- "Too Many To Count": The Global Persecution Of Christians
“Too Many To Count”: The Global Persecution Of Christians
Authored by Raymond Ibrahim via The Gatestone Institute,
Today is one of the International Days of Prayer for the Persecuted Church (IDOP). Initiated over 20 years ago by the World Evangelical Alliance, 100,000 congregations around the world and millions of Christians participate on this day.
“This November let us unite in prayer for our persecuted brothers and sisters,” IDOP noted in a brief video that highlights a few examples of recent persecution, including the Easter Sunday church bombings in Sri Lanka and the ongoing slaughter of Christians by Islamic groups in Nigeria and, increasingly, Burkina Faso.
Discussing this day’s significance, Vernon Brewer, the CEO and founder of World Help, a Christian humanitarian organization, wrote:
“It’s easy to go about our lives and forget that in places like Nigeria, Iran and North Korea being a Christian can often lead to death. After all, for the most part, persecution for our faith isn’t something most of us face… But I can’t forget the believers I’ve met in Iraq, China or at the North Korean border. I can’t forget their scars or their haunted eyes and horrific stories… The more I travel, the more I see that in many countries Christian persecution is worse than ever before.”
Statistics bear out this grim assertion: “4,136 Christians were killed for faith-related reasons,” noted Open Doors in its World Watch List 2019. “On average, that’s 11 Christians killed every day for their faith.” Additionally, “2,625 Christians were detained without trial, arrested, sentenced and imprisoned” and “1,266 churches or Christian buildings were attacked.”
The report further states that more than 245 million Christians around the world are currently suffering from persecution. In other words, “1 in 9 Christians experience high levels of persecution worldwide.”
Typically women fare worse: “In many places, they experience a ‘double persecution’— one for being a Christian and one for being a woman.” As for specific numbers: “At least six women every day are raped, sexually harassed or forced into marriage to a Muslim man under the threat of death for their Christian faith…”
The “Independent Review into the global persecution of Christians,” led by Rev. Philip Mounstephen, the Bishop of Truro, and published in early 2019, states:
“Evidence shows not only the geographic spread of anti-Christian persecution, but also its increasing severity. In some regions, the level and nature of persecution is arguably coming close to meeting the international definition of genocide, according to that adopted by the UN.”
The bishop’s detailed report, which was commissioned by then British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, concluded that the persecution of Christians is near “genocide” levels.
Both studies make clear that most of the persecution occurs in the Muslim world. In seven of the top ten worst nations, “the primary cause of persecution is Islamic oppression,” notes Open Doors. Additionally, 38 of the 50 nations that persecute Christians the most are Muslim-majority.
The Bishop of Truro’s report gives specifics:
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“The persecution of Christians is perhaps at its most virulent in the region of the birthplace of Christianity — the Middle East & North Africa.”
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“Christianity now faces the possibility of being wiped-out in parts of the Middle East where its roots go back furthest. In Palestine, Christian numbers are below 1.5 percent; in Syria the Christian population has declined from 1.7 million in 2011 to below 450,000 and in Iraq, Christian numbers have slumped from 1.5 million before 2003 to below 120,000 today.”
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“In countries such as Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia the situation of Christians and other minorities has reached an alarming stage.”
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“[T]here is mass violence which regularly expresses itself through the bombing of churches, as has been the case in countries such as Egypt, Pakistan, and Indonesia.”
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“The single-greatest threat to Christians [in Nigeria] … came from Islamist militant group Boko Haram, with US intelligence reports in 2015 suggesting that 200,000 Christians were at risk of being killed… Those worst affected included Christian women and girls ‘abducted, and forced to convert, enter forced marriages, sexual abuse and torture.'”
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“An intent to erase all evidence of the Christian presence [in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, north-east Nigeria and the Philippines] was made plain by the removal of crosses, the destruction of Church buildings and other Church symbols. The killing and abduction of clergy represented a direct attack on the Church’s structure and leadership.”
Outside the Muslim world, the persecution of Christians is also getting significantly worse, particularly North Korea, where “never-ending pressure and violence” is directed against Christians. In India, for the first time in modern history, Christians are experiencing “extreme persecution.”
In the end, numbers and statistics will never adequately capture the magnitude of the problem. “Too many to count, too many unknown,” states the video by International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church, “All because they bear the name of Jesus.”
Tyler Durden
Mon, 11/11/2019 – 02:00 -
- How The Deep State "Justifies" Itself In America
How The Deep State “Justifies” Itself In America
Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
On October 30th, there was a panel discussion broadcast live on C-Span from the National Press Club and the Michael V. Hayden Center. The discussants were John Brennan, Michael McCabe, John McGlaughlin, and Michael Morrell. They all agreed with the statement by McLaughlin (former Deputy CIA Director) “Thank God for the ‘Deep State’”, and the large audience there also applauded it — nobody booed it.
Former CIA director John McLaughlin on Trump’s impeachment: “Thank God for the deep state” pic.twitter.com/t4pQhFOBuj
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) October 31, 2019
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John Brennan amplified upon the thought, and there was yet more applause. However, that thought hadn’t been invented by McLaughlin; it instead had evolved recently in the pages of the New York Times. Perhaps the discussants had read it there. Instead of America’s ‘news’-media uncritically trumpeting what government officials assert to be facts (as they traditionally do), we now have former spooks uncritically trumpeting what a mainstream ‘news’-medium has recently concocted to be the case — about themselves. They’ve come out of the closet, about being the Deep State. However, even in that, they are lying, because they aren’t it; they are only agents for it.
In America, the Deep State ‘justifies’ itself in the ‘news’-media that it owns, and does so by falsely ‘defining’ what the “Deep State” is (which is actually the nation’s 607 billionaires, whose hired agents number in the millions). They mis-‘define’ it, as being, instead, the taxpayer-salaried career Government employees, known professionally as “the Civil Service.” (Although some Civil Servants — especially at the upper levels — are agents for America’s billionaires and retire to cushy board seats, most of them actually are not and do not. And the “revolving door” between “the public sector” and “the private sector” is where the Deep State operations become concentrated. That’s the core of the networking, by which the billionaires get served. And, of course, those former spooks at the National Press Club said nothing about it. Are they authentically so stupid that they don’t know about it, or is that just pretense from them?)
How the Deep State’s operatives perpetrate this deception about the meaning of “Deep State” was well exemplified in the nine links that were supplied on October 28th by the extraordinarily honest anonymous German intelligence analyst who blogs as “Moon of Alabama” and who condemned there (and linked to) 9 recent articles in the New York Times, as posing a threat against democracy in America.
As I intend to argue here, the 9 articles are, indeed, aimed at deceiving the American public, about what the true meaning of the phrase “the Deep State” is. He headlined “Endorsing The Deep State Endangers Democracy”. (And that’s what the October 30th panel discussion was actually doing — endorsing the Deep State.)
However, he didn’t explain the tactic the NYT’s editors (and those former spooks) use to deceive the public about the Deep State, and this is what I aim to do here, by showing the transformation, over time, in the way that that propaganda-organization, the New York Times, has been employing the phrase “Deep State” — a remarkable transformation, which started, on 16 February 2017, by the newspaper’s denying that any Deep State exists in America but that it exists only in corrupt nations; and which gradually transitioned into an upside-down, by asserting that a Deep State does exist in the United States, and that it fights against corruption in this country. As always, only fools (such as that applauding audience on October 30th) would believe it, but propagandists depend upon fools and cannot thrive without them. In this case, the Times, in those 9 articles, was evolving quickly from a blanket denial, to an American-exceptionalist proud affirmation, that a Deep State rules this country and ought to rule it. I agree with the statement that “Endorsing The Deep State Endangers Democracy”, but I am more concerned here to explain how that endorsement — that deceit — is being done.
The first of these NYT articles was published on 16 February 2017, and it denied that the US has any “Deep State” whatsoever.
The second, published on 6 March 2017, blamed President Trump (since the NYT represents mainly Democratic Party billionaires) for mainstreaming the phrase “the Deep State” into American political discourse, and it alleged that that phrase actually refers only to “countries like Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan, where authoritarian elements band together to undercut democratically elected leaders.”
The third, published on 10 March 2017, repeated this allegation, that this phrase applies only to “the powerful deep states of countries like Egypt or Pakistan, experts say.”
The fourth, published on 5 September 2018, was an anonymous op-ed from a Government employee who condemned Trump and “vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” “This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.” So: still the NYT’s editors were hewing to their propaganda-line, that no “Deep State” exists in America — there are just whistleblowers, here.
The fifth, on 18 December 2018, said, for example, that “Adam Lovinger, a Pentagon analyst, was one of the first to wrap himself in the deep state defense” — namely, that they consist of “people who have been targeted for political reasons.” So, the NYT’s editors were now reinforcing their new false ‘definition’ of “Deep State,” as consisting just of Government whistleblowers.
The sixth, on 6 October 2019, said, “President Trump and some of his allies have asserted without evidence that a cabal of American officials — the so-called deep state — embarked on a broad operation to thwart Mr. Trump’s campaign. The conspiracy theory remains unsubstantiated.” So: the NYT’s editors were back, again, to denying that there is any “Deep State” in America. This was a signal, from them, that they were starting to recognize that they’d need to jiggle their ‘definition’ of “Deep State,” at least a bit.
The seventh, on 20 October 2019, was by a member of the Editorial Board, and it boldly proclaimed, about “the deep state,” “Let us now praise these not-silent heroes.” The propagandists now had settled firmly upon their new (and previously merely exploratory) ‘definition’ of “Deep State,” as consisting of whistleblowers in the US Government’s Civil Services, “individuals willing to step up and protest the administration’s war on science, expertise and facts.”
The eighth, on 23 October 2019, equated “the deep state” even more boldly with the impeachment of President Trump: “Over the last three weeks, the deep state has emerged from the shadows in the form of real live government officials, past and present, who have defied a White House attempt to block cooperation with House impeachment investigators and provided evidence that largely backs up the still-anonymous whistle-blower.”
The ninth, on 26 October 2019, which came from “a contributing opinion writer and professor of history,” alleged that the origins of “the deep state” are to be found with Teddy Roosevelt in the 1880s, when “A healthy dose of elitism drove Roosevelt’s crusade, as the spoils system had been the path to power for immigrant-driven political machines in big cities like New York. Yet the Civil Service laws he and others created marked the beginning of a shift toward a fairer, less corrupt public realm.”
In other words: the Deep State, in America, are not perpetrators of corrupt government (such as in “countries like Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan, where authoritarian elements band together to undercut democratically elected leaders”), but are instead courageous enemies of corrupt government; and they are instituted by the aristocracy here (today’s American billionaires), in order to reduce, if not eliminate, corruption in government (which, the Times now alleges, originates amongst, or serves, the lower classes).
The lessons about Big Brother, which were taught by George Orwell in his merely metaphorical masterpiece 1984, were apparently never learned, because even now — as his “Newspeak” is being further refined so that black is white, and good is bad, and truth is falsehood — there still are people who subscribe to the propagandists and cannot get enough of their ridiculous con-games. Though in some poor countries, a corrupt Deep State rules; a Deep State rules in America so as to reduce if not prevent corruption, the New York Times now concludes.
You can see how it’s done, in those nine NYT articles. Isn’t it simply amazing there?!
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/10/2019 – 23:30 - Chaos In Bolivia After President Morales Resigns, Claims He Was Victim Of A Coup
Chaos In Bolivia After President Morales Resigns, Claims He Was Victim Of A Coup
Shortly after the country’s military “urged” him to do so, Bolivian President Evo Morales resigned on Sunday to ease violence that has gripped the South American nation since a disputed election last month, but he stoked fears of further unrest in a country that has been paralyzed by weeks of protests after saying he was the victim of a “coup” and faced arrest.
Morales, who has been in power for nearly 14 years, said in televised comments that he would submit his resignation letter to help restore stability, though he aimed barbs at what he called a “civic coup” and later said police planned to arrest him.
“I resign from my position as president so that (Carlos) Mesa and (Luis Fernando) Camacho do not continue to persecute socialist leaders,” Morales said in the televised address naming the leaders of the opposition.
#Bolivia President @evoespueblo announcing resignation. pic.twitter.com/qpOX4gz5WD
— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) November 10, 2019
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Morales said that he decided to leave the post in hopes that his departure would stop the spate of violent attacks against officials and indigenous people, “so that protesters do not continue burning the houses of public officials” and “kidnapping and mistreating” families of indigenous leaders.
“I am resigning, sending my letter of resignation to the Legislative Assembly,” Morales said, adding that it was his “obligation as indigenous president and president of all Bolivians to seek peace.”
Morales has received a reputation as a staunch defender of socialism and an ardent critic of US foreign policy. The country’s highest court ruled in 2018 that he could run for the fourth time.
Underscoring the ongoing tensions, Morales later said on Twitter that the police had an “illegal” warrant for his arrest and that “violent groups” had attacked his home, according to Reuters, although the local police chief later refuted there was a warrant for Morales’ arrest.
Shortly before Morales announced his resignation, Bolivian TV channels aired footage of what they say was a presidential plane departing from El Alto International airport. It was reported that the plane took Morales to his political stronghold of Chimoré in the Department of Cochabamba, 300 kilometers east of La Paz, a city where he launched his reelection bid back in May.
#Último #P7Informa
El avión presidencial arriba a Chimoré en el departamento de Cochabamba. pic.twitter.com/6e3XxhdsF1— Página Siete (@pagina_siete) November 10, 2019
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The resignation of Morales, a leftist icon and the last survivor of Latin America’s “pink tide” of two decades ago, has already sent shockwaves across the region at a time when left-leaning leaders have returned to power in Mexico and Argentina.
Completing a trifecta of resignations, Vice President Álvaro García Linera also resigned, as did Bolivia senate’s president, Adriana Salvatierra.
#Bolivia vice president also resigns. pic.twitter.com/5CmVyVXxzz
— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) November 10, 2019
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Echoing Morales, some of his leftist Latin American allies decried the turn of events as a “coup,” including Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Brazil’s Lula (who last week was released from prison) and Argentine President-elect Alberto Fernandez. Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said his country would offer Morales asylum if he sought it.
#Mexico offers asylum to @evoespueblo. https://t.co/DnvP663Tnf
— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) November 10, 2019
While Bolivia under Morales enjoyed a period of welcome prosperity, including one of the region’s strongest economic growth rates and its poverty rate was cut in half, his determination to cling to power and seek a fourth term alienated many allies, even among indigenous communities.
* * *
Pressure had been ramping up on Morales since he was declared the winner of the Oct. 20 election. Ahead of today’s announcement, General Williams Kaliman, the head of Bolivia’s armed forces, on Sunday said the military had asked Morales to step down to help restore peace and stability after weeks of protests over the vote. Kaliman added that the military was calling on the Bolivian people to refrain from violence and disorder.
Videos from La Paz, the site of many recent anti-Morales protests, showed crowds cheering after the resignation announcement.
#VideoNoticias
La gente sale a la avenida principal de Obrajes, en #LaPaz, para celebrar la dimisión de @evoespueblo. La gente que circula en sus autos acompaña el festejo con bocinas pic.twitter.com/IsNty9PhEg— La Razón Digital (@LaRazon_Bolivia) November 10, 2019
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After the contested October elections there were rival rallies of Morales’ opponents and supporters throughout the country. While many anti-government protests remained peaceful, others have led to rioting in major cities, clashes with police, and attacks on pro-government politicians. On Saturday, protesters burned the house of Oruro city governor Víctor Hugo Vásquez, who stood by the president as tensions flared up.
Earlier on Sunday, Morales had agreed to hold new elections after a report from the Organization of American States (OAS), which conducted an audit of the Oct. 20 vote, revealed serious irregularities. The OAS report said that election should be annulled after it had found “clear manipulations” of the voting system that called into question Morales’ win, with a lead of just over 10 points over main rival Carlos Mesa.
Bolivian opposition urged Morales to resign altogether despite his promise of the new elections. While he briefly resisted such calls, branding them “unconstitutional” and an “attempted coup,” the President eventually gave in after the military joined that chorus.
Adding to the chaos resulting from weeks of protests, the resignations of Morales and his vice president meant it was not initially clear who would take the helm of the country pending the results of new elections.
According to Bolivian law, in the absence of the president and vice president, the head of the Senate would normally take over provisionally. However, as noted above, Senate President Adriana Salvatierra also stepped down late on Sunday, leaving an unprecedented power vacuum (which we are confident will be filled quick). Legislators were expected to meet to agree on an interim commission or legislator who would have temporary administrative control of the country, according to a constitutional lawyer who spoke to Reuters.
Morales, speaking at an earlier news conference, had tried to placate critics with a pledge to replace the electoral tribunal for the new vote, though his opponents – already angry that he ran in defiance of term limits – were not assuaged.
The election standoff has dented the image of Morales – who has helmed Bolivia through a period of relative stability and economic growth – and hit the landlocked nation’s economy. His “legacy will be compromised and the region will suffer another impact with consequences well beyond Bolivia,” said Juan Cruz Diaz, managing director of risk advisory Cefeidas Group, referring to Argentina, Chile, Peru, Paraguay and Brazil.
Luis Fernando Camacho, a civic leader from the eastern city of Santa Cruz who has become a symbol of the opposition, said the OAS report on Sunday clearly demonstrated election fraud. He had reiterated his call for Morales to resign.
“Today we won a battle,” Camacho told a crowd of cheering supporters in the capital before Morales’ resignation, though he added more time was needed to repair the constitutional order and democracy. “Only when we can be sure that democracy is solid, then will we go back home.”
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had also welcomed the call for a new vote to “ensure free and fair elections.”
Full statement from @SecPompeo on #Bolivia. pic.twitter.com/b7b7iE420E
— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) November 10, 2019
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As the fall-out from the audit report swept across Bolivia, and as the military pulled its backing, Morales’ support crumbled on Sunday. Several of his allies resigned, including Mining Minister Cesar Navarro and Chamber of Deputies President Victor Borda, who belongs to Morales’ party. They both cited fear for the safety of their families as the reason for stepping down. Juan Carlos Huarachi, leader of the Bolivian Workers’ Center, a powerful pro-government union, said Morales should stand down if that would help end recent violence.
But the straw that broke the camel’s back is when the police forces also joined anti-government protests, while the military said it would not “confront the people” over the issue. The attorney general’s office also announced it had ordered an investigation with the aim of prosecuting the members of the electoral body and others responsible for the irregularities.
Mesa had also said Morales and his vice president should not preside over the electoral process or be candidates.
Morales, who came to power in 2006 as Bolivia’s first indigenous leader, had defended his election win but said he would adhere to the findings of the OAS audit. “The manipulations to the computer systems are of such magnitude that they must be deeply investigated by the Bolivian State to get to the bottom of and assign responsibility in this serious case,” the preliminary OAS report had said.
So just as some blame Russia when elections don’t go their way, others finds a culprit in computer system manipulations.
Voting in a new election should take place as soon as conditions are in place to guarantee it being able to go ahead, including a newly composed electoral body, the OAS said. The OAS added that it was statistically unlikely that Morales had secured the 10-percentage-point margin of victory needed to win outright.
Morales stressed that his resignation does not mean that the socialist case is defeated.
“It is no betrayal. The struggle continues. We are a people,” he said.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/10/2019 – 23:19 - Where U.S. Troops Are Based In The Middle East
Where U.S. Troops Are Based In The Middle East
After the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria caused turmoil in the region, Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes that some units formerly stationed in Syria have moved to stay in Iraq.
The country had formerly been the base of more than 5,000 U.S. troops, as our graphic shows.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Other Middle Eastern countries host many more U.S. troops.
The largest U.S. base in the Middle East is in Qatar. The country hosts around 13,000 U.S. troops, according to numbers compiled by Axios. Located southwest of Doha, Al Udeid Air Base has proven crucial in the fight against ISIS. Qatar invested $1 billion in constructing the base and it’s also home to the the U.S. Combined Air Operations Center, responsible for coordinating U.S. and allied air power across the Middle East, particularly in airspace over Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.
The above infographic also highlights just how important Qatar, along with Kuwait, is to the U.S. presence in the Middle East.
Both countries hosts an estimated 13,000 U.S. troops.
Neighboring Bahrain is also vital to American interests in the region, home to the Naval Support Activity Bahrain, the U.S. Fifth Fleet and a substantial military presence at Isa Air Base. 7,000 troops are based there.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/10/2019 – 23:00 - Who Wants To Destroy The World?
Who Wants To Destroy The World?
Authored by Phil Torres via OneZero,
For most of human history, the question of who would want to destroy the world didn’t much matter. The reason, of course, was that that no individual or group of humans could demolish civilization or cause our extinction. Our ancestors just didn’t have the tools: no amount of spears, arrows, swords, or catapults would have enabled them — even the most bloodthirsty and misanthropic — to have inflicted harm in every corner of the world.
This changed with the invention of the atomic bomb. While scholars often identify 1945 as the year that human self-annihilation became possible, a more accurate date is 1948 or 1949, since this is when the United States stockpiled enough nuclear weapons (about 100) to have initiated a hemisphere-spanning “nuclear winter.” (See this work in progress for why I’m focusing on 100 nuclear weapons as a threshold.) A nuclear winter occurs when soot from burning cities significantly reduces the amount of sunlight reaching Earth’s surface for a period of months or years, thereby causing temperatures to plummet and famines to ensue. Quite unsettlingly, it wasn’t until the 1980s — decades after we had enough nukes to blot out the sun — that the nuclear winter phenomenon was first identified, although lingering questions remain even today.
The U.S. monopoly on world-ending power didn’t last long: by 1953, the Soviet Union had likewise expanded to 100 weapons. Now there were two nations on Earth that could obliterate civilization. But again, this didn’t last very long. The United Kingdom joined the club of potential world-enders around 1962, China around 1971, and France around 1973, with Israel, Pakistan, and India becoming members of this club in the 2010s. Hence, in less than a century, the world went from containing zero actors capable of unilaterally destroying the world to eight.
This is a scary situation. Unfortunately, it’s getting worse — much worse. The reason is that states are no longer the only players in the game. Thanks to new technologies, nonstate actors such as terrorist groups and lone wolves are getting in on the action, too, and they might be a lot more willing than national governments to push the proverbial doomsday button.
My own research suggests that the percentage of people who would push a doomsday button, if it were placed within finger’s reach, is fairly small, but the absolute number is unacceptably high. Even a quick Google search seems to affirm this. Consider the following answers, taken from different online sources, to the question of whether one would destroy the world if one could (quoting typos and all):
“Yes. It is obvious that we gain nothing from living and there is a huge amount of human suffering that I find quite unjustifiable. The complete annihilation of the human race would be the greatest act of compassion ever.” Reddit.com
“Yes, we suck as a human race.” Reddit.com
“Yes. Because you all are assholes. And this is not a joke I would love to push something that ends humanity. I always thought about it and now there is the question about that topic and I am happy to say I want you all dead everyone single one of you fuckers. Please give me the chance to wipe out humanity.” Reddit.com
“My view is that Mankind is a plague… I vote to destroy mankind and let nature start over.” Debate.org
“The human animal is the only evil animal in the animal kingdom. We destroy everything… I email the president weekly and beg him to push the button and stop the madness already.” Debate.org
“In the short time we’ve been on this planet, humans have already destroyed so much. We destroy ecosystems, and kill off entire species of animals… The world would be better off without humans as a whole.” Debate.org
Of course, saying something definitely isn’t the same as doing it. Even so, can we be fully certain that not a single person in the world would attempt to follow through on his or her annihilatory fantasies? One way to approach this question is to look for historical examples of groups or people who both expressed a desire to kill everyone and committed some terrible act or acts of violence. The combination of these two phenomena implies that such people would be willing to act on their omnicidal (meaning killing everyone) impulses and willingly, perhaps even eagerly, push a doomsday button. So are there such examples?
Unfortunately, yes. Lots of them. And they seem to fall into a handful of basic categories.
Consider the disturbing case of Eric Harris, the psychopathic mastermind behind the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. His journal is full of all sorts of genuinely horrifying, ghoulish fantasies. On several occasions, he explicitly mentions his burning desire to extinguish humanity. At one point. he writes: “If you recall your history the Nazis came up with a ‘final solution’ to the Jewish problem. Kill them all. Well, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I say ‘KILL MANKIND’ no one should survive.”
Elsewhere, Harris mused, “I think I would want us to go extinct,” to which he added, “I have a goal to destroy as much as possible… I want to burn the world” and “I just wish I could actually DO this instead of just DREAM about it all.”
When Harris and Dylan Klebold, his partner in crime, perpetrated their massacre in Columbine, they were equipped with garden-variety weapons. Dangerous to be sure, but hardly capable of “burning the world.” Can there be any doubt, though, that if Harris — who was relatively intelligent and liked math and science — had had access to some of the advanced technologies of tomorrow, he would have, when committing suicide, tried to go out with a much bigger bang?
The Columbine massacre had a huge influence on later rampage shooters, some of whom also dreamt of omnicide. For example, in 2007, an 18-year-old Finnish student named Pekka-Eric Auvinen shot several people at his school, which he also tried to burn down. Like Harris, he wrote about “a final solution” as “the death of the entire human race,” and described his massacre as “an operation against humanity with the purpose of killing as many people as possible.” Yet another rampage shooter from Finland, Matti Saari, wrote in his suicide note, “I hate the human race, I hate mankind, I hate the whole world, and I want to kill as many people as possible.”
Then, of course, there was Elliot Rodger, the incel psychopath who killed seven people and injured 14 in the 2014 Isla Vista killings. In a video shot one day before the rampage, he said in no uncertain terms: “I hate all of you. Humanity is a disgusting, wretched, depraved species. If I had it in my power, I would stop at nothing to reduce every single one of you to mountains of skulls and rivers of blood. And rightfully so. You deserve to be annihilated. And I’ll give that to you.”
School shooters and other lone wolves have idiosyncratic motives, such as a misanthropic hatred of humanity, or a desire to retaliate against women for perceived romantic and sexual slights. Together, though, they comprise a relatively cohesive category of omnicidal actors, and a relatively unpredictable one at that.
Another type of omnicidal actor comes in the form of apocalyptic terrorists who believe that to save the world, it must first be destroyed. ISIS, arguably the largest and richest terrorist group in history, is a paradigm case. While some members of ISIS probably didn’t hold apocalyptic beliefs, the leadership most certainly did — and they made strategic decisions based on these beliefs. The man who essentially founded ISIS, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, believed that Islam’s version of Armageddon was about to unfold around the small Syrian town of Dabiq. Hence, the name of the group’s propaganda magazine, Dabiq. After the U.S. military killed al-Zarqawi in 2006, leadership of ISIS transferred to Abu Ayyub al-Masri, a fevered apocalypticist who insisted that the Islamic end-of-days messianic figure, the “Mahdi,” was about to appear in Iraq. Like al-Zarqawi, he based his strategy on his apocalyptic belief — and it backfired. He soon met his end at the hands of Western forces.
Both of these individuals really believed that the end was nigh, and that it was their duty to use violence — catastrophic violence, to be more specific — to bring about the apocalypse. ISIS members talked about acquiring nuclear weapons, releasing deadly pathogens, and building dirty bombs. I personally haven’t spoken to a single terrorism scholar who doesn’t think that ISIS would have gleefully pushed a “destroy-the-world” button, especially if Western forces were marching toward Dabiq.
But ISIS is far from the only apocalyptic group. Famously, the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo attempted to trigger Armageddon by releasing sarin in the Tokyo subway in 1995. Here in the U.S., more than a dozen hate groups subscribe to Christian Identity, an apocalyptic worldview that endorses the use of catastrophic violence as a means of triggering a “race war” that will initiate the end of the world. And one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history, the Taiping Rebellion, involved an apocalyptic movement called the “Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.” This was led by a man named Hong Xiuquan, who believed that he was the brother of Jesus Christ, “commissioned by the Lord of Heaven to slay the devil-demons (Manchus) whose rule had brought ruin to China.”
A final type of omnicidal actor lingers within the outermost fringe of radical environmentalist, anarcho-primitivist, and Neo-Luddite ideologies. Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, provides an example par excellence. Beginning in 1978, Kaczynski perpetrated numerous domestic terrorist attacks, killing three people and injuring 23 others. A former UC Berkeley mathematics professor and Harvard alumnus, Kaczynski didn’t wish for humanity to go extinct. Rather, he wanted to trigger a global revolution against industrial society, with the ultimate goal of causing its collapse. Kaczynski ultimately didn’t care whether his revolution would cause people to die, since in his utilitarian calculus the ends would justify the means. As Kaczynski wrote in 1995: “This revolution may or may not make use of violence; it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society.”
In contrast, other actors in this category have explicitly embraced pro-extinction convictions. For example, the Gaia Liberation Front (GLF), an ecoterrorist group, holds as their mission “the total liberation of the Earth, which can be accomplished only through the extinction of the Humans as a species.” In advocating this, they argue that “if any Humans survive, they may start the whole thing over again. Our policy is to take no chances.”
How might they accomplish their omnicidal aims? GLF contends that bioengineering is “the specific technology for doing the job right of annihilating humanity — and it’s something that could be done by just one person with the necessary expertise and access to the necessary equipment.” They continue: “…genetically engineered viruses… have the advantage of attacking only the target species. To complicate the search for a cure or a vaccine, and as insurance against the possibility that some Humans might be immune to a particular virus, several different viruses could be released (with provision being made for the release of a second round after the generals and the politicians had come out of their shelters).”
This parallels an anonymous article in the Earth First! Journal, published in 1989, meaning that this idea has been around for a while: “Contributions are urgently solicited for scientific research on a species specific virus that will eliminate Homo shiticus from the planet. Only an absolutely species specific virus should be set loose. Otherwise it will be just another technological fix. Remember, Equal Rights for All Other Species.”
While the most radical fringe of the environmentalist movement has avoided the limelight in recent years, some experts, such as the terrorism scholar Frances Flannery, expect a resurgence as climate and biodiversity crises worsen. This poses an obvious danger in a world replete with bullets and bombs; but it poses an existential threat in a world of cheap and easy gene editing. Technologies such as gene drives, digital-to-biological converters, and CRISPR-Cas9 are making it increasingly feasible to synthesize designer pathogens that could be far more devastating than anything found in nature.
Are there any solutions to the problems posed by virus-toting omnicidal maniacs? One hard-to-avoid — and completely terrifying — answer is mass surveillance. This could take the form of what the philosopher Jeremy Bentham called a “panopticon,” whereby the state (perhaps run by computer programs designed specifically to govern — a form of government called “algocracy”) monitors every action of its citizens. The obvious danger is that this could collapse into tyrannical totalitarianism, which itself constitutes an existential risk.
Another possibility involves what the science fiction writer, David Brin, dubs the “transparent society.” This would make surveillance egalitarian, so to speak: everyone would be able to see what everyone else is doing all the time, thereby enabling those watched to watch the watchers. Brin doesn’t argue that this is an ideal situation, only that it’s a better situation than one in which the state has all the power. Perhaps a total loss of privacy is the cost of existential security.
Alternatively, I have previously claimed that, in order to reduce the risks posed by malicious agents like those mentioned above, society should prioritize mitigating climate change and ecological destruction. Both phenomena are threat multipliers and threat intensifiers, which means that they’ll introduce new problems while making old problems even worse. Better environmental policies would lower the threat posed by ecoterrorists, whose fundamental complaint — “Humans are stupidly destroying the biosphere” — is scientifically accurate. Such policies would also decrease the number and severity of natural disasters, which could fertilize apocalyptic fervor among religious extremists. As the terrorism scholar Mark Juergensmeyer has remarked, “radical times will breed radical religion,” a hypothesis apparently supported by the rise of ISIS during the Syrian civil war.
Moving forward, people who care about human survival need to think hard not just about the various technologies that will become available, but about the types of actors who might try to use these technologies for catastrophic ill. The future of the human race could quite literally depend on it.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/10/2019 – 22:30 - Caught On Video: Hong Kong Protester Shot By Police During Morning Clashes; Hang Seng Tumbles
Caught On Video: Hong Kong Protester Shot By Police During Morning Clashes; Hang Seng Tumbles
Hong Kong police opened fire and hit at least one protester on Monday according to multiple news sources, as chaos erupted across the city a day after officers fired tear gas to break up demonstrations that are entering their sixth month.
Police fired live rounds at protesters on the eastern side of Hong Kong island, and local Cable TV said one protester was wounded when police opened fire. Video footage showed a protester lying in a pool of blood with his eyes wide open. Police also pepper-sprayed and subdued a woman nearby as plastic crates were thrown at officers, the video shared on social media showed.
A longer clip of the shooting is below. Reader discretion advised.
The shot protester is said in critical condition, according to CableTB.
Riot police soon appeared after the shooting, helping the traffic officers subdue the protesters according to RTHK. Angry people started demanding explanations for the shooting, but were pepper sprayed by riot police. A woman who continued to confront the officers was thrown to the ground, then subdued, as the enraged crowd threw objects at the officers and cursed them.
An ambulance arrived around six minutes after the shooting, by which time the first man who was shot appeared to be barely moving, lying in a pool of blood. The camera operator was by this time sobbing as he recounted the shooting to his audience.
Following the shooting, police cordoned off the area, but a large crowd of many hundreds of people quickly gathered at the intersection, yelling abuse at the officers, many of them extremely emotional. Police ordered them to leave immediately, only to be ignored. Officers then used pepper spray on the crowd. Some then left, and officers rushed forward to arrest a few of them.
Police issued a statement saying that radical protesters had set up barricades at multiple locations across the city and warned the demonstrators to “stop their illegal acts immediately.” They did not comment immediately on the apparent shooting.
Services on some train and subway lines were alsodisrupted early on Monday, with riot police deployed near stations and shopping malls. Many universities cancelled classes on Monday and there were long traffic jams in some areas.
Monday’s violence followed a 24th straight weekend of anti-government unrest as activists blocked roads and trashed shopping malls across Hong Kong’s New Territories and Kowloon peninsula.
Today’s chaos follows the death last Friday of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology student Chow Tsz-lok, days after he fell in a car park near a police dispersal operation where tear gas had been fired.
Protesters are angry about what they see as police brutality and meddling by Beijing in the former British colony’s freedoms, guaranteed by the “one country, two systems” formula put in place when the territory returned to Chinese rule in 1997. Meanwhile, China has repeatedly warned that continued violence could be met with a ground invasion of Hong Kong, although so far Beijing has demonstrated an unwillingness to escalate.
The Hang Seng stock index tumbled more than 2% in early trading following news of the shooting.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/10/2019 – 22:01 - Bank Behind World's Largest Money Laundering Scandal Offered Russians Gold Bars To Hide Their Fortune
Bank Behind World’s Largest Money Laundering Scandal Offered Russians Gold Bars To Hide Their Fortune
When we last looked at Danske Bank, the Danish lender was at the center of what has been dubbed the world’s largest, $220 billion money-laundering scandal that allegedly involved Russians transferring funds offshore in violation of European regulations (it also involved the chronically criminal Deutsche Bank). Then, two months ago, the scandal took a lethal turn when the CEO of the bank’s Estonia branch was found dead in a still-unexplained suicide. Now, we learn of yet another bizarre twist in what some have dubbed the biggest dirty money scandal of all time: the Danish lender was offering gold bars to wealthy clients to help them keep their fortunes hidden.
According to Bloomberg, the bank’s Estonian branch – whose CEO committed suicide – which was already wiring billions of client dollars to offshore accounts, told a select group of mostly Russian customers some time around 2012, that they could now also convert their money into gold bars and coins.
So for those asking the benefits of holding money in physical gold instead of fiat (or crypto), here is the answer: aside from offering a hedge against risk, Danske presented gold as a way for clients to achieve “anonymity,” according to the documents. More importantly, the bank said that using gold ensured “portability” of assets, according to an internal presentation dated June 2012.
As one would expect, the gold/money-laundering service did not come cheap: Danske charged a fee of 0.5% on larger orders, while smaller orders had a commission of as much as 4%.
This is the first time we learn that Danske offered such “services” – in the bank’s own report on its non-resident unit, the bank listed the services it provided to clients. Aside from payments, these included setting up foreign-exchange lines, as well as bond and securities trading. The bank didn’t list the sale of gold bars.
While it’s not known how much gold Danske managed to sell while the now defunct Estonian unit was still running, an internal email seen by Bloomberg revealed that at least some clients used the service. Local private banking clients were also offered the service.
Furthermore, for gold bars weighing 250 grams or more, Danske clients could obtain the precious metal without a sealed pack or paper certificates. Bloomberg adds that anti-money laundering approval was needed before customers could collect the gold, but such approvals weren’t necessary if the gold was kept in long-term storage, according to the documents.
The report goes on to note that the alleged “gold laundering” service – somewhat similar to the Turkey-Dubai-Iran PetroGold Triangle that emerged in 2012 as a means by which Iran evaded the Western blockade – was no longer offered after 2013, when the price of gold tumbled. A bank presentation dated from June 2012, when gold was trading close to an all-time high, told clients that “the product is not being advertised publicly or in the media.”
Additional documents revealed that Danske’s Estonian branch sourced its gold from two partners, depending on the size of orders. One partner handled orders that exceeded 300,000 euros, equivalent to 6 kilograms at the time, and bought the gold from the Austrian mint; the other was used for smaller orders, according to the presentation, which didn’t name the suppliers.
Some of the documents promoting gold bars are signed by Howard Wilkinson, the whistleblower who brought the Danske Bank laundering scandal into the public light. His lawyer, Stephen Kohn, didn’t immediately comment on the matter when contacted by Bloomberg.
As reported previously, Danske Bank is currently investigated by the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission in the U.S. In Europe, it’s the target of criminal probes by prosecutors in Denmark, Estonia and France, according to Bloomberg. The bank has also had several class-action lawsuits brought against it, and its former chief executive officer, Thomas Borgen, is under preliminary criminal investigation in Denmark, along with many other former directors at Danske.
As an aside, gold has traditionally played a special role in the “historic ties” between Russia and Estonia, which was swallowed by the Soviet Union in 1940 after it gained independence following WWI, and which communists participating in the Russian revolution used as a bridge to channel vast quantities of gold taken from the murdered family of Czar Nicholas II into the West.
In the early 1920s, about 700 tons of Czarist coins dodged a western blockade by passing through Tallinn with the knowledge of the country’s leaders, before heading for Scandinavia and the U.K. It now appears that Russian elite may have used the same path.
It remains unclear who bought the Danske gold, or where it now resides.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/10/2019 – 22:00 - Gabbard And Trump Jr. Change America's View Of 'The View'
Gabbard And Trump Jr. Change America’s View Of ‘The View’
Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,
The unbearable harpies of The View that gather every weekday on ABC to show the world what toxic femininity looks like reached their peak of relevance this week thanks to two Presidential candidates, Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) and Donald Trump Jr. (R-Future).
Both Gabbard and Trump Jr. sat in the middle seat and commanded it like they owned it, doing what most of America has been begging for for years, to put both the panel and their hand-picked audience in their place.
Since she entered the race for the Democratic nomination Gabbard has been under consistent attack by the establishment. They repeatedly make the arrogant mistake of trying to bully from their pulpit believing they can destroy a person of obvious character into submission who dissents from foreign policy orthodoxy, the true third-rail of American politics.
The hope is that Gabbard will make a mistake which can be then played ad nauseum, ad infinitum until she slinks off the stage in shame.
But Gabbard is too strong for that. And the difference in demeanor and character was plainly evident as she turned on Joy Behar, the lead torchbearer for all things anti-Trump, war-like and pathetic.
Gabbard didn’t waste time, taking the fight to The View before they knew what was happening. Because she has learned in this game that you do not fight on ground prepared by your opponent.
You set the stage. You command the field. It’s safe to say she’s learned something while being in the military for the past seventeen years.
Doing this, you make your opponents look petty, venal and stupid for saying the things they’re saying.
By confronting her accusers directly Gabbard showed everyone watching the difference between the caricature created by Clinton and her cronies on The View and the reality of her character.
And that is the kind of narrative-breaking moment that sinks careers for some and defines them for others.
Speaking of careers, like it or not, Donald Trump Jr. has a future in politics. He came onto The View, like Gabbard the day before, armed to the teeth and ready use everything at his disposal.
He knows walking into that arena they aren’t going to fight fair, that they’ll fall back on the laziest of arguments, like Meghan McCain virtue signaling her false eyelashes off over “Gold Star Families” who are disrespected by President Trump’s private locker room conversation, while disgustingly wrapping herself in her dead father’s flag.
And his comebacks and arguments were so strong that he had The View’s audience cheering for him. It forced Joy Behar to publicly scold her audience that her show wasn’t a MAGA rally.
A very Behar moment — petty, venal and stupid.
And when he goes anywhere near attacking their character they scream him down, and fade to black. Whoopi comes out looking like a pathetic bully having to ‘call for the bailiff’ to stop a conversation and fight she knows she’s going to lose.
Because how do you excuse pedophilia unless you’re a sick twisted bitch?
Trump Jr. in less than one seven-minute television segment ripped off their masks revealing the true depth of The View’s ugliness.
The View Revealed (H/T The Bleeding Fool)
It was masterful.
It proves that he learned at his father’s knee and is absolutely a force to be reckoned with.
It revealed that The View’s view of America comes from Hell itself.
These are bile-filled opportunists who champion infanticide, defend child molestation and cover for mass murderers while showing zero tolerance for dissent because ‘muh feelingz are your responsibility.’
Newsflash for you Whoopie, they most certainly are not.
Their worldview is so solipsistic the name of the show is ‘The View.’ Not A View or Our View.
The View.
Now, why is this important? Why am I going on about this?
Because The View, like so much of televised media, is a pillar of the system of control to shape what you think, who you think these thoughts at and what to say to someone who doesn’t think them.
It exists to reinforce whatever narrative the self-serving Western oligarchy wants the women of America to think about politics.
When Gabbard went on, the establishment was already up to its neck burying the James O’Keefe’s bombshell video of Good Morning America’s Amy Robach talking about how her expose of Jeffrey Epstein was squashed by pressure from the British royal family.
And for Gabbard and Trump Jr. to come in on consecutive days and rip The View apart reminds us just how sad and ineffectual that system has become.
Because these incidents remind us that we live in a Post Dorothy Oz.
Dorothy pulled back the curtain to reveal a sad, pathetic man with no power and then goes home leaving a landscape behind her that will have to struggle with the loss of institutional control. Oz is revealed as a false god and the Witch is dead but what’s next?
Because, we can see them. We’re all wearing our Roddy Piper sunglasses.
But are we ready to chew some bubblegum?
I think so.
Gabbard and Trump Jr. woke thousands of people up this week outside of their respective echo chambers.
They are becoming champions to the voiceless. And everywhere we look new instances of “Jeffrey Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself” are springing up not just the Internet but the real world.
It seems everyday more people are donning their Guy Fawkes masks ready to tear the entire rotten edifice down.
The revolt against these revolting people is here. Hillary Clinton still thinks she can call up her friends at CNN or ABC and seed her Alinsky-inspired talking point into the narrative to shape reality in her favor.
That only works when the people are still willing to believe that the Wizard is all-powerful.
The system, however, doesn’t work anymore. But unfortunately, the remnants of it are still functioning and capable of doing tremendous damage while it fails.
It doesn’t matter if we’re looking at places like Syria, Yemen, Hong Kong, the shit-filled streets of San Francisco or Libya. These places all remain incredibly dangerous because while the control systems are failing, the infrastructure it protects is still operating.
If anything, it’s going into overdrive with the push for pre-crime, total surveillance, the scrubbing of inconvenient historical truths and assaults on basic human liberties and dignity.
And keepers of the status quo like Joy Behar, Whoopie Goldberg and ABC News will not survive it with their View intact.
* * *
Join My Patreon if you think the wizard isn’t all-powerful. Install the Brave Browser if you don’t want to empower him.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/10/2019 – 21:30 - Old People Can Start Infusing Children's Blood Again
Old People Can Start Infusing Children’s Blood Again
Less than a year after the FDA warned old people against infusing the blood of young people, Stanford graduate Jesse Karmazin says his company, Ambrosia, is back in business despite the agency issuing a ‘buyer beware,’ according to OneZero.
Jesse Karmazin, the CEO and founder of Ambrosia, told OneZero in an interview that the company had resumed giving customers transfusions of plasma, the colorless liquid part of the blood, from young donors about a month ago. “Our patients really want the treatment,” he said. “Patients are receiving plasma transfusions from donors ages 16 to 25 again.” One-liter transfusions cost $8,000, and two-liter transfusions are $12,000. –OneZero
Karmazin, who isn’t a licensed medical practitioner, stopped treating patients following the FDA announcement earlier this year and disabled his website.
Now, young blood is back on the market – you just have to get it “off-label,” meaning a doctor can prescribe it for something other than its approved use.
Karmazin is a graduate of Stanford Medical School but does not have a license to practice medicine and does not do the transfusions himself. Instead, he contracts with doctors to do the procedures. When asked, he would not name any doctors he works with or other Ambrosia employees. He says the company does not obtain blood directly from young donors but gets it from licensed blood banks in the United States. –OneZero
“We’re a company interested in making you young again,” he said at a 2017 conference. The company says that “experiments in mice called parabiosis provided the inspiration to deliver treatments with young plasma.”
That said, while plasma can help blood to clot or to manage excessive bleeding during surgeries, experts say there is no basis for using it to slow or reverse aging-related diseases as Karmazin has claimed.
“There is no proven clinical benefit of infusion of plasma from young donors to cure, mitigate, treat or prevent these conditions, and there are risks associated with the use of any plasma product,” read a February statement from FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb and Peter Marks, who leads the agency’s biologics center.
“The reported uses of these products should not be assumed to be safe or effective,” the said. “We strongly discourage consumers from pursuing this therapy outside of clinical trials under appropriate institutional review board and regulatory oversight.”
“We’re concerned that some patients are being preyed upon by unscrupulous actors touting treatments of plasma from young donors as cures and remedies.”
The agency told OneZero “The FDA has not licensed or approved any plasma product obtained from young donors for any use.”
As of last fall, the company had performed the procedure on about 150 people ranging in age from 35 to 92, while 81% of those people participated in the company’s clinical trial. The trial gave patients one and a half liters of plasma from a donor between the ages of 16 and 25 and was conducted with David Wright, a physician who has his own intravenous blood therapy center in California.
Trial participants footed the bill for their own treatments – while the results of their clinical trials have not been publicly released.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/10/2019 – 21:00 - Doug Casey On What Happens When Socialists Win Elections
Doug Casey On What Happens When Socialists Win Elections
International Man: Earlier this year, it became apparent a socialist would win Argentina’s presidential election.
The Argentine peso lost 30% of its value in a single day. The same day, in US dollar terms, the value of the Argentine stock market was cut in half.
Doug, you spend a lot of time in Argentina and the Southern Cone. What’s your take on the situation? Is Argentina headed for another currency collapse?
Doug Casey: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was elected vice president and Alberto Fernández was elected president in the October 27 election. They basically destroyed the incumbent Mauricio Macri.
It’s a real pity because Macri is a decent human being whose heart was is in the right place politically and economically. But he was too timid. He did too little too late. Typical of “conservatives” everywhere, he didn’t make a moral argument to the populace. He made no effort to pull the corrupt fascist welfare state out by its roots, explaining why it’s destructive and why the state is the cause, not the cure, of the country’s problems. Instead, he just made some marginal improvements around the edges, and made things more comfortable for the Peronists now that they’re back in office.
And—since he’s associated with the free market—he actually discredited the free market.
In any event, Argentina is going back into the toilet. Who knows what kind of new stupidities, in addition to the usual old stupidities, the two Fernándezes are going to impose upon the country?
On the bright side—but only for tourists—Argentina is one of the cheapest countries in the world right now. That’s because the currency has collapsed. Good news for tourists and foreign speculators but a disaster for Argentines, most of whom have all their savings and earn their salaries in the increasingly worthless peso.
If you’re a long-term believer in Argentina or if you want to enjoy a great lifestyle, now’s the time to go shopping there. Real estate is at bargain levels again. There’s really no bid for a lot of properties. In Buenos Aires an apartment costs 5–10% of its equivalent in New York or London.
Things are definitely in crisis in Argentina. But the fact is that just about every other country in the world is heading in the wrong direction—at a faster or slower rate—certainly including the United States, Canada, and countries in western Europe. The socialists, the fascists, and the jingoists are in the ascendant all over the world.
There are many reasons for this. One is that Marxist-oriented professors have been indoctrinating the younger generation in high school and college for decades. The left has totally taken over educational systems everywhere. The average person has been inculcated with perverse and destructive ideas about economics, politics, philosophy, and ethics from roughly age 6 to age 22. It’s hard to get these things out of their heads once they’ve learned them in their youth.
Also, remember that, especially since the end of the 19th century, “democracy”—really just a polite form of mob rule—has been the world’s ruling ideology. It’s resulted in the politicization of all areas of society. When every parliament or legislature in the world meets, they believe it’s not just their right but their duty to pass new laws. And that’s idiotically applauded as a good thing by the hoi polloi. Those laws tell you what you must do and what you must not do and designate penalties if you don’t obey. And all that legislation, which accrues like barnacles on a ship’s hull, has to be paid for with taxes.
Fortunately, science and technology are still advancing at the rate of Moore’s Law. Unfortunately, the world is degenerating politically at about the same rate. Argentina is not an aberration from that point of view. It’s just a generation or so “ahead” of the United States in sliding down the slippery slope.
That said, it’s more important than ever that you have a crib in a second country, no matter where you live—because anything can happen anywhere. If you can afford it and are able to do so, you should have a backup plan someplace else in the world.
International Man: As you said, Argentina isn’t the only country headed down a path toward economic hardship. Governments around the world are printing dollars, pounds, euros, pesos, and what have you by the trillions, and the trend seems to be accelerating. How do you see this playing out in the next few years?
Doug Casey: We’re going into what I’ve styled the Greater Depression. We entered the leading edge of a gigantic financial and economic hurricane in 2007 and went through it in 2008 and 2009, and now we’re in the eye of the storm.
It’s a very big hurricane, and the storm has a very big “eye,” but we’re now approaching the trailing edge. When we go into the storm’s trailing edge, it’s going to be much longer lasting, much different, and much worse than what we experienced in 2008—if anybody remembers how scary that was.
It’s going to be accompanied by social, cultural, and probably military upsets as well. Now’s the time to prepare. It’s going to be one for the record books, and not just in the United States. It’s going to happen all over the world, because all the world’s central banks and governments think the same way. They’re all bankrupt and trying to solve the problems they’ve created by printing up more currency and passing more laws. It’s bad news.
International Man: Americans are growing increasingly sympathetic to socialist ideas and politicians that promise “free stuff.” How does this trend translate into a situation like what’s happening in Argentina?
Doug Casey: The world’s governments—prominently including the US’s—are creating massive new amounts of fiat money as we speak. So far, most of this money has gone into the financial markets, creating gigantic bubbles in stocks, bonds, and real estate. A lot of people are relying on these artificially high values. They’re going to get hurt.
Over the coming decade, governments and their central banks are going to destroy their national currencies. The average guy—if he’s able to save at all—saves in dollars, euros, or yen, etc. He’s going to be wiped out.
The rich will continue to get richer, because they stand next to the fire hose of money being created. The middle and lower classes resent the politically favoured classes getting more. The middle and bottom levels of society could see real social upset, with catastrophic political ramifications.
It’s one of the reasons the odds favor Trump losing in 2020. I say that as someone who bet that he’d win in 2016. If the economy gets ugly, you’re going to get one of these absolutely crazy socialists or welfare statists that we see lined up on the Democratic debate stage. The best case is that somebody like Bloomberg—basically kind of a mellower Trump—steps in for the Democrats.
On the off chance that Trump wins in 2020, then the storm is going to definitely break during his next administration. That guarantees that the crazy Democrats—which is to say the socialists, radical welfarites, and cultural Marxists—are going to win in the next election. The conflict in basic belief systems between the Red and Blue counties is so acrid and radical—it’s the kind atmosphere you see before a civil war.
Who knows what either the Red or Blue people will do? They’re capable of absolutely anything. None of it good. I don’t see a way out.
But let’s go back to Argentina for a minute. As I said, the US is only about a generation behind the Argentines, and the Argentine electorate has been totally corrupted. The place is a blueprint for where the United States is going.
The US’s size, accumulated capital, and the productivity of its people have insulated it from a lot of the stupid things its government and the Fed have done. But if the US destroys its currency—and it’s well on the way to doing so—it will be much worse than when the Argentines destroy their currency.
Argentines have hundreds of billions of dollars stored abroad in foreign banks. When the Argentine peso collapses, that money can be brought into Argentina to pick up the bargains and bring capital into the country to get things going again.
If the US dollar is destroyed, however, it will be completely different.
First, the dollar is the major asset of most banks all around the world. It’s actually the world’s currency. If the dollar goes, it’s going to destroy their balance sheets.
Second, people all over the world who have foreign bank accounts generally save in dollars. They’re going to be devastated.
Third, Americans don’t have a lot of money abroad to bring back into the country to get things going again. In fact, the US government has made it quite hard for the average American to diversify internationally.
Fourth, the major US export for decades hasn’t been wheat or Boeings. It’s been dollars. The foreign trade deficit of $600 billion per year has given Americans an artificially high standard of living for many years. Nice foreigners give us real goods in exchange for fiat dollars. When confidence in the dollar collapses, Americans will feel it.
So, it’s going to be extremely serious when the chickens come home to roost this time. It’s a consequence of what the Federal Reserve is doing to the dollar. They’re inflating it—but they call that “Quantitative Easing.”
The Chinese symbol for the word crisis is a combination of the symbols for danger and opportunity. I’ve been pointing out the danger part, but I also want to point out the opportunity part of the equation.
The good news is that precious metals should go on a really wild run up in price. If you own a lot of gold and silver, you should not only be insulated from many of these financial and economic problems, but you should gain in relative terms.
The cheapest part of the market right now is gold and silver mining stocks. There’s going to be a panic into these stocks; they’re the only part of the stock market that offers real upside.
It’s a good-news/bad-news type of thing. The good news being that if you position yourself now, you should be able to profit from what’s going to happen. The bad news is that in a real depression everybody loses; the winners are merely the ones who lose the least.
The important thing to remember is that most of the real wealth in the world will still exist no matter how bad the Greater Depression is, and your share of it can grow if you allocate capital properly now.
International Man: The 2020 presidential election is just around the corner. Whether Donald Trump gets reelected or a Democratic candidate wins, how do you think it will affect the overall economic situation in the US?
An avalanche of money printing to finance deficit spending seems certain no matter who wins.
Doug Casey: As I said before, if Trump is reelected because the economy holds together until November 2020—which I doubt—it’s definitely going to collapse on his next term in office.
Trump is incorrectly associated with the free market and capitalism. Trump is basically a statist who thinks the government really ought to control the economy—but in the way he thinks best. Once again capitalism—what’s left of it—will be blamed in the next crisis, and in the following election the socialists will grab the economy in a stranglehold and choke it to death.
In a way, it doesn’t matter if the socialists win this time or the next time. The trend is in motion, and a real crisis seems inevitable.
I think the United States is going to be hard to recognize in five years. That’s not even counting the fact that the US government might have a serious war with the Iranians, the Chinese, or the Russians. None of this is necessary, but it’s probable.
International Man: What can people do to protect themselves and prevent the crisis from wiping them out?
Doug Casey: Buy physical gold and silver. Speculate in mining stocks. Be aware that commodities in general— and especially agricultural commodities like corn, soybeans, cattle, hogs, coffee, orange juice—are all very, very cheap.
It’s likely that we’re going to see an explosion in some or all of these things over the next few years. Last but not least, start getting into some—or all—of the second- and third-generation cryptocurrencies. My colleague Marco Wutzer, who knows about ten times more than anyone else in the field, makes an excellent case that some of them have 1,000-to-one potential from current levels.
* * *
Marco just released a new exclusive video on what he thinks is the most compelling crypto play right now. Click here to watch it now.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/10/2019 – 20:30 - California Approves $3.2 Billion Bond For High Speed Train To Nowhere
California Approves $3.2 Billion Bond For High Speed Train To Nowhere
The high speed train is dead, long live the high speed train.
Less than a year after California Gov. Gavin Newsom brought California’s dreams for a LA to San Fran bullet train crashing down, when he said in February that he is ending the state’s hugely expensive and hopelessly quixotic high-speed rail line fiasco (which would have been completed in 2033 at a staggering cost of $77 billion), California is about to unleash another high speed train project, and this one is even more idiotic.
The California Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank (IBank) has authorized a $3.2 billion tax-exempt, fixed-rate revenue bond issuance to help DesertXpress Enterprises, an affiliate of Virgin Trains USA, build a high-speed train from Victorville, California, to Las Vegas. The new XpressWest service, at speeds of up to 180 miles per hour, will take about 90 minutes one way.
There is just one problem: Victorville, located in SoCal’s high desert, is quite literally in the middle of nowhere.
More on that in a second.
DesertXpress will be able to use the money to pay for the 135 miles of the project located within the state of California. This, according to ConstructionDrive, includes the costs of design, development, construction, operation and maintenance of the rail system itself; a passenger station; a maintenance facility; train cars; and electrification infrastructure. DesertXpress will also be able to use the bonds, which are sponsored by the California county of San Bernardino, to establish a debt service reserve fund, as well as pay for interest and other bond-related expenses. While total spending is listed at around $4.8 billion, “hard construction costs” are $3.6 billion.
Construction, which is expected to begin in the second half of 2020 and wrap up in 2023, according to an IBank staff report, will generate more than 15,800 temporary construction jobs.
That’s the good news. The bad news is… what the hell are they thinking?
In theory, it’s not a terrible idea: California has for decades sought to find a fast path between Los Angleles and Las Vegas. In practice, the fact that the train runs to Victorville assures that the project is DOA.
The XpressWest between California and Las Vegas, according to the IBank staff report, will take about half the time of a car trip, but Randal O’Toole, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, thinks that there simply won’t be enough potential passengers — at least enough to make the new bullet train a success.
“If you’re driving from Los Angeles to Victorville, by the time you get there, you’re pretty much halfway to Vegas,” O’Toole said, “so why would you stop and leave your car somewhere and take a train and then have to walk to wherever your destination is — or take a cab or an Uber or Lyft — when you can just drive your car there?”
That’s probably a question the creators of the project should have asked first.
Here’s the problem: the distance between Los Angeles and Victorville is about 90 miles and about 190 miles from Victorville to Las Vegas.
“Driving from Los Angeles to Victorville,” O’Toole said, “you’re driving through all the traffic — you’re driving over the mountains … and you get to Victorville and it’s just a straight shot to Las Vegas. It’s more miles, but there’s very little traffic.
“If they were going to go from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, they might have a chance of attracting some customers, but going through the mountain would be extremely expensive,” he said. “They’re building the easy part of the rail line but not the part that they need to build to actually attract customers.”
Virgin Trains USA is a majority owner of Virgin Trains USA Florida, formerly known as Brightline, and currently owns and operates an express rail passenger rail system that runs from Miami to West Palm Beach. The company is building a $4 billion extension to Orlando International Airport. The estimated completion date is sometime in 2022.
And while the company’s projects may be viable in Florida, they will be another epic waste of funds in California.
Meanwhile, when we said that the first high speed train is dead, well that wasn’t quite right: the construction of the original California bullet train is still chugging along, albeit on a reduced scale. While Governor Gavin Newsom shelved the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s plans for a $77 billion rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles after amid concerns over escalating costs and schedule delays, the governor limited work to the $20 billion Central Valley portion of the project that will take passengers between Bakersfield and Merced.
In other words, another high speed train going from nowhere to nowhere.
So why does California continue to press along with not one but two train projects it knows will be a disaster? The answer is simple: “free” Federal money. The High-Speed Rail authority is trying to beat a Dec. 31, 2022 deadline in order to not lose a $929 million Federal Railroad Administration grant for that particular segment.
In other words, instead of saving almost a billion dollars in taxpayer funds, and applying them to something useful, California is willing to begin a project which everyone knows will be a catastrophic waste of funds, but since the money has to be spent, even if it means digging holes just to fill them up again… well, so be it. After all, this is the government hard at work.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/10/2019 – 20:11 - Young First-Time Buyers Are Vanishing From US Housing Market
Young First-Time Buyers Are Vanishing From US Housing Market
Seeing as most young Americans are saddled with student-loan debt, underemployment and other economic blights, few have any money left for important large purchases like a home. At this point, it’s beginning to look like millennials will be remembered as the first rentier generation in the country’s history.
To wit, according to data from the National Association of Realtors, the median age of first-time home buyers has increased to 33 in 2019, the highest median age since they started collecting the data back in 1981. Meanwhile, the median age for all buyers hit a fresh record high of 47, climbing for the third straight year, and well above the median age of 31 in 1981.
Source: Bloomberg
Though the median age for first timers only increased by one year, BBG reports that it reflects a variety of factors impacting those who are searching for a home.
For one, since the housing-market collapse ten years ago, construction of affordable housing has never recovered. Low housing stock, coupled with low interest rates, has stoked higher prices, especially in more affordable markets from the coasts to the middle of the country. This made circumstances ideal for older Americans with more assets to borrow against and cash on hand. But younger Americans who don’t have enough saved for a down payment lost out.
“Housing affordability is so difficult today, especially when coupled with rising rents and student loan debt, that they’re finding different ways to enter home ownership,” said Jessica Lautz, vice president of demographics and behavioral insights at the Realtors group in Washington.
That’s not all: the percentage of first-time buyers who are married has declined as more single people buy homes to share with girlfriends, boyfriends or roommates. As the average ages of home buyers increases, average incomes have also risen. The median income of purchasers rose to $93,200 in 2018 as the disappearance of affordable housing pushes low-income buyers out of the market.
Factoring in the expansion of economic inequality, young buyers who do manage to buy their own homes typically receive a small gift from their relatives to help cover the down payment first.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/10/2019 – 20:00 - Mauldin: How China Plans To Take Over The US
Mauldin: How China Plans To Take Over The US
Authored by John Mauldin via MauldinEconomics.com,
When the US and ultimately the rest of the Western world began to engage China, resulting in China finally being allowed into the World Trade Organization in the early 2000s, no one really expected the outcomes we see today.
There is no simple disengagement path, given the scope of economic and legal entanglements. This isn’t a “trade” we can simply walk away from.
But it is also one that, if allowed to continue in its current form, could lead to a loss of personal freedom for Western civilization. It really is that much of an existential question.
Doing nothing isn’t an especially good option because, like it or not, the world is becoming something quite different than we expected just a few years ago—not just technologically, but geopolitically and socially.
China and the West
Let’s begin with how we got here.
My generation came of age during the Cold War. China was a huge, impoverished odd duck in those years. In the late 1970s, China began slowly opening to the West. Change unfolded gradually but by the 1990s, serious people wanted to bring China into the modern world, and China wanted to join it.
Understand that China’s total GDP in 1980 was under $90 billion in current dollars. Today, it is over $12 trillion. The world has never seen such enormous economic growth in such a short time.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union collapsed and the internet was born. The US, as sole superpower, saw opportunities everywhere. American businesses shifted production to lower-cost countries. Thus came the incredible extension of globalization.
We in the Western world thought (somewhat arrogantly, in hindsight) everyone else wanted to be like us. It made sense. Our ideas, freedom, and technology had won both World War II and the Cold War that followed it. Obviously, our ways were best.
But that wasn’t obvious to people elsewhere, most notably China. Leaders in Beijing may have admired our accomplishments, but not enough to abandon Communism.
They merely adapted and rebranded it. We perceived a bigger change than there actually was. Today’s Chinese communists are nowhere near Mao’s kind of communism. Xi calls it “Socialism with a Chinese character.” It appears to be a dynamic capitalistic market, but is also a totalitarian, top-down structure with rigid rules and social restrictions.
So here we are, our economy now hardwired with an autocratic regime that has no interest in becoming like us.
China’s Hundred-Year Marathon
In The Hundred-Year Marathon, Michael Pillsbury marshals a lot of evidence showing the Chinese government has a detailed strategy to overtake the US as the world’s dominant power.
They want to do this by 2049, the centennial of China’s Communist revolution.
The strategy has been well documented in Chinese literature, published and sanctioned by organizations of the People’s Liberation Army, for well over 50 years.
And just as we have hawks and moderates on China within the US, there are hawks and moderates within China about how to engage the West. Unfortunately, the hawks are ascendant, embodied most clearly in Xi Jinping.
Xi’s vision of the Chinese Communist Party controlling the state and eventually influencing and even controlling the rest of the world is clear. These are not merely words for the consumption of the masses. They are instructions to party members.
Grand dreams of world domination are part and parcel of communist ideologies, going all the way back to Karl Marx. For the Chinese, this blends with the country’s own long history.
It isn’t always clear to Western minds whether they actually believe the rhetoric or simply use it to keep the peasantry in line. Pillsbury says Xi Jinping really sees this as China’s destiny, and himself as the leader who will deliver it.
To that end, according to Pillsbury, the Chinese manipulated Western politicians and business leaders into thinking China was evolving toward democracy and capitalism. In fact, the intent was to acquire our capital, technology, and other resources for use in China’s own modernization.
It worked, too.
Over the last 20–30 years, we have equipped the Chinese with almost everything they need to match us, technologically and otherwise. Hundreds of billions of Western dollars have been spent developing China and its state-owned businesses.
Sometimes this happened voluntarily, as companies gave away trade secrets in the (often futile) hope it would let them access China’s huge market. Other times it was outright theft. In either case, this was no accident but part of a long-term plan.
Pillsbury (who, by the way, advises the White House including the president himself) thinks the clash is intensifying because President Trump’s China skepticism is disrupting the Chinese plan. They see his talk of restoring America’s greatness as an affront to their own dreams.
In any case, we have reached a crossroads. What do we do about China now?
Targeted Response
In crafting a response, the first step is to define the problem correctly and specifically. We hear a lot about China cheating on trade deals and taking jobs from Americans. That’s not entirely wrong, but it’s also not the main challenge.
I believe in free trade. I think David Ricardo was right about comparative advantage: Every nation is better off if all specialize in whatever they do best.
However, free trade doesn’t mean nations need to arm their potential adversaries. Nowadays, military superiority is less about factories and shipyards than high-tech weapons and cyberwarfare. Much of our “peaceful” technology is easily weaponized.
This means our response has to be narrowly targeted at specific companies and products. Broad-based tariffs are the opposite of what we should be doing. Ditto for capital controls.
They are blunt instruments that may feel good to swing, but they hurt the wrong people and may not accomplish what we want.
We should not be using the blunt tool of tariffs to fight a trade deficit that is actually necessary. The Chinese are not paying our tariffs; US consumers are.
Importing t-shirts and sneakers from China doesn’t threaten our national security. Let that kind of trade continue unmolested and work instead on protecting our advantages in quantum computing, artificial intelligence, autonomous drones, and so on.
The Trump administration appears to (finally) be getting this. They are clearly seeking ways to pull back the various tariffs and ramping up other efforts.
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I predict an unprecedented crisis that will lead to the biggest wipeout of wealth in history. And most investors are completely unaware of the pressure building right now. Learn more here.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/10/2019 – 19:30 - WeWork Disaster Aftermath: With 97% Of Companies Using Non-GAAP Metrics, Is Everything Fake?
WeWork Disaster Aftermath: With 97% Of Companies Using Non-GAAP Metrics, Is Everything Fake?
Back in August 2018, long before WeWork’s historic implosion, we discussed how WeWork’s EBITDA is “whatever you want it to be” thanks to the company’s bizarre pro forma addbacks, which transformed a $933MM net loss and a $193 million adjusted EBITDA loss, into a “positive” $233 million “community-adusted” EBITDA for 2017, and a net loss of about $1.9 billion using standard accounting, to a $467 million “profit” in 2018.
This is what we said:
Here, for the first time we saw not just one adjustment to adjusted EBITDA, but an adjustment to the adjustment to the adjustment, and it was called “Community Adjusted EBITDA”, which by the miracles of non-GAAP “accounting”, pushed the company’s EBITDA from negative $193 million to positive $233 million.
We made this observation in the context of Moody’s inexplicably scrapping its B3 credit rating on WeWork. Commenting on this, we said:
It wasn’t clear why Moody’s – the rating agency with the lowest opinion of the office space leasing company – withdrew its rating, but it could be an indication that finally rating agencies are getting tired of the bizarre – and in this case, ridiculous – adjustments that companies increasingly come up with to lipstick their pig, and present their company in a far better light than reality.
Fast forward to today, when the topic of WeWork’s community-adjusted EBITDA has once again come up after the WSJ reported that in the weeks before its now failed attempt to go public, the SEC had “ordered WeWork to remove the measure, before the company offered to substantially change it.”
Specifically, according to a WSJ report on the “wrangling” that was taking place between WeWork and the SEC over whether or not to include the grotesque EBITDA adjustment, which the company had since renamed to the less jarring “contribution margin”, as the IPO loomed, “the SEC zeroed in on how WeWork framed its heavy losses, particularly through a bespoke profitability metric called “contribution margin,” a version of which had formerly been known as “community-adjusted Ebitda.” The agency had first ordered WeWork to remove the measure, before the company offered to substantially change it.”
Demonstrating just how seriously corporations takes the SEC, however, the day before WeWork had hoped to start the roadshow to peddle its IPO to investors, the metric was still mentioned in its revised prospectus more than 100 times (WeWork supposedly planned to amend the filing before starting the roadshow — but instead shelved the IPO, as investors questioned the company’s worth and its corporate governance.)
There are two key points here: the first, of course, is that WeWork was hoping to mislead investors (all of whom were sophisticated enough to know the garbage that “community-adjusted” anything is) by keeping this massive pro forma adjustment; the second is that WeWork appears to be openly defying the SEC’s instructions on cleaning up its prospectus – something it obviously couldn’t do if it hoped to deflect attention from the company’s massive losses.
“It’s highly unusual to have issues that are so important still being disputed while they are out there marketing the stock to investors,” said Minor Myers, a law professor at the University of Connecticut who reviewed the correspondence at the Journal’s request. As WeWork was battling the SEC over its metrics, its advisers were “figuring what they can sell using these numbers,” Mr. Myers added.
The WSJ also reports that WeWork’s resistance to removing the metric was directed by Mr. Neumann himself, who had “previously boasted about the metric to reporters and investors, to show how the company’s core business was profitable.”
Of course, the core business wasn’t profitable as demonstrating previously just how dismal WeWork’s real bottom line was:
Furthermore, if WeWork was “profitable” along any metric, it would not have scrapped its IPO and demanded a SoftBank bailout.
It wasn’t just the community-adjusted EBITDA that was a concern for the SEC: among other issues the SEC targeted was what the WeWork prospectus called “illustrative annual economics.” The agency questioned how the company had arrived at some rosy numbers. “Please explain to readers and tell us how your assumed workstation utilization rate of 100% is realistic,” its letter said. In reply, WeWork agreed to drop the illustrative economics section from the prospectus.
The bottom line, as the WSJ summarizes, “WeWork’s liberal use of customized metrics that don’t comply with generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, was central to its wrangling with the SEC, according to people close to the process. The draft prospectus WeWork filed in December cited at least six non-GAAP metrics; by the time it issued the prospectus in August, the tally had fallen.”
Yet even after the back and forth with the SEC, and the IPO debacle, WeWork refused to change its way: on Friday, after markets closed, WeWork published a slide deck from Oct. 11—long after the company’s self-annointed messiah, Adam Neumann resigned, that showed financial results including a “location contribution margin” that appeared to be a renamed version of the metric at the center of its dispute with the SEC.
In short, once you start lying to the investing public in how you misrepresent your business, it is virtually impossible to stop, unless you are SoftBank of course in which case you just assume everyone is an idiot as Masa Son’s financial juggernaut did with these two slides.
However, it is not our intention here to focus on WeWork’s fake financials – we did that last August. Instead, it’s to point out that there is never just one cockroach. In fact, when it comes to non-GAAP adjustments, and “fake numbers”, one can say that everyone is a cockroach: as the WSJ points out, nearly all big companies now use at least one non-GAAP financial metric. Last year, 97% of S&P 500 companies used non-GAAP metrics, up from 59% in 1996, according Audit Analytics.
Which begs the question: in the aftermath of the WeWork fiasco, which relied exclusively on non-GAAP, “community” adjustments to make its financials appear respectable even though fundamentally they were a disaster, is every financial report – and with 97% out of all companies using non-GAAP metrics one can be excused to use the term “ever” – nothing but fake financial news, and when the veil is finally lifted, as was the case with We Work, what will happen to all those trillions in market capitalization built upon “one-time”, “non-recurring” addbacks and pro forma, adjusted, recasted and otherwise fake foundations?
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/10/2019 – 19:00 - The Long March Has Paid Off: Millennials Love Socialism
The Long March Has Paid Off: Millennials Love Socialism
Authored by Onar Am via LibertyNation.com,
According to a new poll conducted by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, 70% of millennials would likely vote for a socialist candidate. Furthermore, 19% of them see The Communist Manifesto as a surer guarantee of freedom and equality than the Declaration of Independence, and 15% think that the world would be a better place if the Soviet Union still existed.
The Conundrum
To many, this may come as a shock. Socialism has failed wherever it has been tried and communism has cost the lives of more people than any other ideology in a comparable amount of time. Historical circumstances produced a near-perfect scientific test of the system in the 20th century. In every case, communism failed – ending in a bloodbath, regardless of race, ethnicity, culture, and development stage.
Simultaneously, near-capitalist societies were tested with those same ethnicities and cultures: East- versus West-Germany, North- versus South-Korea, and Hong Kong versus mainland China. The outcome was as conclusive and decisive as any social experiment could ever get: While capitalism lifted people out of poverty and created largely stable and prosperous societies, communism produced murderous and oppressive hellholes from which people desperately tried to flee.
Given the massive evidence of the positive effects of capitalism and the disastrous results of socialism, a resurgence of communism should have been impossible. How could it happen?
The Long March Through The Institutions
The answer is straightforward: Teachers and professors are bombarding students with communist propaganda. They teach that the U.S. was founded on slavery while conveniently overlooking the fact that western civilization is the only one in the world to have successfully abolished slavery.
They teach that Hitler was the vilest person ever to have existed but conveniently forget to mention that Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ceausescu, Mugabe, Barre, and Castro together killed far more than 100 million people and enslaved many more across four continents. Students learn about the Holocaust, but not the Holodomor.
The professors are not doing this out of ignorance. After World War II, when it became clear that Marxism could never compete with capitalism as an economic system, the radical left formulated a strategy of achieving their utopia by taking over the educational institutions and indoctrinating children with their worldview.
That would have sounded like a conspiracy theory if it hadn’t been for the fact that leftists have been open about this goal for a long time. In the 1960s, German communist Rudi Dutschke formulated the slogan the “long march through the institutions.” He described it as a way of creating the necessary conditions for a communist revolution by infiltrating said institutions. One of the prominent figures of the so-called Frankfurt School in America, Herbert Marcuse, agreed with this strategy in 1971: “[I] regard your notion of the ‘long march through the institutions’ as the only effective way … ”
In his recent book The Madness of Crowds, author Douglas Murray documents that leftists in the 1980s saw the working class voting for Ronald Reagan as traitors to the socialist cause and therefore needed to turn their back on ordinary people and instead make minorities the focus of their campaign to destroy capitalism.
The near-unthinkable surge of socialist and communist sympathies among millennials in the freest, most prosperous nation in the world is the result of that 70-year-long march through the institutions.
A Feature, Not A Bug
But why? Why would a group of radical leftists want to destroy the system that has uplifted so many people out of poverty in favor of a system that has murdered millions? In a conversation with Eric Weinstein, Peter Thiel presents a chilling possibility. Mass murder is a feature of communism, not a bug:
“My Stanford professor René Gerard had the observation that communism among Western intellectuals became unfashionable in 1953, the year Stalin died, and the reason was that they were not communists despite the millions of people being killed; they were communists because of it.”
For naïve students, communism and socialism are just idealistic fantasies – but how many of their professors harbor far more sinister motivations?
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/10/2019 – 18:30 - Onerous Loan Terms Are Crippling Already Broke Subprime Auto Buyers
Onerous Loan Terms Are Crippling Already Broke Subprime Auto Buyers
As the bubble in subprime auto continues to grow bigger – even at the same time the auto industry is mired in recession – terms on new loans for new buyers continue to get more burdensome for already broke consumers.
In fact, many people are piling on debt to their auto loans that far exceeds the car’s value, according to the Wall Street Journal. Like homeowners during the financial crisis, this leaves many people with negative equity or “underwater”.
33% of people who traded in cars to buy new ones in the first nine months of 2019 had negative equity. This compares to 28% five years ago and 19% 10 years ago. The borrowers owed about $5,000, on average, after trading in their cars before taking on new loans. Five years ago that figure stood at an average of about $4,000.
And the rise in car prices isn’t helping, either. Easy lending standards are helping perpetuate the cycle, with lenders now issuing loans that can last 7 years or longer, as we have documented here on Zero Hedge.
Borrowers remain responsible for paying their remaining debt even after they get rid of the vehicle that’s tied to it. When buying a new car, they just roll this debt into a new loan. Dealerships, who now make more money on financing than on selling the car, encourage this type of refinancing.
Consumer lawyers say that customers are often forced to trade in their vehicles, either due to changing needs or vehicle problems.
David Goldsmith, a lawyer who defends consumers in auto cases said: “These aren’t Rolls-Royces. They’re Ford Escapes.”
Borrowers that have negative equity at the time of buying a new vehicle are often saddled with longer loan terms, higher interest rates and higher monthly payments. The higher rates and longer amortization schedule means that a smaller share of their payments go to paying off their principal. The result is obvious: many consumers wind up deeper and deeper in the hole everytime they trade in a new vehicle.
Underwater loans are most prevalent with subprime borrowers, mainly due to consumers with lower credit scores lacking the means to pay off the remaining balances on their loans before taking out the next one. In the even of a default, lenders generally take possession of the vehicles and try to resell them. That money is then applied to the unpaid balance, but often isn’t enough to cover the total balance.
Most of these loans are originated at dealerships now, which then assign the loans to a number of lenders, banks and credit unions. Many loans are also bundled into bonds and sold to Wall Street.
The added debt from these loans can make it difficult for borrowers to stay current. 5.2% of outstanding securitized subprime auto loan balances were at least 60 days past due on a rolling 12 month average period ending June 2019. This is up from 4.8% the year before and 4.9% two years prior.
Nicole-Malia Tennent and Shyanne Fernandez, both in their early 20s, are a perfect example. They sought to trade in the car they shared for something less expensive last year. They instead ended up splurging on a new vehicle and rolling over their $12,500 unpaid loan balance from their last car into a loan for a new 2018 GMC Sierra.
The new loan balance stood at $66,000 as a result of the old loan being rolled over. They split the payment of $900 per month now, which they have 84 months to pay off. Their old loan was about $500 per month.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/10/2019 – 18:00 - Morgan Stanley: "Climate Will Be A Key Driver Of Asset Prices In The Months And Years Ahead"
Morgan Stanley: “Climate Will Be A Key Driver Of Asset Prices In The Months And Years Ahead”
“Sunday Start”, authored by Morgan Stanley equity strategist, Jessica Alsford
In three weeks, the world’s leaders will begin to gather in Madrid for the 25th United Nations Climate Change Conference. The intensity of the global climate strikes this year suggests that the proceedings will be scrutinized as never before. But the decisions made, or not made, will also have repercussions for global markets.
We’re transitioning towards a lower carbon economy, albeit at a slower pace than needed to stay within a two degrees Celsius climate scenario (2DS). For companies that can build offshore wind installations, develop electric vehicles and manufacture renewable diesels, we see potential for material earnings growth. In Decarbonisation: The Race to Net Zero, we estimated that more than US$50 trillion of capital will need to be deployed into renewables, EVs, hydrogen, biofuels and carbon capture and storage over the next 30 years, putting US$3-10 trillion of EBIT up for grabs.
Decarbonising electricity is the largest opportunity to reduce carbon emissions, with the power sector responsible for a quarter of global emissions. Strong renewables growth should be achievable given the significant improvements we’ve seen in solar and wind economics. But costs continue to constrain many other clean technologies, including battery storage, green hydrogen, CCS and biofuels.
If governments are serious about halting climate change, some form of stimulus will be needed.
Subsidies have already been key in industries like renewables. In the US, federal subsidies have helped to drive the transition to renewable energy, which rose from 14% of total power generation capacity in 2000 to 24% in 2018.
One alternative is to make high-carbon incumbents prohibitively expensive. European regulation on CO2 emissions, together with city bans on diesel, has catalyzed investment by global OEMs into electric vehicles. While the transition will be costly for the autos industry, it’s hard to see another path towards achieving aggressive targets.
Taxes should be another means of incentivizing investment in low-carbon technologies, but they remain ineffective. Even in Europe, where the carbon price has increased three-fold since the end of 2017, it remains far below the US$75 per tonne estimated by the IMF as necessary by 2030 to achieve a 2DS.
Even if the price of carbon rises to that level, a global tax is needed, through either a multilateral agreement or a carbon border adjustment. Domestic carbon taxes are unlikely to succeed in a world where many industries can move to regions with less punitive environmental regimes.
Until now, the willingness of governments to take steps to halt climate change has been open to question, given the potential implications for inflation, government debt and employment. But we see several reasons why change may come over the next 12 months. Significantly, awareness and concern about climate change among the general population are growing, driven by more frequent extreme weather, media coverage and actions by protest groups.
Regarding political appetite for change, we see notable shifts in tone across the world. The EC’s incoming president, Ursula von der Leyen, has announced the intention to create a climate plan. This includes legislation to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, the introduction of a green border tax and the creation of a fund to advance a “just transition”. In the US, the current administration has formally notified the UN that it intends to withdraw from the Paris Agreement the day after the 2020 presidential election. However, the majority of Democratic candidates have made climate change a key item in their policy agendas.
Climate and carbon could also become drivers of QE. Christine Lagarde has made it abundantly clear that climate change will be a priority during her tenure as ECB president, suggesting that the central bank might use monetary policy to support a climate-friendly stance.
As with many market drivers, it’s hard to pinpoint the moment when a risk will become a reality. But to us, the direction of travel for the carbon price is clear. Challenges still lie ahead, but if the next 12 months don’t bring a material response from the world’s leaders, we see an increasing likelihood that carbon will impact asset prices through other channels. Between 2016-18, climate-related disasters such as wildfires and hurricanes have caused over US$650 billion worth of economic damage worldwide (or 28bp of global GDP).
Whichever trajectory we end up following, it seems clear that climate will be a key driver of asset prices in the months and years ahead.
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Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/10/2019 – 17:30 - Twitter CEO Hosted MbS 6 Months AFTER Saudi Spies Discovered Within The Company
Twitter CEO Hosted MbS 6 Months AFTER Saudi Spies Discovered Within The Company
More fallout at Twitter after it was revealed last week that that two Twitter employees spied on users on behalf of Saudi Arabia — and after the arrest of one as another fled the country: CEO Jack Dorsey had actually met privately with crown prince Mohammed bin Salman six months after the company uncovered the Saudi intelligence infiltration, a new report has revealed.
Middle East Eye uncovered the critical timeline related to the meeting via the Justice Department’s criminal complaint filed in California, which raises a host of pressing questions, given the scandal was known internally to Twitter executives by December 2015, yet Dorsey sat down with MbS in June 2016. Middle East Eye reported Saturday:
Lawyers for one of the Saudi dissidents targeted in the operation say Dorsey and Mohammed bin Salman’s meeting raises questions about what the CEO of Twitter, a company which has seen massive Saudi investment in recent years, knew and when he knew it.
Via the Middle East Eye report: Jack Dorsey and MbS shaking hands in photo posted by Bader al-Asaker in June 2016. Image source: Instagram The Washington Post reported that two employees working for the company in 2015 accessed the private information of more than 6,000 Twitter accounts. Their Saudi intelligence “handler” had actually been a close associate to MbS at the time. And yet even after this bombshell scandal was unearthed internally Jack appeared chummy and business as usual with MbS in New York.
Crucially, at least one of the accounts accessed by the spies could be related to the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, given it belongs Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz, well-known to have been a close friend and confidant of Khashoggi.
Thus it’s further important to remember that this major Saudi spy infiltration of Twitter occurred significantly prior to the October 2, 2018 murder of Khashoggi by a Saudi hit team at the Istanbul consulate. What did Jack know and when of the personal Twitter information collected on Saudi dissidents accessed from within the company? Did he broach the issue with MbS during their 2016 meeting?
The two former Twitter employees, identified as Ahmad Abouammo and Ali Alzabarah – the former arrested in Seattle and the latter believed to have fled US soil – along with their alleged Saudi intelligence ‘handler’ Ahmed Almutairi, who was identified as serving as the intermediary between Saudi Arabia and the Twitter staff, were central to the broader MbS campaign to muzzle critics and activists overseas.
According to the criminal complaint, Twitter did take some limited action a week after uncovering the spy plot to warn several dozen users that they “may have been targeted by state-sponsored actors”.
The attorney for the friend of Khashoggi who was targetted, Omar Abdulaziz, told Middle East Eye the following:
“The thing that strikes me is when you look through the government’s complaint, this guy hacked 5,500 records in June. That’s not a small number. It raises the question about what Twitter did and did not want to know,” said Mark Kleiman, an attorney who represents Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi dissident living in Canada.
Kleiman told Middle East Eye that he and Ben Gharagozli, a second lawyer representing Abdulaziz, understood that “somebody from one of the three-letter agencies in the US” tipped Twitter off about Azabarah, before company put him on administrative leave in early December 2015.
Abdulaziz and his attorney are furious, given it was literally life and death on the line, as was proven with Khashoggi’s heinous murder by Saudi state assassins, which possibly was even planned with information gleaned from Twitter or other messaging platforms.
Kleiman underscored that “It’s hard to imagine that [Dorsey] wouldn’t have heard about it six months later.”
* * *
HRH Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman meets with Twitter cofounder & CEO Jack Dorsey in NYC @jack pic.twitter.com/Nd8szEr2ZN
— بدر العساكر Bader Al Asaker (@Badermasaker) June 25, 2016
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Middle East Eye notes in its report that it sent Twitter a list of the following questions, though it initially received no response:
- When and how Twitter became aware of Alzabarah’s activities
- Whether Twitter believed its accounts had been targeted by a state-sponsored actor in December 2015
- Whether Twitter was aware in December 2015 that Alzabarah had been feeding user data to Bader al-Asaker, who had close ties to the Saudi ruling family
- Whether Dorsey had been made aware of Alzabarah’s activities and the fact that he had been involved in state-sponsored activity and, if so, whether he knew about these actions when he met with Mohammed bin Salman in June 2016
- Whether Dorsey raised any concerns over the incident with Mohammed bin Salman or Asaker during the June 2016 meeting
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/10/2019 – 17:00 - Former Central Banker: "As A Young Man I Would Have Never Imagined This Would Be Our Destination"
Former Central Banker: “As A Young Man I Would Have Never Imagined This Would Be Our Destination”
Submitted by Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management
“Hmmm,” said the former central banker, leaning back in a chair. I’d asked how his thinking on the meaning of money had changed over these last three decades. We both started this journey in 1989, and our paths somehow led us to this long table in Tokyo. In that time, much changed. Back then, Japan’s gov’t debt-to-GDP was roughly 50%, 10yr JGB yields were 5%, the dollar was worth 127 Yen. But now, debt/GDP is roughly 250%, the central bank has printed enough money to buy half of it, 10yr yields are -0.07%, the Yen has strengthened to 109.
“You are correct, as a young man I would have never imagined this would be our destination,” he said, after some consideration. “And I am trying to think about how my views changed over so many years, because I cannot recall a moment when I realized everything was not as I had previously understood,” he said. “Perhaps, over such a long span of time our thinking gradually evolves, and we’re not aware that it has.” I nodded, quietly considering my long wander. “But here we are, and while I do not understand it perfectly, it makes some sense.”
Fishy
We were discussing equity markets over sushi. America’s has had an extraordinary run. In the 30yrs from Japan’s 1989 Nikkei high, the S&P 500 gained 925%, and from the 2009 GFC crisis lows the S&P 500 gained 464%. The Nasdaq gained 1,948% since 1989 (+655% from 2009 low). They say the reason for this recent extraordinary march is the Fed’s QE and a policy of low rates that has combined to push America’s CEOs to buy back stock, while forcing global investors to pay any price for growth in an ageing economy, where growth is scarce.
“I suppose that explanation for America’s bull run makes sense in isolation,” said the CIO in Tokyo. But Japanese rates are -0.10%. The BOJ printed enough money to make an Italian central banker blush and continues buying stocks directly on the open market. Japan is the ultimate ageing economy, with slow growth, world-class technologists, researchers, and plenty of entrepreneurs. “Investors have come to accept that overall explanation without reservation. Yet, if it is true, how can it also be true that the Nikkei remains 40% below its 1989 high?”
Hump DayThe Japanese work culture is notorious for its long hours. Microsoft Japan conducted an experiment in August with 2,300 workers. It paid them to not work on Fridays. It encouraged online chats in place of meetings or emails. It insisted meetings include five people or fewer and last no longer than 30mins. Microsoft saw a 40% increase in sales/worker, a 59% decline in paper usage, and a 23% drop in electricity consumption. Asked what day employees would like off if the firm moves to a 4-day workweek, 50% answered Wednesday.
Minnows
The dynamism in Japan’s economy is not to be found in the conglomerates,” said the CIO, focused on small cap stocks. “To find the interesting companies, you must look at the small and mid-sized firms that supply the large players – they’re the ones where you find the creativity, the risk takers, innovators.” Japan spends 3.5% of GDP on Research & Development, the US spends 2.8% and China 2.0%. Only South Korea spends a larger percentage of its GDP on R&D (4.3%). “The very big firms here have grown to resemble state owned enterprises.”
Anecote
“We move slowly here,” said the executive, chain smoking Seven Stars. “We have refined the art of flawless production,” he explained. “But there was a time when it was not so.” Two Asahi Extra Dry’s arrived, the thick foam head in each glass identical, poured deliberately, in perfect proportion, beautiful beer. “We once copied the chemical compounds designed in America,” he admitted. “As we amassed knowledge, we developed our own, and accumulated manufacturing know-how, capital.” In the distance, Japan’s factories spewed smoke, but at a pace that made the past appear more frantic than the present. “We produced chemicals and materials for the world to incorporate into nearly every product, and in pursuit of perfection, we introduced quality controls. Then controls on controls. And controls on controls on controls, ensuring that our final output was flawless.” The executive smiled, drawing deeply, his wrinkled face aglow. “But this pursuit of perfection slowed our ability to develop new compounds. And now the Chinese outpace us. They copy our formulas as we once copied yours. They produce at a pace that ensures higher impurities, but greater throughput, wider margins. And without having to bear the costs of R&D investment, they slash prices savagely.” The executive lit another Seven Star, turned his head slowly, exhaled. “The Chinese test their compounds with scant regard to safety. Then iterate again and again. Racing to produce compounds that may not be great but are perhaps good enough. They scale production overnight. They do what they must to capture market share,” he said, growing quiet, contemplative. I matched his silence, waiting for him to fill the void. Across the world’s third largest economy, the mighty conglomerates lumbered onward, industrial inertia. “And while we know this, and see this all unfolding, we appear unwilling to respond, unable to change course, accelerate.”
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/10/2019 – 16:30
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