- The Origins Of America's Secret Police
The Origins Of America’s Secret Police
Authored by Cynthia Chung via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
“Know Thyself,
Nothing to Excess,
Surety Brings Ruin”– inscribed at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi
Many are aware of the Apollo at Delphi inscription and associate it as words of wisdom, after all, the Temple at Delphi was at the center of global intelligence. Kings, emperors, statesmen, generals from all quarters of the ancient world would travel to the Temple with a very generous payment in gold in hopes that the wisdom of the great god Apollo would be bestowed on them and give strength and power to their particular cause.
One of the most famous prophecies made by the Cult of Delphi, according to the ancient historian Herodotus, was to King Croesus of Lydia. King Croesus was a very rich king and the last bastion of the Ionian cities against the increasing Persian power in Anatolia. King Croesus wished to know whether he should continue his military campaign deeper into Persian Empire territory and whether he should seek a military alliance in such a feat.
According to Herodotus, the amount of gold King Croesus delivered was the greatest ever bestowed upon the Temple of Apollo. In return the priestess of Delphi, otherwise known as the Oracle, (some poor young girl selected once a year with the “right attributes”) would spout nonsensical babble, intoxicated by the gas vapours of the chasm she was conveniently placed over. The priests would then “translate” the Oracle’s prophecy.
King Croesus was told as his prophecy-riddle, “If Croesus goes to war he will destroy a great empire.” Croesus was also told to ally himself with the most powerful Greek state, and he chose Sparta. Croesus was overjoyed and thought his victory solid and immediately began working towards building his military campaign against Persia. Long story short, Croesus lost everything and Lydia was taken over by the Persians. The Spartans never showed up.
It turns out the prophecy-riddle was not wrong, but that Croesus mistook which great empire would fall.
There is likely a great deal of truth in this story. And the words inscribed at the Temple of Apollo “Know Thyself, Nothing to Excess, Surety Brings Ruin” becomes more a foreboding to anyone who dares enter such a Temple in search of wisdom and power; those who are “worthy” of the god Apollo will have the wisdom to solve the riddle of their prophecy and will prevail, those unworthy of Apollo’s “good graces” will fail and be ruined.
It’s a nice story, but it is in fact, a brilliant cover for a global intelligence racket.
The Cult of Delphi was indeed the nerve center of military and political intelligence that had no “allegiance” to any state or empire, but rather was able to use intel that they collected with their network of spies, along with intel they were given by those foolish enough to layout their plans (and their gold) to them. The priests of Delphi would then decide thereupon what information needed to be shared with what target to fit their purpose, a “prophecy” that they shaped, like moving pawns on a chessboard.
The question for those who dared visit the Cult of Delphi was thus not so much about having enough wisdom to solve the veiled prophecy, but rather, ‘What kind of pawn are you to the priests of Apollo?’
The Morals and Dogma of the Scottish Rite
Those who seek wisdom and power have tended to also have an interest in the realm of “secret knowledge.” After all, who wouldn’t want a fast track toward their desires? Who wouldn’t want to believe that their destiny is to be rich, privileged and powerful? Who wouldn’t want to believe that they were chosen out of a few to hold special qualities (one could say supernatural) that make them superior to the majority?
The Scottish Rite was formally organized in the U.S. in 1801, as a group of Tory partisans on the losing side of the American Revolution. One of the principal men involved from the very beginning was a British general by the name of Augustine Prevost. Prevost had conquered Charleston, South Carolina, and set up a secret police apparatus there which became the Scottish Rite headquarters, after the British Army left. (1)
The Scottish Rite would come to rule over American Freemasonry during the nineteenth century and Albert Pike is recognised as the source of this success.
In 1859, Pike was elected “Sovereign Grand Commander” of the Scottish Rite’s Southern Jurisdiction. In 1871, “Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry” (the anti-bible of the Rite) was first published by its author Albert Pike, former General of the Confederate Armies during the Civil War.
Why am I bringing this all up when the focus of this paper is on the origins of America’s secret police?
Because the man credited for building the FBI into the massive domestic intelligence apparatus that it is today was J. Edgar Hoover, who happened to be a 33rd degree mason of the Scottish Rite, which he was “coroneted” in 1955 after 35 years of membership.
Why is this relevant for the purpose of this paper? If one is to understand what constitutes the “Morals and Dogma” of such a membership, to which Hoover entered the inner most circle, it will become clear that not only does the Rite act as an opposing church to Christianity, but that pledging one’s allegiance to this secret society is understood as coming before all else in this material world, including government and country.
For this reason I think it apt to share a few quotes…
Writing about top-down organization, Pike wrote the following in his book Morals and Dogma:
“The Blue [or lower] Degrees are but the outer court … of the Temple. Part of the symbols are displayed there to the Initiate, but he is intentionally misled by false interpretations. It is not intended that he shall understand them, but it is intended that he shall imagine he understands them. Their true explication is reserved for the Adepts, the Princes of Masonry. . . .” [emphasis added]
These are the very same techniques used by the Cult of Delphi with the understanding that the “true explication” of the “symbols” will only be understood by those supposedly worthy of them, i.e. “the Adepts, the Princes of Masonry.”
How does one know if one is a Prince of Masonry? Those who are foolish enough to have complete faith in the magic of the occult will give an honest attempt to understand such symbols, however, the truth of the matter is those who are chosen for their “understanding” and thus moved closer to the inner “sanctum”, are merely chosen for their usefulness as an instrument for “a higher will.” While this person might be a pawn who plays the determining role in a checkmate, they remain, nevertheless, just a pawn.
Pike would also write in his Morals and Dogma:
“Men are but the automata of Providence, and [Providenae] uses the demagogue, the fanatic, and the knave . .. as its tools and instruments to effect that of which they do not dream, and which they imagine themselves commissioned to prevent …”
Here it becomes clear that the majority of mankind are considered by the Rite as instruments of Providence, and that to do the will of such Providence justifies that the Rite treat mankind as such. I will address shortly what sort of providence they are speaking of.
Pike goes on to explain the Rite’s main guide to the universe, as:
‘‘Magic is the science of the ancient magi.. Magic unites in one and the same science, whatsoever Philosophy can possess that is most certain, and Religion of the Infallible and the Eternal. It perfectly … reconciles these two terms… faith and reason … those who accept [magic] as a rule may give their will a sovereign power that will make them the masters of all inferior beings and of all errant spirits; that is to say, will make them the Arbiters and Kings of the World….”
Again, we see the concept that only a select few will be chosen to be able to decipher and use magic, and that thereby justifies their dominion “that will make them masters of all inferior beings…[and] make them the Arbiters and Kings of the World.”
Pike wrote the above quote to instruct “Sublime Princes of the Royal Secret”- gentlemen of the 32nd Degree.
At this point, it is clear that to truly hold this view of oneself, humankind and the “laws of the universe” means that one is in direct conflict with the idea of democracy towards a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
Lastly, I will share a quote from 1889 while Pike was in France, expressing his views of God and what is to be considered “the Good”:
“The Masonic religion should be, by all of us initiates of the high degrees, maintained in the purity of the Luciferian Doctrine. If Lucifer were not God, would Adonay (the God of the Christians) whose deeds prove his cruelty, perfidy and hatred of man, barbarism and repulsion to science, would Adonay and his priests calumniate him?
`Yes, Lucifer is God, and unfortunately Adonay is also God. For the eternal law is that there is no light without shade, no beauty without ugliness, no white without black, for the absolute can only exist as two Gods…the true and pure philosophical religion is the belief in Lucifer, the equal of Adonay; but Lucifer, God of Light and God of Good, is struggling for humanity against Adonay, the God of Darkness and Evil.”
This quote, as per historian Anton Chaitkin, is available in French and English in the Albert Pike vertical file at the library of the Scottish Rite Southern Jurisdiction at 1733 16th St. NW, Washington D.C.
In later years, the body of Albert Pike would be interred inside the Washington DC Temple’s walls. A few feet away, they built a complete replication of the office and desk of their second most honored member, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
It should also be known that much of the FBI is implicated in the Scottish Rite. For instance, there are certain Washington lodges which have a disproportionately high number of FBI agents in them such as the Alexandria Lodge.
[For more information on this refer to historian Anton Chaitkin’s “Treason in America”.]
The Seat of Government
On Dec. 17, 1906, Teddy Roosevelt promoted his Navy Secretary, Charles J. Bonaparte, to become Attorney General. Bonaparte lost no time and told Congress that the Department of Justice must be given “a force of permanent police… under its control.”
On May 27, 1908, Congress reacted by prohibiting all Executive departments from using Secret Service agents as policemen, including the Justice Department. During this period only the Treasury Department had the authority to use Secret Service men.
To get around this block from Congress, on July 26, 1908, Attorney General Bonaparte, on Teddy Roosevelt’s instructions, ordered the creation of an investigative agency within the Department of Justice; which later became known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
It was the start of what would become an unelected oligarchy, in direct opposition to the rule of self-government.
In the midst of this, a 22-year-old J. Edgar Hoover was first recruited, the year was 1917. Just out of law school, he was put in charge of the Department of Justice’s War Emergency Division’s Enemy Alien Bureau, and was quickly immersed in the wildly lawless wartime counterinsurgency of the First Red Scare (1917-1920).
Anton Chaitkin writes of this period in his paper “Hoover’s FBI and Anglo-American Dictatorship”:
“Attorney General Palmer created a General Intelligence (or “Radical”) Division in the Bureau of Investigation, and appointed Hoover its head. Military Intelligence and Hoover’s agents working together as a single secret service now built up a network of civilian vigilante spies, informers and provocateurs.
…
These auxiliaries were then set loose in the “Palmer Raids,” a war on unions, radicals, civil rights advocates, teachers, and immigrants from November 1919 to January 1920. This initial descent into a police state was, however, deeply opposed by the American population, and sparked popular protests and outrage.”
Edgar Hoover was well fitted as Palmer’s deputy, in overseeing the political mass arrests, deportations, lynchings, terror propaganda, and witch-hunts. Hoover would put a Southern White Masonic unit inside the Bureau itself, called the Fidelity Chapter. And insist that his agents refer to the Bureau, and his office, as “The Seat of Government”. (2)
In 1922, Walter Lippmann put forth in his incredibly influential book “Public Opinion,” that a dictatorship was of the utmost necessity to correct the crisis America was now facing, and that it could no longer afford to delude itself with the idea of a Constitutional system. Lippmann argued that the general public was incapable of exercising reasoned judgment. He claimed the people could only think in “stereotypes” such that they are led to believe in “villains and conspiracies.”
Thus, to overcome such “ignorance,” Lippmann declared that the consensus must be generated not by the ill-educated people, but rather “engineered” by an elite class of “experts”, using “propaganda.” This elite class was in turn to guide the national government from within its every department, forming a permanent dictatorship, its governing members appointed, not elected, to serve for life. A “soft” dictatorship so to speak.
When the Great Depression hit (1929-1933), Hoover blamed the general lawlessness on inefficient, corrupt local politicians and police. What was the solution? More power to “the Bureau.”
Presidents Come and Go But One Thing Remains Constant
While campaigning for the Presidency, Franklin Roosevelt installed his close friend Thomas J. Walsh as the 1932 Democratic convention chairman.
Montana Senator Walsh “knew where the bodies were buried” so to speak.
The reason for this was that in 1921, Thomas J. Walsh had led the battle at the Senate hearings on the Justice Department’s illegal practices. During the hearings he confronted Palmer and his deputy Hoover with evidence that they had perpetrated “an orgy of terror, violence and crime against citizens and aliens….”
Walsh remained in the Senate as J. Edgar Hoover’s dedicated enemy.
Franklin Roosevelt won the election on November 8, 1932; he was to take office in March. On February 15, 1933, a low-level Italian Freemason named Giuseppe Zingara shot at President-elect Roosevelt. He missed and ended up killing the Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak instead.
On February 26, Franklin Roosevelt announced his appointment of Senator Thomas J. Walsh as U.S. Attorney General. On March 1, the New York Times reported Walsh’s pledge that “he would re-organize the Department of Justice when he assumes office, probably with an almost completely new personnel.”
It is said that Walsh had declared that one of his first acts would be to oust J. Edgar Hoover.
Walsh was found dead the next morning, while on a train to Washington, D.C. for Roosevelt’s March 4 inauguration and his own swearing-in.
Starting in July 1933, a group of American Legion officials paid by J.P. Morgan’s men asked Marine Corps General Smedley Butler to lead a coup d’état against President Roosevelt. When General Butler had gathered enough evidence he went to J. Edgar Hoover for action. Hoover refused to take any action stating that there was no evidence a federal criminal statute had been violated. General Butler had no choice but to broadcast the coup plot to the American people in order to subvert the fascist takeover.
Franklin Roosevelt was entirely aware that the growing power of the federal bureau was a terrible threat, and had rapidly become an abhorrent opposing force to the president’s authority. It is for that reason that Franklin Roosevelt made the decision to centralise U.S. intelligence under his own control, which was to be created and guided by Colonel Donovan under the newly created OSS.
It was no secret that Colonel Donovan and J. Edgar Hoover were entirely opposed to each other. In fact, Donovan was up there with Martin Luther King, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Robert Kennedy on Hoover’s most despised list.
Franklin Roosevelt died on April 12th, 1945. WWII was officially over on Sept 2nd, 1945. The OSS would be dissolved three weeks later on Sept 20th, 1945. The CIA was “officially” created two years later, purged of its FDR patriots. Donovan vied for leadership of the CIA and was denied. Instead Truman assigned him the task of heading a committee studying the country’s fire departments. (For more on this refer to my paper)
Following this the FBI continued to conduct witch hunts through Congressional committees, President Truman, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, and the young California Congressman Richard M. Nixon.
On November 22nd, 1963 President Kennedy was brutally murdered in the streets of Dallas, Texas in broad daylight.
On November 29th, 1963 the Warren Commission was set up to investigate the murder of President Kennedy.
The old Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana (an ally of FDR) was a member of that Warren Commission. Boggs became increasingly disturbed by the lack of transparency and rigour exhibited by the Commission and became convinced that many of the documents used to incriminate Oswald were in fact forgeries.
In 1965 Rep. Boggs told New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison that Oswald could not have been the one who killed Kennedy. (4) It was Boggs who encouraged Garrison to begin the only law enforcement prosecution of the President’s murder to this day.
Nixon was inaugurated as President of the United States on Jan 20th, 1969. Hale Boggs soon after called on Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell to have the courage to fire J. Edgar Hoover. (5)
It wasn’t long thereafter that the private airplane carrying Hale Boggs disappeared without a trace.
Jim Garrison was the District Attorney of New Orleans from 1962 to 1973 and was the only one to bring forth a trial concerning the assassination of President Kennedy. In Jim Garrison’s book “On the Trail of the Assassins”, J. Edgar Hoover comes up several times impeding or shutting down investigations into JFK’s murder, in particular concerning the evidence collected by the Dallas Police Department, such as the nitrate test Oswald was given and which exonerated him, proving that he never shot a rifle the day of Nov 22nd, 1963. However, for reasons only known to the government and its investigators this fact was kept secret for 10 months. (6) It was finally revealed in the Warren Commission report, which inexplicably didn’t change their opinion that Oswald had shot Kennedy.
Another particularly damning incident was concerning the Zapruder film that was in the possession of the FBI and which they had sent a “copy” to the Warren Commission for their investigation. This film was one of the leading piece of evidence used to support the “magic bullet theory” and showcase the direction of the headshot coming from behind, thus verifying that Oswald’s location was adequate for such a shot.
During Garrison’s trial on the Kennedy assassination (1967-1969) he subpoenaed the Zapruder film that for some peculiar reason had been locked up in some vault owned by Life magazine. This was the first time in more than five years that the Zapruder film was made public. It turns out the FBI’s copy that was sent to the Warren Commission had two critical frames reversed to create a false impression that the rifle shot was from behind.
When Garrison got a hold of the original film it was discovered that the head shot had actually come from the front. In fact, what the whole film showed was that the President had been shot from multiple angles meaning there was more than one gunman. (7)
When the FBI was questioned about how these two critical frames could have been reversed, they answered self-satisfactorily that it must have been a technical glitch…
Today there are those who continue an attempt to discredit the work of Jim Garrison for the crime of challenging the absurd narrative of the Warren Commission. However, anyone who bothers to read the Warren Commission report, would soon discover it to be a mess of contradictions, fallacies and outright fabrications. Not only an absurd sham but ultimately complicit in one of the most disgraceful cover-ups in American history.
When will the American people realise that the biggest threat to American freedom is not from without but from within its very own walls, where it has been prominently residing for the last 112 years…
[In a following article I will be addressing the central role of H.G. Wells and Walter Lippmann in British-American Intelligence which will subsequently be followed by an expose on the role of CIA Godfather Allen Dulles and the real reason Americans were manipulated into entering the Vietnam War.]
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/09/2021 – 23:30 - Food Price Inflation Accelerates For Seventh Consecutive Month
Food Price Inflation Accelerates For Seventh Consecutive Month
Is it time to worry about food inflation?
The Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Price Index rose for a seventh consecutive month in December, led by dairy products and vegetable oils.
The FAO Food Price Index averaged 107.5 points last month versus 105.2 points in November.
The benchmark, which tracks global food prices of cereals, oilseeds, dairy products, meat, and sugar, averaged 97.9 points for 2020, a three-year high, and a 3.1% rise from 2019 levels.
The global food index was still down 25% from its historical high reached in 2011.
Vegetable oil prices saw the most significant jump, up 4.7% month-on-month in December after surging more than 14.0% in November. The index was up 19.1% in 2020 over the prior year.
FAO explained that soaring vegetable oil prices are due to “ongoing supply tightness in major palm oil-producing countries. International trade was affected by a sharp hike in export duties in Indonesia. International prices for soy oil rose in part due to prolonged strikes in Argentina that impacted both crushing activity and port logistics.”
Cereal prices rose 1.1% from November and for all of 2020 averaged 6.6% over the prior year. The reason for the increase is that export prices for wheat, maize, sorghum, and rice all rose last month due to growing condition concerns in North and South America and the Russian Federation.
Earlier this week, we highlighted drought conditions materialized in Argentina resulted in corn (maize) prices trading in Chicago surging to 6-1/2 year highs.
Rome-based FAO said the dairy index increased 3.2% on the month, but for the year, it was flat compared to 2019.
The meat index increased 1.7% last month, while its average this year was 4.5% below that of 2019.
Everyone’s favorite permabear, SocGen’s Albert Edwards, who, unlike Goldman Sachs, is starting to worry about soaring food inflation, writes FAO Food Price Index been surging over the last few months.
With the FAO food index continually rising, Edwards notes that “annual inflation in cereals reached 20%, the highest annual rise since mid-2011 when the Arab Spring was in full flow! (see chart below).”
Edwards makes his feelings clear on who ultimately was to blame for the global tidal wave in food inflation back in 2011: “Despite Ben Bernanke’s denials that the Fed’s QE policies caused rampant food price inflation in 2011 (link), many economists such as myself believe that was absolutely the case.”
Edwards summarizes his concerns best with the following statement: “even in the richest country in the world, food poverty has become a real problem during this pandemic.”
This leaves us with the next imminent food inflation crisis as central banks are mindlessly injecting a record $1.4 billion in liquidity into capital markets every hour.
Soaring food inflation may result in social-destabilization; the question is where will it start?
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/09/2021 – 23:00 - Escobar: The Assange Saga – Practicing Real Journalism Is Criminally Insane
Escobar: The Assange Saga – Practicing Real Journalism Is Criminally Insane
Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,
Synchronicity is definitely fond of mirror wonderwalls. The Julian Assange saga seemed to have entered a new chapter as he was, in thesis, on his way to – conditional – freedom this past Monday, only one day after the first anniversary of the start of the Raging Twenties: the assassination of Maj Gen Qassem Soleimani.
The fate of the journalist the Empire seeks to terminate was just juxtaposed to the fate of the warrior/diplomat the empire already terminated.
Two days later, Julian Assange was de facto re-incarcerated exactly as the Empire was hit by an “insurrection” which, whenever instigated in that distant “Third World”, is celebrated in Exceptionalistan as “people power”.
The invaluable Craig Murray, from inside Westminster Magistrates Court No. 1 in London, meticulously presented the full contours of the insanity this Wednesday.
Read it in conjunction with the positively terrifying judgment delivered on Monday in the United States government case against Julian Assange.
The defining issue, for all those who practice real journalism all across the world, is that the judgment affirms, conclusively, that any journalist can be prosecuted under the US Espionage Act. Since a 1961 amendment, the Espionage Act carries universal jurisdiction.
The great John Pilger memorably describes “judge” Vanessa Baraitser as “that Gothic woman”. She is in fact an obscure public servant, not a jurist. Her judgment walks and talks like it was written by a mediocre rookie hack. Or, better yet, entirely lifted from the US Department of Justice indictment.
Julian Assange was – at the last minute – discharged on theoretically humanitarian grounds. So the case had, in effect, ended. Not really. Two days later, he was sent back to Belmarsh, a squalid maximum security prison rife with Covid-19. So the case is ongoing.
WikiLeaks editor Kristinn Hrafnnson correctly noted, “It is unjust and unfair and illogical when you consider her ruling of two days ago about Julian’s health in large part because he is in Belmarsh prison (…) To send him back there doesn’t make any sense.”
It does when one considers the real role of Baraitser – at a loss to juggle between the imperatives of the imperial agenda and the necessity of saving the face of British justice.
Baraitser is a mere, lowly foot soldier punching way above her weight. The real power in the Assange case is Lady Emma Arbuthnot, forced out of a visible role because of very compromising, direct ties she and her husband Lord Arbuthnot maintain with British intelligence and military, first revealed by – who else – WikiLeaks.
It was Arbuthnot who picked up obscure Baraitser – who dutifully follows her road map. In court, as Murray has detailed in a series of searing reports, Baraitser essentially covers her incompetence with glaring vindictiveness.
Baraitser discharged Julian Assange, according to her own reasoning, because she was not convinced the appalling American gulag would prevent him from committing suicide.
But the key issue is that before reaching this conclusion, she agreed and reinforced virtually every point of the US indictment.
So at this point, on Monday, the “Gothic woman” was performing a contortion to save the US from the profound global embarrassment of prosecuting a de facto journalist and publisher for revealing imperial war crimes, not United States government secrets.
Two days later, the full picture became crystal clear. There was nothing “humanitarian” about that judgment. Political dissent was equaled with mental illness. Julian Assange was branded as criminally insane. Once again, practicing journalism was criminalized.
There are reasons to believe though, that a United States government appeal may fail. A British High Court would be reluctant to overturn a judgment where Baraitser actually established findings of fact: a direct correlation between the state of the American gulag, and the extreme danger to Assange’s health if he’s thrown inside this system.
As it stands, it didn’t even matter that Assange’s defense offered a full package to obtain bail, from home arrest to the use of an ankle bracelet. Baraitser’s notion that the British security state would not be able to prevent his “escape” wearing an ankle bracelet in the middle of a total, police state-style lockdown does not even qualify as a joke.
So Julian Assange is back to suffering a perverse, interminable rewrite of Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum.
The US government’s legal strategy before the High Court convenes in April is basically to try to prove its American gulag is competent enough to prevent a suicide – even though the ultimate aim of this post-truth Inquisition seems to be the termination of Julian Assange inside the penal system. That goal doesn’t even require a supermax prison in Colorado. Belmarsh will do.Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/09/2021 – 22:30 - Nearly Half Of Republicans Approve Of Capitol Riot
Nearly Half Of Republicans Approve Of Capitol Riot
The U.S. Capitol building was stormed by an angry pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6. Overall, five people died as a result of the riot – one woman shot as she tried to break into a room of lawmakers, three people who died of medical emergencies in the crowd and one Capitol Police Officer who later died due to head injuries sustained from an attack by a rioter.
The attack occurred during the early moments of Congress counting all electoral votes in a largely ceremonious declaration of President-elect Biden as the incoming successor to Trump. Continued claims of election fraud from Trump over the last two months, parroted by a minority of Republicans in the House and Senate, led to a few lawmakers objecting to certain swing states’ electoral votes.
At times during the attack, Capitol Police either nonchalantly allowed rioters to get closer to the Capitol or outright encouraged the mob to gather right at its doors and windows. Several videos show sections of police using little or no force in stopping the mob, with some standing to take selfies. Three of the four Capitol Police Board members have since resigned.
According to a recent YouGov survey, while a majority of Americans oppose the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, 45 percent of Republicans say they’re in support of the riot and believe it’s justified. That’s roughly 33 million voters across the country…
You will find more infographics at Statista
As YouGov notes, the partisan difference in support could be down to differing perceptions of the nature of the protests.
While 59% of voters who are aware of the events at the Capitol perceive them as being more violent than more peaceful (28%), the opposite is true of Republicans. By 58% to 22%, Republicans see the goings on as more peaceful than more violent.
Democrats are swiftly moving to draft articles of impeachment against Trump before his term ends in less than two weeks. The party is also hoping to implement the 25th amendment, which would have two-thirds of Congress vote to remove Trump from office and install Vice President Pence for the remainder of the term. Both appear unlikely to gain enough Republican support, but huge cracks within the GOP are emerging following the Capitol attack as anger builds across both parties.
Those on both sides of the dispute are at odds in their descriptions of those currently occupying the US Capitol.
About half (52%) of voters agree with the “extremist” label, the most commonly selected of all the terms we put to respondents (but the split between Republicans and Democrats is vast). Nearly as many (49%) think “domestic terrorists” is an appropriate title, and 41% consider them “criminals.”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/09/2021 – 22:05 - Chinese Communist Party Says Biden A "New Window Of Hope"
Chinese Communist Party Says Biden A “New Window Of Hope”
Authored by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times,
Beijing is looking forward to a new U.S. administration after Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi said Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden represented a “new window of hope” for the Sino–U.S. relationship.
Wang made the remarks last week in an interview with Chinese state-run media Xinhua and China Media Group. He also expressed hopes that the incoming U.S. administration will “return to a sensible approach,” according to a government transcript.
He took a swipe at the Trump administration, saying that in recent years, the United States has tried to “suppress China and start a new cold war.” The Chinese regime has frequently used this rhetoric, especially during the 2018–2019 trade war, to criticize the administration’s China policies.
He also accused U.S. policymakers of having “serious misconceptions” about China and called on the United States to “respect” China’s social system.
Wang concluded his interview by saying that the two countries could resolve their differences “as long as the United States can draw lessons from the past and work with China in the same direction.”
The Trump administration has confronted the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on a range of issues, including unfair trade practices, espionage, malign influence in the United States, security threats posed by Chinese technology, and its human rights abuses against religious minorities and Hong Kong residents.
Biden’s critics have expressed concerns that an administration under him would be soft on China, and Chinese state-run media have openly stated their preference for Biden.
Most recently, China’s state-run media Global Times, in an article published on Jan. 5, used the sudden decision by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) not to delist three Chinese telecom companies as a sign that a more “flexible” administration under Biden would be more friendly toward Beijing. The NYSE has since reversed course again, saying on Jan. 6 that it would go ahead with delisting them.
“Chinese experts translated the move as a voice of reason from some in Wall Street and US political circle [sic], who wish the incumbent US president won’t hamstring the incoming Biden administration in making decisions related to China,” the article stated.
It also cited a Chinese professor who said U.S. politicians and businessmen would prefer “flexibility” under Biden over Trump’s “boundless style of bullying.”
On Dec. 31, 2020, the NYSE announced that it would begin the process of delisting China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom, in compliance with Trump’s executive order, as the three companies were found by the Pentagon to have ties to the Chinese military.
In a commentary article published in the Chinese-language Epoch Times last month, Zhong Yuan, a researcher focused on China’s political system, explained that the CCP preferred a Biden presidency because he would implement a policy of engagement with Beijing.
The CCP’s favorable stance toward Biden was reflected in an opinion article published by Xinhua on Dec. 19, 2020, according to Zhong. The article stated that the Trump administration had left behind “a mess” and considered what his successor should do.
Zhong said there was an urgency for the CCP to start working with Biden because there’s internal division within the Party about how to handle deteriorating Sino–U.S. ties. Zhong said the division was evident in another Xinhua opinion article published in December 2020, that denounced “certain people” for spreading “favorable comments” about the United States.
The division threatened the position of Chinese leader Xi Jinping within the Party, Zhong said, and was likely the reason Chinese state-run media took up the position of supporting Biden.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/09/2021 – 21:40 - Connecticut Surpasses New York In COVID Vaccinations; Israel Remains Global Leader
Connecticut Surpasses New York In COVID Vaccinations; Israel Remains Global Leader
Connecticut Gov Ned Lamont is showing Gov Andrew Cuomo the error of his attention-seeking ways. While Lamont has been more than comfortable playing a supporting role in the alliance of northeastern governors led by Cuomo, Bloomberg pointed out in a recent piece that tiny Connecticut had surpassed the neighboring Empire State by taking a different, significantly looser approach to vaccinating its most vulnerable residents.
As we reported yesterday, after enduring a torrent of criticism, Cuomo has finally reversed his strategy for vaccinating New Yorkers in a truly “equitable” manner, after discovering that his tight restrictions and hefty penalties was forcing hospitals to slow the pace of vaccinations to a crawl.
After finally relenting, Cuomo said the other day that New York would start scheduling vaccination appointments for seniors, teachers and first responders, as well as New Yorkers 75+.
Bloomberg’s vaccination tracker shows New York has administered just 38% of the shots it has received from the US government as of Jan. 7. Connecticut has worked through 46% of its supply.
Connecticut has given 3.26 doses per 100 people in the state, while NY has given 2.46 doses per 100 people.
High-risk hospital workers (emergency room and intensive-care staff) were first in line in the Empire State, while other health-care personnel such as independent doctors were set to be vaccinated later, though Cuomo opened vaccination to them Monday.
Cuomo on Friday said the guidelines were designed to protect the people treating coronavirus patients, but they ultimately caused frustration among some health-care workers. Jana Dehovitz, a pediatrician in Brooklyn, unsuccessfully tried to get vaccinated for weeks. She said she was frustrated hearing stories of politicians and specialists at large health systems who don’t see patients receiving their shots.
“Are they going to come see our patients for us since they’ll be protected?” Dehovitz said. She got the first of a two-course shot Thursday.
Of course, the US rollout has fallen short of projections set months ago by Operation Warp Speed. While the initial round of shots through early January has been doled out primarily via hospitals, the next phase will draw more on pharmacies and health clinics (ie places where vaccines are more traditionally administered) and will broaden the pool of people eligible to get the shots).
Source: WSJ
As the chart above shows, Israel is leading not only the US, but most of Europe and the Middle East as well. Still, we look forward to watching CNN, MSNBC and the rest of the medi
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/09/2021 – 21:15 - Twitter Allows 'Hang Mike Pence' To Trend After Banning Trump For "Inciting Violence"
Twitter Allows ‘Hang Mike Pence’ To Trend After Banning Trump For “Inciting Violence”
Authored by Matt Margolis via PJMedia.com,
The hypocrisy of left-wing Big Tech companies is astounding.
A day after Twitter banned President Trump “due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” the social media company let “Hang Mike Pence” trend on its platform.
WTF why is this allowed to trend?
I get that people have been tweeting it to quote some of the insurrectionists but it shouldn’t be allowed to trend. pic.twitter.com/HTlSYnoB5y
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) January 9, 2021
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Twitter eventually noticed the term trending and blocked it and variations from trending.
“We blocked the phrase and other variations of it from trending,” a Twitter spokesperson told Fox News.
“We want trends to promote healthy discussions on Twitter.”
Healthy discussions, like this tweet from Kathy Griffin, featuring her infamous photoshoot with a severed Trump head effigy.
Just resign now. You lost. Its over. https://t.co/NtrE1yJ2By pic.twitter.com/Y75ewRv5E0
— Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) January 6, 2021
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While the phrase “Hang Mike Pence” apparently began trending because of a viral video from the Capitol riot showing protesters chanting the phrase, many believed Twitter letting the phrase trend at all was hypocritical following the company justifying banning Trump over bogus allegations that he incited violence.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/09/2021 – 20:50 - Record Investor Euphoria Is Now Literally Off The Chart
Record Investor Euphoria Is Now Literally Off The Chart
The past few months can best be characterized as a period of unprecedented market optimism and sheer euphoria, and we have done just that with several recent articles…
- Dec 1: Market Euphoria Surpasses Dot Com Levels: What’s An Investor To Do?
- Dec 2: Citi Warns Most “Euphoric” Market Since Dot Com Bubble
- Dec 6: JPMorgan Warns Crowded Trades And Euphoric Consensus Are The Biggest Threats For Markets
- Dec 15: Record Wall Street Euphoria Triggers First BofA “Sell Signal” Since February 2020
- Dec 17: Euphoria Goes To 11: Futures, Global Markets, Bitcoin Soar As Dollar Collapse Continues
… and so on. But whereas in the recent past, the euphoria was always bounded by the upper limit reached during the insatiable buying spree of the dot com bubble, the first week of the year is when we went off the chart. Literally.
As the latest Citi Panic/Euphoria model shows, this week’s Panic/Euphoria jumped to a record 1.83 versus an upwardly revised 1.69 in the prior week.
What does this mean? It’s simple: as Citi chief economist Tobias Levkovich writes when looking at market returns following previous euphoria extremes, there is now a “100% historical probability of down markets in the next 12 months at current levels.”
“Nasdaq Volume as % NYSE (though volatile), retail money market funds, margin debt, AAII & II bullishness, put/call premiums and NYSE short interest ratio all contributed to the elevated reading” according to Citi.
And just to make it extra confusing, in the same report Levkovich writes that “the normalized earnings yield gap analysis is 1.56 standard deviations below its 40-year average, yielding an 88% probability of higher markets in a year’s time, based on history.” So… 100% probability the market will be lower and 88% probability it will be higher: brilliant.
It wasn’t just Citi stunned by the record market euphoria: in his latest Flows and Liquidity report, JPM quant Nick Panigirtzoglou took a break from bashing bitcoin (well not really, more on that in a subsequent post, suffice to say anyone who listened to him and sold last Friday has missed out on 35% gains in the past week), and instead muses at the resilience of the market, driven by – what else – investor euphoria, to wit:
This week’s Democratic sweep added more fuel to risk markets and pushed US government bond yields to new highs. Neither the violent scenes from Capitol Hill nor the potential negatives from a Democratic sweep, i.e. tax rises and stricter regulations, managed to unsettle risk markets this week. Risk markets exhibited similar resilience in December. At the time, neither the lack of any new policy impulse by the Fed, pension fund rebalancing flows nor fears about the UK variant of the virus managed to unnerve risk markets.
What, according to JPM, explains this remarkable resilience of equity and risk markets more generally since December? The answer is simple: central banks, or rather liquidity, “which appears to be reverberating once again in an intense manner via retail investors, in a repeat to Q2 of last year.” Panigirtzoglou points to retail investors’ activity, especially that of younger cohorts, and says that as the “anticipation of further US stimulus checks”, or stimmies as they are better known…
Investment advice…on TikTok? Young investors are weighing in on how people should spend their $600 “stimmy” checks. https://t.co/SHkfFZ5pot pic.twitter.com/McfQP7Nf7D
— Bloomberg TV (@BloombergTV) January 5, 2021
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… “this force is likely to be sustained over the coming weeks”, JPM says and points to several indicators of euphoric retail trader activity including record call option trading both on exchange, which is forcing yet another gamma-squeeze (or as JPM puts it “To the extent this accumulation of long call options by retail investors continues, it could eventually result in a rise in vol via the delta-hedging of accumulated short call option positions by dealers taking the other side, similar to last August”)…
… as well as off.
To quantify the latter, JPM looks at the six main OTC market venues used by retail brokers: Virtu Americas LLC, Citadel Execution Services, G1 execution services, Two Sigma Securities LLC, Wolverine Securities LLC and UBS Securities LLC. The chart below shows the aggregate share to OTC transaction routed to different market venues (destination flow) by retail brokers, again as percentage of total US equity market volume. After slowing during the third quarter, US retail activity has “rebounded strongly in November.
And this chart is only through November: one can only imagine that we will need a bigger chart for the December print here too.
In summary, JPM concludes that the record euphoria is due to “the liquidity force” – i.e., central banks and the latest round of fiscal stimulus – which “appears to be reverberating once again in an intense manner via retail investors, in a repeat of Q2 of last year. Given the anticipation of further fiscal support (e.g. additional US stimulus checks of $1400 to get to the original proposal of $2000), this force is likely to be sustained over the coming weeks.“
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/09/2021 – 20:25 - DOJ Warns Over Fake 'Pardons' Post That Tricks DC Protesters Into Doxxing Selves
DOJ Warns Over Fake ‘Pardons’ Post That Tricks DC Protesters Into Doxxing Selves
The Justice Department has issued a memo warning people not to fall for an online scam designed to trick Trump supporters who ‘stormed the capitol’ on Wedensday into doxxing themselves and admitting guilt over any crimes ‘you think you need to be pardoned for.’
In a post circulating over social media, someone going by the name “Rosalind” who claims to be from the “WH Office of Pardon Attorney” says that President Trump is “strongly considering PARDONING all of the patriots who #stormthecapitol,” and that all one needs to do is provide their name, city, and “what crimes you think you need to be pardoned for and the briefest explanation of why you think you need the pardon (Eg: trespassing -entered the capitol; theft – stole art from the capitol; assault; etc. etc.)
“Please be advised that the information circulating on social media claiming to be from Acting Pardon Attorney Rosalind Sargent-Burns is inauthentic and should not be taken seriously,” the Just department said in a Saturday statement, adding “The Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney does not have a social media presence and is not involved in any efforts to pardon individuals or groups involved with the heinous acts that took place this week in and around the U.S. Capitol.“
We have to wonder who, or what entity, started this obvious trap – and who fell for it?
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/09/2021 – 20:00 - California Reports Record COVID Fatalities; UK 1st In Europe To Top 3MM Deaths: Live Updates
California Reports Record COVID Fatalities; UK 1st In Europe To Top 3MM Deaths: Live Updates
Summary:
- California sees record deaths
- Nevada suffers deadliest week yet
- US sees record 310K new cases
- NJ reported nearly 20K new cases
- CA reports 50K cases
- UK, Germany daily deaths top 1K
- UK tops 3MM cases
- UK deaths top 80K
- Portugal reports 9K+ cases
- Japan may extend emergency order
- China moves to expedite vaccinations
* * *
Update (1930ET): It’s late in Europe, and well into the evening on the East Coast of the US, and we’ve already seen a fair number of startling COVID-19-related headlines on Saturday.
While cable TV news “analysts” won’t shut up about the “coup” at the Capitol this week also having the potential to become a “super-spreader” event, California, where the latest surge in the virus has filled hospitals and morgues, has reported its worst day for deaths yet on Saturday.
Arizona, meanwhile, surpassed 10K deaths total after reporting another 98 new deaths on Saturday alone.
In the South, North Carolina and Virginia reported a record number of new infections.
Nevada ended its deadliest week with more than 300 fatalities, almost 100 more than the previous week. While the state reported 56 deaths on Saturday, just below the record 60 on Wednesday, the total deaths for Clark County reached 3,450,
As we noted earlier, as deaths soar across western and central Europe, the UK has become the first country in western Europe to report more than 3MM coronavirus cases, as it grapples with the “mutated” strain.
* * *
Yesterday, we reported on speculation about a new hyper-infectious COVID-19 strain that could be circulating around the US. Well, mere hours after CNN shared the evidence gleaned from a Jan. 3 report from the White House coronavirus task force, members of the committee are insisting it was inaccurate. Another example of ‘Fake News’ reported by CNN, we suppose. But we digress…
As of Saturday morning, the the coronavirus outbreak in the US and Europe showed no signs of abating over the last 24 hours, as the US reported another record jump in new cases, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
NJ reported nearly 20K probable COVID-19 cases and CA reported over 50K cases, with both states greatly influencing the large uptick in today’s total cases. In NY, 18.8K new cases were reported, with hospitalizations at a near-record 8.6K. To try and hasten the pace of vaccinations as NY falls further behind, Cuomo has again expanded the list of who is eligible, with all people 75 and older now able to receive the vaccine.
16 states in total reported their highest hospitalization numbers this week.
Germany’s death toll has topped 1K for a 4th-straight day, prompting Chancellor Angela Merkel to try to hasten the pace of vaccinations. Meanwhile, in France, Emmanuel Macron is promising to have 100K of the country’s most vulnerable people vaccinated by the end of the weekend. That’s up from 80K as of Friday afternoon. Across the US more than 7MM people have been vaccinated.
In terms of infections, the US continues to outpace Europe, and the UK is outpacing all of its Continental peers.
Even China is intensifying is vaccine rollout plan as new lockdowns rattle Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Province (situated in the northeast near Beijing). Data from trials in Brazil and Indonesia shows vaccines from SinoPharm are 78% effective, according to the Brazil trial data.
Here’s some more COVID-19 news from overnight and Saturday morning:
Osaka and its surrounding prefectures asked Japan to expand a state of emergency to the western cities in an effort to contain the latest Covid-19 outbreak, while Tokyo’s new daily infections keep above 2,000 cases on Saturday (Source: Reuters).
Israel Police will adjust the deployment of lockdown barricades throughout the country in an attempt to reduce traffic congestion, the police announced Saturday afternoon. According to the changes, the police will deploy blockades starting at 0900 and will remove them between 1530 and 18000. However, Police Traffic Division patrol vehicles will continue to patrol the country’s highways, regardless of the deployment of the barricades (Source: Jerusalem Post).
Portugal on Saturday reported 9,478 new confirmed coronavirus cases in a day, less than the record 10,176 announced on Friday, taking the total to 476,187. The total number of deaths rose by 111 to 7,701, following a record daily increase of 118 on Friday. The government has said it may tighten restrictions on movement next week (Source: Bloomberg).
Iran reported a dip in both the number of daily Covid-19 deaths and new cases with 82 fatalities and 5,924 new infections in the last 24 hours (Source: Bloomberg).
Poland posted a 20% day-to-day leap in reported Covid cases to 10,548 on Saturday. Overall toll breached 31,000 mark with 438 new deaths reported, as country has vaccinated almost 189,000 people (Source: Bloomberg).
* * *
In the UK, meanwhile, the number of total cases has topped 3MM as hospitalizations and new daily cases remain at record levels. Deaths, meanwhile, topped 1K again, driving the total death toll north of 80K.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/09/2021 – 19:36 - The Liberal-Left Has Gone Fully Illiberal
The Liberal-Left Has Gone Fully Illiberal
Authored by Jenin Younes via The American Institute for Economic Research,
Over ten months, I have watched with incredulity as the liberal-left has unquestioningly and unequivocally embraced policies, ostensibly to manage the coronavirus pandemic, that are not only illiberal but authoritarian. With each passing day, those on the left-liberal side of the political spectrum display greater acceptance of increasingly oppressive measures. Maybe I should have been prepared.
With more and more frequency during the past years, I have found myself departing from my cohorts’ consensus during various discussions arising from current events, particularly insofar as they pertained to civil liberties issues. More disturbing than the substantive disagreement was the utter lack of regard for difference of opinion among many of my peers.
Nevertheless, I did not anticipate that the left would soon abandon all pretense of concern for liberal values, which are widely understood to consist of tolerance, open-mindedness, and protection of individual rights and dignity (As a preliminary matter, I am using the term “liberal-left” broadly, to describe: individuals who so identify, the Democratic Party and politicians, and center-left news outlets such as the New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, MSNBC, and CNN. I am aware that there is diversity of opinion, but believe it is fair to characterize the overarching left-liberal view as one that accepts the efficacy and morality of lockdowns, masks, and forced human separation).
At this point, those of us unfortunate enough to live in blue and purple states, as well as in many other parts of the world, have been deprived of our basic liberties for nearly a year. We cannot freely associate with other people, operate our businesses, send our children to school, or travel to many places without having to isolate for two weeks, which often translates into visiting loved ones becoming a practical impossibility. College students are imprisoned in dorm rooms for weeks because they or someone they interacted with tested positive for the virus (I will leave the topic of the unreliability of these tests for another day). They are expelled, harshly punished, and shamed for attending parties and socializing in groups. It is no surprise that, condemned for engaging in the most natural activities for those their age, suicidal ideation, depression, and drug usage have skyrocketed in this demographic. Children are forbidden from playing with one another or forced to do so while muzzled.
These oppressive policies, which at face value constitute grotesque violations of civil rights and liberties, are enacted and enforced primarily by Democratic politicians, not least among them the governors of New York, Michigan and California: Andrew Cuomo, Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom, respectively. For the most part, these pandemic management strategies are lauded by their constituents and center-left publications alike. To the extent they are criticized from the left, it is usually for failing to enact the measures sooner or enforcing them more stringently.
Particularly chilling is a piece published in the New York Times on January 4, 2021, “In a Topsy-Turvy Pandemic World, China Offers Its Version of Freedom,” by Li Yuan. Notably, this article appeared not in the opinion pages, where arguably it could defensively be printed, but in the news section, and accordingly can be deemed representative of the Times’s views. It is worth pointing out that the Times’s influence cannot be overstated: it is the journalistic arm of the Democratic establishment and informs the consciousness and values of the urban professional class. One can be fairly certain that the beliefs of most doctors, teachers, lawyers, and professors will reflect the ideas propagated in the paper.
The premise of Ms. Yuan’s piece is that the post-enlightenment values that until recently were considered non-negotiable in most Western democracies– freedom of speech, freedom to worship, freedom of assembly – are dispensable.
That is because, according to Ms. Yuan, China has triumphed over the virus, needless to say by trampling on these very rights, and in doing so allowed for a different set: the freedom to live a normal life (“the West may find it has to work harder to sell its vision of freedom after China has made its model seem so attractive”).
Who is to say which rights are more important? the article queries.
Ms. Yuan next speculates that “[t]he global crisis could plant doubts about other types of freedom” as “[n]early half of voting Americans supported a president who ignored science and failed to take basic precautions to protect their country. Some Americans assert that it is their individual right to ignore health experts’ recommendations to wear masks, putting themselves and others at increasing risk of infection.”
These are an astonishing set of assertions: they appear to call into question the importance of democracy itself, and more vaguely the rights of Americans to make their own decisions about their health and to question and dissent from government mandates. Perhaps I am naïve, but I was under the impression that in a free society, people are at liberty to evaluate the evidence for any proposition — especially one as personal as whether or not to wear a face-covering – to assess the risk, and to act accordingly.
It is deeply troubling that neither Ms. Yuan nor the New York Times appear to recognize the danger in allowing “experts” to dictate our every move (never mind the faulty premise underlying this, as the science supporting mask usage as a means of curbing coronavirus spread is at best incredibly shoddy). More disturbing, evidently the rights of the individual are no longer sacrosanct; rather, they may be subverted for the betterment of society. People should not be forced to choose between leading a normal life (i.e. socializing, attending school, earning a living, going to restaurants, and experiencing the arts) and possessing fundamental civil liberties. Both are absolute, immutable features of a liberal democracy.
Conveniently, the article fails to mention that China’s willingness to sacrifice the individual in furtherance of the communal good has led to the creation of concentration camps for Uighur Muslims, that include, among other horrors, torture and forced sterilization. Amnesty International’s China 2019 page opens by observing that: “[t]he human rights situation continued to be marked by a systematic crackdown on dissent. The justice system remained plagued by unfair trials and torture and other ill-treatment in detention. China still classified information on its extensive use of the death penalty as a state secret.”
Likewise, Human Rights Watch’s [HRW] webpage states that:
China’s government sees human rights as an existential threat. Its reaction could pose an existential threat to the rights of people worldwide. At home, the Chinese Communist Party [CCP], worried that permitted political freedom would jeopardize its grasp on power, has constructed an Orwellian high-tech surveillance state and a sophisticated internet censorship system to monitor and suppress public criticism. Abroad, it uses its growing economic clout to silence critics and to carry out the most intense attack on the global system for enforcing human rights since that system began to emerge in the mid-20th century.
If China eradicated the virus — and there is widespread agreement that the CCP’s coronavirus data cannot be trusted — it did so using the same tactics that are violative of human rights discussed above by HRW and Amnesty International (incidentally, the Times itself recognized that a mere ten months ago). That the Times and Ms. Yuan apparently consider it appropriate to gloss over that reality is nothing short of astounding.
On the other hand, Ms. Yuan’s article is simply a more express admission than many of the paper’s more subtle suggestions that liberal values are overrated and ought to be abandoned in favor of virus suppression policies that do not bother with such annoyances as human rights. A recent Op-ed argues that doctors who question the efficacy of masks and social distancing should have their licenses revoked. Another heavily insinuates that speech deemed a danger to the Republic should be illegal. Ms. Yuan’s article also bears striking resemblance to various recent, albeit slightly more nuanced, pieces in, for instance, the Economist and the New Yorker, implying that perhaps we should look to China and adopt its virus management strategy.
Many in the scientific and medical community have similarly expressed admiration for China’s approach. At a September press conference, Mike Ryan, the executive director of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Programme, offered his “congratulations” to the Chinese for bringing the virus under control. Gregory Poland, director of the Vaccine Research Group at the Mayo Clinic, observed that China’s success could be attributed, in part, to a compliant population and a government that “can put bigger constraints on individual freedoms than would be considered acceptable in most Western countries.”
Apparently, some members of the New York legislature agree that the CCP’s model should be emulated. Lawmakers in the state are contemplating a bill that would permit the State to forcibly detain individuals who might be carrying an infectious disease. It is not difficult to imagine a near-future in which people like me, who refuse to abide by inhumane, nonsensical, and never-ending dictates, end up behind bars as potential pathogen carriers.
Likewise, in a fashion that would make leaders of the CCP proud, critics of lockdown and mask policies are silenced by the media and educational institutions. For example, a tenured professor at New York University is currently under investigation after a student reported him and petitioned for him to be fired because he suggested — in a course on media propaganda, no less! — that students read studies finding that masks do not provide protection from the coronavirus, in addition to those reaching the opposite conclusion.
Not only have the scientists who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, which rejects the lockdown approach to coronavirus management, been personally and professionally persecuted, but they have faced significant efforts to silence them, leading one writer to observe that “their critics want them removed from the public sphere. This has all the characteristics of a modern high-tech witch-hunt.” Keep in mind that these are three of the world’s preeminent epidemiologists, from Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford Universities. There are countless stories of scientists and others who have been censored on social media platforms for departing from the prevailing wisdom on the seriousness of the coronavirus or appropriate and effective methods for managing it.
A free, liberal society fosters open discussion and debate. It does not silence and punish those who offer opinions that depart from the consensus, however inconvenient those ideas may be to the people in control. It does not use state power to lock people in their homes for the crime of existing in a world along with pathogens. Nor does it prevent them from seeing family and friends, educating their children, and earning a living. It certainly does not contemplate imprisoning people in detention camps because they could carry a pathogen.
Maybe I was naïve to be so startled by Topsy-Turvy Pandemic World, and its thesis that we should remake our conception of freedom in the image of China’s. In retrospect, it was the natural next step in the creeping authoritarianism that I witnessed for about a decade and has crescendoed in the last year. It is as close to an express concession as I have seen thus far that the liberal-left has entirely abandoned the tenets of liberalism.
Even Neil Ferguson, whose wildly inaccurate Imperial model spurred lockdowns in the West, was surprised that the public acquiesced to China-style virus suppression measures. In a recent interview, he observed that “people’s sense of what is possible…changed quite dramatically between January and March.” At first, scientists in the U.K. presumed that “locking entire communities down and not permitting them to leave their homes…would not be an available option in a liberal Western democracy…and then Italy did it. And we realized we could.”
That the liberal-left appears untroubled by the grotesque violations of civil rights and liberties we have witnessed over the past ten months tells us all we need to know. Human rights are negotiable under this new ideology. I am not certain what this political theory should be called – perhaps left-wing authoritarianism – but it bears no resemblance to liberalism whatsoever. To the extent we have not gone quite as far as China in violating human rights in the quest to suppress the virus, the consensus on the liberal-left is plain: we have not gone far enough.
One of the particular features of tyrannical regimes is that most people remain unaware of their true nature until they have solidified their grip on power. It is far easier to acquire and maintain control over a population that at least initially believes the governing force is benevolent.
Pick up a history book if you believe that in the near future the pandemic will be declared over and normal life will resume. Even well-intentioned individuals have difficulty surrendering power once they have had a taste. Nothing about the actions of leaders such as Governors Cuomo, Whitmer and Newsom, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson, ought to lead people to believe that life will ever be the same unless we refuse to accept this erosion of our civil rights and liberties.
Each day, I hope that my friends on the liberal-left will wake up and see what is happening before their eyes, before it is too late.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/09/2021 – 19:35 - U-Haul Reveals 2020 Migration Trends As Pandemic And Taxes Take Toll
U-Haul Reveals 2020 Migration Trends As Pandemic And Taxes Take Toll
A new report has found that Tennessee posted the largest net gain of U-Haul trucks than any other state in 2020, making it U-Haul’s top growth state for the first time.
Growth rates are determined by the net gain of one-way U-Haul trucks entering a state versus leaving that state in a given year. U-Haul keeps tabs on more than two million one-way U-Haul truck customer transactions annually, allowing the company to observe migration trends, according to the report published by U-Haul.
“Tennessee’s influx of do-it-yourself movers during a turbulent year marked by the coronavirus pandemic means that a state other than Florida and Texas tops the growth rankings for the first time since 2015 when North Carolina led the way,” the report said.
Texas and Florida were the top two other destinations. For three consecutive years, Texas had the largest net gain of one-way U-Haul trucks before Florida displaced it for the number one spot last year.
Before the pandemic, Americans fled liberal-run states and metro areas because of high taxes to conservative states that were business-friendly, such as Texas and Florida. The pandemic certainly amplified the exodus.
Ohio, Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, and Georgia made up the rest of the top ten states with a net gain of one-way U-Haul trucks.
On the flip side, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Oregon were the top five states with the most significant net loss of U-Haul trucks.
Jeff Porter, U-Haul Company of Nashville president, said his company is “seeing a lot of people from California move (to Tennessee) because they’re attracted to our lifestyle.”
Porter pointed out, “Tennessee has no income tax and is very business-friendly. There are plenty of jobs. People and companies are taking note.”
He noted, “Nashville is ever-growing, and even the era of COVID-19 isn’t slowing that. We saw movement before the virus hit, but I think the situation has pushed a lot more people away from the West Coast to our state.”
“Arrivals of one-way U-Haul trucks into Tennessee jumped 12%, while departures rose only 9% over 2019, with that disparity catapulting it up the charts. Arrivals accounted for 50.6% of all one-way U-Haul traffic in Tennessee, which ranked No. 12 among growth states a year ago,” the report said.
“The best thing about Tennessee is the southern hospitality. People are decent to one another,” said Clay McQuade, U-Haul Company of Knoxville president. “I believe the draw to Tennessee is the rural atmosphere.”
Full List: States Ranked By Migration Growth
U-Haul migration trends are useful data to show how higher taxes and the pandemic are shifting Americans from liberal-run states to more friendly conservative states.
In July, we noted some people in Illinois waited nearly three weeks for a U-Haul truck as the pandemic plus the state’s dire fiscal situation resulted in an exodus of residents.
Compound high taxes, the pandemic, decimation of the local economy, plus soaring violent crime, New Yorkers have been fleeing the metro area by the tens of thousands.
“Long lines were seen outside of a number of U-Haul stations in the neighborhood across Saturday and Sunday, with moving vehicles lining residential streets and discarded furniture stacked on sidewalks left by locals seeking pastures new,” reported the Daily Mail.
We have never seen such a sudden mass exodus away from major cities in modern American history. U-Haul’s report offers a unique insight into migration trends that are overwhelmingly benefiting conservative states while liberal ones plunge into socio-economic turmoil.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/09/2021 – 19:10 - Beijing Pushes Back Against Trump Administration Efforts To Halt Slave Labor In Xinjiang
Beijing Pushes Back Against Trump Administration Efforts To Halt Slave Labor In Xinjiang
When push came to shove, the NYSE showed Americans just how badly the globalists depend on China, when it resisted an executive order to delist Chinese telcos.
The exchange’s embarrassing flipflop comes as the Trump Administration does what it can to hammer the CCP for its persecution of Muslims in Xinjing. Yet, as Trump and liberals finally come together to champion the cause of human rights, Americans who have demanded the US do whatever it can to protect Hong Kongers, the people of Taiwan and Muslims in Xinjiang are suddenly being drowned out by tech giants, including Twitter, Facebook, Apple but also Shopify, having accused Trump of “glorifying violence”.
Amid all the chaos of the past week, one of Trump’s most trusted national security advisors, Matt Pottinger, resigned, Just days after he delivered a presentation reiterating all the evidence he has seen to suggest that China unleashed the virus upon Wuhan on purpose.
So, with Trump administration officials (including Pottinger) abandoning ship to protect their own careers, Beijing is once again pushing back, imposing new punitive measures that will again force foreign companies to choose between acquiescing to Beijing, or Washington.
Here’s more from the NYT:
China fired back at the Trump administration on Saturday with new rules that would punish global companies for complying with Washington’s tightening restrictions on doing business with Chinese companies.
China’s Ministry of Commerce said that the rules, which went into effect immediately, were intended to counter foreign laws that “unjustly prohibit or restrict” people or companies in China from doing normal business. It said its measures were necessary to safeguard China’s national sovereignty and security and to protect the rights of Chinese citizens and entities.
It’s likely that China’s measure could force Joe Biden to back off many of his predecessors’ efforts to force China to abide by international standards on everything from labor laws (ironic, considering China is a officially Communist) to unfair state subsidies, to corporate auditing standards.
As the NYT explains, the US under Trump has passed myriad new restrictions and other punitive measures intended to isolate China, blaming the country’s abuses like the ones mentioned above.
But now, Beijing is taking things one step further by enabling companies to sue in Chinese courts (essentially a guaranteed win).
Trump administration prohibited the sale of American technology to Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, and other firms. It also issued rules that punish companies for their ties to the Chinese military and for their involvement in Beijing’s surveillance and suppression of mostly Muslim ethnic minorities in China’s far northwestern region of Xinjiang.
The new rules released on Saturday would allow Chinese officials and companies to strike back at those who comply with those U.S. limits. The Chinese measures allow government officials to issue orders saying that companies do not have to comply with certain foreign restrictions.
Chinese companies that incur losses because of another party’s compliance with those laws can sue for damages in Chinese courts, according to the Commerce Ministry’s notice. Such a case would be likely to result in a victory for a Chinese plaintiff, since China’s courts are ultimately answerable to the Communist Party.
Fortunately for the US, during his time in office, Trump never caved to China’s threats to retaliate against US business, knowing that there’s plenty that China buys from the US that it absolutely needs – everything from microchips to software, a fact that gives the US more built-in leverage, which Trump was happy to exploit. Economics wonks who closely monitor the bilateral trade numbers might be quick to point to the growing trade deficit with China as evidence that Trump failed in his efforts to pressure China with his trade war.
But as we pointed out a few days ago, it appears Beijing is using inflated numbers to overstate exports, a classic way of getting capital into a country with capital controls.
As recent reports have shown us, companies from around the world sell products that involved the forced labor of Uygher Muslims essentially forced to work for free (either that, or they get shipped off to a reeducation camp). Instead of trying to hide this, Beijing is celebrating it, twisting the truth via the state-controlled media, which recently touted the forced sterilization of Uygher women.
Now, Beijing is once again about to force Washington and others to call its bluff by essentially reviving its threats to create an “unreliable entities” list. Trump didn’t fall for it, but after spending the last year in his basement, can we trust Joe Biden to stand his ground?
Or is this where all those payments to Hunter Biden will finally pay dividends for Beijing?
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/09/2021 – 18:45 - America's Recline & Flail Goes On
America’s Recline & Flail Goes On
Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,
Let the good times roll
Let them knock you around
Let the good times roll
Let them make you a clown– Good Times Roll, by The Cars
America’s Recline and Flail Goes On
The storming of the U.S. Capitol Building on Wednesday was a wacky and wild escapade. But it shouldn’t be a surprise. These things happen when a nation’s in decline. And, as Wednesday demonstrated, America’s recline and flail goes on.
More telling is the fake outrage by politicians to score political points and justify additional control over the populace. Chuck Schumer compared it to Pearl Harbor, calling it a date “in American history that will live forever in infamy.” President-elect Joe Biden characterized it as “one of the darkest days in the history or our nation” and “an unprecedented assault on our democracy.”
Schumer and Biden conveniently overlook the irony of their statements. They may be accurate. But only for reasons they never intended. Lost in the ruckus was any candid consideration of election counting shenanigans. This is the real assault on democracy that will forever live in infamy.
But, again, proper perspective must be maintained. A fraud election should come as no surprise. These things happen when a nation’s in decline. We don’t like it. But these are the facts.
At the same time, the nation’s leaders have little clue what’s going on. Schumer. Pelosi. McConnell. All the clowns in Congress. They think that with that ogre Trump out of the way, they can let the good times roll again. They know not what they face.
How wealth is created and naturally dispersed is complex and multifaceted. Attempts to explain it, like attempts to explain the development of the human embryo, are generally lacking. Nonetheless, for amusement and the benefit of members of Congress who may be reading, the following rough attempt is extended.
Where All Roads Lead
Countless factors influence an economy’s vitality. The fundamentals include sound money, respect for private property, and the rule of law. These are followed by technological advancement, demographic trends, and the level of international trade. Interest rates, the credit cycle, and public and private debt levels are also significant factors.
When a nation’s population is young, its money sound, and its institutions fresh, there are greater prospects for economic growth. People are relatively free to do what they want, so long as they don’t threaten or commit violence against another person or another person’s property.
But as with spring and then summer, there’s also fall and then winter. Life first grows and flowers. Later it decays and dies.
Over time, the size of government grows and laws and regulations become more and more restrictive. Then corporate lobbyists arrive on the scene and things really devolve. The practice of inserting pay to play arrangements into legislation becomes commonplace.
As a nation’s population ages and the reach of government increases the economy stagnates. Pension programs become top heavy. Public and private interests become entrenched. Barriers to entry multiply. Legacy costs pile up and institutions decay into disrepair.
Indeed, economic decline and the stagnation of incomes are the result of many different factors. Though all roads lead back to aging populations, bloated government, fake money, and extreme public and private debt levels. GDP growth of 6 percent was common many decades ago. Now, under the weight of all the excess, 3 percent is as good as it gets.
Let The Good Times Roll
The confluence of these unfavorable circumstances cannot be reversed. There’s no policy prescription to magically restore health and vitality. The progression must run its course. Promises must be broken. Institutions must fail. Governments must default. Currencies must collapse.
Of course, those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo will do everything they can to resist. Insiders will use money games and currency devaluations to stretch things out. Politicians will use government policies to try and abate circumstances beyond their control.
Presently, in the United States all means for preserving the status quo are on the table. The Federal Reserve, for instance, creates credit from thin air and loans it to the Treasury via bond purchase. The Treasury, in turn, shovels the money to defense contractors and other preferred service providers – like the big banks.
The Fed also uses its credit creation machine to suppress lending rates. Zombie companies use the cheap credit to rollover their debt. And when that doesn’t cut it, the Fed directly purchases corporate debt.
These policies stand the economy on its head. They concentrate wealth into the hands of the insiders to the detriment of workers. After several decades of this madness the workers and the growing population of the unemployed stick their hands out and demand they be filled too.
Wealth disparities and the resulting discontent spark cries for redistribution schemes. Thus, the Treasury tosses some bread crumbs in the form of stimulus checks to citizens and noncitizens alike. Before long, stimulus checks become a constant. And the population is dependent on the benevolent hand of government for sustenance.
Mad economic policies, like Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and universal basic income (UBI), are dreamed up to justify the insanity. The government gives money to zombie companies, goes the rationale. Why can’t it give money to actual zombies too?
Make no mistake, these are policies of desperation. They’re a last ditch effort to preserve the status quo and let the good times roll. But for who?
Not you!
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/09/2021 – 18:20 - "This Was A Coordinated Attack": Parler CEO Speaks Out After Amazon Boots From AWS, Vows To Rebuild 'From Scratch'
“This Was A Coordinated Attack”: Parler CEO Speaks Out After Amazon Boots From AWS, Vows To Rebuild ‘From Scratch’
Update (2210 ET): Parler CEO John Matze has issued a statement (emphasis ours):
Sunday (tomorrow) at midnight Amazon will be shutting off all of our servers in an attempt to completely remove free speech off the internet. There is the possibility Parler will be unavailable on the internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch. We prepared for events like this by never relying on amazons proprietary infrastructure and building bare metal products.
We will try our best to move to a new provider right now as we have many competing for our business, however Amazon, Google and Apple purposefully did this as a coordinated effort knowing our options would be limited and knowing this would inflict the most damage right as President Trump was banned from the tech companies.
This was a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market place. We were too successful too fast. You can expect the war on competition and free speech to continue, but don’t count us out.
#speakfreely
* * *
Update (2130 ET): And so the hammer has come down late on Saturday, when Amazon officially kicked Parler off its cloud Web hosting service, AWS according to Buzzfeed. The suspension means that once the ban takes effect on Sunday, the website – which as of this moment is still up – will be offline until it finds someone else to host it.
* * *
Update (2100 ET): As expected, Apple removed Parler permanently from its app store on Saturday. “[T]here is no place on our platform for threats of violence and illegal activity,” the iPhone maker said, according to CNN which adds that Apple notified Parler of its decision in a message that said it had violated the company’s app store terms.
“The processes Parler has put in place to moderate or prevent the spread of dangerous and illegal content have proved insufficient,” Apple told Parler. “Specifically, we have continued to find direct threats of violence and calls to incite lawless action in violation of Guideline 1.1 – Safety – Objectionable Content.”
Apple’s notice said Parler’s responses to an earlier warning were inadequate, including Parler’s defense that it had been taking violent rhetoric on its platform “very seriously for weeks” and that it had a moderation plan “for the time being,” according to Apple.
A search for the Parler app as of 8pm showed that the app was no longer there, with the search query returning recommended substitutes:
“Parler has not taken adequate measures to address the proliferation of these threats to people’s safety,” Apple said in a statement to CNN Business. “We have suspended Parler from the App Store until they resolve these issues.”
Apple’s decision follows a similar move by Google to drop Parler from the Google Play Store, and after Amazon (AMZN) has come under pressure by its own employees to stop hosting Parler’s website on Amazon Web Services.
John Matze, Parler’s CEO, wrote in a message on his platform that Apple “will be banning Parler until we give up free speech, institute broad and invasive policies like Twitter and Facebook and we become a surveillance platform by pursuing guilt of those who use Parler before innocence.”
“They claim it is due to violence on the platform,” Matze wrote of Apple, whom he also accused of being a “software monopoly,” a particularly relevant attack right now given an ongoing antitrust suit against Apple from Fortnite maker Epic Games. “The community disagrees as we hit number 1 on their store today.”
Matze promised to share “more details about our next plans coming soon as we have many options.”
* * *
Earlier:
A coalition of Amazon corporate employees have demanded that the Seattle-based megacorp kick Parler off the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform unless ‘posts inciting violence’ are removed, which would force the Trump-friendly Twitter competitor to find another host.
According to CNBC, an employee advocacy group – Amazon Employees for Climate Justice – said in a Saturday tweet that AWS should “deny Parler services until it removes posts inciting violence, including at the Presidential inauguration.”
Enough is enough. Amazon hosts Parler on @awscloud.
As Amazon workers, we demand Amazon deny Parler services until it removes posts inciting violence, including at the Presidential inauguration.
We cannot be complicit in more bloodshed and violent attacks on our democracy.
— Amazon Employees For Climate Justice (@AMZNforClimate) January 9, 2021
More via CNBC:
Pressure has been mounting for Amazon to stop hosting Parler on AWS after other tech giants took action against the social media app in the wake of the deadly U.S. Capitol riot earlier this week. Google on Friday removed Parler from its app store for Android users, Google Play Store. BuzzFeed News reported on Friday that Apple has threatened to pull Parler from its App Store.
Parler, which launched in 2018, has emerged as a popular platform for President Trump’s allies in the last year by billing itself as a free speech alternative to mainstream social media services like Twitter and Facebook. –CNBC
To justify censoring Parler, critics have pointed to posts calling for ‘firing squads’ – like one from attorney Lin Wood (who some say handed the Senate to the Democrats by openly calling for Georgians not to vote in the runoff election unless the GOP candidates backed Trump’s election fraud claims).
In 2019, Amazon pulled the plug on their AWS partnership with Twitter alternative GAB over user posts. CEO Andrew Torba essentially blamed the CIA – claiming that a “PSYOP campaign started back in early December” in which newly created accounts were “popping up out of nowhere and making threats of violence.”
Torba’s letter continues:
After this week, it’s clear why this PSYOP was started: to take down alt-tech platforms and frame them for the January 6th protests that ended with the police killing an unarmed woman.
Almost instantly after police allowed protestors into the Capitol the New York Times started a baseless narrative that this protest was organized on alt-tech sites, and in particular on Gab, without offering any proof, screenshots, usernames, or evidence to back these baseless claims. I’ve recorded a video highlighting how this all played out. I hope you’ll take some time to watch it to learn how the CIA Mockingbird Media complex operates. The way we fight back is with truth and by speaking truth to their power, which is quickly fading.
Meanwhile, Parler has jumped to the #1 app in Apple’s app store.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/09/2021 – 17:55 - Another Nail In The Coffin Of Big Cities
Another Nail In The Coffin Of Big Cities
Authored by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,
The riots, political turmoil, and other banana republic embarrassments seem to be ending – for now. So let’s get back to examining the real problems of this hyper-leveraged, dangerously-complex world. Like how big cities might soon be obsolete:
Pretend it’s 2019 and you’re living in a major US city. You, your spouse and two kids have a fairly nice (though admittedly very expensive) apartment in a relatively safe neighborhood, and life is pretty good. There’s a park nearby, dozens of great restaurants within walking distance, and plenty of interesting friends. And of course your high-paying jobs are right there.
Then comes 2020. A pandemic causes your mayor to panic and lock down the city. There go the park, friends, and restaurants. And before the horror of this new normal has a chance to sink in, civil unrest explodes and turns your once-iconic neighborhood into a Mad Maxian war zone of burned-out cars and boarded up storefronts.
If it was just you, you might stick it out. But with a family, this life is now untenable. So you look into moving, preferably to somewhere semi-rural where neither a lockdown nor riots will ever be a problem and the kids can actually play outside. Maybe it’s time to indulge your fantasy of working remotely from a homestead in a gorgeous place.
But you immediately hit a technological speed bump: Broadband Internet, which up to this point had seemed both ubiquitous and a basic human right, isn’t available on the homesteads you now covet. The only option out there is low-tech, unreliable, molasses-slow satellite Internet that, if the reviews are to be believed, is worse than nothing at all.
You realize that if you want to keep doing your work at a high level, you’ll have to stay urban, or at best suburban, with all the health and safety risks that that now implies. Big cities and their burbs, it seems, will live on for a while as necessary places for sophisticated professionals to do their thing.
Then Elon Musk, of all people, announces that SpaceX, his privately held space launch company, is going to blanket the sky with thousands of low-orbit satellites to create a global broadband network, and the roll-out has begun.
Early reviews are better than good:
SpaceX Starlink Broadband Beta Testers “Amazed” By Its Speed
Photos are starting to leak from SpaceX Starlink beta users, who are trying the satellite broadband service in remote areas for the first time. So far, the beta testing appears to be going far better than that of full self-driving.
One beta tester shared his experience on Reddit after he brought his Starlink equipment to a remote forest in Idaho. There, he said he was able to achieve 120Mbps download speeds and access the Internet at lightning-fast speed.
He wrote that the service “works beautifully.” He continued: “I did a real-time video call and some tests. My power supply is max 300w, and the drain for the whole system while active was around 116w.”
At his house, he said he got 135Mbps download speeds when the dish was at a ground-level spot with “limited obstruction.”
“Given all the obstructions for this connection at the moment, I am amazed at how well it works. Streaming, low-latency video conferencing, and gaming are all completely accessible with this service. Even for the beta, it appears as though they’ve under-estimated Starlink’s capabilities, so I am excited to see it mature.”
This isn’t as fast as an urban gigabit fiber connection, but it’s more than adequate for Zoom calls, shared coding projects and the like. And since these are beta-test results, it’s a safe bet that the final product will even better.
The advent of Internet-everywhere couldn’t come at a worse time for some of the cities that are already seeing big outmigration. As Wolf Richter just reported, rents are already plunging:
“Exodus” Havoc: Rents Plunge in San Francisco, New York, Boston, Seattle, Other High-Cost Cities
In the exodus cities, rents continued plunging in December. For example, in San Francisco, the median asking rent for one-bedroom apartments fell 1.5% from November and is now down 28% from June 2019; in New York City and in Seattle, rents fell about 2.5% for the month and are down 21% from July 2019.
Rents are depicting the massive shifts playing out in the US housing market, brought about by the Pandemic and by working from anywhere and perhaps by a general urge to rethink things.
San Francisco rents in breath-taking downward spiral.
San Francisco remains the most expensive rental market in the US only because rents are also plunging in New York City. The median asking rent in December for 1-BR apartments dropped another 1.5% from November, and by 24% year-over-year, and by 28.5% from June 2019, to $2,660, according to data from Zumper’s Rent Report. In terms of dollars, the drop since June 2019 amounted to $1,060 a month.
This does not include the widely advertised incentives of “two months free,” or getting popular, “three months free,” which cut effective rents for the first year by an additional slice:
For 2-BR apartments in San Francisco, the median asking rent dropped by 2.0% in December from November, and by 22% year-over-year, to $3,500. Since June 2019, it has plunged by 27%, or by $1,300 a month, not including the incentives.
These are median asking rents in apartment buildings, including apartment towers. There are now reports of vacancy rates of 30% in luxury apartment towers in San Francisco, with landlords advertising “three months free.”
The financial implications of the emptying of big cities are immense. The list of cities and states that were already lurching towards bankruptcy via their wildly underfunded public sector pensions was already growing. And a federal bailout was already looking imminent before the chaos of 2020.
Now it’s a lock that in 2021 we’ll be faced with the choice of multiple municipal bankruptcies — which would threaten a national second Great Depression — or a multi-trillion-dollar federal bailout that threatens a currency crisis.
The next few weeks of relative peace are looking like a very temporary reprieve.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/09/2021 – 17:30 - Washington "One-China" Policy Dead As Pompeo Lifts Restrictions On US-Taiwan Relations
Washington “One-China” Policy Dead As Pompeo Lifts Restrictions On US-Taiwan Relations
The embattled Trump administration has just nuked the decades long US recognition of the “One China” policy status quo in what surely constitutes the biggest shot across Beijing’s bow after months of anti-China escalation.
Despite the globe’s attention focused on the Capitol protest chaos and Democrats readying a charge to impeach under Pelosi, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Saturday announced this absolute bombshell, namely that he’s now lifting “self-imposed restrictions” on the relationship between the United States and Taiwan. He announced in an official statement:
Today I am announcing that I am lifting all of these self-imposed restrictions. Executive branch agencies should consider all “contact guidelines” regarding relations with Taiwan previously issued by the Department of State under authorities delegated to the Secretary of State to be null and void.
The US will no longer act in accord with viewing the island in context of a single sovereign China when it comes to relations with Taiwan as has kept the unsteady “peace” for decades.
His statement began by describing the complex impediments restraining US action which have been in effect since at least the 1980’s (since 1979, and outgrowth of Carter’s Taiwan Relations Act) regarding the official ‘One China’ doctrine which he’s just effectively declared null and void:
Taiwan is a vibrant democracy and reliable partner of the United States, and yet for several decades the State Department has created complex internal restrictions to regulate our diplomats, servicemembers, and other officials’ interactions with their Taiwanese counterparts. The United States government took these actions unilaterally, in an attempt to appease the Communist regime in Beijing. No more.
Crucially the shock announcement comes just ahead of U.S. Ambassador to the UN Kelly Craft’s controversial visit to Taipei, which Beijing has already slammed as a “crazy provocation”.
China had further already warned this week that Washington will pay a “heavy price” should it move forward with sending Kelly on the official visit.
To be sure, the Chinese govt will not be happy about this memo, but (from their perspective) at least @SecPompeo referred to Taiwan as an “unofficial partner.”
— Julian Ku 古舉倫 (@julianku) January 9, 2021
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Pompeo’s full statement continued:
Additionally, any and all sections of the Foreign Affairs Manual or Foreign Affairs Handbook that convey authorities or otherwise purport to regulate executive branch engagement with Taiwan via any entity other than the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) are also hereby voided. The executive branch‘s relations with Taiwan are to be handled by the non-profit AIT, as stipulated in the Taiwan Relations Act.
The United States government maintains relationships with unofficial partners around the world, and Taiwan is no exception. Our two democracies share common values of individual freedom, the rule of law, and a respect for human dignity. Today’s statement recognizes that the U.S.-Taiwan relationship need not, and should not, be shackled by self-imposed restrictions of our permanent bureaucracy.
This is sure to create more transition chaos with a mere week-and-a-half left till Biden’s inauguration.
The timing of it will also be a huge factor in determining Beijing’s response, given it may look to Biden for assurances that he’ll roll back whatever “damage” Trump’s dumping of the longstanding ‘One China’ has done on the way out the door.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/09/2021 – 17:00 - ABC News Calls For "Cleansing" Of Trump Supporters
ABC News Calls For “Cleansing” Of Trump Supporters
Authored by Kipp Jones via The Western Journal,
As part of the Democratic Party, establishment media and Washington swamp campaign to tear down the legacy of President Donald Trump this week, the political director for ABC News called for a “cleansing” of Trump’s movement.
Rick Klein, who is the rudder on the corrupt ABC News political coverage ship, must have been feeling awfully emboldened Thursday after Democrat Joe Biden was officially certified as the country’s next president. Perhaps a little too emboldened, as is evident by what he said on Twitter.
“Trump will be an ex-president in 13 days. The fact is that getting rid of Trump is the easy part. Cleansing the movement he commands is going to be something else,” Klein said in a tweet, which he later deleted.
Thank the good lord for screen shots.
Political Director for @ABC News based in Washington DC appears to have deleted his tweet about the 75 million Americans who voted for Trump that talked about the challenge of “cleansing the movement.” pic.twitter.com/HS1Rwrn94S
— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) January 7, 2021
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But this was no mere slip-up of a lone network employee on social media. ABC News published a piece in which Klein echoed his message. His views are apparently shared by others at the legacy media outlet.
Thursday on the website’s political analysis page “The Note,” Klein and Mary Alice Parks, ABC News deputy political director, co-wrote a piece that called for a similar “cleansing” of the Trump movement before it was later stealthily edited to change that vague and dark language, Fox News reported.
Pointing to Wednesday’s Capitol incursion as a reason to use the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office or impeach him, Klein and Parks wrote, “Even aside from impeachment and 25th Amendment talk, Trump will be an ex-president in 13 days. The fact is that getting rid of Trump is the easy part.”
“Cleaning up the movement he commands, or getting rid of what he represents to so many Americans, is going to be something else.”
That last section originally read, “Cleansing the movement he commands, or getting rid of what he represents to so many Americans, is going to be something else.”
ABC News and Klein cleaned up their creepy genocidal language, but the veil is off, and we know who they are. We know that these people want.
The majority of the establishment media wants a one-party state where every man, woman and child knows his or her place. Trump’s awakening of the GOP base and others is a threat to that, and it became even more threatening after he began successfully courting Democratic voters last year.
Leftists have used words such as “reconciliation” and “re-education” with regard to how to deal with us since the election. Now ABC News has called for a “cleansing” of the political movement the president created.
While for most of us that movement equates to a robust economy, individual liberty, national sovereignty and a strong military, the hateful establishment media always viewed it as a threat to the status quo.
The actions of a relatively small number of Trump supporters at the Capitol on Wednesday have given these people what they view as a valid reason to delegitimize every one of the tens of millions of Americans who voted against the corrupt Washington and media establishment.
Rogue conservatives roaming the halls of Congress is exactly what the corporate media wanted. Remember, this is the same establishment media that joined Democrats in inciting or excusing violence for a great deal of last year, and even before that.
SUERCUT!
Media: Yes, violence is the answer pic.twitter.com/1juSdYtKvD
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 7, 2021
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Oops, wouldn’t want this highlight reel of Democrat leaders calling for uprisings to go viral pic.twitter.com/onBBfhMA3f
— Rogan O’Handley 🇺🇸 (@DC_Draino) January 8, 2021
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Save for the late Peter Jennings, ABC News has always been awful. The network never attempted to hide its bias during the election or during the four years when Trump was called “illegitimate” and a Russian plant. Klein was silent as fake news stories led the coverage for four years, and he never denounced Biden for going around talking about punching people — but now the mask is off.
Klein and his colleagues want to put us all in a corner and shame us over the D.C. spectacle, which 99.9 percent of us were not a party to. We can’t ask valid questions about election integrity if we’re all too afraid to show our faces, and maybe that’s the point. The Klein message highlights the depths of the establishment media’s desperation to make us go away and fall in line. No thanks.
It was the corporate media and its sponsors, Democrats, and those who threw bricks and molotov cocktails for months on end who brought shame to our republic, not Trump or the movement he has led. That’s an inconvenient fact that is being written over in a mad dash to turn the president’s legacy into ash by attempting to portray him as a man who simply spent four years inciting a riot.
It’s a lie, just like all the others. Let the dust settle and don’t be shamed.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/09/2021 – 16:30 - Kim Jong Un Orders More Tactical Nukes Be Made For Readiness Against "Archenemy" US
Kim Jong Un Orders More Tactical Nukes Be Made For Readiness Against “Archenemy” US
Kim Jong Un has begun ratcheting up anti-US rhetoric with less than two weeks to go before the Biden inauguration, calling America his country’s “principal enemy” on Saturday.
“Our external political activities must focus on controlling and subjugating the United States, our archenemy and the biggest stumbling block to the development of our revolution,” Kim said, according to official KCNA news agency.
“The real intention of its policy toward the DPRK will never change, whoever comes into power in the US,” he added during an address to the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea.
But more importantly, he announced that he no longer considers himself bound by the self-imposed moratorium on testing nuclear devices weapons and long-range ballistic missiles.
According to a paraphrase of his bellicose speech:
At the congress, Kim called for the improvement of the country’s nuclear arsenal to include solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles that can be launched from land and sea, and accurately hit targets at a range of up to 9,320 miles, putting the U.S. mainland in reach.
He also ordered the development of miniaturized nuclear weapons, tactical nukes, military surveillance satellites and hypersonic aircraft.
The incoming Biden administration is not expected to respond unless he actually puts any of this in action, particularly testing of banned strategic weapons.
Biden previously referred to Kim as a “thug” on the campaign trail, to which the North Korean leader responded by calling Biden a “rabid dog”.
Meanwhile, Biden has characterized that his approach will be a slower, “principled diplomacy” – suggesting such high stakes media-centric summits that was Trump’s style is out the door.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/09/2021 – 16:00
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