dummies

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 11/03/2020 – 00:00

    Authored by Tessa Lena via ‘Tessa Fights Robots’ substack,

    What is “the Great Reset”?

    The Great Reset is a massively funded, desperately ambitious, internationally coordinated project led by some of the biggest multinational corporations and financial players on the planet and carried out by cooperating state bodies and NGOs. Its soul is a combination of early 20th century science fiction, idyllic Soviet posters, the obsessiveness of a deranged accountant with a gambling addiction—and an upgraded, digital version of “Manifest Destiny.”

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    The peasants are getting fat, and they are breeding! Oh no.

    The mathematical reason for the Great Reset is that thanks to technology, the planet has gotten small, and the infinite expansion economic model is bust—but obviously, the super wealthy want to continue staying super wealthy, and so they need a miracle, another bubble, plus a surgically precise system for managing what they perceive as “their limited resources.” Thus, they desperately want a bubble providing new growth out of thin air—literally—while simultaneously they seek to tighten the peasants’ belts, an effort that starts with “behavioral modification,” a.k.a. resetting the western peasants’ sense of entitlement to high life standards and liberties (see awful “privilege”).

    The psychological reason for the Great Reset is the fear of losing control of property, the planet. I suppose, if you own billions and move trillions, your perception of reality gets funky, and everything down below looks like an ant hill that exists for you. Just ants and numbers, your assets.

    Thus, the practical aim of the Great Reset is to fundamentally restructure the world’s economy and geopolitical relations based on two assumptions:

    • one, that every element of nature and every life form is a part of the global inventory (managed by the allegedly benevolent state, which, in turn, is owned by several suddenly benevolent wealthy people, via technology), and

    • two, that all inventory needs to be strictly accounted for: be registered in a central database, be readable by a scanner and easily ID’ed, and be managed by AI, using the latest “science.”

    The goal is to count and then efficiently manage and control all resources, including people, on an unprecedented scale, with unprecedented digital anxiety and precision—all while the masters keep indulging, enjoying vast patches of conserved nature, free of unnecessary sovereign peasants and their unpredictability. The king’s world feels far more predictable and relaxed when the chaos of human subjectivity is contained for good.

    Plus, as a potentially lucrative aside, a bunch of these tightly managed “assets” can be also turned into new financial instruments and traded. Game on!

    In other words, it’s an “efficient” global feudalism that goes much farther than its medieval brother since the scanner is all-seeing: every person, every mineral, and every berry is digitally tagged and tracked. Under that framework, every peasant has a function that is derived not from the mystery of life, and not from their inner calling—but from AI, the master of efficiency and the servant of the king. Ideally, the peasants can be convinced that it’s good for them (or necessary to be safe, see “contact tracing”) and that this is what progress and happiness are like—but if not, there are other ways, from classic violence to virtual prisons to “morality pills.”

    The reform in question is meant to disrupt all areas of life, on a planetary scale: government, international relations, finance, energy, food, medicine, jobs, urban planning, real estate, law enforcement, and human interactions—and it starts with changing the way we think of ourselves and our relationship with the world. Notably, privacy is a huge thorn in the collective eye of our “great resetters”—and—as I am typing this, they are pushing their sweet talking points about how privacy is really an outdated concept—especially when it comes to people’s medical data, sheesh—and that we simply cannot move forward with the bright future if silly people keep clinging to their privacy.

    I will briefly go over different elements of this slippery reform in a sec—but to sum it up, the desired end result is a giant, joyless, highly controlled global conveyor of everything and everybody where privacy is tremendously expensive, dissent is unthinkable, and spiritual submission is mandatory. It’s like a 24/7 medicated reality, except the medications are both chemical and digital, and they are reporting you back to the mothership, which can then punish you for bad behavior by, say, blocking your access to certain places or by putting a hold on your digital bank account—perhaps without any human intervention at all.

    Thus, on a sensory level—as it relates to money and power—this conveyor is an attempt of the super wealthy to organize and monetize their “assets,” including people—more efficiently than ever before. On a theological level, the initiative is shaped by transhumanism, a formal belief system rooted in a pathological feeling of being repelled by all things natural—and a resulting view of biological forms as defective robots, which are made perfect, serial killer perfect, by merging with machines in a way that redefines the meaning of being alive and defies death itself.

    I would like to stress that we should never underestimate the importance of subjective feelings and theology in the shaping of historical events. Our entire history is a sum of subjective choices—where the choices of the more powerful and the more driven weigh more. And religious reform, which typically stems from various powerful individuals’ subjective preference for what the big picture should be like, has been a driver of large-scale social, economic, and cultural changes on this planet for centuries. What we are looking at here is a new religion—and as much as I want to believe in the general cleanliness and rationality of the system—on the higher level, we are not dealing with a rational, scientific, honest, benevolent—or even misguided—attempt to make things better. When it comes to the masterminds of the Great Reset, we are dealing with a combination of standard greed—and the emotional pathology of restless, rotting madmen who are freaking out over the maintenance of their property in this new era, and who resent their biological nature as such and want to be gods. Sadly, the crazies are rich and well-connected, and they can hire a million underlings to put on a convincing, feel-good, rational external-facing presentation about their new religion. And to bribe the media. And politicians. And academics. And campaign organizers. And non-profits. And let’s not forget my brethren, the artists, who, out of starvation and indignity, will then create beautiful, artful, moving ads for anything that pays. And by the time the circle is complete, we have a brand new public opinion and technically, still a “democracy”! If only those conspiracy theorists went away…

    So, who are the people leading this, and how coordinated is this effort?

    From the looks of it, it seems to be the usual suspects: top capitalists of the world, historically wealthy dynasties from different parts of Earth, members of secular and religious royalty, billionaires, etc.—in other words, it’s the people who have enough money to feel like this world is theirs, the 0.0001%—and maybe also the people immediately under them who are seeking upward mobility. Some familiar faces, some faces we’ve never seen.

    Obviously, they are not a monolithic mass, and I am sure that they don’t agree with each other on everything and probably compete over who gets to eat more peasants. There is certainly rivalry between the American and the Chinese elites, for example, or between the American and the Russian elites—as well as between different individual super sharks. But all in all, even as they compete, they have shared interests and shared messaging, and there is more strategic camaraderie and common ground between them than between any of them and any of the peasants. For example, none of them is likely to turn down the idea of creating a new class of financial assets to make money off! In addition, they also have advisers—who, in turn, are competing with each other for the highest pay, trying to push their ideas through. All subjective, yet also extensively—and expensively—coordinated in areas of their shared interests.

    And currently, the “winning” concept of the day seems to be a world filled with abbreviations: AI, 5G, IoT, and so on. A world where the money is digital, the food is lab-grown, where everything is counted and controlled by giant monopolies, and the people are largely deprived of free will. A world where each element of nature and each living being is either a data host, or a source of energy—or both. A world where the flow of the peasants’ everyday is micromanaged by ever-monitoring, ever-nudging AI that registers thoughts and feelings before the people even get a chance to make those thoughts and feeling their own. A world where living itself is outsourced to the machine, and a human being is essentially a meat suit.

    Now, I don’t think that this exact vision will ever come true in full. It is likely to implode before it gets half-way there—and some of what I just described is no more than daydreaming of a very broken mind. But the powerful crazies are trying their best to make this nightmare reality. Thus, the danger is not in being overtaken by suddenly self-conscious AI but in the disruption of normal life and in the utter misery that the crazies may cause to our minds and bodies as they rush to slice and dice the world, using various convenient catch phrases such as “global health crisis” or “climate change.”

    And yes, there is definitely coordination and continuity, as there is continuity in dynasties and philosophical trends. Some of it is more ephemeral, and some of it is more concrete. On the ephemeral side, the vision of the “resetters” is related to the futuristic ideas that were popular in the early 20th century, to the dream of a global corporate monopoly that propped up the bolshevik revolution of 1917, and to the overall crave of controlling the world with technology, something that was attempted and failed in the Soviet Union in the 60s—using the language very similar to today’s. On the concrete side, the Great Reset (which by the way is very well coordinated, to the extent that both Biden and Johnson are using the same coded words put forward by the WEF) grows out of the post-WWII efforts to maintain a “correct” power balance in the world, with “correct” financial interests reaping the benefits.

    The “sustainability” language, which is an important pillar of the Great Reset marketing kit, was initially created as a part of various United Nation’s programs—such as “Agenda 21” and “Agenda 2030,” and I am sure that during the production of those programs, both elements—conspiracy and benevolence—were present. Both are sets of extremely dry and boring documents about resource management and justice, which read like something written by a tired, square Soviet teacher with a good grasp of bureaucratic terms, written mostly to justify the paycheck of the bureaucrats and the existence of the United Nations. What’s interesting about the latter is that typically, the UN is pretty useless, meaning that people get together, talk, come up with long bureaucratic documents and non-binding resolutions—and then nothing of essence happens. But not this time. Not now. The program’s on! So it must be important to somebody who’s paying. And yes, I am cynical. In everything that happens, there is always a combination of good intentions, greed, ambition, personal relationships, financial interests, delusions, and so on. Politicians talk to financiers, generals talk to politicians, somebody is somebody else’s uncle, and this is how things get done. Unfortunately, the less straightforward the top-down messaging, and the more abundant the propaganda, the less the value of good intentions, and the easier it is for villains to pull off utter absurdities.

    And of course, initiatives of such great magnitude may go through very long and quiet “planning phases,” during which the desired ideas are being planted in the heads of the desired people through private conversations, small meeting, funded research, industry conventions, and the like. So by the time the “action” button is pressed, it feels like a trend is already there. And let me repeat again, absolutely everything in history is a result of subjective choices made by subjective people. The way everything in history happens is that people get together, decide what they want to do, and do it. When important people act, the impact is more visible. So, in a way, everything is a “conspiracy,” because everything comes through human agency. And often, the important people cover up their deeds, that shouldn’t be a radical idea.

    And yes, by now, the top power holders in the West have figured out that it’s more cost-effective and less labor-consuming for them to just bribe the media “of record,” the scientists, the academics, the politicians, and even the “controlled opposition”—and have them convince the peasants—than to police everything and everyone by force. And by the way, while the pinnacle of this tower is a conspiracy in earnest, in a sense of it being a coordinated effort where the masterminds are acting in general alignment with each other, without disclosing their true long-term goals to the peasants—the rest of the tower is probably the usual human stuff, multiplied by the lack of the old-fashioned, moral sense of responsibility. The usual human stuff is a medley of ambition, hustling, greed, carelessness, arrogance, and even good intentions. The closer to the bottom, the more ignorance and the better the intentions—because most people do believe that they are doing good—but it doesn’t change the tragic trajectory of the “resetting” cavalcade.

    Okay but maybe hold on, there is a real crisis, and the rich have woken up because they want to live? What if there is no conspiracy per se, and they have simply realized that the planet is a mess, and now they want to address the issues of overpopulation and pollution because there really are too many people on the planet who are all over-consuming and polluting? What do you say to that?

    I am glad you asked, so let’s talk about that.

    It is absolutely true that the soulless, utilitarian approach to nature, to life, and to other living beings has been extremely destructive—with the most immediate, most visible destruction outsourced to “third world countries” and to the less financially fortunate people in the West. (See landfills, Cancer Alley, and unhealthy, poison-filled non-organic foods). It is true that massive consumerism and the use disposables (brought to us by more or less the same parties who are now scolding people for consumerism) have created a lot of messes. It is true that our oceans and lungs are full of plastic, that the amount of chronic disease is skyrocketing, and that many species are dying off. It is true that our soil, our food, and our bodies are tainted with highly toxic glyphosate. It is true that usually, decades pass between the time manufacturers realize the toxicity of their product and the time when saying so in a conversation stops being a conspiracy theory. All true. However, it is also true that the people who are pointing fingers at social ills and telling us that we need a Great Reset are from same camps and lineages that have caused it in the first place. It is true that underneath the language of their marketing brochures, there is toxicity and havoc that greatly exceed what we have today. Thus, they are either idiots or liars—and I am afraid it is the latter. However rich, they are not even remotely morally qualified to fix anything in this world. And whatever we choose to do to heal our relationship with nature and with each other—it definitely isn’t the technofascist, neofeudal Great Reset.

    A metaphor: If the leader of the Rapists Party came up with a Platform Against Rape that didn’t stop the raping but that rebranded the very act by saying that if one uses a pink dildo made of recycled plastic to penetrate, then it’s not rape… would you think it’s a platform against rape in earnest?

    So no, they are not the people to lead the way (just check out this garbage in space idea). If we go along, we will end up with a world that looks like this:

    Speaking of solutions, there are plenty of activists and local leaders, such as Vandana Shiva, for example, coming up with ways to heal our relationship with nature. There are whistleblowers. There are lawyers fighting corporate giants and sometimes winning. There are doctors risking their careers to protect their patients. There are local farmers. There are artists baring their souls. There are truth tellers. There is dignity, and there is respect if we insist on them. I believe that good long-term solutions come from inner honesty and peace, and that each of us possesses the unique genius that helps us locate our piece of the puzzle, which ultimately heals the world.

    As far as there being too many people on the planet, I think even that is spin. Actually, Vandana Shiva has produced analysis of industrial vs. traditional local agriculture in terms of numbers, and it looks like we’ve been lied to by Big Ag about their importance, too. Also, the biggest “demographic problem” in the West right now is the growing number of the old vs. the young. And even in the “developing world,” the trends seem to be different from what we are are taught to think. And furthermore, the planet has enough for all, and the reason we are facing scarcity is because that 0.0001% of people control a lot. Ironically, they are the same people who are worried that there is not enough, pushing the idea of overpopulation—often while breeding enthusiastically—and infecting young brains with the idea of overpopulation to the extent that now, some middle-class young people don’t want to have kids, “to save the planet.” How messed up is that?

    And yes, the idea of overpopulation has been worrying the leaders for some decades. I would argue that at times, their thoughts have carried eugenics overtones (see, for example, this 1974 Kissinger Report that brags about “incentivizing” Indian men to get vasectomies). And no, it wouldn’t be completely crazy to posit that eugenics didn’t quite go away since Hitler has ruined the brand, and that whoever believes themselves to own the world, probably wouldn’t mind a little more surgical management of the demographic trends. Can I read their minds? No. I can’t say who exactly thinks what exactly, and luckily for me, I am not invited to their meetings—but every now and then, personas like Gates or Prince Charles say things that sound quite Hitleresque, and it make me wonder. On the other hand, I don’t find it particularly shocking because human nature hasn’t changed since the time when eugenics was socially acceptable in the “respectable society.” Thus, my theory is that some powerful people of the world are truly evil and probably fiddling with eugenics—and some are probably just indifferent to the desires of the peasants—but on my end, I don’t really care which one it is. Evil or indifferent, I don’t want them to destroy my world. Is that too much to ask?

    My job is Poison Distributor.
    My condition is
    Hatred of Biological Forms.
    They call me deranged
    But I am the sanest of all.
    They call me a merciless killer,
    A sadist, a robot, a king.
    But I am just a perfectionist.

    My job is Poison Distributor.
    My religion is
    Hatred of Unpredictable Shapes.
    My poison will find you
    In words,
    In the water you drink,
    In food,
    In the air your breathe,
    This way or another,
    It’ll find you.

    My job is Poison Distributor.
    A very practical job.
    You are welcome.

    Now, let’s quickly look at the areas that, according to the blueprint of the Great Reset, need to be disrupted and completely redesigned. That is a giant topic in itself, and I will only touch upon it lightly, with a special focus on the language used and how it overlaps with the “pandemic response.” I strongly encourage you to go to the World Economic Forum website and look around.

    Statehood and Governance.

    In the new world, countries still exist but they all abide by a central order. It’s “cooperative” (wink, wink). A lot of government functions are automated and delegated to AI. Decisions are based on data and algorithms, there is no privacy, and there is a lot more fluidity as far as migrations (so unfortunately, the very humane sentiment of being kind to immigrants that is being promoted in the media might not about kindness, which is a bummer to me personally). There is also a possibility of replacing human governments with AI altogether, but not immediately. The reasoning is simple: In order for the super wealthy to manage global inventory, individual governments have to act more like mid-level managers accountable to international authorities than like independent federal governments.

    (Remember how “mom and pop shops” were pushed off the market and replaced by chain stores? Same thing here except in this case, the mom and pop stores are countries.)

    Traditional America, now, is very much in the way of this. Its habit of generous consumption and free expression, its self-centered foreign policies, its sense of entitlement, and its big suburban houses are a no-go. A traditional, independent, strong America is an obstacle. In that light—and with a disclaimer that I don’t think that there is such a thing as a just empire, I feel like there is an active effort to “even America out,” to co-opt its government, to destroy farms and small businesses—especially the ones that are not consistent with this all-digital future—and to bring down the entitled middle class, especially in “outdated” career paths. It feels like we are currently in the middle of a “color revolution,” a soft coup. Usually, American elites do it to other nations—but now it’s happening on the domestic soil. It feels like the Great Reset agenda, through its messengers and through its money, is shaping both the schizophrenic “COVID response” and the suddenly mainstream and well-funded, super corporate “social justice / climate” movement, which are all at this point intertwined in terms of messaging. Both pretend to promote pubic good, and both skillfully weaponize real issues and get a rise out of people who have a real love of fairness in their hearts—all to clear the way for the financial goals of the “great resetters”—such as a complete erosion of privacy (see contact tracing), moving all human activities online (see, well, everything), AI-based law enforcement and precrime (see “defund the police”), and so on. And yes, America has many honest problems. But it’s not like the current structures are being replaced with a council of spiritually grounded, wise indigenous elders who are deeply connected to Earth and who will not hurt any innocent life. What’s being attempted—however fuzzy the marketing coverup—is far worse, far less humane, and far more destructive than what we have today. I don’t like it.

    Finance.

    It’s digital currency, crypto, and mobile payments all the way. The citizens must be totally transparent and leave a trace of everything they do, remember?

    Food.

    All I can say is I hope you like cockroach meat, because it’s coming.

    Cynical remarks aside, the “future of food” is a disaster. The liars in high chairs have the nerve to use good words like “sustainable development” but there is nothing sustainable about this thing. It’s BigAg on steroids, very toxic. And, incidentally, it’s also energy-consuming as all these robots, sensors, and data centers ain’t free, but who’s counting that.

    Also, today’s farms have to go. Not only are the pesky traditional local farmers competing with patented lab-grown food and—also patented—GMOs, and—also patented—soils—they are also taking up the space needed for royal recreational areas, as well as wind turbine and solar panel parks (which all take up a lot of space, by the way). And what do you know, maybe the kings really want to “conserve” some patches of nature by keeping it free of people. It’s their inventory, after all, it makes sense to maintain it well.

    No wonder the “COVID response” is hitting the farms so hard, forcing them to go out of business…

    Agriculture

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    Education.

    Online.

    Medicine.

    Tele-

    So far, in both medicine and education, we are very much on track, thanks to the global pandemic…

    Energy.

    Now, this one is interesting. Because fossil fuels, the devil of today’s marketing, are genuinely bad. It’s true that oil extraction is abusive to the planet. The spills create a lot of havoc, and they happen all the time. Oil barons are bandits. People who live close to refineries get sick. Plastic, which comes from oil, is polluting everything, from the oceans to our stomachs and lungs. However, fossil fuels are also the only energy source—besides nuclear—that is currently capable of supporting the world’s population’s consumption levels. Furthermore, if you look under the hood of “green,” it’s not that green, really, unless we are talking the color of money. Solar panels take up a ton on space (see below), they degrade quickly, and turn into toxic heaps.

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    Wind turbines also take up a ton of space and have their own problems. Both are highly dependent on weather and don’t provide sufficient energy. It is also noteworthy that the recent film by Michael Moore, Planet of the Humans, which was exploring some of the not so green aspects of “green energy” and shedding light on some of the corruption in the environmental movement, was attacked by the leading environmentalists to viciously and so uniformly that the film was removed from major platforms and kind of disappeared from the public eye.

    Anyway, what’s going to happen if fossil fuels go away? By the way—and this is an important point—I am not actually convinced that the “resetters’” intend for fossil fuels to truly go away. I think we could be looking at an act of rebranding. I did think until recently that they really wanted to “disapper” fossil fuels—but then I looked into “climate tech”—and now I am thinking that the things are more complex, that it could be a strategic geopolitical maneuver. I don’t know. There are some peculiar technological overlaps between fossil fuels and “green” energy—but time will tell. In any case, if they either go away or pretend to go away, we’ll quickly discover that wind and solar are not cutting it—and then, we’ll meet our new king of “green” energy, nuclear fusion, yay.

    When that happens, our friend, the famous philantrocapitalist, will come to rescue. He is heavily invested in nuclear fusion reactors—in fact, his favorite project, according to himself. (Actually, he happens to be very deeply involved in about every bullet point on the Great Reset list, what a business genius he is.) But wait, to make the intrigue even more interesting, the WHO, which of course enjoys his generous funding, has in the past gone to great lengths to underplay the health toll of nuclear incidents such as Chernobyl and Fukushima.

    Speaking of energy and finance, let’s talk about “human capital.” In the new world, “human capital” is not just a metaphor for HR or labor. Microsoft, for example, has a patent for a method of transforming human behavior into cryptocurency, which is done through an unspecified device coupled with a server that registers body activity and “mines” crypto. Since under the New Normal, digital and crypto are supposed to become mainstream, this looks suspiciously like a tool that can be used both to tightly control the behavior of the poor who may depend on this for income—and to literally mine the bodies of otherwise “useless” welfare dependents / UBI recepients for energy (which, by the way, is an actual thing, believe it or not).

    Furthermore, this patent could potentially be used to create a new financial instrument because, if mined for energy, these people become “assets” that could possibly be bunched together into virtual portfolios and virtually traded. See how neat? Now, we are talking proper serfdom! And yes, this sounds very sci-fi but let’s not forget how some billionaire “visionaries” think—not like normal people, or else the workers at Amazon warehouses wouldn’t be wearing diapers to skip bathroom breaks. Also let’s not forget that today, there is trading of very theoretical items as well as betting on weather. A lot of money in this world is made on strange, arbitrary things!

    Speaking of weather, the Great Reset also legitimizes the dangerous, invasive atrocity that is geoengineering, and makes it potentially “cool” and “life-saving,” just like some “climate change movement” white papers do. I noticed that and mourned that fact a couple of years ago, screaming from the rooftops about how messed up it was. Spraying toxic crap in the air is cool and “green”? What an act of linguistic trickery.

    Also, a word on carbon. I am not going to get into the entire thing because the article is already long, however, it seems that whatever the story of carbon was at birth, by now the story has transformed into a tool of creating a market out of thin air, and a bunch of financial instruments to make money off, also out of thin air. For example, look at this plant, backed by Gates and some oil giants. My favorite part is that after carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere using a cocktail of chemicals, one of the ways to store the loot is to burn a bunch of trees (sorry, “biomass”). Yes, that makes perfect sense, because who can make money off simply leaving trees alone and letting them do the job, for free? What kind of idiot would allow that?

    I would also like to point out the fact that when it’s stored, it’s stored deep underground in ways never done before. (What does is do the inner processes of the planet? Did anybody think this through?) It also requires building pipelines to transport carbon dioxide from one place to another, much like transporting oil. And finally, carbon capture and storage is incredibly energy intensive, and the energy comes from… fossil fuels? Nuclear? Wind turbines that then have to take up half of the planet’s surface? Oh I don’t know… And speaking of language, the goal is not “zero carbon emissions,” it’s “Net Zero Carbon Emissions,” which means that we can keep polluting, and then build a new lucrative industry on top of it, while creating a new kind of pollution. In other words, business as usual…

    Also, while we are on the topic of “green sustainable development,” isn’t building a lot more surveillance tech and infrastructure—which are all extremely energy-consuming not to mention unclean—at odds with the idea of green? I thought about it a while ago when I read, with great initial excitement, the text of the Green New Deal proposed legislation. I was, like, yay justice and indigenous rights, yay…. wait… “smart” power grids? Isn’t it exactly what Big Tech wants, and doesn’t it imply a need for smart sensors that come with more infrastructure and satellites, more towers, a loss of privacy, and new kind of wireless pollution producing untested health effects? It stopped me on my tracks and compelled me to look into various “green” initiatives—and as a result, discover various skeletons in the closet. And then I stumbled into the work of Cory Morningstar, and I was like, wow. My instincts were right, it’s not exactly what it seems!!

    Now, this provides a nice segue into how the “global health crisis” narrative plays into the Great Reset.

    First, some housekeeping notes.

    As I said before, the Great Reset is an extremely ambitious plan of restructuring both the world’s economy—and the very notion of what it means to be alive. (Is an AI-nudged zombie whose decision-making is externalized really alive?) Without a cooperating population, this ambitious economic and religious reform cannot succeed.

    What is the best way of making the population cooperate with this very strange reform? It’s fear—because promises of pleasure are not enough to pull off such a massive and bizarro shift. Thus, it has to be fear and stress, whether it’s because of an external enemy, a prospect of a natural disaster, or a disease.

    Let’s not forget that prior to 2020, there has already been a very expensively organized fear narrative, supported by more or less the same players who are now pushing for the Great Reset. I am of course talking about the weaponized “climate change” narrative. And while there are plenty of environmental problems that need to be addressed asap, the corporate “climate change” movement has been strangely focused on messaging that roughly coincides with the messaging of the Great Reset campaign, serving their financial goals—and the funding trajectories also overlap. So it looks like the financial interests behind the Great Reset tried out to use the “climate movement” first but it didn’t generate the desired fear levels quickly enough. Not enough people cared. I have personally sat through a training session, and am familiar with “organizing” and the neurolinguistic programming tricks that are supposed to make the audiences very worried about the climate. The messaging is very well thought-through and gives away a generous financial backing, it’s not a hippie grassroots movement—even if a lot of individual people sincerely pour their souls into that. Just like rank-and-file Jehovah witnesses knocking on your door might be extremely sincere.

    As a human being, I don’t trust any entity that coldly, calculatedly, tries to make me scared and trigger a stress response. The people I listened to didn’t seem very afraid themselves. They were well-fed, middle-class, and not underemployed. They were not afraid to be arrested at a protest—and actually they sought to be arrested, without any fear for their future employment. After seeing that, I started asking questions as to why they wanted me to be afraid, and what they wanted me to do. When I started asking questions and researching, it turned out that the trajectory of “solutions” included things like smart grids, electric cars (that are not remotely green), and geoengineering. That, to me, was not acceptable. It also meant that they didn’t really respect the planet because if they did, they wouldn’t want to stick towers everywhere or spray crap in the atmosphere to block the sun. Now, it is very possible that the environmental movement was good and honest when it just started—but a lot of it has been since hijacked, in a very stealthy way where the people on the ground don’t even realize whom they are serving. And again, let me repeat: There is a tremendous need for true sustainability, it’s just that the practical measures implied by the coded marketing language are not sustainable at all!

    In any case, scaring the people with the official narrative of the climate emergency definitely created a ripple in people’s consciousness and a degree of environmental anxiety, especially in Gen Z—but it didn’t do enough to either paralyze or mobilize. But when the virus came along, as if by magic, things started falling into places quickly—things that had been unthinkable before. No, I am not saying that the virus isn’t real. And I am not making any definitive statements about where it came from or how it came about. I have my theories but some things, I just won’t know, and can’t change. But what I know is that the reaction has been absurd, unprecedented, and strangely consistent with the action items that had already been on the agenda. Speaking of emergencies, Woodstock happened during a big pandemic…

    So let’s see.

    Did we forcefully move most activities—such as education, medicine, shopping, sex, and recreation—online for now, as we are working on “digitizing” the physical world, for easy tracking and surveillance?

    Check.

    Did we, despite the lockdowns for white collar peasants, continue with construction—including very robust construction of new telecom structures and cellular antennas, necessary to support the IoT?

    Check.

    Did we succeed at near destroying the livelihoods of many independent farmers who were competing with our new “edible” products, and also at disrupting the traditional food supply chains?

    Check.

    Did we also succeed at destroying a good number of small face-to-face businesses?

    Well, of course!

    Live music venues and theaters?

    For sure.

    Are we working on replacing law enforcement with AI?

    You bet! Defund! Defund! Defund!

    Are we trying to legitimize complete erosion of privacy and easy access to private health data?

    Yes! Because health emergency.

    Are we on target when it comes to tracking every movement of every person?

    Contact tracing, yes! But some countries are still behind.

    Is a digital health ID now required for international travel?

    Yes, Common Pass is live!

    Have we been able to disrupt political and legal procedures and create chaos?

    Yes, Sir!

    Importantly, have we succeeded at messing up human thinking and relationships to the extent that we, the robot, the abuser, are now everybody’s only friend?

    Still working on it but close.

    Are we well on target with prepping the people for a broad rollout of smart wearables?

    Yep. Wear your mask.

    Are we legally controlling people’s sex lives?

    Yes!

    Speaking of, state control of people’s bodies and sexuality is a classic sign of a religious reform. Whenever that happens, watch out.

    Or let’s take lockdowns, for example. Lockdowns and restrictions of movement and physical contact are great tools of behavioral modification—and behavioral modification, also known as social engineering, is for sure a very respected art form among the powerful ones. A self-respecting social engineer plans ten steps ahead and creates situations in which targets beg for desired changes! I posit that currently, we are subjected to an involuntary S&M dance. We are in the middle of a ritual of designed to create a sense of confusion, insecurity, and dependence—eventually to be resolved by our Masters, for which we will be very grateful because we will just want to the unbearable tension to be resolved. Already, many have developed the Stockholm Syndrome, siding with the abuser. The measures are entirely arbitrary—but it doesn’t matter, we are expected to comply and to accept that our suffering and deprivation are for our own good. It makes us a “better person.”

    In the eyes of a psychopath, there is no joy.

    In the eyes of a slave, there is an acceptance of a strange feeling of numbness where the soul used to be.

    Where do we go from there?

    I, for one, don’t think that we should accept the darkness. I think that our best option is to insist on dignity and to find our hearts. Our hearts will tell us what to do next.

  • Private Jet Traffic Soars As Elites Panic Exit Cities Amid Virus, Elections 
    Private Jet Traffic Soars As Elites Panic Exit Cities Amid Virus, Elections 

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/02/2020 – 23:40

    With US new coronavirus cases steadily rising  since mid-September, ushering in what some call the second wave of the virus pandemic, private jet traffic has soared as wealthy folks are leaving metro areas for rural communities, according to CNBC. 

    Data from Tivoli, an online payments platform for jets, collected by Private Jet Card Comparisons, showed private jet flights at Francis S. Gabreski Airport in Westhampton, New York, jumped 172% in October. Flights at Aspen Airport in Aspen, Colorado, surged 135%, and Vail flights were up 95% over the month. 

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    Inversely, private jet traffic at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport plummeted 52% in October. Teterboro is used by wealthy people to fly into New York City. Private flights at Westchester County Airport, another airport used by elites to fly into New York City, also registered a decline for the month, down 36%. 

    Chicago’s Midway Airport saw private jet flights decrease by as much as 47%, while flights at Dulles International Airport, the second-busiest private jet airport in the country – saw flights nearly halved for the month. 

    “The coronavirus pandemic is redrawing the flight patterns of America’s private jets, as airports in resort towns see big jumps in traffic while flights near cities decline,” CNBC noted. The reason is that wealthy folks panic bought homes in rural areas earlier this year to escape the pandemic. Now, as the second virus wave arrives, these folks are “bugging out.” 

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    Doug Gollan, the founder of Private Jet Card Comparisons, told CNBC this is “further proof that instead of being at their Park Avenue apartments, the wealthy are in the Hamptons or Aspen.” 

    Gollan said corporate America is conducting business meetings at their homes, which has disrupted the typical flight patterns for business jets. 

    “Instead of having a meeting in their office, a CEO will have a team fly to their home in the Hamptons or Aspen and have the meeting there,” he said.

    In Nantucket, Massachusetts, airports observed a 28% rise in October, along with a 19% increase in Martha’s Vineyard. 

    Gollan was uncertain if remote working would permanently change private jet flight routes, though, in the short run, there’s a noticeable change, he said. 

    “There is going to be a direct correlation between Covid and the pace at which big offices reopen or don’t open,” he said.

    Besides the virus pandemic, elites are jumping on private jets to their second and or third homes in rural communities ahead of the election, which could produce the next round of social unrest. 

  • This Election Is A Simple Choice: Face A Chaotic Future With Courage… Or Fear
    This Election Is A Simple Choice: Face A Chaotic Future With Courage… Or Fear

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/02/2020 – 23:20

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

    This election season hasn’t been about Trump versus Biden.

    It hasn’t been about capitalism versus socialism.

    It’s not even about liberty versus authority.

    As I said in my last article this election is about a simple choice, facing a chaotic future with courage or fear.

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    Regardless of who wins, my many libertarian friends and colleagues are correct that the ship of state cannot and will not be turned at this point in any meaningful way.

    There are forces at work which will unleash hell on earth if Trump wins, which he should.

    If the past four years have taught us anything it should have taught us that.

    What’s on the ballot tomorrow is something much larger, however, because hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. and Europe are facing an existential choice on both sides of the power dynamic.

    The People sense the closing off of escape routes by an oligarch class that rightly sees their institutional power waning in the face of rapid decentralization of information.

    Because of this, an inevitable power struggle has ensued. This election has taken on a quality that transcends the practical nature of elections — who will run the consensual hallucination that is the State.

    The Davos Crowd is in full control at the moment in Europe and attempting The Black Revolution here in the U.S. They will enact as much of their Great Reset as they can and play every card in their hand and dirty trick in their bag to achieve it.

    This election is a nexus, a singularity, that has become an opportunity for an inflection point in history, one where ideas that were forced into the fringe of the political discourse during the last cycle have the opportunity for a real audience in the next one.

    And the question I have for libertarians is, “Are you ready to lead or are you going to sit aloof, arms folded, and miss your chance?”

    From what I’ve seen so far it’s not promising.

    Donald Trump is no Ron Paul, but, honestly, libertarian commentators were moaning about Ron in 2008 and 2012. He didn’t pass the purity test they said and he was encouraging people into the vortex of politics.

    That was the wrong read then and it’s the wrong read now.

    As Trump holds rally after rally around the country, bringing literally millions of people together a statement has been made.

    Courage trumps fear.

    Even Obama couldn’t pull crowds like Trump has. This is unprecedented in American politics.

    I contend the symbolism of this election far outweighs all other considerations. There’s a spirit animating this election unlike any other I’ve witnessed because not of who Trump is but what he represents.

    Earlier in the year, post-George Floyd, the picture was very different. It was much darker. BLM and Antifa, thanks to corporate sponsorship and billions in oligarch money, ran wild in the streets.

    Dressed in black bloc, chanting slogans, throwing rocks, sucker-punching suburbanites and burning cities they took over the streets in a crude attempt to force change onto people already scared over a virus.

    Videos of white people washing the feet of their new black masters were all over social media. Struggle sessions were brought to diners forced to eat outside thanks to stupid COVID-19 social distancing rules.

    With government assistance (because communists can’t build anything of value on their own) they set up the CHAZ in Seattle and failed miserably in places like Atlanta.

    All of these projects, however, lost their momentum the moment it became obvious Americans weren’t buying any of it.

    They bought guns instead.

    They may have bought guns out of fear, but they bought them anyway.

    Marxism has been the dominant political philosophy of this past cycle, pushing the nascent ideas of extreme individualism to the fringe.

    And it is reaching for the gold ring of ultimate power. The orgy of violence its adherents call for is here. There’s no avoiding it but it doesn’t have to become an all-consuming jihad against the human spirit like it has been in the past – think Cambodia, Vietnam, the U.S.S.R and, of course, Germany.

    Millions of Americans saw this future and recoiled from it. Right into the arms of Donald Trump who preached faith in them.

    That’s where these mind-blowing rallies, flotillas, caravans and spontaneous uprisings supporting Trump are coming from. Improperly harnessed, that energy can be turned into something truly ugly.

    This should be the signal for libertarians to come down off their mountains and declare themselves ready to lead the restitution of culture and civilized behavior.

    Marxism can’t bring anything except a few thousand paid agitators to politically-sympathetic jurisdictions to loot, steal and bully people.

    The mere threat of liberty brings out millions to sing ‘God Bless America.”

    Because the Trump movement is a celebration of that which should unite us — family, faith, community, dignity. After decades of the Marxists dividing us into ever smaller echo chambers we were supposed to be demoralized and beaten.

    And judging from what I see from great thinkers like Robert Higgs I can only conclude they are just that, encouraging Ancaps to think this is a winning strategy.

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    This response is a defense mechanism of people without the capacity to lead.

    Bob is right there are problems with Trump but where he sees dismay I see hope.

    Why? Again, because this election isn’t about Trump or the State. It’s not about the nation. It’s about the assault on our communities, faith, family and sense of self.

    It is an assault on the value of a human life.

    And the question we are facing, imperfectly, is, “Are we the Last Man clinging to life like a barnacle in a violent sea or something greater; something with vitality, possessed with the spark of the creative, or even the divine?”

    The people at those Trump rallies are anything but barnacles. And Twitter is full of supposed libertarians cynically reminding us that voting doesn’t matter.

    It doesn’t, until it does.

    For all his faults, Trump did what so many libertarians refuse to do, come off the mountain and lead. He could do this because Ron Paul motivated the people to declare they wanted some of what libertarians are selling.

    In marketing terms these are ‘hot leads.’

    And we don’t listen to them.

    We talk at them, if not down to them.

    We treat them exactly as Antifa and BLM treat those that don’t agree with them, as beneath them. People wonder why I hate the term, “sheeple.” Shouldn’t it be obvious? Because you don’t denigrate the people you’re trying to convince to buy what you’re selling.

    So, my next question is, “Do you want to be right or do you want to help make a better world?”

    If it’s the latter then realize the opportunity is here to direct that energy towards what comes next. What comes after the election will require leadership and skill. It will require patience, temperance and most importantly, courage.

    It will require people willing to step up, be better and lead. And if you don’t like Trump’s leadership, fine. What will you do to counter it…. and posting memes on Twitter isn’t an answer.

    Because even if we have the right ideas, we won’t be given that opportunity if we don’t first do the smallest thing we can do, stand next to them. Be a part of something not perpetually outside of it.

    If that means voting, then vote. The symbolism should be clear enough.

    It means stating without irony that the State is truly immoral but you voted anyway. Not because you love Trump, though he’s hilarious, but because you are willing to find common ground with people who you disagree with but who also stand athwart the tide of authoritarian control.

    The people you are trying to persuade will respect you for that. The ideas you have will get a better audience.

    I used to be that guy. I know what that looks like. Guess what? It looks an awful lot like despair.

    And if that’s the best we libertarians have to offer, then this fight for the individual’s spirit, regardless of what happens in this election, is already over.

    *  *  *

    Join my Patreon if you want a guide through the post-election breakdown. Install the Brave Browser because Google sucks.

  • "You Are No Longer My Mother" – 'Trump Derangement Symptom' Is Tearing Families Apart
    “You Are No Longer My Mother” – ‘Trump Derangement Symptom’ Is Tearing Families Apart

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/02/2020 – 23:00

    America hasn’t been this divided almost since the end of the “Reconstruction” era. President Trump has been labeled the most polarizing political figure of his generation. In certain areas, the red ‘Make America Great Again’ baseball cap simply cannot be worn without the risk of harassment or physical violence.

    This has made many Trump supporters all the more stubborn about expressing their views, provoking confrontations and arguments at the table during family get-togethers.

    In a recent piece published just one day before Election Day, Reuters spoke to 10 people who shared how their support for the president has impacted their relationships with family member.

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    One lifelong Democrat named Mayra Gomez, an immigrant to the country, told her 21-year-old son five months ago that she was voting for Donald Trump. In response, she says, he cut her out of his life.

    Their last argument was so acrimonious, Gomez isn’t even certain whether their differences can be overcome.

    “He specifically told me, ‘You are no longer my mother, because you are voting for Trump’” Gomez, 41, a personal care worker in Milwaukee, told Reuters. Their last conversation was so bitter that she is not sure they can reconcile, even if Trump loses his re-election bid.

    “The damage is done. In people’s minds, Trump is a monster. It’s sad. There are people not talking to me anymore, and I’m not sure that will change,” said Gomez, who is a fan of Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigrants and handling of the economy.

    Once upon a time, elderly family members relied on their children and grandchildren to run errands and help provide for them in old age. That social contract has now eroded to such an intense degree that many believe it’s too late now: the damage to the inter-generational relationship will be almost impossible to repair, even if Trump loses, few expect the animosity animating Trump and his supporters to fade quickly.

    “Unfortunately, I don’t think national healing is as easy as changing the president,” said Jaime Saal, a psychotherapist at the Rochester Center for Behavioral Medicine in Rochester Hills, Michigan. “It takes time and it takes effort, and it takes both parties – no pun intended – being willing to let go and move forward,” she said. Saal said tensions in people’s personal relationships have spiked given the political, health and social dynamics facing the United States. Most often she sees clients who have political rifts with siblings, parents or in-laws, as opposed to spouses.

    Neighbors have turned against neighbors amid a flood of reports about lawn sign vandalism, and there has even been a surge in divorces:

    Gayle McCormick, 77, who separated from her husband William, 81, after he voted for Trump in 2016, said, “I think the legacy of Trump is going to take a long time to recover from.”

    The two still spend time together, although she is now based in Vancouver, he in Alaska. Two of her grandchildren no longer speak to her because of her support for Democrat Hillary Clinton four years ago. She has also become estranged from other relatives and friends who are Trump supporters.

    Finally, a study by Gallup found that Trump’s third year in office set a new record for party polarization; as 89% of Republicans approved of Trump’s performance in office in 2019, only 7% of Democrats thought he was doing a good job.

  • U.S. New Vehicle Sales Could Disappoint In October Amid Virus Resurgence
    U.S. New Vehicle Sales Could Disappoint In October Amid Virus Resurgence

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/02/2020 – 22:40

    Submitted by Christophe Barraud

    Analysts look divided concerning U.S. new vehicle sales in October after they rebounded by 90.4% MoM since April (Wards data).

    According to the Bloomberg consensus, they should rise to 16.50m(e) SAAR, up from 16.34m in September.

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    However, two out of four specialists I’m following closely, are betting on a sharp downward surprise in a context where the federal government’s CARES Act programs for the most part expired at the end of July and a new wave of coronavirus hit several states in cooler regions.

    1- ALG, Inc., a subsidiary of TrueCar, Inc. projects “ total new vehicle sales will reach 1,307,998 units in October 2020, down 6.1% from a year ago when adjusted for the same number of selling days. This month’s seasonally adjusted annualized rate (SAAR) for total light vehicle sales is an estimated 15.7 million units. ”

    2- In the meantime, Industry consultants J.D. Power and LMC Automotive said “the seasonally adjusted annualized rate (SAAR) for total new vehicle sales is expected to be 15.9 million units, down 0.8 million units from 2019, the smallest year-over-year decline since the pandemic began.”

    3- At the opposite, Cox Automotive noted “the seasonally adjusted annual rate (SAAR) of sales is expected to finish near 16.4 million, up slightly from September’s surprisingly strong 16.3 million rate but down from last year’s 16.8 million level”

    4- Finally, Wards Intelligence expects sales to reach 16.8 million SAAR.

  • Russia Vows "All Necessary Assistance" To Armenia In Nagorno-Karabakh, Threatening Regional War
    Russia Vows “All Necessary Assistance” To Armenia In Nagorno-Karabakh, Threatening Regional War

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/02/2020 – 22:20

    In a major weekend development Russia said that should Azerbaijan spread its military operations against Armenia beyond the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region, it will give “all necessary assistance” to Armenia, with which Moscow has a defense pact:

    Russia would be prepared to render “all necessary assistance” to treaty partner Armenia if the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict expanded to Armenian territory, Russia’s Foreign Ministry declared Saturday.

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    Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan with President Putin, via Kremlin.ru

    Russia’s Foreign Ministry stated that Moscow “will render Yerevan all necessary assistance if clashes take place directly on the territory of Armenia.”

    This after over the past month there’s been no less than three failed ceasefire attempts, with the last couple lasting a mere hours before large-scale shelling resumed from both sides. 

    The Russian statements makes the potential for the conflict to spin out into a regional war more likely, given Turkey has already made similar vows to its ally Azerbaijan. Turkey’s government has outright called for the “liberation” of Armenian ethnic held Nagorno-Karabakh. And Armenia’s military has accused Turkey of already actively supporting the Azeri Army through air support and foreign mercenaries transferred from northern Syria.

    According to Moscow Times, “Russia has reportedly set up a small military outpost on the border of Armenia in an apparent attempt to keep Azerbaijan’s offensive from spilling over into Armenian territory.”

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    Armenia is clearly pressing for greater Russian involvement. “The prime minister of Armenia has asked the Russian president to begin urgent consultations with the aim of determining the kind and amount of aid which the Russian Federation can provide Armenia to ensure its security,” Armenia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Saturday.

    Meanwhile neither side nor their international backers appear willing to back down or deescalate anytime soon. On Monday Turkey’s Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said the Azeri Army will not stop its operations in Karabakh and adjacent areas until total withdrawal of Armenian forces from “occupied Azerbaijani lands”.

    Ironically this continues the trend of NATO member Turkey stoking the conflict even as NATO leadership in Brussels urges both parties to come to the table for peace talks.

  • Vonnegut's Dark Vision Arrived 60 Years Early…
    Vonnegut’s Dark Vision Arrived 60 Years Early…

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/02/2020 – 22:00

    Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

    “THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.” – Harrison Bergeron – Kurt Vonnegut

    Kurt Vonnegut’s short story – Harrison Bergeron – was written in 1961, and in Vonnegut’s darkly satirical style, portrayed America in 2081 as an disgracefully dystopian nightmare. Little did Vonnegut know what he considered outrageous and 120 years in the future, would be far closer to our current dystopian reality just 60 years later. The story was brought to my attention by my wife a week ago when we were talking about the absurdity of masks, their uselessness in stopping viruses, how they are nothing more than a means to control the population, being used to spread fear, and as a dehumanizing technique.

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    She remembered the name Diana Moon Glampers from reading the story in high school. Never has a story that takes 15 minutes to read, captured the evilness and depravity of a government demanding “equality” in a more succinct and brutal manner. Its parallels with our current government enforced lockdown, mandatory muzzles, mainstream media propaganda, and social media censorship is uncannily accurate.

    The premise of Vonnegut’s story is George and Hazel Bergeron sitting on their couch watching TV, sometime after their fourteen-year old son Harrison had been taken away by the government and jailed for the crime of being strong, good looking, intelligent, and defiant against their ridiculous regulations and dictates. The mediocre minds of those in charge had taken the American Declaration of Independence’s phrase – “All men are created equal” to a ludicrous extreme.

    Their warped interpretation of our founding document failed to acknowledge the term “independence”, and the unalienable rights of all men to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We are created equal in the eyes of God, but we have free choice to use our abilities to succeed or fail in life. Some people use their intellectual abilities to succeed, others use their athletic strength, and others their physical appearance and talents. The government should not dictate who should succeed or fail.

    The totalitarian government in Vonnegut’s 2081 America coerces its citizens into being equal to one another in appearance, behavior, and achievements. To attain physical and intellectual equality among all Americans, the government torments its citizens through mandatory handicapping, enforced by the Handicapper General – Diana Moon Glampers.

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    The beautiful must wear repugnant masks or disfigure themselves, the intelligent must listen to piercing noises that impede their ability to think, and the elegant and strong must wear weights around their necks. Removal of their government mandated handicaps results in huge fines and imprisonment. Vonnegut takes the “achievement” of total equality to its most absurd outcomes. The foolishness of handicapping the best and brightest citizens to achieve total equality is unnatural and wrong. Punishing the talented by forcing them to be unexceptional and compliant, results in a society of mediocrity and mendaciousness.

    Harrison Bergeron is seven feet tall, three hundred pounds, athletic, graceful, handsome, intelligent and defiant. He is the embodiment of the alpha American male, making him a dangerous threat to a government dependent upon keeping its populace fearful, sedated, cowed, average and unmotivated to defy their dictates. The handicaps placed on Harrison were heavier than anyone had ever required.

    “Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides. Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.” – Harrison Bergeron – Kurt Vonnegut

    Despite these hinderances, he escapes from his jail cell, bursts into the studio where average ballet dancers, masked to hide their beauty, and weighed down by bags of birdshot, are joylessly giving an unexceptional performance in front of a nationwide audience of unthinking automatons, obediently following the orders of their overseers. The warning announcement from the government before he arrived at the studio said he was plotting to overthrow the government and should be considered extremely dangerous.

    In this world of the “future”, anyone not toeing the government line and exercising their right to think differently or question the government narrative is considered a traitor and dangerous. Individuality is a crime. Thinking for yourself is a crime. Enjoying life is a crime. Not obeying masking rules is a crime. Does this remind you of anything in present day America? Harrison is brave and defiant, while the majority are cowardly and passive.

    Harrison rips off his steel restraints and handicaps, revealing his physical strength and magnificence, reminding TV viewers that underneath their own restraints and handicaps, they too are individuals, capable of excelling and living life fully. He declares himself emperor and selects a ballerina as his empress.

    The other dancers and musicians removed their handicaps and began to play and dance up to their God given abilities. This scene offered the potential for a revolution. As Harrison and his empress danced majestically, you could visualize the mental and physical binds breaking across the country. A spirit of excellence and independence could sweep across the land and the people could break free of their government mandated trusses.

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    But it was not to be. Authoritarian governments, once they attain power and control, will not relinquish it without a fight. They will use violent means to keep the sheep docile and obedient.

    “It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor. Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.” – Harrison Bergeron – Kurt Vonnegut

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    The governments of the future and the present cannot allow displays of individuality and defiance of authority, or they lose their power, control and wealth. Therefore, they will resort to extreme acts of violence to enforce their will upon their subjects. Governments want passive, unthinking, obedient serfs, who do as they are told and believe whatever narrative they are peddled.

    In Vonnegut’s dystopian future the government achieved this mental state of distraction through externally applied handicaps, but in reality, they have been able to achieve this outcome through government school indoctrination centers, drugs to induce tranquility, and technology to mesmerize, distract, and propagandize an easily swayed populace.

    Vonnegut was certainly warning his readers about the evils of equality as sold by the socialists/communists during the 1950s. Based on what have seen since his warning and the current drift of the country towards socialist authoritarian enforced equality – taking from the successful and giving to the failures – we have failed to heed the moral of his cautionary tale. We’ve chosen comforting lies over unpleasant truths.

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    Vonnegut’s two main themes were the dangers of government enforced total equality and the power of television/technology to control and manipulate our thoughts and feelings. Those with average intelligence required nothing more than to be entertained by the TV, but those with above average intelligence or abilities either willingly dumbed themselves down or hid their special attributes, to avoid the harsh handicaps inflicted by the government.

    Fear of severe punishment intimidated the talented into docile submission. The quest for equality was achieved. The result was a nation of stupid, slow dullards, incapable of critical thought or achievement. Vonnegut’s question for his audience was, are we willing to sacrifice our liberty and freedom in order to achieve a government mandated and enforced level of warped equality?

    Anyone with an iota of awareness and critical thinking ability can see the parallels with our current path of compulsory equality, enforced through government regulations, left wing academics, social media shaming, corporate virtue signaling, and socialist politicians. Rather than physically handicapping those with more talent and drive, they attempt to equalize for the inept and lazy by lowering the bar and heaping financial incentives upon the “disadvantaged”.

    The entire BLM scam being jammed down the throats of white Americans is based on the falsehood of systemic racism and the perceived need to equal the playing field for blacks by giving them the ball on the five-yard line. We have universities ignoring SAT scores to allow minorities slots earned by Asians and whites. The entire educational system has been dumbed down to make the intellectually challenged (aka dummies) feel like they are equal to those who outperform and outwork them. Being educated at a university by academics who have never worked a day in their lives doesn’t make you intelligent, as we can plainly see by the level of ignorance in this country.

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    The narrative of victimhood has been flogged by the deceitful mainstream media, pandering politicians, and imparted by left wing professors to their oblivious indoctrinated students. This narrative is used to guilt those who worked for their success into volunteering their positions and supporting undeserved remunerations.

    The trillions spent to alleviate the perceived disadvantages of blacks since LBJ’s Great Society implementation have done nothing but enslave millions in the chains of a welfare mentality and it’s never enough. Equality won’t be achieved until trillions of reparation bribes are paid and their criminal element are rewarded for their looting and rioting efforts in cities across the land.

    The victim card is used by feminists for “equal pay”, even though the statistics they use are fake. The LGBQT movement demands special rights, rather than equal rights. Sports Illustrated now puts obese chicks and men pretending to be women in their swimsuit issue in order to be politically correct and woke. Those of a libertarian bent don’t care how others choose to live their lives, but trying to force abnormality upon the community through laws and regulations is a bridge too far. Bringing others down to further your agenda is not what this country is about. And the pushback is now commencing.

    The most relevant parallel between Vonnegut’s dystopian future and 2020 has been the use of fear by the government, their media mouthpieces, and handsomely paid “experts” to herd the population into lockdown corrals, while forcing mandatory masking (muzzling) under threat of fines and imprisonment. This has been done to “save us” from a flu that will not kill 99.7% of us and is only a risk to the very old and infirm.

    Even though the CDC, New England Journal of Medicine and numerous other medical authorities detailed the ineffectiveness of masks in combating viruses prior to this engineered pandemic, the authorities demand compliance and submission to mask mandates, even though the virus continues to spread despite compulsory masking around the world – except in Sweden.

    In Vonnegut’s dark vision of the future, the handsome and beautiful are masked to make the ugly and average feel good about themselves. The intelligent and thoughtful are hampered by screeching sounds so they are dumbed down to the level of compliant dullards. The fear of reprisal and punishment keeps the population terrified and easy to manipulate and manage.

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    Vonnegut’s totalitarian government behemoth sought to dehumanize its subjects, suck the joy from their lives, and create a nation of submissive serfs, unwilling to revolt against their masters. Our power-crazed autocrats, running the show, are jubilant at the success of their demonic experiment in convincing the vast swath of humanity to love their servitude, scurrying around like masked mice, avoiding each other as if there was a real plague engulfing the world.

    The un-Constitutional lockdowns are a test drive for further authoritarian measures designed to make our lives joyless, bleak and controlled by a master class of oligarchs and their henchmen enforcers. Their goal is to turn us against each other, creating a nation of snitches and equally miserable slaves for the state. They haven’t resorted to shotgun blasts on national TV, but physically attacking the non-compliant has begun.

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    Vonnegut’s entire story takes place with George and Hazel Bergeron planted on their couch watching TV. Vonnegut clearly believed the relatively new invention of television had become a hugely important part of our daily lives, with the potential capacity to be used by the government to sedate, rule and terrorize the population into doing what they were told. As Bernays noted almost 100 years ago, the manipulation of the habits and opinions of the masses through unseen propaganda techniques allow the invisible government to manipulate and control the minds of its citizens.

    Television made this “necessary” molding of minds to the desires of the government dramatically easier. Vonnegut saw television as mainly a sedative for the masses, keeping them docile and distracted from thinking. It was also a means of coercion, as the news bulletin showed a photograph of Harrison with his good looks disfigured and strength dissipated as a visual example to viewers of what will happen to them if they do not stifle their own abilities and obey their overlords. The live executions on TV were used as a warning to everyone about the fate of revolutionaries.

    Vonnegut had no idea how the power of television would be taken to the nth power with the onset of the internet, “smart” phones, and social media. The geniuses and techno-geeks assured us technology would enhance freedom and open the world to new horizons and discoveries. All the knowledge ever learned would be at the fingertips of everyone on the planet. A glorious future awaited. Sadly, for humanity, the glorious future never arrived. As Huxley predicted, technological progress has just provided a more efficient means of going backwards. Technology is used as a never-ending distraction for those with below average intelligence.

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    The unadulterated use of propaganda and fear has never been more evident than during this great reset pandemic scheme. The brightly colored Covid-19 case counters at the bottom of every MSM news channel screen are designed to scare the non-thinking math challenged noobs into believing mass death will sweep the nation unless they lockdown and mask-up. The government uses influencers (Hollywood idiots and sports heroes who can’t spell hero) and mass media advertising campaigns to make the plebs believe masks work and lockdowns will stop the virus. The level of willful ignorance is beyond comprehension, but a true credit to the propaganda powers of the state.

    The truth is out there, but the billionaire Silicon Valley censorship police are doing their part as the enforcement arm of the invisible government overseers, to obscure, delete, and suppress any opinions not adhering to the approved Party narrative. There are thousands of medical professionals who know HCQ + zinc stops this virus dead in its tracks, but acknowledging that truth would not help enrich Gates, Fauci and the drug company complex. Therefore, it is ridiculed, scorned and banned from use by politicians and media pundits on the take. The current fear mongering has reached a new level this week as their final push to rid themselves of Trump enters the home stretch.

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    The talking heads screech about new all-time highs in cases and hyper-ventilate about the coming wave of death unless we elect Biden, lockdown and enforce mandatory masking. What they do not tell you is testing reached an all-time high of 1.4 million yesterday, so with the same positivity rate (with at least 50% false positives), cases will always go up. The vast majority of those testing positive have no symptoms, meaning they aren’t sick. The only thing that should matter is deaths per case. How many cases lead to a death?

    At the peak in April there were 2,113 deaths per day when cases were 30,000. That was a death rate of 7%. Two months ago, there were 922 deaths per day when cases were 41,000. That was a death rate of 2.3%. Today we have 809 deaths per day, with cases at 79,000 – a death rate of 1%. Have you heard an MSM propagandist joyously declare the death rate is now down 86% from its peak and down 57% in the last two months? That doesn’t fit the narrative of fear needed to keep you controlled, cowed and compliant.

    Vonnegut was right, but he was far too optimistic on the timing. The totalitarians are on the warpath. They already have control over most governments and intend a great worldwide reset to implement their socialist/communist agenda of equality for all – except themselves. They want more wealth, more control, and more power. As Orwell predicted, they seek power for its own sake. They don’t care about our lives, liberties, or pursuit of happiness. They just want dumbed down obedient workers to do the menial jobs and passively accept their fate until death.

    “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?” – 1984 – George Orwell

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    Of course, the antidote to this new world order is written within our founding document. The government should derive its powers from the consent of the governed. Those in charge, whether elected or unelected, have destroyed our rights, freedom and liberty. Therefore, it is our right to abolish the existing form of government and institute a new government under our original founding principles. Those in control will not relinquish their power without violent conflict. That is how Fourth Turnings reach a climax. I have a feeling the fight will begin in earnest on November 4. Brace yourself and prepare to fight for the future of our country.

    “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.” – Declaration of Independence – 1776

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    The corrupt establishment will do anything to suppress sites like the Burning Platform from revealing the truth. The corporate media does this by demonetizing sites like mine by blackballing the site from advertising revenue. If you get value from this site, please keep it running with a donation.

  • Vision Fund Executives Abandon Ship As SoftBank's Masa Son Plots Comeback
    Vision Fund Executives Abandon Ship As SoftBank’s Masa Son Plots Comeback

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/02/2020 – 21:40

    Ever since Vision Fund chief Rajeev Misra told Bloomberg that SoftBank’s second “Vision Fund” might instead be formulated as a “SPAC” instead of another VC fund, we’ve pretty much been waiting for the next shoe to drop over at the Vision Fund.

    Miraculously, SoftBank’s shares have recovered, and talk of giving a WeWork IPO one more shot suggests Masayoshi Son is more focused on rehabilitating his reputation than embarking on a new venture replete with new companies and new risks. Plus, the firm is also dealing with the fallout from the whole “Nasdaq Whale” fiasco.

    At the time, we speculated that a SoftBank SPAC might be brought in to finally bring WeWork public, without Adam Neumann and his cliches about “elevating consciousness”,  maybe investors could be persuaded that companies like WeWork, which offer more “flexibility” when it comes to leasing apartment space, might be in a better position to capitalize on the ‘work from home’ economy. WeWork’s CEO insists the company will be profitable next year, an almost unimaginable feat, and a claim that we are deeply skeptical of.

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    SoftBank has insisted that Vision Fund 2 will happen, but apparently, many of its most senior, and thus most richly-paid employees, are reading the writing on the wall. Because as Bloomberg reports, at least 4 Vision Fund executives have left the company, which is also supposed to oversee its investments.

    Here’s the rundown on who is leaving, and who has left: (text courtesy of Bloomberg):

    • Ruwan Weerasekera, 54, the fund’s chief operating officer and a managing partner, has retired, according to SoftBank spokesman Andrew Kovacs.
    • Neil Hadley, who’s also chief of staff to Vision Fund Chief Executive Officer Rajeev Misra, will take on the COO role in addition to his current duties.
    • Penny Bodle, a partner who headed investor relations, has also departed, Kovacs confirmed.
    • Avi Golan, an operating partner, has left to become CEO of artificial intelligence software maker AnyVision, the company said in a statement last week.
    • Carolina Brochado gave her notice a month after she was promoted to partner.
    • Investing partners Ted Fike and Justin Wilson have resigned to join Alec Gores’s eponymous Gores Group as senior managing directors, focusing on the firm’s special purpose acquisitions companies, or SPACs, effort, Kovacs said (their move was reported by Axios on Sunday).

    In recent years, the media has portrayed SoftBank’s culture as aggressive and reckless, an impression that will no doubt be cemented if the company follows through with the SPAC plan.

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    Like we noted above, VF still has companies to run, and it’s still putting money to work: this year, VF has made investments in fitness tracker whoop and restaurant-technology maker Ordermark. It’s not clear how much money has been raised for the second vision fund, but the first featured $100 billion with at least half of that amount coming from the Middle East.

    But it’s not like Masa needs any more outside money: for all we know, the “Nasdaq Whale” trades might have given SoftBank and the Vision Fund the financialsupport they needed to strike out on its own.

    To be sure, we imagine Misra, the top dog over at the Vision Fund, is pleased to see all of these potential rivals search for greener pastures. Despite its failures, the Vision Fund has a sizable portfolio. And now Misra and Masa Son are effectively the only two left to run it.

  • Who Wins If Trump Loses?
    Who Wins If Trump Loses?

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/02/2020 – 21:20

    Authored by Michael Tracey via Medium.com,

    From the moment Donald J. Trump took office, I argued it was necessary that he face a rational opposition – with an emphasis on “rational.”

    Discerning, targeted, evidence-based criticism would be imperative to counteract against Trump’s worst impulses, I maintained at the time, given his hardly-disguised penchant for blusterous, petty authoritarianism. While of course Trump would be far from the only president whose excesses needed checking – any occupant of the most powerful office in world history would – there was at least some reasonable cause to believe that his regular issuances of impulsive, fly-by-tweet demands could eventually raise unique civil liberties concerns.

    In hindsight, I might as well have been arguing for a parade of pinstriped purple unicorns to march down Fifth Avenue. Because the concept of a rational Trump opposition was an utter fantasy.

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    Instead what we got right off the bat was blanket “Resistance” to Trump, with the concept of “Resistance” turning into far more of a self-promotional branding exercise than any kind of sensible civic-minded disposition. Seemingly every word that came out of Trump’s mouth, no matter how inane or innocuous, prompted wild outbursts of blithering hysteria — egged on by the unholy profit-seeking alliance of social media algorithms and TV ratings. In the imaginations of his most excitable antagonists, it was taken as a truism that the United States was perpetually teetering on the edge of total Trump-induced collapse. Usually because he insulted a cable news host or something.

    To encapsulate this paranoid oppositional tendency, the slogan “Resistance” was picked for a specifically self-aggrandizing reason – having been derived from European anti-Nazi insurgent brigades in World War II. As preposterous as it sounds that anyone of stable mental health could have possibly believed present-day America to be meaningfully comparable with Occupied France, this conceit became near-ubiquitous within anti-Trump activism and media circles. Sure, some who trafficked in rhetoric of “anti-fascism” probably did so out of a bizarre psychic need to feel as though they were combatants in an epic battle to save civilization from genocidal tyranny. But many also came to really and truly believe it, with full-fledged sincerity — as I can personally attest based on innumerable direct interactions with such people. A “Literal Nazi” president running literal concentration camps? Yup, that was a standard, uncontroversial viewpoint amongst the culture-media-activism industrial complex.

    Clearly, to harbor such delusions about the nature of your own country’s political circumstances was antithetical to the “rational opposition” ideal that I’d initially floated. Combine it with the storyline that Trump had been illegitimately installed into power by a hostile foreign government — another profit-generating bonanza for the corporate media — and any prospect of sanity being maintained during the 2016–2020 period was rendered completely hopeless.

    As for civil liberties? The preservation of which is what I had originally thought would necessitate a rational opposition? So much for that. If anything, the overt reliance by Democratic partisans and self-styled “Resisters” on officials associated with the CIA, FBI, NSA, and other “intelligence community” has been an unbridled civil liberties disaster.

    With some distance from the day-to-day mania of life under Trump, it’s going to be impossible to deny that these agencies intruded to an extraordinary degree in US domestic political affairs over the course of the past several years. But because it was largely done to the detriment of Trump – typically to create the impression that he’s an agent of Russia, or at least benefitting from their sinister so-called “interference” – the long-term consequences of this development have yet to be fully wrestled with. Let’s just say it doesn’t bode well for the future of civil liberties when intelligence agencies seize autonomy to do whatever they please in the political realm.

    Those of us repulsed by this slew of anti-Trump tactics – despite having no affinity for Trump himself, or the Republican Party, and no reason to support his re-election – will have to reckon with a grim recognition if he goes down to defeat this week. Which is that these tactics will have been successful.

    All the security state machinations, the blathering media tirades, the incessant waves of phony moral panic, the needless infliction of mass psychological turmoil – the constant fantasies and delusions that obscured far more than they ever revealed about the country’s actual problems – all of it will have been vindicated. Because it will have been done in service of accomplishing the desperately-craved goal that has been forefront in the minds of these hysteria-purveyors every single day for the past four years: removing Trump.

    Trump is routinely decried as a singularly menacing destroyer of democracy. And at least around the margins, there’s probably a kernel of truth to some of that. But the damage his opponents have done — arguably far more significant — will reverberate long after he’s gone.

    Please note, to observe this does not amount to making an affirmative case for Trump. Irrespective of the insanity of his haters, Trump as the incumbent had to deliver on the pledges he made in 2016, and then some, in order to expand his coalition and have any hope of re-election. By and large he hasn’t done that. Either way, he screwed up the federal response to a pandemic, so it might’ve been a wash regardless. And just for the record, Trump himself has certainly been more than happy to provoke, troll, and needle his foes, so it’s not as if he’s blame-free in the ensuing miasma of hyper-partisan craziness.

    Still, if the “Resistance” is really on course to declare victory tomorrow – barring some unforeseen shift or major polling error – then we’re just hours away from the final vindication of their off-the-wall tactics.

    Trump may not deserve another term on his own merits.

    But a loss for Trump is nonetheless a win for the lunatics who’ve spent four years subjecting the rest of us an unceasing tsunami of freakish nonsense.

    *  *  *

    Note from MT: Regardless of the election outcome, there’s little hope that the corrupting dynamics so painfully observable in the media industry are going to improve any time soon. Recent developments at The Intercept and elsewhere confirm that. So, this is why I asked for reader/viewer-based contributions to sustain my own independence. I appreciate the support:

    PayPal: https://paypal.me/mctracey

    Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mtracey

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  • China Is Stealing Border Land From Tiny Nepal To Build Military Bases
    China Is Stealing Border Land From Tiny Nepal To Build Military Bases

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/02/2020 – 21:00

    China is again being accused of a blatant landgrab along the disputed Himalayan high altitude border region not far from where Chinese and Indian Army troops previously clashed. 

    This time it’s the country of Nepal that has accused China of stealing over 150 hectares sovereign of its territory, or about 1.5 square kilometers. Leaders of the tiny country wedged between the major regional powers of India and China made the explosive charge to the Daily Telegraph early this week.

    “Why should China come over into Nepal, when China is already sixty times the size of our small country?” a lawmaker in the Nepali Congress Party, Jeevan Bahadur Shahi, said. However, it’s believed that thus far neither Kathmandu nor Beijing has officially acknowledged it because it would harm trade ties – a much more worrisome prospect for the Nepal side. 

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    The entire country of Nepal is mountainous with extreme altitudes. Image source: Shutterstock.com

    Nepalese politicians have recently accused top officials have seeking to hide the scandal for fear of the economic repercussions. 

    But perhaps most alarming is what the cross-border territory is to be used for by the PLA, as the Telegraph explains:

    China allegedly began seizing Nepalese land in five frontier districts in May, sending members of its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) across undefended areas of the border.

    In the north-western district of Humla, PLA troops crossed the border into the Limi Valley and Hilsa, moving stone pillars which had previously demarcated the boundary further into Nepalese territory before constructing alleged military bases. The Daily Telegraph has seen images of the bases.

    Border identifiers were also allegedly moved by the Chinese in the district of Gorkha as well, while additional annexations Rasuwa, Sindhupalchowk and Sankuwasabha were also said to have taken place according to the report. 

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    PLA Military camps and bases have also featured into the much larger dispute along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) which separates Indian-controlled territory from Chinese-controlled territory, especially in the Ladakh region, which witnessed hand-to-hand combat last summer resulting in at least 20 Indian troop deaths. India had accused PLA forces of setting up fortifications inside its administered territory.

    But in the case of Nepal, China may think it can get away with more while hoping the ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP) will look the other way, given the two governments consider themselves ideological allies.

  • At Least 2 Civilians, 1 Attacker Killed In Vienna As Police Launch Manhunt
    At Least 2 Civilians, 1 Attacker Killed In Vienna As Police Launch Manhunt

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/02/2020 – 20:56

    Update 2100ET): Police in Vienna have finished their late-night press conference offering more definitive details from Monday’s shooting.

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    Police confirmed that 2 civilians died, along with one attacker, who was killed. 15 others were wounded, seven critically. At least one police officer was wounded. The number of attackers wasn’t immediately clear.

    The army has been brought in to the city to guard key targets while police focus all of their energies on the manhunt.

    * * *

    Update (1740ET): Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has officially labeled the incident in Vienna today as a “hideous terrorist attack”. He added that the armed forces will be taking over from the police to allow police to focus on their anti-terror investigation.

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    However, some of the early details associated with the attack appear to have changed: Police say the location of the attack, near the Stadttempel synagogue, actually had nothing to do with the target: there was nobody in the synagogue at the time of the attack, and no Jews were hurt or killed.

    Witnesses said the attacker randomly fired at people sitting outside in the city’s bars and restaurants on Judengasse and Seitenstettengasse in central Vienna. “He did not aim at the Stadttempel [synagogue],” the witness said.

    The Stadttempel synagogue was once target of a terror attack almost four decades ago, on Aug. 29 1981 two members of the Palestinian group Fatah, the Revolutionary Council, also known as ANO, tried to storm the synagogue building but were stopped at the gates by security forces. Two people were killed and 21 others injured in the attack.

    In a series of tweets, Austrian President Sebastian Kurz thanked the emergency services who “risk their lives, especially today, for our safety” while adding that the military would temporarily assist the police in Vienna with the task of maintaining order, while police focus on the investigation.

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    “We are currently going through difficult times in our republic. I would like to thank all the emergency services who risk their lives, especially today for our safety. Our police will take decisive action against the perpetrators of this hideous terrorist attack.  I am glad that our police officers have already been able to eliminate a perpetrator. We will never allow ourselves to be intimidated by terrorism and will fight these attacks resolutely by all means.  So that the police can concentrate fully on the fight against terrorism, the federal government has decided that the armed forces will take over the property protection previously carried out by the police in Vienna.  The whole country is in thoughts with the victims, injured and their families, to whom I express my deepest condolences.  We thank the leaders of the European Union and our international partners for their sympathy and the expressions of solidarity.”

    –Sebastian Kurz

    Among the 15 injured, 7 were listed as in critical condition. One of the injured is a police officer. Police originally responded to seven attackers armed with rifles who showed up at “six different shooting locations.”

    Meanwhile, reports of a massive death toll have been repudiated; only one citizen died in the attack, and one attacker, while others have apparently gotten away.

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    French President Emmanuel Macron has tweeted his condolences in what was a gesture of solidarity and support, saying “We, the French, share the shock and sadness of the Austrians after an attack in Vienna. It is a friendly country that is under attack. This is our Europe. Our enemies need to know who they are dealing with. We won’t give in to anything.”

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    Source: the Guardian

    * * *

    Update (1540ET): Austrian media now reporting seven dead, including one police officer, in Monday evening’s attack near a synagogue in Vienna.

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    Media reports also said gunmen took hostages during the first shooting.

    Another ahooting is reportedly underway at a Hilton hotel in Vienna, and hostages have reportedly been taken by terrorists at a third location.

    All of this has the hint of coordination, though information is limited so far.

    * * *

    A potential terror attack is currently underway in Vienna, where gunshots have been reported at a synagogue that stands as the epicenter of what remains of the city’s Jewish population.

    The attack occurred near Schwedenplatz, a main square near the synagogue where a large police deployment was underway.

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    Another video of one of the gunmen up close was uploaded to twitter.

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    The attacker has reportedly blown himself up with an explosive belt. Additional “perpetrators” are said to be on the run according to reports in a local newspaper. The number of suspects wasn’t immediately clear. Police have asked Austrians to avoid the area in the city’s First District where the attack took place.

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    Police were cordoning off the area around the Rotensturmstrasse. According to reports, one officer was shot and is in serious condition.

    “It sounded like a blast,” one eyewitness told the local press.

    “Then you noticed that these were shots. Then you saw a person running down the Seitenstetten (who shot) wildly with an automatic weapon. He then turned down, at the (local) ‘Roter Engel’ from there in the direction of Schwedenplatz. He continued to shoot wildly there. Then the police came and fired. “

    Eyewitnesses reported “at least 50 shots.” There were pictures of at least one injured person who was bleeding on the floor in front of a bar and was being cared for.

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    The total number of casualties and deaths remains unclear, though one police officer is said to have been seriously wounded. 

  • France Reports Another COVID-19 Record; Mass. Governor Orders Overnight Curfew: Live Updates
    France Reports Another COVID-19 Record; Mass. Governor Orders Overnight Curfew: Live Updates

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/02/2020 – 20:48

    Summary:

    • Mass issues overnight stay at home order
    • Midwestern states see near-record cases
    • Texas hospitalizations climb
    • Cases climb in key election states
    • Florida becomes 4th state to top 17,000 COVID-19 deaths
    • France reports 50k+ new cases in latest record
    • Italian PM lays out new restrictions
    • CureVac vaccine shows positive response in early trial
    • Dr. Tedros self-isolates
    • Deaths top 1.2 million
    • Sunak says England lockdown could be extended
    • South  Korea confirms 97 new cases
    • China reports 24 cases
    • India reports 45,231 new cases as outbreak continues to slow

    * * *

    Update (2030ET): Cases accelerated in several swing states Monday as America braces for election day, as more than 100 million voters have already voted by mail. Hospitalizations increased in Houston and four other Texas cities as the outbreak worsened in several of the newly “purple” state’s worst-hit hotspots.

    In El Paso, Amarillo, Lubbock and Laredo, COVID-19 patients are occupying 15% of total beds. El Paso is in the worst condition, with 40% of beds occupied, followed by Amarillo at 28%.

    In several Midwestern swing states, cases saw near-record numbers. In Minnesota, health department officials reported 2,954 new cases, jus shy of the state’s 3,004 record. The state has seen a 13.4% jump in new cases over the past week. Wisconsin reported 3,433 new cases on Monday, compared with about 4,000 new cases reported in California, which has roughly 7x the population of Wisconsin. Iowa’s 14-day positivity rate hit 14.5%, more than 2x the national average.

    In Massachusetts, Gov. Charlie Baker ordered residents to stay home between 2200 and 0500 unless they’re going to work. Many businesses will need to close at 0930.

    Face coverings will now be required in all public places, even in areas where social distancing can be maintained.

    Mass. has seen its total cases increase by 278% since Labor Day. And it wasn’t the only state to sound the alarm. In Colorado, where Sen. Cory Gardner is facing a tough reelection fight,

    * * *

    Update (1320ET): France just reported another 52,518 new cases and 416 deaths over the last 24 hours, marking the latest record jump in terms of new cases added in a single day.

    The latest comes after Europe suffered its deadliest week since Apri.

    The number of patients in the ICU climbed to 3,730, a level unseen since May 3.

    Over in the US, Florida just became the fourth state to top 17,000 COVID-19-linked deaths since the start of the pandemic, while authorities confirmed another. Only New York, Texas and California, which rank fourth, second and first, respectively, by population, have confirmed more fatalities since the start of the pandemic.

    * * *

    As of Monday morning, global deaths tied to COVID-19 have topped 1.2 million after the deadliest week for the virus since April, according to data from Johns Hopkins. The number of new cases reported daily has doubled over the past five weeks, as England has joined Belgium, France, Germany and others in enacting new lockdown measures.

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    Deaths climbed by 4,895 yesterday, bringing the global total to 1,201,833. Cases,  meanwhile, climbed to 46,618,804.

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    Ironically, Dr. Tedros, the head of the WHO, has entered self-quarantine after coming into contact with somebody said to be COVID-19 positive.

    On Monday morning, Italian PM Giuseppe Conte announced a tiered system of COVID-9 restrictions reminiscent of the prior UK regime, and the Spanish state of emergency. Shopping malls will close on weekends nationwide, econadry schools will be shut as students return to online lessons.

    Additional restrictions will be added based on regional needs.

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    Another big story Monday morning pertains to an announcement from CureVac, which said its product showed a “good immune response” comparable to that found in recovered patients in an early-stage test on more than 250 to volunteers. The best response was seen using the strongest dose of the vaccine.

    According to Bloomberg, the research validates 20 years of the tiny biotech company’s research into mRNA vaccines.

    Speaking to the press on Sunday one day after PM Boris Johnson enacted a one-month lockdown, Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that while the lockdown in England is currently slated to expire on Dec. 2, the administration could extend the new emergency measures, threatening the Christmas Holiday. However, “the firm hope and expectation” is that it will end on Dec. 2.

    Asked by the BBC if these measures would result in the cancellation of Christmas, Sunak said “I appreciate everyone’s frustration,” he said. “Our hope and expectation is these measures will be sufficient to bring the R rate back to where we need it to be.”

    Sunak also promised to increase support for the self-employed during the lockdown that will begin later this week. Sunak appeared to dispel rumors that he had opposed the lockdown.

    Speaking on CNBC Monday morning, the CEO of Ryanair criticized the new lockdown measures in England, saying it only highlights how ineffective the first round of lockdowns were.

    The only way to suppress the virus is to implement mass testing, Michael O’Leary, Ryanair CEO, said, adding that the failure of global governments to implement mass testing has been staggering. United Airlines recentyl announced that it would implement mandatory on-sight testing before long-haul flights. O’Leary went on to explain that one problem is the PCR tests are labor-intensive and time consuming, while the antigen tests, are much easier and more expedient; the only problem is governments don’t recognize the rapid tests as sufficiently accurate. Some experts have argued that this is a mistake, and that mass testing would quickly make up for any lapses in accuracy, as positive individuals would inevitably be uncovered by multiple tests.

    Here are some more COVID-19 stories from overnight and Monday morning:

    India reports 45,231 new cases for the past 24 hours, down from 46,963 the previous day, bringing the country tally to 8.23 million. The death toll jumped by 496 to 122,607 (Source: Nikkei).

    Public viewing of tuna auctions at Tokyo’s Toyosu fish market resumes after an eight-month hiatus. Eighteen visitors selected by lottery in advance gathered at the market in the early morning and watched from a deck as dealers wearing masks took part in the bidding (Source: Nikkei).

    New York Governor Cuomo said New York is setting protocols to permit children in virus hot zones to attend school in which the protocol for cluster schools would require testing and children would need to test negative to return to school, while it was separately reported that San Francisco is to temporarily pause reopening amid a rise in cases. (Newswires)

    South Korea confirms 97 new cases, down from 124 a day ago. Total infections reach 26,732 with 468 deaths (Source: Nikkei).

    China reports 24 cases for Sunday, the same as a day earlier, with 21 being imported and three in the Xinjiang region (Source: Nikkei).

    Iran reported a record number of daily virus-related deaths for a second day in a row at 440, bringing the total to 35,738. The number of cases reached 628,780 with 8,289 new infections in the past 24 hours, just below the record reported last week (Source: Bloomberg).

  • Yale Psychiatrist Argues That Trump is Worse Than Hitler
    Yale Psychiatrist Argues That Trump is Worse Than Hitler

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/02/2020 – 20:40

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    A Yale psychiatrist with a history of anti-Trump rhetoric tried to seriously argue on Twitter that Donald Trump is worse than Adolf Hitler, before deleting her tweet.

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    Bandy Xenobia Lee bills herself as an “Expert on global violence prevention,” yet she appears to seriously think that Trump poses a bigger threat than one of the worst dictators in human history.

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    “Donald Trump is not an Adolf Hitler,” Lee tweeted.

    “At least Hitler improved the daily life of his followers, had discipline, and required more of himself to gain the respect of his followers. Even with the same pathology, there are varying degrees of competence.”

    Desperately backpedaling, Lee was forced to delete the tweet and issue a mealy-mouthed apology.

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    And then doubled-down on her remarkable hyperbole…

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    Lee’s outburst is ironic given that she has repeatedly asserted that Trump is mentally unstable yet is clearly suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome herself.

    Respondents weighed in with their views on Lee’s bizarre tweet.

    “The doctor has the worst case of TDS I’ve ever seen. Sick stuff,” said one.

    “You’d think that the [checks notes] President of the World Mental Health Coalition wouldn’t be fucking insane. And yet here we are,” remarked another.

    “Intellectuals nowadays. Gotta love ’em,” added another.

    *  *  *

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  • Your Last Minute Election Night Preview
    Your Last Minute Election Night Preview

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/02/2020 – 20:28

    Yesterday we published a lengthy election cheat sheet looking at what happens on and after November 3.

    Due to popular demand, and since there have been some notable changes in the past 24 hours, we update this preview as well as present some new data that will be relevant to keep track of tomorrow’s events.

    But first, here is how to follow the news on Election Day.

    The table below shows the states that are considered toss-ups or have a slight lean according to forecasters (“likely” and “safe” states are likely to go as expected, which gives Biden 226 Electoral College votes and Trump 125 Electoral College votes). As different states below are awarded to each candidate, add the Electoral College votes to their total. The first candidate to 270 Electoral College votes wins the Presidency. Times which these states were called on election night in 2016 are also included, though these times can and will likely vary this year.

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    Florida and Pennsylvania are perhaps the two most important states to watch as no Republican has won the Presidency without winning Florida since 1924 and it is a must-win for Trump – without it the path for him to reach 270 Electoral College votes diminishes significantly. Meanwhile, as we reported last night, Pennsylvania is considered by FiveThirtyEight to be the most likely “tipping point” in the election and should Biden lose it, he will become the underdog. It is another state which Trump likely needs, but is also critical for Biden. If Biden wins Florida or Pennsylvania, he is very likely to win the election and if he wins both it is almost certain he gains the 270 Electoral College votes.

    Additionally, Iowa, Ohio and North Carolina are states Trump won in 2016 and he needs to retain some combination of them – though not necessarily all of them – to win. If he loses all three, it is likely Trump has lost.

    Here are a few tips from Bank of America:

    1. Be wary of exit polls: The track record of exit polls is tenuous at best. In 2004, exit polls showed John Kerry winning the popular vote by 51% to 48% only to ultimately lose by the same margin. Similarly, there were major flaws in the 2016 exit polls which substantially underestimated the number of white working-class voters while overestimating the number of college-educated white voters, leading to bias results favoring Hilary Clinton. Pollsters claim they have fixed the issues ailing Election Day polls but the better mouse trap is yet unproven. Moreover, there has been unprecedented surge in early voting (both in person and mail-in) with over 70mn votes cast nationwide to-date and there is a major skew in voter day preference by party. Admittedly, pollster are aware of this issue and will enhance their methodology by polling at large and early voting centers but nevertheless this creates greater uncertainty in their estimates.
    2. Brace for head fakes: Results from battleground states should begin to trickle in just after polls close within each state (Table 3). First battleground states to report will be Florida, Georgia and New Hampshire where polls close at 7pm EDT (polls in Florida’s panhandle will close at 8 pm), followed by North Carolina, Ohio and Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Type of ballots reported first will vary across states. For example, according to reporting done by the Upshot blog of the New York Times, battleground states such as Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Arizona, and Iowa will report early in-person and processed mail-in votes first. Meanwhile, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Nevada will not follow any specific order. Getting a clear sense of who is winning will be difficult given the large number of early voting by mail and absentee ballots and different rules around processing ballots, which we discuss below.
    3. Key demographics: In 2016, President Trump was able to tip the election by winning the older and suburban vote. A post-mortem of the 2016 election by the Pew research center showed that Trump won the age groups 50-64 and 65+ by a margin of 6 and 9 points, respectively and edged out the suburban vote by 2 points. During the 2020 election cycle, polls have shown President Trump consistently running below his 2016 election numbers in these key demographic groups. In this context, keep an eye on results coming out of suburban areas such as Maricopa County in Arizona and Peach County in Georgia and older leaning regions such as Sumter County and Pinellas County in Florida. Results in these regions could prove to be a canary in the coalmine.

    Below we present a BofA cheat sheet summarizing the key election details including poll closing times, ballot processing and deadlines, heatmap of Electoral College votes, and competitive Senate races (Battleground states highlighted in blue, bold Senators indicate predicted flipped seat).

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    As Reuters expands, here is what to expect in some of the most bitterly contested states :

    Blue Mirage

    Florida and North Carolina allow election officials to begin processing mail-in ballots weeks before Election Day, and the results of those counts are expected to be released as soon as polls close on Nov. 3. If both states follow that schedule, it is likely that Biden will appear to be ahead initially, as the latest Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll shows that people who already have voted in Florida and North Carolina support the Democratic challenger by a more than 2-to-1 margin over the president. In both states, a majority of people who plan to vote in person on Election Day support Trump.  A blue mirage is not expected to last long in either state. Experts say they expect Florida and North Carolina to finish counting most of their mail-in and in-person ballots before the end of the night.

    Texas, Iowa and Ohio – which Trump won easily in 2016 but polls show could be competitive this year – also allow early processing of mail ballots, so could show a similar blue mirag. All three states are expected to finish counting most ballots on Nov. 3.

    Red Mirage

    In Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, mail-in ballots cannot be counted until Election Day. While Michigan did recently pass a law that allows many cities to start processing mail-in ballots, such as opening ballot envelopes, the day before the election, they cannot begin to count votes. Because mail-in ballots typically take longer to count than ballots cast in person, the initial results could skew Republican. Then, some experts say, expect a “blue shift” as election officials wade through the piles of mail-in ballots. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin may be slowed by their lack of experience with high volumes of mail-in ballots. About one in 20 votes in the two states were cast by mail in the 2018 congressional election, compared to a quarter of Michigan’s votes and about a third of Florida’s.

    Pennsylvania’s vote counting could go on for days. Democrats in the state recently won a victory in the U.S. Supreme Court to allow officials to accept mail-in ballots up to three days after the election as long as they are postmarked by Nov. 3. “Something I’m prepared for on election night is for Pennsylvania to look more Republican than it may actually be, whoever ends up winning the state,” said Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. Ballots in Wisconsin and Michigan must arrive by Election Day, although litigation is under way over whether the states should count ballots that arrive late if postmarked by Nov. 3.

    When could the Presidential election be called?

    Traditionally, most Presidential elections are called by midnight of Election Day (see chart below) but there are few exceptions including the 2000 contested Bush-Gore election and the 2016 Trump-Clinton election. These are also the only two elections in over 130 years in which the Electoral College winner was not the winner of the national popular vote (that is the loser in both those elections received more national votes than the winner).

    As a reminder, the 2000 election came down to Florida’s 25 Electoral College votes as the deciding factor (and Bush only won the state by 537 votes). The 2016 election came down to Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania which Trump won by around 77,000 votes (0.05% of all votes cast in 2016).

    The obvious message here is that the timing of the results is conditional on how close the election is. Given current election forecasts, polls including in swing states, it is possible that the election results could therefore be known before midnight IF Biden in actuality is going to win by a significant margin. Even if Biden wins, a smaller margin of victory could see delayed results.

    One other item to note is that there could be greater care in calling the winner by the major news networks. Traditionally, AP gives the official “call” though other news networks compete to be the first. However, given the polarized climate and concerns around contested elections, networks could be especially cautious before proclamations.

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    Closing Gap

    One key development of note in the past 24 hours has been the continued shift in Trump’s favor in a number of swing state polls, which has narrowed the polling margin error difference separating a decisive early Biden victory and a potentially delayed slog towards certainty. This can be seen in a number of states that have more closely clustered around the 1.6-1.9% polling margin in favor of Biden (GA, NC, FL, AZ), which together count for 71 Electoral College Votes (26% of those needed to win). Furthermore, the spread in battleground states has collapsed from over 5% on Oct 13 to half that as of the final polling this evening, at 2.6%

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    This matters because if we re-run the analysis we conducted over the weekend where we assume the same polling errors in 2020 as in 2016, Trump will win comfortably with 279 votes, and take Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona and North Carolina.

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    As the following chart from JPMorgan shows, Biden’s shrinking lead in the polls is indicated by the unusual steepness of the Electoral College curve just before the 2% margin. The exhibit presents cumulative electoral college votes according to polling margin – to give an idea of which states are important to watch to determine which final outcome is most likely. Put in plain English, a systematic polling error of less than 1.6% should give high certainty of a decisive Biden victory assumed tomorrow evening. A systematic polling error of greater than 1.9%, however, will likely push the tipping point states towards those known to likely have delayed results (PA, WI, MI).

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    The next chart shows a baseline and alternative scenarios where a decisive number of electoral college votes could be achieved over the course of election day and beyond. This chart shows cumulative electoral college votes according to likely result release time according to various representative scenarios, to provide a template to track how the actual observed outcomes unfolding election night and beyond is tracking to either the baseline, or to alternative wildcards outcomes.

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    Here are some observations on the chart above from JPMorgan:

    • The ‘Baseline’: Early confirmation of Biden/Blue Wave sweep (TX goes to Biden at ~9-10 pm EST). Each of TX, GA, OH, FL and IA are close contests after strong Republican outturns in 2016. Newswires called TX first in 2016, followed by OH. If the same holds true in 2020, Biden victories in TX or OH would suggest no systematic polling error in favor of Trump (and the potential for the opposite). It would set a decisive path to deliver the majority 270 EC votes by around 10-11pm (after the 9pm EST closing polls report), and towards as many as 417 Electoral College votes. Earlier in the evening (with the 7pm poll closures) a definitive Biden victory in Florida and Georgia would also go a long way to signaling a highly probable Biden victory. Importantly, if Biden wins in all the states where he has a polling margin lead (including Florida), he will be able to be confirmed without relying on states where there could be potential reporting delays because of mail-in ballot counting, with the decisive EC votes coming in after CA and WA report. Finally, Biden could win even with a polling margin error of up to ~4% in favor of Trump, but this would likely involve a delay.
    • Wildcards: On the other hand, Trump has a path to win or at least contest the election process (Trump wins Florida at ~11pm EST, PA/WI/MI results are delayed). Trump realistically needs Florida to remain competitive on election night. If he wins Florida and upsets in a number of smaller states (e.g. NC, GA and AZ, implying a systematic polling error at least 2% in Trump’s favor), then this would elevate the importance of PA, WI and MI to cross the 270 electoral vote threshold. These three states have all seen massive surges in requests for mail-in ballots, and largely do not pre-process the votes; this creates risk of reporting delays. Delayed results in these states keep a contested election a possibility, and could delay the final official outcome for several days while late absentee votes are counted in PA. Importantly, a Trump upset requires a greater than 4.5% systematic polling error in his favor and will almost necessarily involve states where there would likely be delayed reporting. Without any delays, this upset win could be confirmed as soon as the 10pm closing polls report.
    • Biden/gridlock likely (Republicans defend almost all Lean-R incumbent Senate seats pushing to a Jan 5 Georgia Runoff). If Biden wins, Democrats need to net +3 seats to have the bare minimum for a Blue Wave sweep that includes a win in the Senate. Per Cook, they look poised to net +2, with seven toss-up seats to be decided. A Biden victory in NC or IA could potentially carry the Senate seat as well, giving Democrats net +3 or +4. So the signal for the Senate may be clear before midnight (it was called at 1:24am EST in 2016). But if the Republicans mount a strong defensive performance, it may come down to seats in Georgia – at least one of which is likely to be decided in a run-off format on 5 Jan 2021. Thus in a tail-risk scenario, there is scope for the Senate not to be decided until January, which would pose significant discomfort for market participants given the potential legislative agenda at stake.

    According to JPM, markets should focus on and potentially reprice specifically around outcomes in Texas and Florida. A Texas Biden win should trigger a fuller pricing in of the Blue Wave scenario and a closing of wildcard hedges, as it will also likely rule out a delayed or contested scenario. A Florida win by Trump should trigger a pricing of greater risk premium against the baseline low-drama Blue Wave scenario. Together with news of too-close-to-call outcomes in PA, WI, MI and NC will trigger hedging against a delayed outcome and more significant chance of a Trump upset.

    The chart below presents a full listing of state-level election details, together with the risk of delays and the deadline to receive absentee ballots when it’s not election day.

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    Risks of delays and lead changes

    Concerns around delays due to greater voting by mail may be overblown in some states, and understated in others. Over 93 million Americans have already voted, including 59 million by mail and 34 million in-person. For reference just 25% of the 2016 votes were by mail, although a big reason for the mail votes is due to the covid pandemic. Most of the swing states are able to process and even count votes ahead of Election Day, which should reduce or eliminate delays. Therefore we would not expect any significant delays in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa or Ohio, thought marginal delays (hours not days) could be seen in Michigan and Wisconsin.

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    The biggest potential for delays come from Pennsylvania and North Carolina as under current law both states will allow ballots to arrive up to three days after Election Day so long as they are sent by November 3. These are the two most important swing states after Florida, therefore a tight race in these states could lead to delayed results through Friday, November 6. Both states could see potential cases in the Supreme Court that could alter these rules: Pennsylvania could see its deadline forced back to Election Day and North Carolina could see its deadline extended from three days to nine days. These states need not see such long delays, though, if there is a big lead by one candidate; rather this how long the delays could be under a worst-case scenario. Officials in North Carolina expect over 98% of ballots will be reported on election night which suggests we may still see early results there.

    How are the mail in ballots being counted?

    According to BofA, states could have a challenging time working through such a large number of mail-in ballots. The rules also vary by state in terms of when the ballot can be sent and counted. The most common state deadline is on Election Day when the polls close (see Table 3 above).

    However, some states will accept a mailed ballot if it is received after Election Day as long as it is postmarked prior. The rules differ in terms of when the ballots can be counted. Some states do not allow mail-in ballots to be opened before Election Day which could mean counting delays. This includes a few of the critical swing states – such as PA and WI. Moreover, mail-in ballots may be contested for signatures that don’t match voter registration cards.

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    Expect to wait for Arizona

    On election night in 2018, Arizona Republican Martha McSally appeared to be on the road to victory in the state’s U.S. Senate race, telling her supporters she was going “to bed with a lead of over 14,000 votes.” Six days later, McSally conceded the race to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema as election officials tallied hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots, including many from the Democratic-leaning metropolitan areas of Phoenix and Tucson that were handed in at voting centers on Election Day.

    Arizona officials said they hope it will take less time to count ballots this year as Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, has upgraded its equipment and added an extra week to handle early mail-in ballots. But if the race is close, it could still take days to fully count the votes. That would be “an indication of things going the way they’re supposed to,” said C. Murphy Hebert, a spokeswoman for the Arizona Secretary of State. “The process is complex, and we would just invite folks to be patient.”

    Lead changes throughout the night

    One potential consequence of the significant early voting and different counting procedures is for lead changes throughout the evening. In states with delayed processing/counting (e.g., Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania), in-person Election Day voting could be counted and reported sooner than mail-in voting which could appear to give Trump an early lead that later diminishes. Conversely, states reporting already-counted mail-in votes early could appear to give Biden a lead initially that then reduces as in-person Election Day votes are tallied (e.g., Florida, North Carolina). This is why Twitter today said it will flag tweets from certain accounts, including those of presidential candidates, who claim a U.S. election victory before it’s called by two of seven media outlets (indicatively, Twitter cited the following news outlets as acceptable race callers: The Associated Press, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, FOX News, DecisionDeskHQ and NBC News).

    Contested election risk

    Close races in key states could lead to delays because it can trigger recounts, in some cases automatically, especially in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida if the margin is less than 0.5%. Initial machine recounts can be done in days while manual recounts if needed can take longer. Even if results are not within the margin to trigger automatic recounts, candidates are still able to petition for recounts in close elections.

    Recounts – an infrequent if normal part of elections – come with added risk this year as markets have becoming increasingly concerned with the potential for a contested election. A contested election is conditional on close/unclear results. Clear, lopsided results on election night could still lead to challenges but they are unlikely to be material or alter outcomes. However, a scenario wherein: (1) the Electoral College 270 vote threshold is a function of one or two states, and (2) where initial results in those deciding states are close enough to require recounts could lead to a significantly higher probability of a contested election, as was the case in the 2000 Bush versus Gore election.

    Therefore, if the overall outcome is not known by the morning following the election as we are waiting on recounts or delayed results, the markets could quickly price in a higher probability of a contested election and we could see the USD higher and equities and yields lower on risk-off sentiment until there is greater clarity.

    A recent note from Bank of America attempted to quantify the impact of a contested election on markets: in it BofA’s Michelle Meyer and Savita Subramanian said that stocks could slide as much as 20% if there’s a contested election. This means that as soon as Wednesday once it emerges if the election will not have a clear winner, we could see a bear market. Whether that happens or note will depend on the reason and duration of the delay. There are three scenarios:

    1. Benign: Results are delayed due to counting backlogs given the large number of absentee and mail-in ballots but a result is expected within days.
    2. Painful: If the count is close, it could result in a dispute about ballot validity and lead to a recount at the state level. C
    3. Crisis: Either side refuses to accept the results, leading to a legislative battle and a high degree of government dysfunction

    “A landslide victory for either Trump or Biden and rapid election conclusion would likely be welcomed by markets while a severely contested election could see risk-off and drive 10-year rates materially lower”…

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    … and even though probability of a contested election has subsided  (or perhaps, acceptance of a contested election has increased) VIX futures still remain elevated, clearly discounting risks of a contested election.

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    The flipside, of course, is that “if markets sell off violently and the economic data deteriorate, we could see Washington facilitate the passage of stimulus even in a highly contentious environment.“

    The battle for the Senate

    An unspoken truth is that while the presidential race is important, it will have little to no impact on markets. It will however, matter, in conjunction with the outcome of Congressional votes. As such the outcome of the Senate race matters more markets.  Currently, Republicans hold 53 of the 100 seats, with 34 seats up for re-election this year. Recall that in the event of a 50-50 split, the Vice President acts as a tiebreaking vote. Currently forecasters expect Democrats to lose a seat in Alabama and gain seats in Arizona, Colorado and Maine for a net gain of 2 seats (from 47 to 49 of 100). This leaves four toss-up Senate seats to watch: Georgia, Iowa, Montana and North Carolina. Democrats would need to win one of these four and the Presidency or two of these outright to ensure control of the Senate. The Georgia Senate seat requires 50% of votes; however, there are multiple candidates running which likely means a run-off election on January 5 will be needed to determine the winner of that seat. Though unlikely, this can create a scenario where the Senate majority is not known until then.

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    According to the Iowa Electronic Markets, the probability of the Democrats taking over the Senate and maintaining the House (Democratic Sweep) is the mostly likely outcome with a 57.5% probability, although online prediction market PredictIt begs to differ, and according to the latest data, odds of a Blue Sweep have tumbled to just 50%, the lowest in weeks and leaving open the possibility of years of Congressional gridlock.

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    As noted above, the Senate and Presidential election results need not be called at the same time, and historically this has been the case for many of the key states we are watching. In 2016 Senate results were typically called earlier than Presidential results, and the same political party won both elections in all swing states. In 2012, though, the Senate results were usually slightly delayed compared to the Presidential election; however, here again there was consistency across parties with three of the four swing states seeing the same political party win both contests.

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    The story for stimulus

    The first order impact of the election will be on the trajectory for additional stimulus. Here are our expectations:

    • Biden win + Democratic Congress (‘Blue wave’): $2.0 – 2.5tr in stimulus, including additional funds for the COVID health response. Passed right after inauguration.
    • Biden win + divided Congress: $500bn – 1tr in stimulus. Passed after inauguration but with some delay. There is also some chance of continued gridlock in this scenario.
    • Trump win + divided Congress (‘Status quo’): $1.5 – 2.0tr in stimulus. Passed in the lame duck session because neither side gains an advantage by waiting for a new government to form.

    Needless to say, a clear victory could accelerate stimulus negotiations. This is particularly the case if it returns the status quo so neither side has a reason to delay. The two sides are not that far apart — both agree on additional unemployment insurance (around 100% replacement income which is about $300-400 additional/week) and aid for small businesses. They disagree over state & local aid and liability protections for businesses but these appear surmountable hurdles. It is even possible that stimulus is passed in the lame duck session with a status quo result.

    The worst case scenario, and one which could lead to a 20% drop in markets according to BofA, a scenario of a Biden victory with a Republican Senate could make it harder to get any package through, creating a risk of sustained gridlock. By contrast, a “Blue Wave” would make a stimulus package very likely by February, one that is likely in excess of $2tr. Under any election result, there will be much more clarity on the path for fiscal stimulus with a fading of the uncertainty shock.

    In the event of a contested election that looks like either scenario 2 or 3, the political environment creates a challenge for additional stimulus. Markets will likely become discouraged about the prospects for compromise. However, there is a threshold. If markets sell off violently and the economic data deteriorate, we could see Washington facilitate the passage of stimulus even in a highly contentious environment.

    To summarize, BofA believes that an election result of status quo could lead to an earlier passage of stimulus (in lame duck), a “Blue Wave” makes a stimulus package very likely but only after inauguration and a highly contested election would likely create an impediment to stimulus but if the markets and economy deteriorate, an emergency stimulus could be triggered. A clear victory would be a net positive for the economy as it reduces some of the negative risk from higher uncertainty. A Blue Wave likely means greater stimulus which thereby provides the greatest near-term boost to the economy.

    The Fed wild card

    If there is not a result and financial conditions tighten due to a contested election, BofA believes the Fed’s credit facilities will once again be needed. The Fed could consider easing terms to facilitate the flow of credit. The Fed could also ramp up the QE program, buying Treasuries and MBS at a faster rate, as well as corporate credit as needed, particularly if it sees concerns over market liquidity. Ultimately the focus could be on credit (MBS and corporate credit) versus USTs in a risk-off scenario. Or as BofA recaps, “the Fed has tools and will use them.”

  • Taibbi: The Worst Choice Ever
    Taibbi: The Worst Choice Ever

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/02/2020 – 20:00

    My colleagues at Rolling Stone recently endorsed Joe Biden for president:

    Biden’s lived experience and expansive empathy make him not just a good, but an outstanding candidate… This is a fight between light and darkness…

    Joe Biden is a corpse with hair plugs whose idea of “empathy” is to jam fingers in the sternums of people who ask the wrong questions, or call them “fat” or “full of shit,” or dare them to “try me” — and that’s if he remembers what state he’s in. Is he a better human than Donald Trump? Probably, but his mental decline has hit Lloyd Bridges-in-Hot-Shots! levels and he shares troubling characteristics with the president, beginning with a pathological struggle with truth.

    Biden spent much of 2020 lying about everything from his Iraq War vote to his educational history to a fantasy about being arrested in South Africa with Nelson Mandela. The same press that killed him for this behavior in the past let it all slide this time. Same with the growing ledger of handsy-uncle incidents that had adolescent girls and campaigning politicians alike wondering why a Vice President needs to smell their hair or plant lingering kisses on their heads while cameras flash.

    Biden’s entire argument for the presidency, and it’s a powerful one, is his opponent. This week’s election is not a choice between “light or darkness,” but “pretty much anything or Donald Trump,” and only in that context is this disintegrating, bilious iteration of Scranton Joe even distantly credible as a choice for the world’s most powerful office.

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    Donald Trump is going to be a difficult case for future historians because he’s simultaneously the biggest liar and the most lied-about politician in American history. The standard propaganda lines about Trump are all incorrect. The usual technique involves sticking his name in headlines next to absurd disqualifying descriptors: “fascist,” “traitor,” “dictator,” and so on.

    “18 Ways Trump Might Be a Russian Asset” is a typical example of what passed for commentary at outlets like the Washington Post in the Trump years. Such hot takes were a sure way to get TV invites:

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    Trump may have played cartoon Mussolini on the stump and reached for Hitlerian cliches in his campaign videos, but the dirty secret of the last four years — hidden from the broad mass of voters by both conservative and mainstream media — was that the president’s much ballyhooed strongman leanings were a fraud. Trump the Terrible was great TV, but away from cameras he was a fake despot who proved repeatedly that he didn’t know the first thing about how to exercise presidential power, even in his own defense.

    Taibbi subscribers can read the rest of the report here…

  • "A Global Conspiracy Against God" – Archbishop Says Trump Is Only One To Save Humanity From 'The Great Reset'
    “A Global Conspiracy Against God” – Archbishop Says Trump Is Only One To Save Humanity From ‘The Great Reset’

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/02/2020 – 19:40

    The Italian archbishop best known for confronting Pope Francis over the Vatican’s willful blindness to priests who abuse boys has written a letter in which he lashes out at the “global elite”, prompting some to accuse him of sympathizing with the “QAnon” movement of conspiracy theorists.

    The letter, penned by Archibishop Carlo Maria Vigano, formerly the Vatican’s ambassador to the US, attacks a shadowy “global elite”, that is plotting a “Great Reset” intended to undermine “God and humanity”.

    This same group, the archbishop argued, is also responsible for the lockdowns that have restricted movement and freedom around the globe, eliciting protests in many European capitals.

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    “The fate of the whole world is being threatened by a global conspiracy against God and humanity,” Viganò wrote in the letter, which comes just days before the US election, which the archbishop wrote was of “epochal importance.”

    “No one, up until last February,” Viganò writes, “would ever have thought that, in all of our cities, citizens would be arrested simply for wanting to walk down the street, to breathe, to want to keep their business open, to want to go to church on Sunday. Yet now it is happening all over the world, even in picture-postcard Italy that many Americans consider to be a small enchanted country, with its ancient monuments, its churches, its charming cities, its characteristic villages.” Viganò adds: “And while the politicians are barricaded inside their palaces promulgating decrees like Persian satraps, businesses are failing, shops are closing, and people are prevented from living, traveling, working, and praying.”

    Working to protect the world from this group of elites seeking to recast society in a secular, totalitarian model, Viganò portrays President Trump as “the final garrison against the world dictatorship”. Viganò cast Trump’s opponent, Vice President Joe Biden, as “a person who is manipulated by the deep state.”

    Analysts who monitor “QAnon” conspiracy theories and their spread online warned the mainstream press that the letter had been widely discussed on various QAnon message boards, and had been disseminated in languages including Portuguese, Spanish, French, German and Italian, according to Yahoo News.

    Over the summer, Trump tweeted an earlier letter penned by the archbishop, and encouraged his supporters to read it.

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

    In the past, Viagnò has accused Pope Francis of sweeping the child abuse crisis under the rug, and moving to protect homosexual priests, part of a “homosexual current” flowing through the Vatican.

    Read the full letter below:

    * * *

    DONALD J. TRUMP

    Sunday, October 25, 2020

    Solemnity of Christ the King

    Mr. President,

    Allow me to address you at this hour in which the fate of the whole world is being threatened by a global conspiracy against God and humanity. I write to you as an Archbishop, as a Successor of the Apostles, as the former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States of America. I am writing to you in the midst of the silence of both civil and religious authorities. May you accept these words of mine as the “voice of one crying out in the desert” (Jn 1:23).

    As I said when I wrote my letter to you in June, this historical moment sees the forces of Evil aligned in a battle without quarter against the forces of Good; forces of Evil that appear powerful and organized as they oppose the children of Light, who are disoriented and disorganized, abandoned by their temporal and spiritual leaders.

    Daily we sense the attacks multiplying of those who want to destroy the very basis of society: the natural family, respect for human life, love of country, freedom of education and business. We see heads of nations and religious leaders pandering to this suicide of Western culture and its Christian soul, while the fundamental rights of citizens and believers are denied in the name of a health emergency that is revealing itself more and more fully as instrumental to the establishment of an inhuman faceless tyranny.

    A global plan called the Great Reset is underway. Its architect is a global élite that wants to subdue all of humanity, imposing coercive measures with which to drastically limit individual freedoms and those of entire populations. In several nations this plan has already been approved and financed; in others it is still in an early stage. Behind the world leaders who are the accomplices and executors of this infernal project, there are unscrupulous characters who finance the World Economic Forum and Event 201, promoting their agenda.

    The purpose of the Great Reset is the imposition of a health dictatorship aiming at the imposition of liberticidal measures, hidden behind tempting promises of ensuring a universal income and cancelling individual debt. The price of these concessions from the International Monetary Fund will be the renunciation of private property and adherence to a program of vaccination against Covid-19 and Covid-21 promoted by Bill Gates with the collaboration of the main pharmaceutical groups. Beyond the enormous economic interests that motivate the promoters of the Great Reset, the imposition of the vaccination will be accompanied by the requirement of a health passport and a digital ID, with the consequent contact tracing of the population of the entire world. Those who do not accept these measures will be confined in detention camps or placed under house arrest, and all their assets will be confiscated.

    Mr. President, I imagine that you are already aware that in some countries the Great Reset will be activated between the end of this year and the first trimester of 2021. For this purpose, further lockdowns are planned, which will be officially justified by a supposed second and third wave of the pandemic. You are well aware of the means that have been deployed to sow panic and legitimize draconian limitations on individual liberties, artfully provoking a world-wide economic crisis. In the intentions of its architects, this crisis will serve to make the recourse of nations to the Great Reset irreversible, thereby giving the final blow to a world whose existence and very memory they want to completely cancel. But this world, Mr. President, includes people, affections, institutions, faith, culture, traditions, and ideals: people and values that do not act like automatons, who do not obey like machines, because they are endowed with a soul and a heart, because they are tied together by a spiritual bond that draws its strength from above, from that God that our adversaries want to challenge, just as Lucifer did at the beginning of time with his “non serviam.”

    Many people – as we well know – are annoyed by this reference to the clash between Good and Evil and the use of “apocalyptic” overtones, which according to them exasperates spirits and sharpens divisions. It is not surprising that the enemy is angered at being discovered just when he believes he has reached the citadel he seeks to conquer undisturbed. What is surprising, however, is that there is no one to sound the alarm. The reaction of the deep state to those who denounce its plan is broken and incoherent, but understandable. Just when the complicity of the mainstream media had succeeded in making the transition to the New World Order almost painless and unnoticed, all sorts of deceptions, scandals and crimes are coming to light.

    Until a few months ago, it was easy to smear as “conspiracy theorists” those who denounced these terrible plans, which we now see being carried out down to the smallest detail. No one, up until last February, would ever have thought that, in all of our cities, citizens would be arrested simply for wanting to walk down the street, to breathe, to want to keep their business open, to want to go to church on Sunday. Yet now it is happening all over the world, even in picture-postcard Italy that many Americans consider to be a small enchanted country, with its ancient monuments, its churches, its charming cities, its characteristic villages. And while the politicians are barricaded inside their palaces promulgating decrees like Persian satraps, businesses are failing, shops are closing, and people are prevented from living, traveling, working, and praying. The disastrous psychological consequences of this operation are already being seen, beginning with the suicides of desperate entrepreneurs and of our children, segregated from friends and classmates, told to follow their classes while sitting at home alone in front of a computer.

    In Sacred Scripture, Saint Paul speaks to us of “the one who opposes” the manifestation of the mystery of iniquity, the kathèkon (2 Thess 2:6-7). In the religious sphere, this obstacle to evil is the Church, and in particular the papacy; in the political sphere, it is those who impede the establishment of the New World Order.

    As is now clear, the one who occupies the Chair of Peter has betrayed his role from the very beginning in order to defend and promote the globalist ideology, supporting the agenda of the deep church, who chose him from its ranks.

    Mr. President, you have clearly stated that you want to defend the nation – One Nation under God, fundamental liberties, and non-negotiable values that are denied and fought against today. It is you, dear President, who are “the one who opposes” the deep state, the final assault of the children of darkness.

    For this reason, it is necessary that all people of good will be persuaded of the epochal importance of the imminent election: not so much for the sake of this or that political program, but because of the general inspiration of your action that best embodies – in this particular historical context – that world, our world, which they want to cancel by means of the lockdown. Your adversary is also our adversary: it is the Enemy of the human race, He who is “a murderer from the beginning” (Jn 8:44).

    Around you are gathered with faith and courage those who consider you the final garrison against the world dictatorship. The alternative is to vote for a person who is manipulated by the deep state, gravely compromised by scandals and corruption, who will do to the United States what Jorge Mario Bergoglio is doing to the Church, Prime Minister Conte to Italy, President Macron to France, Prime Minster Sanchez to Spain, and so on. The blackmailable nature of Joe Biden – just like that of the prelates of the Vatican’s “magic circle” – will expose him to be used unscrupulously, allowing illegitimate powers to interfere in both domestic politics as well as international balances. It is obvious that those who manipulate him already have someone worse than him ready, with whom they will replace him as soon as the opportunity arises.

    And yet, in the midst of this bleak picture, this apparently unstoppable advance of the “Invisible Enemy,” an element of hope emerges. The adversary does not know how to love, and it does not understand that it is not enough to assure a universal income or to cancel mortgages in order to subjugate the masses and convince them to be branded like cattle. This people, which for too long has endured the abuses of a hateful and tyrannical power, is rediscovering that it has a soul; it is understanding that it is not willing to exchange its freedom for the homogenization and cancellation of its identity; it is beginning to understand the value of familial and social ties, of the bonds of faith and culture that unite honest people. This Great Reset is destined to fail because those who planned it do not understand that there are still people ready to take to the streets to defend their rights, to protect their loved ones, to give a future to their children and grandchildren. The leveling inhumanity of the globalist project will shatter miserably in the face of the firm and courageous opposition of the children of Light. The enemy has Satan on its side, He who only knows how to hate. But on our side, we have the Lord Almighty, the God of armies arrayed for battle, and the Most Holy Virgin, who will crush the head of the ancient Serpent. “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Rom 8:31).

    Mr. President, you are well aware that, in this crucial hour, the United States of America is considered the defending wall against which the war declared by the advocates of globalism has been unleashed. Place your trust in the Lord, strengthened by the words of the Apostle Paul: “I can do all things in Him who strengthens me” (Phil 4:13). To be an instrument of Divine Providence is a great responsibility, for which you will certainly receive all the graces of state that you need, since they are being fervently implored for you by the many people who support you with their prayers.

    With this heavenly hope and the assurance of my prayer for you, for the First Lady, and for your collaborators, with all my heart I send you my blessing.

    God bless the United States of America!

    + Carlo Maria Viganò

    Tit. Archbishop of Ulpiana

    Former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States of America

  • Roots Of Antifa: This 'Idea' Has Violent Consequences
    Roots Of Antifa: This ‘Idea’ Has Violent Consequences

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/02/2020 – 19:20

    Authored by Mark Hemingway via RealClearInvestigations.com,

    As riots and looting consumed Philadelphia the previous week after a fatal police shooting, a radical left-wing group, the “Philly Socialists,” began monitoring police scanners and relaying information to help protesters evade arrest. At one point, the Philly Socialists tweeted out a clue as to their street allegiances:  “Do humanity a favor and learn what antifa stands for.” 

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    The scene in Philadelphia was similar to scores of violent protests around the country since May, which have often featured a common and shadowy element – black-masked men and women who seemed as intent on breaking windows and confronting the police as chanting social justice slogans.

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    Former activist: “For most people antifa is a mystery wrapped in an enigma wearing a black mask.” But its mixture of left-wing politics and anarchist nihilism can be traced back more than 100 years. Antifa/Wikipedia

    The one thing most people can agree on is these people have a name – “antifa,” short for anti-fascists. But larger questions – who are they? where did they come from? what do they want? – have been lost in the battle of partisan politics.

    President Trump has denounced antifa as an organized terror group, like the Ku Klux Klan. At the first presidential debate, Joe Biden disagreed, paraphrasing Trump’s own FBI director, Christopher Wray, as saying that “unlike white supremacists, antifa is an idea, not an organization, not a militia.”

    While Wray did testify to that effect before a House panel in September, he also said antifa was a real threat and that the FBI had undertaken “any number of properly predicated investigations into what we would describe as violent anarchist extremists.” A U.S. attorney with the Justice Department told Congress in August the FBI had opened more than 300 domestic terrorism investigations related to the ongoing riots.  

    Antifa is, in fact, hard to pin down. It has no known leaders, no address, not even a Twitter account. A number of specific groups involved in street violence embrace the antifa label. Those groups, in turn, are highly secretive and loosely organized.  Stanislav Vysotsky, a former antifa activist and author of “American Antifa: The Tactics, Culture, and Practice of Militant Antifascism” (2020), concedes that “for most people antifa is a mystery wrapped in an enigma wearing a black mask.”

    This elusiveness, which appears to be by design, makes it difficult to define or even identify members of a movement that nevertheless has had an outsized impact on American society.

    Yet, the black mask slips. Scholarly research and daily journalism shed light on antifa’s ideology and its long history in the United States. Its mixture of left-wing politics and anarchist nihilism can be traced back more than 100 years. Its modern incarnation, centered in the Pacific Northwest, features 1960s radicals, including former members of the Weather Underground, anti-racist skateboard punks who emerged in the 1980s, and younger radicals. Their racial and ethnic makeup is uncertain, but significant numbers are white. Arrest records and other publicly available information suggest many of those identifying as antifa are itinerant or marginally employed.

    Scholars agree with Vysotsky that “antifascism is simultaneously a complex and simple political phenomenon.” It is simple in that it is an oppositional movement – it is defined by its resistance to “fascism.” Unlike leftists, its adherents are not seeking to gain the levers of power to build a utopia. They are skeptical of state power, hence their frequent clashes with the police, and are more intent on confronting those they see as enemies.

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    John Brown in 1859: The white man who tried to spark a slave revolt at Harper’s Ferry, Va., is a particular hero to antifa.  Martin M. Lawrence – Library of Congress

    But antifascism is also complex because fascism itself “is often an extremely murky concept,” writes Mark Bray, a history lecturer at Rutgers, self-described political organizer and author of “The Antifa Handbook.” To clarify what fascism is, antifa sympathizers try to connect the American movement to a series of obscure 20th century left-wing groups that resisted the likes of Hitler, Mussolini and General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.The leftist slogan of that war, “No pasarán” (“They shall not pass”), is often invoked by American adherents. In general, antifa partisans show no embarrassment from associations with leftist totalitarians. Bray notes that an antifa-sympathizing self-defense group called the “Maoist Red Guards” is still active in Austin.

    At the same time, antifa activists are intensely hostile to American historical traditions. In Portland, rioters recently smashed windows of the Oregon Historical Society, stealing and damaging a quilt made by black women to celebrate America’s bicentennial. That same night, rioters tore down statues of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt that had stood in Portland for more than a century.

    While American antifa adherents explicitly reject the First Amendment and other classically liberal ideas about free speech and assembly, they see as their spiritual ancestors 19th century slavery abolitionists and others who fought slavery and later racism. Bray writes that John Brown, the white man who tried to spark a slave revolt by attacking a federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Va., in 1859, is a particular hero.

    More recently, antifa in America have drawn power from punk-rock subcultures and post-1960s left-wing extremism. After white supremacists recruited disaffected youths as “skinheads” and racist “Oi” bands began to appear, counter-movements formed in response. In particular,  a group of punk rockers known as the Minnesota Baldies in 1987 formed the Anti-Racist Action Network (ARA) to engage in “direct action” confrontations using spray paint, crowbars, and bricks against racists in the punk scene. Word of the group and its exploits, which sometimes involved violent skirmishes with racists, spread via underground punk publications known as “zines” and the organization spread across the country.

    ARA’s anarchist and hard-left sympathies became more overt in 2013 when it was reformed as the Torch Network, sometimes known more explicitly as the Torch Antifa Network. The Torch Network today is the closest thing to an antifa organization. According to Torch’s website, affiliated groups are “autonomous organizing bodies …  they may call themselves whatever they want, and can organize the best way they see fit.” The groups that sign on to Torch do, however, agree to support the organization’s five “Points of Unity”: 

    1. We disrupt fascist and far right organizing and activity.

    2. We don’t rely on the cops or courts to do our work for us.This doesn’t mean we never go to court, but the cops uphold white supremacy and the status quo. They attack us and everyone who resists oppression. We must rely on ourselves to protect ourselves and stop the fascists.

    3. We oppose all forms of oppression and exploitation. We intend to do the hard work necessary to build a broad, strong movement of oppressed people centered on the working class against racism, sexism, nativism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and discrimination against the disabled, the oldest, the youngest, and the most oppressed people. We support abortion rights and reproductive freedom. We want a classless, free society. We intend to win!

    4. We hold ourselves accountable personally and collectively to live up to our ideals and values.

    5. We not only support each other within the network, but we also support people outside the network who we believe have similar aims or principles. An attack on one is an attack on all.

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    The Torch Antifa Network today is the closest thing to an antifa organization. Torch Antifa Network/Wikipedia

    Ties to Terror

    Beyond what is posted on the Torch Network’s website, not much is known about the organization and what, if any, material support it supplies to affiliates. Some insight came from written testimony supplied to the Senate Judiciary Committee in August by Kyle Shideler, director and senior analyst for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy. Shideler described Torch Antifa as “one of the largest regional networks of Antifa in the United States,” and identified a man named Michael Novick, ”the web registrar of the Torch Antifa website,” as a key figure in the movement.

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    Kyle Shideler, analyst: Ex-Weather Underground member Michael Novick “establishes the historic relationship between the communist guerrilla and terrorist movements of the 1970s and Antifa of today.” Center for Security Policy

    Novick “establishes the historic relationship between the communist guerrilla and terrorist movements of the 1970s and Antifa of today,” Shideler reported. “Novick is former member of the Weather Underground terrorist group. He is a founding member of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and a founding member of Anti-Racist Action-Los Angeles.”  

    The business address associated with the national Anti-Racist Action organization is Novick’s home in Los Angeles. Attempts to reach him for comment were unsuccessful.

    He appears to have kept up with his former domestic terrorist associates somewhat – he spoke at an ARA conference in 2011 alongside more notorious Weather Underground members Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, controversial associates of Barack Obama in his Chicago political rise. Novick’s affiliation with the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, founded by Weather Underground members in 1978 and active into the 1990s, is also notable because of that organization’s ties to violence. While the John Brown group did confront Klan groups and work for various anti-racist causes, it also fought for a much broader spectrum of radical causes ranging from Puerto Rican independence to defending leftist governments in Central America at the height of the Cold War.

    Three members of the John Brown group were convicted for their roles in a string of bombings in Washington and New York between 1982 and 1985 — including an explosion in the U.S. Capitol building in 1983, along with explosions at three military installations in the D.C. area, and four more bombings in New York City. Two of the three served long prison terms, but on his last day in office, President Clinton commuted the 40-year sentence of the third, Linda Evans, after 13 years. Evans had also been involved with both the Weather Underground, as well as the John Brown group.

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    Susan Rosenberg’s wanted poster. Now tied to BLM, she got her sentence commuted by Bill Clinton.  Wikimedia

    Such cross-connections between groups appear to be characteristic of groups of that time, and of antifa’s loose organization today. In the book, “Extremist Groups in America,” published in 1990, author Susan Lang reported that the John Brown group “is thought to be a front for the May 19th Communist Organization.” That organization, which took its name from the shared birthday of Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X, also had strong ties to the Weather Underground and was linked to the bombings. Its most notable figure today is Susan Rosenberg, 65, who went to prison on weapons and explosives charges and for her role in helping Assata Shakur (formerly JoAnne Chesimard) escape to Cuba after her conviction as an accomplice to the murder of a New Jersey state trooper. Rosenberg’s 58-year sentence was also commuted by President Clinton.

    Rosenberg today has a prominent tie to Black Lives Matter, not antifa. She is vice chair of Thousand Island Currents, the fiscal sponsor of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, which received millions in corporate donations after George Floyd’s death while in custody of the Minneapolis police. The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation itself was founded by self-described “trained Marxists” who established a relationship with Venezuela’s radical left-wing government.

    Foreign actors may play a role enabling antifa’s domestic violence, Shideler says. “In 2019 Novick travelled to Cuba as part of the 50th Venceremos Brigade, showing the substantial continuity of these movements,” he notes in his Senate testimony. Rosenberg has also been a participant in the Cuban Venceremos Brigades, founded by leftist radicals in 1969 to forge ties with communist Cuba. It has often served as recruitment program for Cuban intelligence and fomented radicalism within the U.S.

    Anarchy in the U.S.A.

    While antifa can be placed in the tradition of left-wing extremist violence, is also influenced by anarchic political movements. Antifa’s imagery is red and black – red representing communist and syndicalist sympathies, while black symbolizes a commitment to anarchy. Loosely speaking, anarchists seek to dissolve governments and abolish all use of forced compliance, reorganizing society according to principles of mutual cooperation.

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    Portland, 2020: Anarchic antifa is prevalent in the Pacific Northwest because the area has strong historical ties to anarchists. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)

    Anarchy also helps explain why antifa is so prevalent in Portland and the Pacific Northwest generally. The area has strong historical ties to anarchists. An anarchist community in Washington state around the turn of the 20th century briefly gained infamy after President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist. More recently, anarchist philosophy was foundational to the eco-terrorist movement that’s been active in Oregon since the 1970s. 

    According to Portland State University history professor Marc Rodriguez, contemporary antifa grew out of the 1999 riots at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, when a subset of black-masked protesters used the cover of a larger protest to engage in violent destruction. Though the antifa label was not in wide use – the first American group calling itself antifa would emerge in Boston in 2002 – the anarchist influence was well-understood at the time.

    There is little doubt that over several decades an anarchist “scene” in the Pacific Northwest has been fertile ground for left-wing radicalism, and that helps explain why Portland and Seattle are the locus of so much antifa activity.  

    Antifa groups make most major tactical decisions by democratic vote, while tolerating individual decisions to engage in action presumably consistent with the group ethos. “Militant antifascist practices … are frequently spontaneous, decentralized, and directly democratic,” notes Vysotsky.

    There’s also quite a lot of overlap between anarchism and communist ideologies.

    “For the most part, you’re looking at an ideology of autonomism, which is bottom-up Marxist organizing rather than a top- down Leninist vanguard organizing. This was an ideology that came out of came out of Italy and Germany in the late60s, early 70s,” Shideler says. “It was influential with the Red Brigades and the Red Army Faction, and you still see this in their language. When they talk about autonomous action or setting up an autonomous zone, that’s what they’re referring to.”

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    From the antifa-friendly website Crimethinc. It published a detailed after-action report where anonymous “participants in the uprising in Minneapolis in response to the murder of George Floyd explore how a combination of different tactics compelled the police to abandon the Third Precinct.” crimethinc.com

    A dramatic example of this approach was evident this summer when protestors established an autonomous zone in downtown Seattle after the mayor forced police to abandon a precinct. The lawless zone quickly became a hub for violence and two African American men were slain inside its boundaries.

    The lack of formal hierarchy inside antifa affinity groups and their model of “leaderless resistance” may have Marxist and anarchic ideological origins, but this same phantom cell structure makes it similar to how more commonly understood terrorist groups such as al Qaeda commonly operate.

    At protests, antifa stalwarts carry weapons and coordinate their actions on the ground in order to evade law enforcement and do maximum damage. “They communicate in large Signal chat rooms, an encrypted peer-to-peer app,” said Andy Ngo, a Portland-based journalist who has been covering antifa for several years. “They also use hand signals, they have walkie-talkie devices, and scouts who watch where the police are and provide real time updates.” Antifa openly and broadly share strategic and tactical intelligence. After a precinct in Minneapolis was overrun in the riots earlier this year, the antifa-friendly website Crimethinc published a detailed after-action report where anonymous “participants in the uprising in Minneapolis in response to the murder of George Floyd explore how a combination of different tactics compelled the police to abandon the Third Precinct.”

    Antifa groups may operate and make decisions according to unusual principles, but they are organized and can coordinate quite effectively.

    Defining Fascism Down

    Antifa’s exceedingly broad definition of fascism (in Portland it includes the Republican Party), combined with left-wing and anarchist ideology that regards basic law enforcement illegitimate, serves to justify some especially radical beliefs. For one, antifa adherents believe their opponents have no right to speech or assembly and must be confronted and shut down wherever they appear.

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    Quote: “At the heart of the anti-fascist outlook is a rejection of the classical liberal phrase … ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ ” Amazon.com

    “The Antifa Handbook” has an entire chapter offering up a series of defenses for “no platforming” antifa opponents. “Militant antifascism refuses to engage in terms of debate that developed out of the precepts of classical liberalism that undergird both ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ positions in the United States,” Bray writes. “Instead of privileging allegedly ‘neutral’ universal rights, anti-fascists prioritize the political project of destroying fascism and protecting the vulnerable regardless of whether their actions are considered violations of the free speech of fascists or not.”

    Other rationales for rejecting free speech rest on embracing anarchy: “The false assumption that the United States maximizes free speech rests on the unstated fact that this right only applies to non-incarcerated citizens,” he adds. “In contrast, antiauthoritarians seek to abolish prisons, states, and the very notion of citizenship—thereby eliminating this black hole of rightlessness.”

    Bray justifies this position by arguing that broad denial of free speech rights is necessary to prevent latter-day Hitlers from arising. “At the heart of the anti-fascist outlook is a rejection of the classical liberal phrase incorrectly ascribed to Voltaire that ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,’” he writes. “After Auschwitz and Treblinka, anti-fascists committed themselves to fighting to the death the ability of organized Nazis to say anything.”

    As a result of this purported vigilance, Bray observes, the ARA and antifa have been a “victim of their own success” in that the last 20 years have seen a marked decline in once sizable and influential white supremacist organizations. He even quotes a New Jersey antifa member saying, “At a certain point the biggest group was the National Socialist Movement, with just 80 dudes doing reenactments.”

    If the numbers of actual fascists are waning, why has antifa violence exploded this year? One answer is that antifa portrays the Trump presidency as a threat.  “No Trump—No KKK—No Fascist USA!” has become “the most popular anti-Trump chant” at protests, Bray writes.

    More problematic is the way this anti-Trump sentiment has resulted in attacks on ordinary voters and local political organizations. In 2017, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler canceled an annual parade in the city after “antifascists” threatened violence because the Multnomah County GOP was marching in the parade. “You have seen how much power we have downtown and that the police cannot stop us from shutting down roads so please consider your decision wisely,” read the threat sent to the city.

    The larger goal of antifa is an end to negotiated politics where political dissent is met with intimidation and punishment. “Our goal should be that in twenty years those who voted for Trump are too uncomfortable to share that fact in public,” writes Bray. “We may not always be able to change someone’s beliefs, but we sure as hell can make it politically, socially, economically, and sometimes physically costly to articulate them.”

    Justifying Violence

    Antifa members fetishize and celebrate their violence. “One of the more shocking aspects of militant antifascist culture for observers outside of the movement is the consumption and trade of violent images,” Vysotsky notes. “Pictures of being beaten or bloodied in addition to memes that extol the virtue of antifascist violence or mock injured fascists are a common element of antifa culture.” Such pictures are known as “riot porn.”

    In addition to actual violence, threats are another key part of antifa’s toolbox. The group is a proponent of “doxing” – Internet slang for exposing someone’s name and/or personal information in order to shame and intimidate them.

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    Evidently not antifa’s cup of tea. heroesamericancafe.com

    The results of such vigilantism are predictable. After left-wing activists in Portland solicited the names of “non-friendly” businesses that didn’t support the Black Lives Matter movement online, an antifa-affiliated twitter account alleged that Heroes American Café in Portland, which has American flag décor and pictures of various American heroes on the wall, supported local police. The owner of Heroes Café, an African American veteran, soon got a threatening phone call. A few days after that, his windows were smashed and bullets were fired into his restaurant during a protest billed as a “Day of Rage.”

    In broader ways, antifa’s embrace of violence makes adherents remarkably similar to the violent racist extremists and alt-right groups they claim to oppose. Both groups use self-justifications for violence that vastly overstate a threat from within broader society. They both rely on tribal identitarian politics to enforce a purity of ideology that is incompatible with the existing cultural and political order that they hope to overthrow.

    Antifa’s beliefs regarding violence appear to plainly meet the definition of domestic terrorism in federal law, defined as activities done “to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.”

    Downplaying the Threat

    Observers sympathetic to social justice goals express concern that antifa violence is counterproductive. “I think [antifa] also need to understand how difficult they may be making the situation for the promotion of Black Lives Matter in this time where Black people are really trying to make some headway,” Portland State University sociologist and Black studies professor Shirley Jackson told a local television station last month. Public opinion seems to bolster Jackson’s worries that violence at protests is impeding the larger goals of racial justice. Last month, Pew reported support for Black Lives Matter had dropped significantly since June, and the “findings come as confrontations between protesters and police have escalated.”

    Despite this, political leadership is often afraid or unwilling to crackdown on antifa. Major police departments across the country have been hamstrung and asked to stand down in the face of ongoing violent riots. Antifa may consider Portland Mayor Wheeler a tyrant, but the city dropped 90% of charges against rioters in September. Despite the city tolerating violent riots, Wheeler is up for reelection in November and is currently tied in the polls with challenger Sarah Iannarone, who has publicly declared, “I am antifa.” In 2016, when Iannarone previously ran for mayor, she tweeted out a photo of a ballot of a constituent who had voted for her but had elsewhere written in Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Che Guevarra, Ho Chi Minh, Angela Davis and other violent Marxists for city offices. Iannarone remarked the ballot was, “Quite possibly my favorite ‘I voted this way’ photo.”

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    docs.google.com

    Far from creating pressure to achieve specific political reforms related to racial injustice or police violence, antifa appears to be using this moment to further press its radical political agenda on a national stage. A group called Shutdown DC has been distributing a 38-page guide called “Stopping the Coup” that offers specific guidance on how to disrupt the national election in November, should it be contested, in order to stop Trump, “who is energized by the forces of white supremacy and brutal capitalism.” The “Stopping the Coup” document disavows violence, but Shutdown DC has not shied away from working closely with affinity groups such as All Out DC, a “collective of DC antifascist activists” who want to “burn down the American plantation” when organizing major protests in the nation’s capital.

    In the meantime, two high profile election simulations done by mainstream political groups – the Transition Integrity Project on the left, and the Texas Public Policy Center in conjunction with the Claremont Institute on the right – both found a high likelihood of antifa violence following November’s election. Regardless of whether antifa is most accurately described as broad ideology or a unified movement, the threat it presents to disrupting the democratic elections and enforcing basic law and order is tangible.

  • $6 Million In Gucci, Prada, & Chanel Goods Stolen From JFK Airport In Elaborate Series Of Heists
    $6 Million In Gucci, Prada, & Chanel Goods Stolen From JFK Airport In Elaborate Series Of Heists

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 11/02/2020 – 19:00

    Just when you thought nothing interesting was happening at airports anymore…

    Two former airport workers are among six people who have been indicted for allegedly stealing more than $6 million worth of designer merchandise, including Gucci purses, jewelry and Chanel handbags, in what is being called a “series of heists” at JFK Airport.https://nbcnewyork.com/portableplayer/?CID=1:2:2694408&videoID=1813173315935&origin=nbcnewyork.com&fullWidth=y

    Two truckers that formerly worked at JFK allegedly used inside knowledge of the airport’s innerworkings to plan and coordinate the heists, according to NBC 4 New York. 

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    One trucker, 33-year-old David Lacarriere, allegedly used a forged document and airway bill at the receiving office for an air cargo importer to gain access to an incoming Prada shipment in January. His accomplice, 43-year-old Gary McArthur, helped him load four pallets of Prada merchandise – worth about $804,000 – onto a tractor trailer. From there, they simply drove off with the goods. 

    The tractor trailer was found days later, empty and doused with bleach. 

    The crew pulled a similar heist in May, where one person posed as a truck driver and another presented similarly forged documentation. During the May heist, the crew was able to walk away with five pallets of Chanel and Gucci items, worth more than $4.4 million. Similarly, that tractor trailer was also found days later, empty and doused with bleach.

    By June, authorities had discovered the crew’s stash house for its stolen goods at an abandoned beauty salon in Queens. While executing a search warrant on the premises, police were able to prevent the sale of $300,000 in stolen merchandise and recover more than 3,000 Gucci items and 1,000 Chanel items collectively worth about $2.5 million.

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    At the time the search warrant was executed, Lacarriere and McArthur were allegedly in the midst of selling nearly 120 items to 51 year old Alan Vu, who law enforcement observed loading products into his Mercedes SUV.

    Four other men were arrested as part of the scheme and police are still pursuing two additional suspects. The men were charged in a 22 count indictment that includes grand larceny, conspiracy and criminal possession of stolen property. Lacarriere and McArthur both face 25 years in prison if convicted. Vu faces up to 15 years. 

    Lacarriere’s attorney told ABC: “We’re anxious to see what the evidence is the people allege they have. They said a lot of things, but they haven’t shown us anything yet.”

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