Today’s News 14th March 2021

• China's Arctic Ambitions Pose Growing Threat To Canadian Interests, Top Defence Official Warns
  China’s Arctic Ambitions Pose Growing Threat To Canadian Interests, Top Defence Official Warns

  Authored by Andrew Chen via The Epoch Times,

  China’s geo-political ambition in the Arctic is posing a growing threat to Canadian interests, a top Defence official warned.

  

  Defence Deputy Minister Jody Thomas told the Ottawa Conference on Security and Defence on Wednesday that as melting ice opens up the Arctic Ocean, Beijing has set eyes on the Northwest Passage for new shipping routes and resource extraction, including fish, fossil fuel, and minerals.

  “We should not underestimate at all that threat of resource exploitation in the Arctic by China in particular,” Thomas said, according to a Globe and Mail report.

  “China has a voracious appetite and will stop at nothing to feed itself, and the Arctic is one of the last domains and regions left and we have to understand it and exploit it and more quickly than they can exploit it,” she said.

  Last December, Ottawa blocked a Chinese state-owned company from taking over a Nunavut gold mine, which would give Beijing a stronger foothold in the Arctic. David Harris, a former contractor with the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, previously told The Epoch Times that a deal with China would have posed serious security and economic threats to Canada.

  Beijing’s aggressive moves to control rare-earth minerals—material that is crucial for the high-tech and military industries—and its plans to seize minerals in Canada’s northern region prompted the United States and Canada to develop a joint strategy last year to reform the global critical mineral supply chains and reduce reliance on Chinese exports.

  Thomas also said Canada has sent a message to China by deploying warships to the South China Sea, where Beijing has in recent years been actively seeking military and geo-political dominance. The South China Sea is also vital for global shipping and commerce.

  “The deployment of the Navy in particular to the South China Sea is one of the messages that can be sent,” Thomas said, Globe and Mail reported.

  “[The deployments] are about the rules-based order and freedom of navigation, the freedom of the seas and the fact we will not be bullied into changing the geography of the world.”

  “A lot of people wonder why we care about the South China Sea. It’s because the geography of this planet has been changed and we have allowed it to happen,” she said.

  Thomas said Russia’s activities in the Arctic are also troubling. Last month, Russia launched a space satellite to monitor the Arctic climate, as the country seeks to develop the energy-rich region. Russia has also built military bases in their Arctic region.

  “Nobody would invest the kind of money in building up the military capacity in the Arctic without reason, intent, or purpose. We should not be naive about that. It doesn’t mean it is immediate—but it is there,” Thomas said.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 03/13/2021 – 23:30

• Explained: The 3 Major COVID-19 Variants
  Explained: The 3 Major COVID-19 Variants

  As billions of people gear up for widespread vaccination against COVID-19, another issue has reared its head. Three major COVID-19 variants have emerged across the globe—and preliminary research suggests these variants may be cause for concern.

  But, as Visual Capitalist’s Carmen Ang explains below, what makes them different from the original strain?

  The following visualizations answer some key questions, including when these variants were first discovered, how far they’ve spread worldwide, and most importantly, their potential impact on the population.

  Some Context: What is a Variant?

  Before diving in, it’s important to understand why viruses mutate in the first place.

  To infect someone, a virus takes over a host cell and uses it to replicate itself. But nature isn’t perfect, and sometimes, mistakes are made during the replication process—those mistakes are called mutations.

  A virus with one or more mutations is referred to as a variant. Most of the time, variants do not affect a virus’s physical structure, and in those instances, they eventually disappear. However, there are certain cases when a mutation impacts part of a virus’s genetic makeup that does change its behavior.

  According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) a change in behavior can alter:

  • Rate of transmission

  • Deadliness

  • Ability to potentially infect someone with natural or vaccine-induced immunity

  Preliminary research has detected some of these changes in the three major COVID-19 variants—B.1.1.7, B.1.351, and P.1.

  The 3 Major COVID-19 Variants

  The three major variants emerged at different times, and in different parts of the world. Here’s an overview of each variant, when they were discovered, and how far they’ve spread so far.

  B.1.1.7

  The B.1.1.7 variant was detected in the UK in the fall of 2020. By December 2020, it had spread across the globe, with cases emerging across Europe, North America, and Asia.

  

  Currently, the variant has been reported in roughly 94 countries.

  Early research suggests it’s 50% more transmissible than other variants, and potentially 35% more deadly than the standard virus. Luckily, studies suggest that some of the existing vaccines work well against it.

  B.1.351

  In October 2020, the second major variant was discovered—B.1.351. It was first identified in South Africa, but by end of the year, it had spread to the UK, Switzerland, Australia, and Japan.

  

  There are approximately 48 countries with reported cases, and research suggests several of the existing COVID-19 vaccines may not be as effective against this variant.

  P.1

  The P.1 variant was the last to arrive on the scene.

  It was first discovered in January 2021, when Japan reported four cases of the variant, which was found in travelers who had arrived from Brazil.

  

  Approximately 25 countries have reported cases of the P.1 variant, and early research suggests this variant is not only more contagious, but could also have the ability to infect people with natural immunity who had already recovered from the original strain.

  Still Early Days

  While there have been preliminary studies showing a dip in vaccine effectiveness, some experts emphasize that it’s too early to tell for certain. More data is needed to gain a deeper and more accurate understanding.

  In the meantime, experts are emphasizing the importance of following our current public health strategies, which include physical distancing, vaccination, washing your hands, and using masks.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 03/13/2021 – 23:00

• Here's How 30 Preppers Have Adapted And What They Foresee Happening Next
  Here’s How 30 Preppers Have Adapted And What They Foresee Happening Next

  Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

  There’s a lot more crazy and a lot less money than usual, and as I’ve written before, the face of prepping has changed. It’s a lot more difficult (and expensive) to go out and stockpile as we did a few years ago, and the event we’ve faced has been a slow-burning SHTF event that has slowly and insidiously taken away financial security from hundreds of thousands of Americans.

  

  I wondered how others have changed the way they prep to adapt to these times so I asked the folks in our Me-We group if they’ve changed how they prep and if so, what changes they’ve made. If you are interested in joining the group, go here, answer four questions, and be sure to change your profile picture from the Me-We basic images. We don’t care what you change them too, we’re just trying to avoid “bot” traffic from prowling through our group.

  Here’s how readers have changed the way they prep.

  With some of the comments, I’ve added a comment or a link in italics for more information.

  Eileen:

  I am working on doing even more with even less. I was laid off at the beginning of Covid. Hubby’s paycheck is down a bit. We have been watching the cost of regularly used items skyrocket, yet again. Teaching myself to grow more long term food items this year. At this point, Daisy, just not giving up feels like prepping, even if it’s just to get up tomorrow and try again.

  Here’s an article on how to keep going when things feel hopeless.  ~ D

  Lynn:

  We are getting ready to move. I am using my food preps to see what we really need and what has been hard to use up. Mostly pertaining to food and household essentials. Saving the money to buy fresh preps after the move. We moved a year ago and I had a huge stockpile that had to be moved twice in two months. I think it is better to use it up than move it and then replace it with fresh food and water.

  This is a great way to rotate your stock and always have fresher products available. Just pay attention to the things that are in shortage or difficult to acquire. You may not want to go through that supply just yet. ~ D

  Jeff:

  I have been building up at least a year’s supply of essential items like laundry detergent, shampoo, hand soap, toothpaste, etc. I will be using the stimulus check to add to my freeze-dried food inventory (mostly protein) since I have 1k lbs of dry food stored away. I don’t know if hyperinflation, war, or another pandemic may hit but if it does the goal is to be able to go at least a year without leaving the house.

  This is a fantastic goal!

  Tami:

  After the Texas snowstorm, I’m prepping mainly for life without electricity. I’ve lived off the grid before but had stopped so I’m going back to it. I also realized my need for more stored water .

  Here’s an article about preparing for longer-term power outages. It’s a great place to start if you’re new to prepping or if you simply need to make sure you have the things you need. ~ D

  Christina:

  Prepping mainly for economic upheaval. We kicked up food storage (have a working pantry) January 2020, but it wasn’t an issue to grocery shop in my area, so I slacked off a bit. August of 2020, we put together 6 months of food (again a working pantry I use and replenish), paying off debts, saving money, buying silver, ammo, guns, etc. Anything that will aid us as food and fuel prices goes up or our income goes down. So far, our income has increased since last year, but you never know. I’ll add my pantry includes HH / personal items too.

  Stocking up on things other than food is really important. Here’s a list of non-food stockpile items that may inspire you to add to your own supplies. ~ D

  Vicki:

  We are prepping for civil unrest and skyrocketing inflation. I’ve been watching the groceries I normally buy going up a lot. We are planning to grow more veggies and put in some more fruit trees. We are also making sure we have extras of the tools we use, and enough supplies to fix things(tools, machinery, plumbing, electrical, etc.) that might break. Lumber has also gone up a huge amount, so we are buying extra of that too.

  Having spare parts for tools and essential equipment is a vital and often overlooked prep. ~ D

  Diane: Everything I can think of from food to security.

  Keeping your preps balanced and not focusing too specifically on just one aspect is advised. Toby talks about the vital balance in this article. ~ D

  Max:

  Building out networks and relationships. Human terrain not “stuff”.

  Here’s advice on building community even during a pandemic and be sure to check out Selco’s on-demand webinar about community building. ~ D

  Susan:

  I think hyperinflation and the possible dollar collapse is more possible now than ever. I am adding canned and dried food stocks to my preps especially items that are predicted to become exorbitantly expensive like corn and coffee. I am also eagerly watching my garden waiting for it to thaw out. Most of the snow and ice is gone except in the woods.

  Here are some things you can do right now to get ready for garden season and here’s some advice on how to start planning your garden. ~ D

  Sheri:

  I’m turning more of my yard into vegetable/herb gardens and will preserve most of the produce. Adding to non-perishables when I see a good sale. Learning basic survival and self-sufficiency skills. Moving toward a simpler lifestyle, so living without modern conveniences will be less of a shock.

  This is precisely why my preps are low-tech. ~ D

  Stacy:

  Survived Texas without blaming the governor or president for leaving me in the cold. We need more stored water. Had enough but saw that I needed more for cleaning. Need larger pots. Fed 7 people easy as my house was only one with gas cooktop. Need cookware to feed 20…and preps to make my own soup kitchen. Need back up potty! Do I have 100 candles? More lamp oil. The little tealight under flowerpot did help to make room cozier. Store for this. A way to wash clothes. A way to take warm shower and wash hair. Prepare a menu, recipes, and storage for meals on the stove top. Prep to share with family. (I live on 20 member family compound.) A way to charge phone. Size c batteries to listen to CDs….more CDs. Hootch. OTC

  Awesome learning experience. I can definitely help with instructions for this off-grid kitty litter potty for humans. ~ D

  Ezra:

  We are working on paying off debts (Dave Ramsey) and materials for life without electricity. We lost power for 4 days during the winter storm here in Texas

  Here are a couple of articles you may find helpful regarding debt (one is directly from Dave’s strategies) and here’s an ebook about dealing with power outages. ~ D

  Lynn:

  We are focusing on our garden this year. Our goal is to be as self-sufficient as possible in regard to produce. I want to save seeds from the garden for the future. We aren’t growing grains, wheat, and oats, though. That is a future project.

  Here’s our favorite source for seeds – you can also get a free garden planner at that link and it is a small, family-run business. ~ D

  Rob:

  The money hasn’t changed for me in the Great White North. I’ve realized, though, that prepping for an event like an EMP is trying to play apocalypse lottery; better to consider the consequences of whatever it is you worry about and prepare for those. It stops you from making assumptions. (Makes an ass of U and umptions). I.e. instead of prepping for an EMP, I’m prepping for a collapse of communication and transportation of goods like food, no matter the cause. I’m expanding my EMP-proof storage still but I’m more prepared to handle, say, a food shortage whereas before my food plans only involved getting out of the city and joining a full farm.

  I think there’s a lot of wisdom to what you said there. A lot of folks hyperfocus on just one thing when in fact most disasters are an entire series of bad things. Some useful links might be this one about making a Faraday cage, this one about a communications collapse, and this one about the strain on our transportation system for goods.

  Bestsmall country:

  Hi Daisy, I’ve been watching everything since early 2018, and the most striking thing is the correlation between Q and the Bible!! I did most of my prepping back then. Long-life food, seeds (I learned how to grow veg). All done under the radar, especially Crypto and PMs. Skills will be the REAL asset. I’m hoping a local viewer of my channel will ‘kidnap’ me because the idiots that wouldn’t listen will be banging on my door

  OpSec is more important than ever! Here’s an article that might help others who are thinking like you about doing things under the radar. ~ D

  Kamay:

  Not much change, if any. Been prepping for the collapse of society, food shortages, and the possibility of a grid failure. We try to do all farming, gardening, preservations without the use of electricity and fancy gadgets. We recycle, upcycle, make do and live outside the box.

  Simplicity is key! I like your style :). ~ D

  Letia:

  I need to get ready for a garden! Strawberries will come back, and I’ll start canning again. I need to check my jars. I have some cases but need to check in case folks are back to normalcy or still canning. I need to practice shooting! I need to work on security with more cameras and change the button lock on my back door. 🙄

  DEFINITELY practice shooting. It’s a perishable skill. Here’s an article about creating a safe room at a reasonable price that might be helpful for the security aspect. ~ D

  Kris:

  Taking care of my animals and plans to raise more meat chickens – so more to feed. Buying feed in bulk and pricing out different feed options, etc.

  Have you checked out the fodder method? I took a class on it when I lived in California, but did not set up my own system because we were moving. Here’s a really good article about it. The guy I took the course from had chickens strictly on fodder and free-range. ~ D

  Roxanne:

  We’re pretty much preparing for our retirement. Then we’ll be on a much lower income. We’ve paid off all our debt except what we use on our credit cards which we pay off every month. We’ve sold off a lot of things which we didn’t need to get rid of the debt. We’re thinking we could be looking at another depression or some other economic troubles. I’ve been trying to grow different vegetables to learn how to do it well. I also have been dehydrating what I can and vacuum sealing them in large mason jars. I plan to learn to pressure can this year so I can take advantage of any sales at the stores on meats and vegetables which don’t grow here.

  Here’s an easy how-to for pressure canning, and if you happen to have a glass top stove, some pressure canning options that will work for you.

  Heather:

  We of the Down Under are keenly aware that we no longer matter with your particular ruling family’s politics. China is now a far more serious threat in the Pacific area. We also no longer refine fuel here, much of it comes from Singapore. We are prepping for blockade/ interruption to supply lines as this would pretty much cripple the country. We have gardens, fruit trees, and are stocking up a bit more on canned goods. We aren’t allowed to store more than a couple of jerry cans of fuel. Also, I have been sure to keep medical checkups and dental checkups very up-to-date for the family as you never know when these things just won’t be available.

  You bring up an excellent point with regard to medical and dental care. During the past year of Covid restrictions many people saw health issues getting far worse because they were unable to seek preventative care, or even take care of conditions that arose.  Handling these things while we an is vital. ~ D

  Shannon:

  I prep for hyperinflation, power grid issues, (due to natural disasters), and civil unrest. I live in the PNW, so we’ve had our share of rioting, unrest, and fluke weather. Prepping food, supplies to deal with no electricity, trying to learn how to cope without electricity. We sold property in Ca. and moved up here and bought property with land.

  With the changes you’ve made, you are most likely looking for some suggestions on becoming more self-reliant with the land and new resources you have available. Check out the self-reliance manifesto here. (Some links are no longer working – we’re striving to keep up!) ~ D

  Kate:

  We’re planning to buy a house/property in the next few years, so we’ve been saving wherever possible. Luckily the covid didn’t affect our income. Cutting back on trips to town. Waiting for the garden to dry out and also waiting for my seeds to arrive. Going to grow mostly for cellar storage this year….potatoes, squashes, carrots, turnips, etc. Jar lids are really hard to find here on Vancouver Island…hopefully, by the fall, I’ll be able to can sauce and V8. Keeping up with buying hard copy books on natural medicine, crafts, foraging.

  I’ve really lucked out and gotten some used books on those topics at yardsales. I once spent $100 at a yardsale buying every book the person was selling because her deceased relative had been into food preservation and herbalism. Talk about a motherlode. Another potential goldmine for you is Thriftbooks, which has millions of used books for sale. If you are new to root cellaring, this article may be helpful. ~ D

  K:

  I’ve spent the last year really focusing on smaller potential SHTF situations (a week to a month type). I feel like I’m in decent shape as far as that goes. Now my focus is more long-term. I want to get sustainable food production set up and keep hounding my kids about the likely change to digital currency in the next few years along with a rise in inflation. I have preached for years that our reliance on food from outside of our areas is going to be a problem in the future. That’s my focus now.

  A couple of articles on two topics you mentioned are this one about how our everyday lives would change in a cashless society and this one about why preppers need to localize their food sources. ~ D

  James:

  Economic misfortune, (job loss, economy downturns) civil unrest, power grid/natural disasters. I am set for two years monetarily, approximately 6 months for comestibles, and a decent self-defense set up although still working on hardening the house. I am also to a lesser extent prepared to bug out home if things really go to s**t, however as I am currently OCONUS I am probably screwed on that part.

  That definitely makes things difficult. I think what I would focus on in your shoes is making certain that your family members are able to hang in there for a period of time while waiting for you to make it home. You don’t want them to be in a situation where only you know how to do something important. Redundancies are essential. ~ D

  Rita:

  We have concentrated more on being self-contained and self-sufficient. We source our needs locally as much as possible. A LOT quieter about accomplishments and acquisitions. For the most part, we no longer have strong public opinions about much of anything. We are becoming more internalized and grey. As we get older, the fighting spirit is still there, but reality says to stock up and shut up. We see civil unrest, and difficult times, if not out and out economic collapse and civil war. The USA is a powder keg right now and some dumba** is going to light the match

  Surviving this crazy time does have a lot to do with keeping your thoughts more private. And sometimes the fight you win is the one you don’t participate in. ~ D

  Valerie:

  Economic collapse is my greatest concern. We are planting a larger garden and stocking up on nonperishable food. I plan to can more this year. In fact, today I scored a lightly used All American 910 canner at the goodwill. $5.99. Scratch that off my bucket list!

  Oh my gosh, what a SCORE!!!!!! I’m sure a lot of us reading that are positively green with envy. And the good thing about the All American is there are no parts or gaskets that might need to be replaced. ~ D

  Rosemary:

  I can’t shake the feeling that we will have a grid-down situation in the near future, so getting prepped for that has been my top priority. Next is food shortages and hyperinflation. Bigger garden & more canning is on my list for this season. I wanted to buy heating mats & lights too this year but didn’t have the extra funds, so I am trying Winter Sowing in gallon water & milk jugs. I have 20+ jugs done so far with lots more to do. Fingers crossed it’s a success!

  I’ll be really interested to hear how your Winter Sowing goes! Please keep us posted. Here’s a link to my book on Amazon, Be Ready for Anything. It goes into a lot of detail about long-term power outages in both summer and winter. ~ D

  Martha:

  Although my area doesn’t normally see really low temps, it does get cold in the winter, and after seeing what happened in Texas, I’m adding a portable heater (either propane or kerosene) to my list of supplies  ASAP.  Just wish AC was as easy to prep for if the grid goes down.  Looking at doing solar with battery backup to keep fridge, freezer running too, and even 1 window ac unit to keep the house at least bearable when it 115 in the summer.

  Wow, that sure sounds like some miserable weather to lose power in. Here’s an article about handling hot weather power outages, an article about how to calculate how much power you need to be able to generate, and the off-grid heater I recommend. ~ D

  Laura:

  In light of the recent hacking into MULTIPLE national security systems, I think the grid down is the biggest threat. Financial collapse would be second after that. I’m using some of the stimulus funds to buy larger ticket items. A respirator/gas mask is next on my list. Additionally, I bought heating pads and fluorescent lights for seed planting this year-going well. Also just bought five 55-gallon water barrels that need washing and set up. Busy time for me trying to keep up with all this.

  Here are some thoughts on preparing for a major cyber attack and an article on respirators and gas masks – I hope you find them helpful. ~ D

  Daisy:

  Yep, it’s me. The thing that I have changed over the past year about my preparedness is paying attention to the local governments and how they’ve responded. I’ve lived in 3 different places over the course of the lockdowns and each place has managed the response to covid very differently. It’s important to understand how your own local government reacts to things because once you do, you can begin to predict what they’ll do in a different situation. I’ve also gotten a lot better at getting information from others without them realizing I’m doing it, and making friends who can be helpful in a variety of events. (Read more in this article.)

  Traveling from place to place, I’ve learned to prep fast and I’ve learned how to make due with what’s available, instead of being so choosy. I plan to continue working on my adaptability levels, for I believe that is my most important skill. My primary goal is to avoid trouble in the first place and my secondary goal is to survive if I can’t. I foresee more restrictions after a brief reprieve and a lot more difficulty for those who just want to be left alone to do so without jumping through hoops.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 03/13/2021 – 22:30

• Air Force Receives First F-15EX Capable Of Carrying Hypersonic Weapons
  Air Force Receives First F-15EX Capable Of Carrying Hypersonic Weapons

  On Wednesday, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) officially accepted the first McDonnell Douglas F-15EX Strike Eagle from Boeing at the defense contractor’s facility in St. Louis, reported Defense News. The fourth-generation fighter has been upgraded with larger weapon capacity and advanced flight control systems. 

  “This is a big moment for the Air Force,” Col. Sean Dorey, F-15EX program manager with the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center’s Fighters and Advanced Aircraft Directorate, responsible for the acquisition, modernization and sustainment of the aircraft, said Thursday in a press release.

  

  We first proposed the question in 2019 of why the Trump administration was rushing to procure an upgrade version of the 45-year old jet. We suggested, at the time, it was due to weapon capacity issues of the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor and Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II “were not able to accommodate heavier weapons, such as hypersonic missiles.” 

  

  Last month, the F-15EX completed its first test flight from St. Louis Lambert International Airport in Missouri. Here’s a video of the flight:

  Check out the #F15EX as it makes its historic first flight. F-15EX is built on a digital thread, allowing it to also serve as a testbed to incorporate future tech and capability for the @USAirForce. pic.twitter.com/6ulnxuy1fm

  — The Boeing Company (@Boeing) February 3, 2021

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

  Prat Kumar, Boeing vice president, and F-15 program manager, recently said the F-15EX “is capable of incorporating the latest advanced battle management systems, sensors, and weapons due to the jet’s digital airframe design and open mission systems architecture.” 

  The USAF expects to purchase at least 144 F-15EX within the next five years. 

  While the internal weapon bays of U.S. stealth fight jets (F-22 & F-35) have limited capacity to carry hypersonic weapons, the Russians are already developing a prototype hypersonic missile that can fit within the weapon bays of its stealth jet, the Sukhoi Su-57. 

  Besides heavy bombers, the U.S. is expected to rely on fourth-generation fighters to deploy hypersonic weapons. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 03/13/2021 – 22:00

• Free Speech: And… It's Gone
  Free Speech: And… It’s Gone

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

  It’s no surprise to me that the war against speech is accelerating. There’s desperation in the air everywhere.

  From the barricading of the U.S. Capitol since January 6th to the shrill calls for continued lockdowns over a virus mostly behind us, we see those with power lashing out trying to hold on to it.

  And it’s no more obvious than in the lockdowns on speech. In the past week we’ve seen another major assault on Twitter-alternative Gab. A massive attack on its security architecture handing out the passwords and information of millions of users to the dark web.

  Then Texas Governor Greg Abbott, you know the guy who let millions of Texans freeze last month rather than order the coal-fired plants brought online in defiance of the DoE, piles on calling Gab “anti-semetic.”

  Anti-Semitic platforms do not represent Texas values.

  Proud to support @PhilKingTX & @GoldmanCraig’s bill to fight anti-Semitism in our communities. #txlege pic.twitter.com/ZVri3z0Wis

  — Gov. Greg Abbott (@GovAbbott) March 11, 2021

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

  Abbott’s just doing what he’s paid to do, serve everyone but Texas.

  Gab CEO Andrew Torba then informed us that the attacks on Gab are far deeper than even a putz like Abbott’s. The relentless pressure to cut his company off from the doing business continues, with bank after bank refusing to do business with them.

  What is happening to Gab is the best ad for bitcoin second only to the trillions of dollars the FED is printing from thin air to debase the US Dollar. https://t.co/vKwiAx092D

  — Gab.com (@getongab) March 12, 2021

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

  Torba’s invoking Operation Chokepoint is important here. It reminds us that Biden is a cypher put in place to restore Obama to the White House as functional president.

  Honestly, taking a step back, is this at all rational? All Torba and Gab want to do is operate a social media platform that conforms, ruthlessly, to the first amendment. Nothing more, nothing less.

  It’s not like Gab is funded by foreign intelligence services spreading obvious agitprop and propaganda. No, sorry, that’s the job of the mainstream media and Twitter.

  

  I thought if we didn’t like the treatment we got on Twitter we could go ‘build our own’ and that would be fine. Separate but equal, freedom of and from association and all that.

  But, no, any competition that doesn’t adhere to the current orthodoxy of what constitutes ‘acceptable speech’ is now no longer tolerated. Free Speech is not an option.

  It’s an obvious coordinated assault from every angle to extend ‘cancel culture’ into a cultural revolution. Because it’s not enough to hound people whose opinions you don’t like from the public square, they have to be beaten out of society entirely, even if the means employed to do so are patently hypocritical.

  And don’t think that doesn’t tie right into what’s coming from Operation Chokepoint vis a vis gun ownership in the coming weeks, but I digress.

  

  Then there’s Amazon’s abrupt turn into the Ministry of Information Gating. From removing a documentary about Clarence Thomas from its streaming service — during Black History Month — to making it verboten to talk about gender dysphoria as a mental illness, which it may well be.

  Amazon is lurching quickly from refusing to publish certain topics under its Kindle Direct Publishing platform to denying authors space on their virtual shelves. I think we’re close to the point where keeping Orwell’s 1984 on the shelves is tolerated because It’ll soon be looked on as children’s literature.

  Speaking of which, the long march of communists through our educational institutions has now led to pulling sales of six classic stories by Dr. Seuss by its publisher and President Biden banning Dr. Seuss from “Dr. Seuss Day.”

  Although the company made the decision last year, they chose to make the announcement on March 2nd: National Read Across America Day—or, as it’s more commonly known, Dr. Seuss Day.

  In 1998, the National Education Association partnered with Dr. Seuss Enterprises 1998 to launch Read Across America Day as a way to encourage children to read. The important role Dr. Seuss has played in children’s literacy was remarked upon by former President Obama, who began the presidential tradition of issuing yearly Read Across America Day proclamations, each of which mentioned Dr. Seuss. In 2016, Obama described the world-renowned author as “one of America’s revered wordsmiths.”

  Attacking Dr. Seuss, even in the mildest way, is yet another tactical move to outrage anyone with a connection to their past. It’s done to create a false discussion of racism and force people to take up the defense of something that needs no defense.

  It’s done to undermine parental choices of what stories they should read their children at night and adding more divisive fodder for family get-togethers (remember those?) where the kids come home from school and blame their racist parents for programming them from birth because Dr. Seuss.

  We’re dealing with people who have no ability to parse nuance or engage in any reasonable discussion of the past. As opposed to turning the depictions of Asians or blacks in Dr. Seuss into a teaching moment about how far we’ve come their impulse is to remove it from ‘polite society’ for the good of everyone.

  And that’s what’s truly shameful.

  Frankly, I’m ambivalent about Dr. Seuss because when I re-read The Cat in the Hat recently I couldn’t tell if it was a cautionary tale about child predation or programming children to accept it?

  I’d go on some long-winded rant about Jung and these malformed people being unwilling to accept and integrate heir shadows, but what’s the point in 2021?

  We’re now dealing with an acceleration of the erasure of the past that will not abate until it consumes most of the people perpetrating it in the first place. So, my advice to you is duck where you can and drink heavily.

  I’ve only covered a couple of these recent events here, because there are too many to list. But it was this post on RT which caught my attention in light of the growing attacks on alternative speech platforms and journalists.

  Because in the days after Buzzfeed fired one-third of the staff at the former Prom Queen of the Woke, the Huffington Post, we’re treated to this fake spat between ‘journalists’ over something Tucker Carlson said.

  This manufactured harassment controversy over his showing a publicly-available picture of some chick (yes, I’m a misogynist, but hey I’m protecting her identity!) who works at the New York Times is on its face laughable. It won’t do anything other than improve Carlson’s ratings.

  Because it isn’t enough to be a disgraced plagiarist fired by that pillar of responsible journalism, Buzzfeed, to try and keep the lights on this incel Broderick pens a piece going after, of all people, Glenn Greenwald.

  Responding to Broderick’s broadside on Thursday, Greenwald noted that journalists have “bizarrely transformed from their traditional role as leading free expression defenders into the most vocal censorship advocates, using their platforms to demand that tech monopolies ban and silence others.”

  Broderick was fired from BuzzFeed for “serial plagiarism” but now wants to reinvent himself as “the Guardian and Defender of Real Journalism” with a straight face, Greenwald pointed out. He also blasted mainstream journalists as having a “bottomless sense of entitlement and self-regard and fragility” and seeking to create a world in which they can attack whoever they want, while banning anyone who criticizes them for it.

  First they came for Gab and no one listened. Then they came for Parler who knuckled under. And now they’ve driven the best investigative journalists to Substack and that’s too much free speech?

  

  But it’s part of the pattern of behavior that continues well beyond Gab’s persecution.

  Because the most disturbing thing I’ve seen this week isn’t any of this. It is the now zero-tolerance for anyone on platforms like YouTube or Patreon who voice any skepticism from the WHO and/or the CDC about COVID-19, the vaccines or anything related.

  Fearless people like The Last American Vagabond, Whitney Webb and now Venessa Beeley have all been canceled by Patreon. My subscribers keep wondering when I’m going to be canceled. I guess we’ll find out soon enough. I continue to get notes from Patrons telling me they won’t support Patreon because ‘they suck’ or ‘they’re evil.’

  And I don’t blame them one bit. Vote with your dollars, force me to consider alternatives (which there are if you are interested).

  But, at the same time, the more Patreon or Twitter or YouTube acts the way they do the more opportunity there is for someone else to build something better.

  That’s what Torba did in 2016 and he’s paid a terrible price for it. He lived by one of Jordan Peterson’s new rules when he built Gab in the first place: “Notice where opportunity lurks when responsibility has been abdicated.”

  Our responsibility to free speech has been abdicated by our professional journalists for decades. In fact, I’d argue, outside of the people I’ve mentioned so far in this article, there are precious few people writing today who could even rise to the level of ‘yellow journalist,’ present company included.

  I’ve been saying since Torba started Gab in 2016 that what is needed is a blockchain-based, censorship-proof platform with inviolable property rights in that which you create. That would disempower gatekeepers like Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and ensure the costs of government censorship would rise to the point of failure.

  And Torba is absolutely right that this assault on free speech in the U.S., and really the world over, is driving the industry towards that eventuality when he mentions bitcoin. Early attempts at this have been a mess — Steemit, Minds, etc. — but the basic concept is sound.

  What these folks are doing with Operation Chokepoint is no different than Trump going Sanctions Slap Happy for four years on our national rivals. Trump tried to raise costs on Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela to the point where they would cry in submission.

  And it didn’t work. And I told you (and Trump) it wouldn’t work. Repeatedly.

  Because the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility is universal in all human endeavors.

  There is an upper limit to the efficacy of any particular activity, simply because accumulating more of one thing lowers its marginal return on your investment of time and/or capital. it’s why Pareto is the law of the land, ultimately.

  In the case of censorship or economic starvation (same thing), when you make the cost of doing business in one arena too expensive — selling oil for dollars, for example — you make the transition away from that medium of exchange (the dollar) relatively more attractive.

  Russia now does more than half of its business in local currencies. Iran is empowering Iranians to mine bitcoin to evade sanctions and procure things from overseas. Both are working with trading partners to bypass the dollar and the euro to effect international trade.

  And soon, all the dissident journalists of exceptional character will be the ones who validate new business models and publishing platforms that do the same. In the same way that we helped validate Patreon’s business model in the first place, which helped us bypass the traditional publishing firms like Buzzfeed and which drove the HuffPo to irrelevancy.

  That’s what’s coming with all of this censorship and marginalization of dissident voices — the proliferation of new platforms that are hardened against cancellation. The people like George Soros who believe they can drive the truth back underground to the days where publishing materials and disseminating them were hideously expensive are living a lie.

  And they are wasting everyone’s time pursuing this in their sick, pathetic attempts to maintain and solidify societal control at a level that is the very definition of unsustainable.

  Today it’s the opposite of that. Today it’s cheaper and easier than ever to produce and disseminate superlative work to an audience. Finding the audience is the hard part. And that’s what they are trying so desperately to keep us from achieving.

  But we will achieve it because total surveillance and the complete abolition of our property right in the work we produce is a fantasy of the deranged and the arrogant. And that’s why their fear is so real you don’t need to be a dog to smell it.

  In the face of planned economic and societal destruction which is driving up the cost of everything, free speech is the most precious commodity of all.

  *  *  *

  Join my Patreon if you want to tell them you value free speech

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  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 03/13/2021 – 21:30

• Tesla Killer? Spy Photos Of First Ford F-150 All-Electric Pickup Emerge 
  Tesla Killer? Spy Photos Of First Ford F-150 All-Electric Pickup Emerge 

  Introduced in 1948, the Ford F-150 has been America’s best-selling vehicle for the last 43 years. After seven decades of production, Ford is set to introduce an all-new model for the Ford truck lineup, called F-150 Electric. Details have been limited so far, but new spy pictures from Autoblog show the truck is the “real deal.” 

  Autoblog snapped a series of pictures of the electric prototype F-150. The blog said:

  From a distance, an F-150 is an F-150, an F-150, but this one stands out right away not for what has been added, but rather for what’s missing: a tailpipe. Looking closer, we can see a few other telltale elements. For starters, there’s that beefy electric drive unit tucked up in front of the under-bed spare. It’s much wider than the differential you’d see in a conventional pickup; Ford probably left the spare wheel in place on purpose to help obscure it from view. 

  

  These shots were taken from a distance, so there’s not much more to be gleaned from the angles of the undercarriage. The drive unit takes up a pretty large chunk of real estate back there, plus the quality makes it difficult to discern much else. We can see what appear to be conventional leaf shackles on either side. We’re not surprised that Ford is likely sticking with a conventional leaf-spring setup back here, as it is likely far too crowded for coils.

  

  Our spy also snagged some photos of the prototype’s flanks. There are some angles that could show hints of the truck’s battery pack peeking out from under its left side. They’re not definitive, but that’s where the ICE F-150’s fuel tank resides, so it’s a logical location. We suspect the pack will be larger than the fuel tank, which means it would probably bleed over to the passenger side as well (where the exhaust is normally routed). 

  Autoblog said the new truck could be released as soon as the second half of 2022. Already, Ford’s Mustang Mach-E electric vehicle has made a splash among the American consumer. So much so that Morgan Stanely warned, the new all-electric Mustang is taking market share from Tesla. 

  Considering most Americans resonate better with Ford (than Tesla), after-all, the F-150 (gas version) has been the best-selling vehicle in the country for more the four decades – this is bad news for Elon Musk. 

  … and, by the way, GMC’s 1,000 horsepower all-electric Hummer will be released as early as this fall.  

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 03/13/2021 – 21:00

• More California Cities Experiment With "Hero Pay" Leading To Predictable Results
  More California Cities Experiment With “Hero Pay” Leading To Predictable Results

  Authored by Jazz Shaw via HotAir.com,

  Back in early February, we looked at a story out of Long Beach, California where the City Council passed an ordinance requiring large, chain grocery stores to provide workers with an extra four dollars per hour as “hero pay” during the pandemic.

  That immediately resulted in two of the biggest Kroger stores in the area closing their doors permanently, putting hundreds of people out of work. At the time, I noted that a number of other large municipalities in the Golden State were either already drafting or considering similar legislation.

  But having seen what happened in Long Beach, they thankfully had sufficient warning not to make the same mistake.

  

  Or so you would have thought. But as it turns out, you’d have been wrong. Los Angeles plunged ahead and passed the same type of law, only they upped the ante and made it five dollars per hour. Try not to faint from shock when I tell you that three more Kroger stores shut down in short order. If only someone could have somehow foreseen this and avoided all of these closures. (Washington Examiner)

  The list of Southern California stores that have been forced to close over government-implemented “hero pay” hikes has grown to five after three more locations announced they will close their doors.

  Two Ralph’s locations and one Food 4 Less location, both owned by the grocery giant Kroger, in West Los Angeles will close due in part, the company says, to a Los Angeles City Council mandate requiring some employers to provide an additional $5 per hour in hazard pay for workers on the “front-lines” during the coronavirus pandemic, according to Fox 11 Los Angeles.

  “The mandate will add an additional $20 million in operating costs over the next 120 days, making it financially unsustainable to continue operating underperforming locations,” Kroger said in a news release.

  Thanks to the City Council’s efforts to “help heroes” during the pandemic, 289 more people lost their jobs overnight. It’s also worth noting that these aren’t minimum wage jobs for students. Thanks to California’s generous labor laws, those grocery store workers were making an average of $18 per hour, which works out to the equivalent of $24 per hour when you include the mandatory benefits they receive. On top of that, those neighborhoods will now be without one of the larger grocery shopping options with the most diverse range of products.

  The only winners here were the smaller grocery stores in those communities. Because L.A. modeled its ordinance on the one enacted in Long Beach, the rules were not applied equally. The “hero pay” requirement was only imposed on larger, national chain stores. Perhaps some of those smaller stores can hire a few of the newly unemployed clerks from Krogers.

  Members of the Los Angeles City Council took another page out of Long Beach’s book, talking about the greedy chain stores and their “record profits.” But as we discussed last time, profit margins in grocery stores are just about as thin as you could imagine because of the competitive nature of the industry. When you suddenly jack up their labor costs by more than 25% overnight, the outlets immediately become unprofitable or uncompetitive. Kroger knows this and isn’t going to wait around and keep bleeding off revenue while waiting to see if the City Council comes to its senses.

  This is yet another case of municipal mismanagement, as bumbling bureaucrats dream up ways to “do the right thing” during the pandemic. Sadly, they decided to start tinkering with bits of the private sector’s machinery when they clearly didn’t understand how it operates.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 03/13/2021 – 20:30

• "Roadable Aircraft" Could Finally Get Off The Ground In New Hampshire
  “Roadable Aircraft” Could Finally Get Off The Ground In New Hampshire

  The most promise for a “flying car” that would be both road-worthy and air-worthy came in January of this year when Woburn, Massachusetts-based Terrafugia received a Federal Aviation Authority airworthiness certificate. But, as Bloomberg notes, by February, it appears hopes were dashed when the company laid off 43 employees and stated it was working on a “new endeavor”.

  For right now, New Hampshire appears to be the only state that is keeping the dream of flying road vehicles alive. New Hampshire “became the first U.S. state to make flying cars road-legal” thanks to a bill being called the “Jetsons bill”. If the machines pass testing with the FAA and owners pay a $2,000 fee, their drivers/pilots are welcome to drive them to the airport – before taking off into the sky in them.

  The state is known for its liberal transit laws – motorcyclists don’t need helmets and cars don’t require seatbelts. “Live Free of Die,” the state’s license plates read. Terrafugia has been performing test flights in the state since 2018. Company Pal-V also sells one product, called the Liberty, out of the airport in Manchester, New Hampshire. 

  Kevin Colburn, vice president and general manager of Terrafugia, said New Hampshire’s bill “opens up interesting possibilities for leisure trips to islands.” He continued: “The time savings in a place like New Hampshire, where the mountainous topography makes for some very indirect and lower-speed driving trips could be substantial.”

  “You need to build something that’s safe both in the air and on the ground. In the air, you want to minimize weight, and on land, you need to be crash-proof if you hit a brick wall. It’s a matter of threading the needle,” Colburn said. 

  

  But New Hampshire could be the place where it happens. “I can see a lot of developers going there to test roadable aircraft,” said Laurie Garrow, an urban and regional air mobility specialist at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

  Keith Ammon, a sales rep for Pal-V, helped write the Jetsons bill. He said of his company’s Liberty: “It’s a gyrocopter. The power goes directly to the blades. The blades fold up, and on the road, it’s three-wheeled, meaning you can lean into the turns like a motorcyclist.”

  The Liberty costs $390,000. Ammon is part of a group in the state called the “Free State Project” that aims to “establish residence in a small state and take over the state government.” The libertarian thread through the state could encourage continued innovation and experimentation. 

  Hybrid road/air vehicles are attempting to come of age right at the same time as electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing vehicles (eVTOLs). eVTOLs are best known as flying taxis – an industry that Morgan Stanley predicts could reach $1.5 trillion by 2040. Names like Porsche and Boeing have already teamed up on eVTOLs. Terrafugia’s owner, Geely, is also working on them with Tencent. 

  Comparatively, roadable aircraft can seem clunky. But don’t count the spirit of innovation in New Hampshire out. “When I read about Terrafugia’s layoffs, it blew my mind,” Ammon said. “But this industry has taken a long time to get off the ground, and we will move forward.”

  He concluded: “We’re not ants in a colony. It’s important that we recognize the spirit in each individual, and it’s important that we give people choices. Libertarians are not selfish because they want each person to explore their own eccentricities, their own creativity. If everyone can do that, we’ll have a more free and happy society.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 03/13/2021 – 20:00

• Newt Gingrich Locked Out Of Twitter For Criticizing Biden's Immigration Policy
  Newt Gingrich Locked Out Of Twitter For Criticizing Biden’s Immigration Policy

  Authored by Annaliese Levy via SaraACarter.com,

  Former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Newt Gingrich was locked out of his Twitter account for over a week after he published a tweet that criticized the Biden administration’s approach to the southern border and raised concern over immigrants crossing the border illegally who may be infected with COVID-19.

  “If there is a covid surge in Texas the fault will not be Governor [Greg] Abbott’s common sense reforms. The greatest threat of a covid surge comes from Biden’s untested illegal immigrants pouring across the border. We have no way of knowing how many of them are bringing covid with them,” Gingrich tweeted on March 3.

  

  Twitter promptly sent Gingrich a message explaining that his account was locked for “violating rules against hateful conduct.”

  In an opinion piece published in The Washington Times, Gingrich defended his tweet saying that he was reacting to a recent story that said federal officials had no way of testing people who are picked up by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol — or forcing them to quarantine.

  In order to unlock his account, Gingrich was required to delete his tweet or go through an appeals process. Gingrich assumed he received this message by accident.

  “Thinking this must have been an error somehow generated by the company’s algorithm, we sent Twitter a message pointing out that my tweet didn’t “promote violence against, threaten, or harass” anyone. We asked that my account be released,” Gingrich said.

  Twitter reiterated to Gingrich that his tweet had broken their rules of conduct.

  “I fail to see how drawing attention to the public health dangers of massive illegal immigration during a pandemic can be censored. So, to unlock my account, I deleted the tweet this morning,” Gingrich wrote.

  “There was no reason to censor my tweet or lock my account,” Gingrich continued. “Nothing in the flagged tweet “promotes violence against, threatens, or harasses” anyone. It is simply pointing out the fact that those entering the country illegally are not tested for COVID-19 and could be a health risk.”

  In an open letter to Twitter officials, Gingrich posed the following questions:

  Do the Twitter censors acknowledge that we are in a pandemic?

  Do the Twitter censors acknowledge that testing is a key tool in fighting the pandemic?

  Do the Twitter censors acknowledge that, unlike people entering the country legally, people who come into the United States illegally are not tested for COVID-19?

  Do the Twitter censors acknowledge that, unlike U.S. citizens, people who come into the country illegally are unlikely to voluntarily get tested because they are trying to keep a low profile?

  If so, how exactly do they justify censoring discussion of the threat to public health posed by people coming into the U.S. illegally without being tested?

  Gingrich noted that the vast majority of those being silenced online are conservatives.

  “This entire experience has made it even more clear to me that Twitter is only interested in censoring conservatives,” Gingrich said.

  “I hope Twitter will stop its aggressive and biased censorship, and return to the spirit and ideals of free speech which allowed it to prosper in the first place.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 03/13/2021 – 19:30

• Air Travel Hits Highest Level In A Year Amid Eased Restrictions, TSA Says
  Air Travel Hits Highest Level In A Year Amid Eased Restrictions, TSA Says

  It appears that both confidence in the vaccine rollout as well as declining coronavirus infection numbers across previously highly impacted states are factors driving Americans back into resuming air travel. 

  According to new numbers from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), air travel hit its highest point nationwide in almost a year on Friday, also amid broad re-opening mandates and a rollback in restrictions in a number of states. 

  The agency reports that it “screened 1.3 million people at airport security checkpoints Friday, the highest figure since March 15, 2020, according to TSA spokesperson Lisa Farbstein,” The Hill writes.

  

  It comes as the Biden administration touted at the end of this week that over 100 million doses of the vaccine have been administered to Americans nationwide.

  Over the past months reports began indicating travel numbers that suggested an approaching ‘return to normal’ over the November and December holidays – when prior single-day highs were seen. Airlines since last spring were forced to make major cuts to routes and number of flights, while at the same time implementing changes in cabin rules such as mask mandates. 

  Recall that airlines were already struggling even before the pandemic, but the nationwide lockdowns produced an effective halt in the majority of air travel for weeks last March when stay-at-home orders were issued across the majority of states.

  BREAKING: @TSA officers screened 1,357,111 people at airport security checkpoints yesterday, Friday, March 12. The last time checkpoint throughput was that high was March 15, 2020. If you choose to fly, wear that mask!

  — Lisa Farbstein, TSA Spokesperson (@TSA_Northeast) March 13, 2021

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

  Into last spring and summer travelers were still skittish despite multiple published studies and scientific institutions remarking on the surprisingly low levels of recorded transmissions of the virus due to air travel:

  At first thought, a narrow metal tube in which strangers are crammed together for hours might seem like a flying petri dish, especially during a pandemic. The reality is a bit more nuanced. While there are risks associated with flying, it may be safer than you think.

  For starters, the air quality on a commercial airliner is actually quite high, with the air volume in the cabin being completely refreshed every two to four minutes. Air flows into the cabin vertically — it enters from overhead vents and is sent downward in a circular motion, exiting at floor level. Once air leaves the cabin, about half is dumped outside, and the rest is sent through HEPA (high-efficiency particulate air) filters, similar to those used in hospitals, before being mixed with fresh outside air and entering the cabin again.

  A spokesperson for Airlines for America, a major lobby group for the industry, said to The Hill this week, “We remain confident that this layered approach significantly reduces risk and are encouraged that science continues to confirm there is a very low risk of virus transmission onboard aircraft.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 03/13/2021 – 19:00

• US Now Engaged In "Indirect Diplomacy" With Iran On Reviving Nuke Deal: Sullivan
  US Now Engaged In “Indirect Diplomacy” With Iran On Reviving Nuke Deal: Sullivan

  Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

  National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said the US is engaged in “indirect diplomacy” with Tehran through Europeans and other parties on the way forward to revive the Iran nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA.

  “Diplomacy with Iran is ongoing, just not in a direct fashion at the moment,” Sullivan told reporters on Friday. “There are communications through the Europeans and through others that enable us to explain to the Iranians what our position is with respect to the compliance for compliance approach and to hear what their position is.”

  

  “Compliance for compliance” is a phrase Biden administration officials are using as their stance on the JCPOA. The issue is, the US is the party that came out of compliance first by reimposing sanctions on Tehran in 2018. After that, Iran waited a year before it began gradually increasing the activity of its civilian nuclear program.

  Throughout this process, Iran has tried everything to preserve the JCPOA by working with the other signatories to the deal. And since the US withdrew, Iran is no longer bound by the limits set by the JCPOA, so it is not technically violating the agreement.

  The Biden administration has rejected the idea of offering sanctions relief before talks with Iran. “We are waiting at this point to hear further from the Iranians how they would like to proceed,” Sullivan said.

  “This is not going to be easy but we believe that we are in a diplomatic process now that we can move forward on and ultimately secure our objective, which is to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and to do so through diplomacy,” Biden’s national security advisor added.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 03/13/2021 – 18:30

• Goldman's Clients Are Asking If There Are Any Cheap Stocks Left
  Goldman’s Clients Are Asking If There Are Any Cheap Stocks Left

  Well, technically, Goldman clients are asking if they should be buying anything at all, period, in a time of resurgent volatility driven by rising rates and bond market vol, which sparked a high beta/growth panic in equities two weeks ago but have since seen the influence fade.

  For those who missed last week’s rollercoaster, Goldman recaps it as follows: “10-year Treasury yields jumped 20 bps last week, retreated by 10 bp, and then reversed that decline to end this week at a new 12-month high of 1.62%.” Yet despite this latest spike in rates, the VIX tumbled with stocks rising to all time highs, even though Treasury implied volatility is now at the highest level since last March, according to the SRVIX index…

  

  … and almost there according to the MOVE index.

  

  Yet anyone hoping for a quick and painless reprieve from surging rates will be disappointed. In his latest Weekly Kickstart, Goldman’s David Kostin writes that the bank’s economists expect that rates will continue to rise in coming months and forecast 11% real US GDP growth in 2Q with core PCE inflation rising to 2.3% “suggesting that investors will have to continually grapple with the anxiety about economic overheating and Fed tightening that has gripped markets in recent weeks.” Goldman also expects the 10-year yield will rise to 1.8% by mid-year and 1.9% by year-end. At the rate it is going, it may get there next week.

   

  This is a big problem for Goldman because while we already know that equities are extremely overpriced according to most valuation metrics, with the S&P 500 trading above the 90th percentile in absolute valuation… 

  

  … and prompting Goldman clients to ask what – if anything – is  still cheap, Kostin responds that stocks are “only” in the 40th percentile relative to interest rates. Which is a problem if rates continue to rise as the only metric on which stocks are cheap will soon suggest they are not that cheap when compared to rates.

  So, to ease client nerves, Kostin writes that in his view “equity valuations should be able to digest 10-year yields of roughly 2% without much difficulty” assuming of course, that the move higher in real yields is slow and contained, something it wasn’t in recent weeks when the surge in real yields was a 2+ std dev event. In fact, it is safe to say that no move higher in yields will ever be contained and organized with trillions in AUM on the verge of panic liquidation any time 10Y yield spikes.

  

  Still, even if the 10-year yield hits 2% against a constant S&P 500 forward EPS yield of 4.5% (the inverse of a 22x P/E multiple) that would reduce the yield gap between stocks and bonds to approximately its 45-year average of 250 bp, neither rich nor cheap.

  So what else do Goldman’s clients think? Well, based on Kostin’s client conversations, most investors share the bank’s view that interest rates will continue rise, but many believe that the equity market rotations that have recently accompanied rising rates have gone too far. Translation: Goldman clients are desperately trying to convince nobody but themselves that the turmoil is over (spoiler alert: it is only just starting).

  Still, the last month has indeed been a nightmare for most investors as nothing – both value stocks and cryptos – seemed to work. Consider that Goldman’s sector-neutral long/short growth factor declined by 12% during the past month, the largest 1-month decline in its history since 1980. At the same time, the 4-month stretch of Value factor outperformance since the vaccine efficacy announcements in November matches the average length of Value rotations since the Financial Crisis, the factor’s 30% recent rise rivals two of the decade’s largest Value rallies, in 2013 and 2016.

  But what may be even more challenging is that value no longer is cheap as it was just a few weeks ago. Specifically, Kostin notes that this week Goldman’s equity analysts’ proprietary Reopening Scale climbed to a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10…

  

  … even as the bank’s Reopening basket has already recovered 75% of its decline, suggesting markets have vastly outrun the recovery. Consider that Goldman’s Cyclicals vs. Defensives basket pair has climbed to its highest level since the post-tax reform surge of early 2018…

  

  … and the relative P/E valuation of the baskets stands at its highest historical level outside of the post-GFC recovery.

  

  So with many cyclicals and “reopening” stocks no longer trading at depressed levels, and with growth stocks susceptible to further market turmoil on the back of rising rates, Goldman’s clients ask: “Where is there still value in the US stock market?”

  Well, since Goldman makes its money by making markets, and has a sworn duty to encourage clients to buy cheap stocks even when there aren’t, Kostin answers with a decisive yes.

  Starting at the top of the list, the Goldman strategist writes that at a factor level, “Value” still looks very attractive relative to history.The P/E multiple gap between the highest valuation and lowest valuation S&P 500 stocks, on a sector-neutral basis, registered 231% at the start of 2021, the highest level since 2000. That spread has since declined to 161% but is still substantially above its 40-year average of 103%

  

  Kostin has some more good news for value investors: “as rates rise and growth accelerates, Value should continue to outperform. High dividend yield stocks, a close cousin of Value, look particularly depressed.”

  

  As a result, at a macro level, S&P 500 dividend futures “also still appear to present an attractive value, with the 2023 contract trading 11% below our top-down forecast and only 5% above realized 2019 payments. “

  A second curious observation is that “surprisingly, the valuation of the S&P 500 Info Tech sector also registers below its historical average relative to the broad index.” As we have documented for the past 4 weeks, much recent investor focus –and portfolio pain –has been concentrated in the longest-duration stocks with attractive long-term growth prospects but weak current profitability. Long-duration equities are particularly sensitive to rising rates, as evidenced by the 13% decline of our new Long Duration basket during the past month.

  

  Goldman’s Short Duration basket (GSTHSDUR) rallied by 12% during the same time. However, there is a large difference between the profitability and valuations of S&P 500 Info Tech and stocks like those in our Non-Profitable Tech basket (GSXUNPTC). Tech’s current 16% P/E premium to the S&P 500 is actually lower than the 40-year average of 32% (29% excluding 1998-2002). One further bullish case for growth stocks: as rates rise, near-term growth and profitability become more valuable; these are strengths of many large-cap tech firms (of course, if rates rise too far too fast, growth stocks will be crushed regardless)

  

  Third, Kostin notes that some of his favorite current thematic investment strategies also remain attractively valued in relative terms despite sharp recent appreciation:

  Our Low Labor Cost basket has outperformed the S&P 500 by 800 bp in the past six weeks (14% vs. 6%) but still trades at an 17x forward P/E, representing a 20% discount to the S&P 500. Our High Operating Leverage basket trades at the same P/E as the S&P 500, but has averaged a 7% premium during the past decade. Both baskets should outperform as the economy improves and unemployment falls.

  Still, not even Kostin can say that the market as a whole is anything but extremely overpriced, and admits that “In absolute terms, most of the US equity market carries above-average valuations relative to history.This is unsurprising with the S&P 500 trading at 22x NTM P/E (96th percentile)” (see chart above). In fact, the Goldman strategist admits that valuations today are even more elevated than they were in 2000. 20 years ago, the aggregate S&P 500 P/E was a similar 24x, but the median stock traded at 14x. Today, the median firm trades at 21x.

  

  A breakdown by sector reveals that the recently hammered defensive industries generally trade at the lowest valuations in the market today, while Consumer Staples, Communication Services, and Health Care trade at the lowest valuations relative to their own histories and vs. the S&P 500. And while Goldman admits that Defensives should carry a discount in an economic environment of improving growth and rising rates, the bank believes that Health Care stands out as an attractive longer-term opportunity. Relative to other “bond proxy” sectors, Health Care generates much stronger EPS growth and has historically exhibited less interest rate sensitivity: “The sector’s current 23% FY2 P/E discount to the S&P 500 matches the largest discount in our 45-year data history, and like other comparable historical episodes is likely explained by an over-abundance of political uncertainty.”

  

  Finally, and extending on a point he made last week, Kostin writes that Goldman’s macro forecasts also suggest that two of the most quintessential value sectors can still appreciate in coming months despite being the strongest recent performers in the market.

  Case in point, Energy – which we have been pounding the table on since last summer (see the Exxon posts) – has returned 40% YTD and continues to trade with a very close relationship to long-term oil prices. Goldman’s commodity strategists expect Brent crude will rise 8% to $75/bbl next year. Energy is also the only S&P 500 sector with short interest above its historical average. This will be key once Quants (which recently covered their energy shorts) go massively long the energy sector as we previewed on Friday. Similarly, Financials, the second best sector YTD (16%), trades closely with Treasury yields. Although it has recently rallied more than its typical relationship with rates would have implied, relative valuations remain low compared to history and Goldman expects value to keep outperforming if the economy continues to accelerate and rates continue to rise.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 03/13/2021 – 18:00

• How Partisan Politics Rots Your Brain
  How Partisan Politics Rots Your Brain

  Authored by David D’Amato via Libertarian Institute & Libertarianism.org,

  Recent research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques is allowing us to peer into the connections, yet shrouded in mystery, between local brain activity, cognitive processes, and partisan attachment. This developing body of knowledge has revealed the profound importance of evolution in shaping the ways in which our brains process all kinds of information, in particular political information. At the center of this evolutionary journey is the importance of groups—of being initiated and accepted into them, of aligning ourselves with them, of being loyal to them regardless of philosophical considerations. The social dynamics of group membership and participation are programmed more deeply into our brains than is abstract philosophizing. “In other words, people will go along with the group, even if the ideas oppose their own ideologies—belonging may have more value than facts.” Because we once moved from place to place as nomads, such groups are our homes even more than any physical locations are.

  We now have decades of research suggesting—if not proving— “the ubiquity of emotion‐​biased motivated reasoning,” reasoning that is qualitatively different from the kind operating when subjects are engaged in “cold reasoning,” where the subjects lack a “strong emotional stake” in the subjects at issue. Coupled with a growing literature on the startling character and extent of political ignorance, the current state has dire implications for human freedom. The stakes are high: in their 2018 study of why and how partisanship impairs the brain’s ability to process information objectively, NYU researchers Jay J. Van Bavel and Andrea Pereira note that “partisanship can alter memory, implicit evaluation, and even perceptual judgments.” 

  

  One recent study, published last fall by a team from Berkeley, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins, set out to better understand how partisan biases develop in the brain. The researchers had subjects watch a series of videos, using fMRI to explore the “neural mechanisms that underlie the biased processing of real‐​world political content.” The results showed that partisan team members process identical information in highly biased and motivated ways. The researchers locate this neural polarization in the part of the brain known as the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a region associated with understanding and formulating narratives. The study also found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that to the extent a given participant’s brain activity during the videos aligned with that of the “average liberal” or “average conservative,” the participant was more likely to take up that group’s position.

  The study accords with years of previous research showing that partisans’ opinions on important social, political, and economic issues are affected by subconscious brain processes—processes of which they’re neither aware nor in control. This ought to be deeply concerning to everyone who belongs to a political team: processes are taking place in your brain, underneath or beyond the level of direct awareness, that are informing your conclusions about important social and political issues. To reflect on this for even a moment should fill anyone who aspires to critical thinking or rationality with a kind of dread, for loyalty to the team seems to be overriding the higher faculties of the mind.

  But, the authors are careful to note, it’s important not to interpret these results as pointing to some kind of determinism, whereby we can’t choose how to think or what we believe. As one of of the study’s authors, Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki, says, “Critically, these differences do not imply that people are hardwired to disagree.” Rather, these neural pathways seem to be carved largely by the kinds and sources of the media we consume. From the data yielded by such research, among many other similar studies, a picture begins to emerge of partisanship as a kind of mind poisoning, an infection that leads to serious and, importantly, measurable cognitive impairment. Evidence suggests that, under the influence of partisanship, we can’t even understand our own thoughts and opinions.

  In another important, recent experiment, researchers wanted to understand the relative accuracy of participants’ introspective constructs. The researchers set out to gauge people’s ability to understand their own choices, to see clearly “the elements of internal argumentation that lead to [their] choices.” In particular, the researchers wanted to know how subjects would deal with choices that had been manipulated—that is, whether subjects would “notice mismatches between their intended choice and the outcome they are presented with.” Would subjects recognize that something was off? If they failed to notice the manipulation, would they offer justifications for choices they had not even made? The assumption is that subjects who fail to notice the mismatches must not really understand the reasons for their choices or “the internal processes leading to a moral or political judgment.”

  The results revealed a conspicuous “introspective blindness to the internal processes leading to a moral or political judgment.” People didn’t seem to understand why they had made the decisions they’d made (or had not made), though some exhibited what the researchers call “unconscious detection of self‐​deception“—these subjects were unable to detect the manipulations of their answers, but they did register lower confidence in the manipulated choices, which the authors suggest points to “the existence of a neural mechanism unconsciously monitoring our own thoughts.”

  

  Once one has chosen and joined a team, she has very little control over her own thoughts. When they are introduced, new data are distorted, misinterpreted, or discarded based on their consistency with what we may describe as a program running in the background: partisanship leads the team member into a cognitive position of unconscious self‐​deception. Few of us, if fully understanding this phenomenon, would choose it for themselves—at least that’s the hope of many who study this area. As the authors observe, “reflecting on our beliefs may help to develop free societies.” They suggest that if citizens better understood the brain mechanics of the cognitive impairment and self‐​deception brought on by partisanship, they’d be positioned to make better decisions. Research has shown that “reflecting on how we make decisions leads to better decisions.”

  Similar research on self‐​deception in politics has also confirmed the presence of the Dunning‐​Kruger effect (to summarize, people think they know a lot more than they actually do). Further, the effect is exaggerated within the context of politics, with low‐​knowledge participants describing themselves as even more knowledgeable than usual once partisanship is made a conspicuous factor. Vitor Geraldi Haase and Isabella Starling‐​Alves posit that the kind of self‐​deception that is such “a major characteristic of political partisanship…probably evolved as an evolutionary adaptive strategy to deal with the intragroup‐​extragroup dynamics of human evolution.” Objective truth, meaning roughly an accurate model of reality, is not important, at least not anywhere near as important, as conformity and indeed submission, which we may associate with social reality.

  Whatever its flaws, evolutionary psychology offers us several promising leads on the question of just why the brain isn’t able to perform on partisanship. This notion of social reality is an important clue. At this juncture, it is important to underline the fact that when we speak of partisanship, we are not speaking of ideology; the relationship between partisan identification and political ideology is complicated, the connection between the two not particularly strong. Ideologues tend to think systematically, and the philosophical contents of their beliefs are deeply important to them. What is important to the partisan is not what she believes, but that she aligns her beliefs with those of her team or in-group—or else, as may be the case, that she is loyal to and supportive of the party group despite any real or perceived ideological nonconcurrences.

  Americans tend to vastly overestimate the differences in political ideology and policy preferences between Democrats and Republicans. In fact, most Americans are not at all ideological, can’t describe ideologies accurately (as their proponents would describe them), and have almost no information on either the history of ideas or the empirical evidence that bears on particular political or policy questions. Interestingly, partisanship doesn’t necessarily seem to be about politics in the normative or philosophical sense, as “people place party loyalty over policy, and even over truth.” There are actually relatively weak correlations between partisan identity and concrete policy preferences. “[P]artisan affect is inconsistently (and perhaps artifactually) founded in policy attitudes.”

  Indeed, strong partisanship is necessarily an impediment to ideological thinking insofar as ideology is predicated on an integrated and consistent approach to policy questions, as against the blind, team‐​rooting approach associated in the literature with partisanship. Ideological people, whatever their flaws, hold political actors and government bodies to account. Partisans change positions readily and shamelessly, depending on anything from who is living in the White House, to the vagaries of party leaders, to what is perceived as popular at the moment. Further, individual Americans’ political opinions are remarkably unstable over time, vacillating between glaring contradictions, relying on a confused amalgam of elite opinions. Partisanship as we know it rather seems to be a holdover from humankind’s history of tribal loyalty, with “selective pressures hav[ing] sculpted human minds to be tribal.” That is, evolution selected for just the kinds of cognitive biases we find in partisans on both sides today (importantly, neither “team” is immune).

  A recent paper published by the American Psychological Association suggests that from a cognitive and psychoneurological standpoint, partisans of the left and right are much more like each other than they are like nonpartisans. As study co‐​author Leor Zmigrod writes, “Regardless of the direction and content of their political beliefs, extreme partisans had a similar cognitive profile.” Specifically, partisans of all stripes show lower levels of cognitive flexibility; importantly, even when processing information that has no political character, they are more dogmatic, less adaptable, and less able to complete tasks that require an “ability to adapt to novel or changing environments and a capacity to switch between modes of thinking.”

  Partisanship quite literally makes one dumb—or is it that dumb people are just more likely to be committed partisans? Zmigrod is careful to point out that the study can’t give us the answer to that question, that we would need longitudinal studies in order to better understand the causal direction and causal phenomena at play. As soon as partisanship is introduced, as soon as a question mentions a politician or political party, subjects are unable to accurately assess basic facts. Indeed, remarkably, tinging a question with a political shade renders many subjects unable to answer a simple question even when they are given the answer. Relatedly, studies have shown that one’s political affiliations even affect her ability to perform basic math: given an operation that yields a statistic contradicting a subject’s partisan view, the subject will tend to question the result rather than updating based on the evidence or attempting to reconcile the new information with her politics.

  In a groundbreaking study published last summer, a team of researchers led by the University of Exeter’s Darren Schreiber attempted to address the lack of brain imaging research specifically aimed at better understanding nonpartisans, a group that has been neglected as almost all such research has focused on the differences between the brains of partisans of the left and right. The study found that nonpartisans’ brains are different from those of their brainwashed brethren, particularly in “regions that are typically involved in social cognition.“

  It may be that the next stage in human evolution will involve rewiring our brains to accept the fact that current groups are artificially and arbitrarily defined—that all human beings are one people. For just as there is harmful, toxic tribalism, there is also socially beneficial, cooperative, cosmopolitanism. As social policy expert Elizabeth A. Segal writes, “Ultimately our goal should be to build the tribe we all belong to: that of humanity.” Libertarians take this lesson quite seriously, for we tend to see ourselves as part of a common global community of connected individuals who are perfectly capable of dealing with one another through peaceful and mutually‐​beneficial interactions. We celebrate social, cultural, religious, and linguistic differences as the spice of life rather than see them as dividing lines or impediments to willing collaboration. If we can understand and think clearly through partisanship, we can begin to build a freer world based not on arbitrary divisions and compromised reasoning, but on mutual respect and renewed emphasis on rigorous critical thinking.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 03/13/2021 – 17:30

• Border Crisis Explodes: Texas Child Migrant Facility At 700% Capacity As ICE Begs For Volunteers; White House Denies Lawyers Access
  Border Crisis Explodes: Texas Child Migrant Facility At 700% Capacity As ICE Begs For Volunteers; White House Denies Lawyers Access

  A flood of child migrants filling Texas immigration facilities has turned into a full-blown crisis in the seven weeks since President Biden took office – a stark contrast to the Trump administration, which required that migrants wait in Mexico while the United States processed asylum requests, as opposed to Biden’s policy of letting everyone in and simply trusting migrants to show up for their hearings.

  

  In recent days, over 3,500 unaccompanied minors have been held in Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) detention centers designed for adults – while Biden officials privately warned on Friday that the administration can’t handle the influx of children, according to the Daily Mail. So far this year, apprehensions are on track to eclipse the last decade of migrant detentions, even with a notable spike in 2019.

  So far in March, more than 4,200 people are arriving into America across the border per day, which if sustained would rival the 132,856 apprehensions recorded in May 2019 – which was the most in 13 years.  

  The surge is leading to overcrowded conditions as the CBP centers – built for adult men – and the HHS shelters do not have space for the mounting numbers. –Daily Mail.

  

  At one Border Patrol facility alone, hundreds of illegal child migrants have been crammed into packed conditions – with some sleeping on the floor because there aren’t just enough beds, they’re run out of mats, according to the Associated Press, citing nonprofit lawyers who interviewed over a dozen children at a Donna, Texas holding complex. Some of the children told attorneys that they’ve been there for a week or more in direct violation of the agency’s three-day limit for detaining child migrants. Over 130 children have been held in CBP facilities for more than 10 days, while many say they haven’t been allowed to phone their parents or other relatives who may be wondering where they are.

  

  Despite concerns about the coronavirus, the children are kept so closely together that they can touch the person next to them, the lawyers said. Some have to wait five days or more to shower, and there isn’t always soap available, just shampoo, according to the lawyers.

  President Joe Biden’s administration denied the lawyers access to the tent facility. During the administration of former President Donald Trump, attorney visits to Border Patrol stations revealed severe problems, including dozens of children held at one rural station without adequate food, water, or soap. –AP

  “It is pretty surprising that the administration talks about the importance of transparency and then won’t let the attorneys for children set eyes on where they’re staying,” said attorney Leecia Welch of the National Center for Youth Law, adding “I find that very disappointing.”

  According to the report, more children are waiting longer in Border Patrol ‘cages’ (and tents) because long-term facilities operated by the US Health and Human Services department have become quickly filled to capacity as hundreds of children are apprehended daily at far higher rates than they are being released to parents or sponsors. It takes an average of 37 days to release a child from HHS custody.

  Meanwhile, ICE has been asking for volunteers to send to the US-Mexico border ‘as soon as this weekend’ to help out at the Donna, Texas facility – which is 729% over capacity, according to CBS News.

  And it’s not just Texas:

  The tip of the iceberg near Yuma, AZ as immigrants begin to flood into the US responding to @JoeBiden’s open border, catch and release policy. How many have COVID? pic.twitter.com/8Cu3k88etZ

  — Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) March 7, 2021

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

  “This situation mandates immediate action to protect the life and safety of federal personnel and the aliens in custody,” said ICE acting assist director for field operations, Michael Meade, in an email obtained by the Washington Post.

  “Start and end dates are TBD, but could begin as soon as this weekend at location along the SWB [southwest border], most likely Texas,” he continued. “It is anticipated that the enforcement actions will continue to grow over the coming months.”

  On March 2, the Donna complex was holding more than 1,800 people — 729% of its pandemic-era capacity, which is designed for 250 migrants, according to an internal CBP document reviewed by CBS News.

  Most of the minors said they had only showered once while in U.S. custody, even though they’d been held for more than five days, according to Desai. Some said they had showered twice.

  “They all said they wanted to shower more and were told they couldn’t,” Desai said. -CBS News

  Democrats, meanwhile, are scrambling to defend Biden’s handling of the migrant surge (which he created).

  “It will be nothing like what we saw in the Trump administration of babies being snatched from the arms of their parents,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) during a Thursday press briefing. “I trust the Biden administration’s policy to be based on humanitarian[ism] and love of children rather than political points or red meat for their Republican base.”

  Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-CA) – vice chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, says party leaders are keeping a watchful eye on the administration to ensure guidelines – which are not being followed – are followed.

  “There is a process for this. The Biden administration will move toward that process, and we will hold them accountable, just like we did the prior administration, to ensure that they’re following the law,” said Aguilar – before giving Biden a huge pass. “But this is a process that is rooted in compassion. And that’s the difference between the prior administration and this administration.”

  House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) disagrees.

  “Biden has created a crisis on the border that he won’t admit; 100,000 illegal immigrants were encountered just last month. Put that in perspective. That is larger than the hometown of Scranton, Pa., of our President Biden, and now it’s only growing month after month,” he said, adding that Biden “tears the wall down at the border, but he put one around the Capitol.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 03/13/2021 – 17:00

• Fact vs. Fiction: Understatement Of Housing Inflation Exceeds "Bubble" Levels
  Fact vs. Fiction: Understatement Of Housing Inflation Exceeds “Bubble” Levels

  Submitted by Joseph Carson, former chief economist of AllianceBernstein

  The understatement of housing inflation in the consumer price index has reached a new milestone. As reported, the gap between the actual change in house prices and owners’ rent, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), exceeds the “bubble” levels.

  In February, BLS reported owner’s rent increased 2% over the last 12 months. House price inflation, as reported by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), increased 11.4%. That gap over 900 basis points exceeds the 800 basis point gap recorded during the housing bubble peak.

  The consumer price index was created and designed to measure prices paid for purchases of specific goods and services by consumers. The CPI was often referred to as a buyers’ index since it only measured prices “paid” by consumers.

  The CPI has lost that designation. It is no longer measures actual prices. For the past two decades, BLS imputes the owners’ rent series, using data from the rental market, no longer using price data from the larger single-family market.

  Imputing prices for the cost of housing services make the CPI a hybrid index or a cross between a price index and a cost of living index. A hybrid index is not appropriate as a gauge to ascertain price stability, especially when the hypothetical measure of owner’s rent accounts for 30% of the core CPI.

  

  The CPI missed the price “bubble” of the mid-2000s, and the economic and financial fallout was historic. History sometimes repeats itself in economics and finance. Policymakers forewarned.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 03/13/2021 – 16:30

• One Year On: Visualizing Key Events In The COVID-19 Timeline
  One Year On: Visualizing Key Events In The COVID-19 Timeline

  It’s been a long and eventful year since COVID-19 was officially declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020.

  The tangible and intangible costs of COVID-19 have been severe. In this visual COVID-19 timeline, Visual Capitalist’s Iman Ghosh delves into some significant milestones that have occurred around the world.

  

  December 2019-February 2020 – Pre-Pandemic COVID-19 Timeline

  The origin story actually begins at the turn of the new year, as events began bubbling under the surface in Wuhan, China. The first coronavirus cluster was reported on December 31, 2019, with initial exposures linked to the Huanan Seafood Market.

  In the new year, the first coronavirus cases began filtering outside of China, to Thailand and the U.S.—causing the WHO to declare a public health emergency of international concern. As the death toll ticked up to over 200, it was clear that this was no ordinary virus.

  

  All dates in the graphic are based on when events occurred rather than when they were widely reported.

  In February 2020, the novel coronavirus was finally named COVID-19. In addition, the Diamond Princess cruise ship was linked to 624 confirmed cases in late February—the highest case cluster outside of China at the time. The ship captured international headlines when it was refused port in a number of countries, casting COVID-19 into the spotlight.

  This month also marked a significant turning point. Dr. Li Wenliang, a Chinese doctor, had tried to draw global attention to the severity of China’s outbreak before he passed of COVID-19 on February 7, 2020.

  “If the officials had disclosed information about the epidemic earlier I think it would have been a lot better […] There should be more openness and transparency.”

  – Dr. Li, in a NYT interview a few days before his passing

  Italy and Iran then grew significantly as global hotspots of COVID-19. The U.S. reported its first death due to COVID-19—however, it was only discovered in April that there were in fact two prior deaths due to the virus in the country.

  On March 11, 2020, WHO made a critical decision. As the virus began to transcend borders and claim thousands of lives, it announced that the COVID-19 outbreak had officially become a deadly global pandemic.

  In the year that followed, the virus was relentless in spreading around the world. How have cumulative case counts and death tolls evolved since the beginning?

  

  Let’s explore key events in the COVID-19 timeline that took place over the course of the past year.

  365 Days of the Pandemic

  The initial impacts of the pandemic were felt swiftly, and progressively became worse. Within the first three months, the world paid a high human and economic toll.

  March-May 2020 – Whiplash for the World

  Following the WHO announcement, numerous sporting events were cancelled, from the NBA and NHL 2019-2020 seasons to the UEFA Euro men’s soccer championship. Even the Tokyo Summer Olympics were postponed for a year.

  In late March 2020, the U.S. surpassed China to become the hardest-hit country by COVID-19. In terms of overall case numbers, it remains the global epicenter of the pandemic today, followed by India and Brazil.

  The stock market took a severe hit, with a crash rivaling other recessions and significant financial crises. For example, here’s how the Dow Jones Index Average dropped in March alone:

  

  Stock markets re-entered a bull market in April, but the damage had already been done. The S&P 500, for example, would only return to pre-pandemic levels in August.

  The onset of the pandemic led to additional economic chaos. The price of oil flipped negative in April, and over 10 million Americans lost their jobs in the sudden downturn.

  To help prop up the economy, the U.S. unveiled the $2 trillion CARES Act, the largest economic stimulus package in history—near 10% of national gross domestic product.

  Multiple countries locked down their borders to the rest of the world, from the European Union to India. These travel bans and reduced mobility affected not just airline revenues, but temporarily had a noticeable effect on carbon emissions too.

  In addition, two world leaders—UK’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Russia’s President Mikhail Mishustin—contracted COVID-19.

  June-November 2020 – A Deadly Surge

  Numbers kept rising over the next six months, following the shifting geography of COVID-19 into densely populated regions such as Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. In a controversial move, Brazil stopped making its COVID-19 case data public starting June 7, 2020.

  Global deaths due to COVID-19 surpassed half a million at the end of June—and jumped to over 1 million by the end of September. Another heartbreaking record was set in mid-October when global cases leapt up by 1 million in just three days.

  Former U.S. President Donald Trump, Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, and Poland’s President Andrzej Duda were among many more world leaders to test positive for COVID-19.

  December 2020-March 2021 – Vaccines Bring Hope

  At the very end of 2020, some optimism for things going back to normal was restored when Moderna announced the very first vaccine candidate, followed by Pfizer/BioNTech.

  However, more alarm was raised as reports of a faster-spreading, more infectious strain of COVID-19 emerged from the UK. Two more variants have also since been discovered:

  

  *Note: P.1 was first detected in Japan but traced back to Brazil

  In January 2021, WHO organized an international scientific consultation around these variants. The good news? Existing and emerging vaccines will still potentially provide adequate protection against these variants.

  In March 2021, the U.S. Congress approved President Biden’s $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill. Some details of the money breakdown include:

  • Up to $1,400-per-person stimulus payments for 90% of households
  • $350 billion in state and local aid
  • $8.5 billion to rural hospitals and healthcare providers

  The rest is expected to go towards safely reopening K-12 schools, assisting hard-hit small businesses, extending food stamp benefits, vaccine R&D and distribution, and more.

  An End in Sight for the COVID-19 Timeline?

  With the global vaccine rollout now underway, many more key vaccine producers, from AstraZeneca/Oxford University to Johnson & Johnson, have joined in the fight to return life to normal.

  Although there have been deep losses due to COVID-19, many hope that we’ll learn from the lessons of this past year, and emerge stronger than ever.

  “We have come so far, we have suffered so much and we have lost so many. We cannot, we must not squander the progress we have made… Science, solutions and solidarity remain our guide. There are no short-cuts.”

  – Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of WHO

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 03/13/2021 – 16:00

• China Splurges On Iranian Oil Despite US Sanctions
  China Splurges On Iranian Oil Despite US Sanctions

  Authored Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

  Despite the U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil exports, some Chinese refiners are buying so much Iranian crude that the ports in the Shandong province, where most independent refiners are based, are experiencing tanker traffic congestions, analysts and traders have told Bloomberg.

  

  China has never actually stopped buying crude oil from the Islamic Republic, even after the Trump Administration slapped sanctions on Iran’s oil sales in 2018, warning buyers to stay away from Iranian crude and risk being sanctioned and cut off from the U.S. banking system.

  Various reports, media investigations, and tanker-tracking firms suggest that China has been receiving much more oil from Iran than the official figures report, when they report imports from Iran.

  The Islamic Republic has been using ship-to-ship transfers with transponders turned off to avoid detection, skirting U.S. sanctions.

  Some Chinese refiners are now taking advantage of the heavily discounted Iranian crude amid surging benchmark oil prices. Those buyers in China who import oil from Iran are reportedly buying the crude at a discount of $3 to $5 per barrel off the Brent Crude benchmark, according to Bloomberg.

  In addition, oil demand in China is back to pre-crisis levels, and some refiners prefer lower-priced crude when Brent is nearing the $70 per barrel threshold.

  China’s imports of crude oil from Iran in March are expected to more than double from February and reach around 856,000 barrels per day (bpd), which would be the highest estimated volume of Chinese imports of Iran’s oil in nearly two years, Kevin Wright, a Singapore-based analyst at Kpler, told Bloomberg. The estimated import level this month includes the oil that Iran is said to have transferred from ship to ship at some point along the route to hide the fact that the origin of the crude was actually Iran.

  

  As a result of the higher imports from Iran, tankers are estimated to have waited for days at Shandong ports, analysts told Bloomberg.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 03/13/2021 – 15:30

• "It's Never Different This Time" – Creator Of Bond Volatility Gauge Warns Selloff Isn't Over
  “It’s Never Different This Time” – Creator Of Bond Volatility Gauge Warns Selloff Isn’t Over

  Ever since the 10-year yield eclipsed 1.25% last month, the market has been eying the steady ascent in yields with trepidation. Last week, the selloff in Treasuries finally forced Jerome Powell to acknowledge the growing inflationary pressures facing the US economy. 

  Although tech stocks and the Nasdaq rallied back on Tuesday following a reflation-inspired rotation into ‘real economy’ stocks, many investors are bracing for bonds and stocks to continue to move lower in tandem. With volatility in equities and fixed income on the rise, RealVision invited the Convexity Maven himself, Harley Bassman, the creator of the MOVE index (a volatility gauge for bonds similar to the equity-focused VIX), to discuss Bassman’s outlook for rates and markets. Unsurprisingly, he sees more volatility, and higher convexity, ahead.

  During the interview, which was conducted by Logica Capital Advisors portfolio manager and chief strategist Mike Green, Bassman explained why he feels interest rates will continue their recent trend higher as markets move recover from Fed-induced mispricing.

  MIKE GREEN: Mike Green. As usual, coming from Marin County these days. Incredibly excited to have my good friend Harley Bassman back on Real Vision for– it’s been forever since you and I have had a chance to talk. Basically, the last time we talked was probably in the EQ Derivatives Conference in 2018, 2019? It’s been a long time.

  Let’s talk interest rates. You are known as Mr. Convexity, you are the inventor of the MOVE index, the equivalent of the VIX for the fixed income space. In an environment in which chaos and drama dominate the interest rates space, there’s nobody that I’d rather talk to than Harley Bassman. Harley, what the hell is going on with interest rates?

  HARLEY BASSMAN: Well, that’s a good question. I would say that this notion that rates are exploding higher and bad things are happening, it’s not quite the case. I would say that when 10-years were at 0.75, that was the wrong price. All we’re doing now is going to the right price as opposed to where we were before, which is the wrong price. I would push back at you. We’ve seen a significant curve steepening. I’m quite certain we’re going to talk about that today quite a bit.

  To illustrate this mis-pricing in rates, Bassman pointed to the historical relationship between the fed funds rate and a popular gauge of inflation expectations five years out. 

  

  Looking back to the period before the pandemic, Bassman and Green mused about the brief yield curve inversions that surfaced in 2019, and the fact that, as it would happen, the coronavirus-inspired recession came about less than one year later. Many economists dismissed these kinks in the yield curve as temporary phenomena, arguing that the predictive power of the yield curve only applies when inversions persist for weeks or a month or longer.

  The big question, as Bassman put it: does the coronavirus-inspired global recession validate the predictive powers of the yield curve? Bassman believes the answer is yes.

  MIKE GREEN: Now, this required you to develop a virus from bats and release it into China and then release it to the United States, but you managed to get the recession.

  HARLEY BASSMAN: Well, what I want to ask you is, do you think this counts? I’ll go first. I say it does. Because I say whenever you get some event, especially a recession, that it’s always a surprise. By definition, a surprise is unknown. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a surprise. Therefore, since the warning came, we could not predict what it would be, but we did get it. You’re saying that a bad virus doesn’t count. Well, I would say maybe a housing crisis doesn’t count from the last recession we had. Does this count, Mike?

  Green agreed with Bassman, adding that slowing home and auto sales in the runup to the pandemic suggested that a recession was likely in the offing anyway. But was last year’s economic chaos enough to “cleanse” this dynamic? Or did the Fed only succeed in delaying the inevitable?

  Following a brief discussion of convexity hedging and the Fed’s impact on the mortgage-bond market, Green and Bassman turned their attention to the outlook for Fed policy, and whether the central bank will move to cap long-term rates via yield curve control to try and prevent any harmful market ructions. In the coming months and years, Bassman believes the Fed will strive to keep front-end rates anchored as promised, while allowing long-term rates to move higher, alleviating the stress on the banking system, pension funds and other savers.

  [HARLEY BASSMAN]…Certainly, volatility reduction has been a specific policy that they’ve been using. I actually think that they’re not going to do yield curve control the back end. My feeling is they’re going to hold the front end, overnight rate stays where it is, as promised, the next two years no matter the inflation number, maybe they hold 2s, maybe 5s. I think they’ll let 10s and 30s go, or at least move up. That’s not a bad thing. The government can move their funding to the front end, and the Fed could absorb it through either money printing, and we could discuss whether it’s money printing or not, what I think.

  The back end going up is public policy good. A steeper curve helps the baking system. For good or for ill, we no longer do barter. We don’t use gold. We are a financial economy, and we’re highly levered. The banking system, maybe there’s bad guys in there and certainly there were villains 10 years ago who should have gone to jail, and didn’t, but the banking system is the plumbing of our financial economy, and we need to maintain it. Therefore steeper curve helps that plumbing system, so the government can do it. The Fed and fiscal policy can be more efficient.

  Having a good plumbing system is good. Number two is taking the whole curve down has not been at zero cost. You’ve taken money from the lenders and given them to the borrowers. Is that a good thing? No, you’ve done a few shows on pension fund instability. If we take the back end up, that helps pension funds, that helps insurance companies. That’s a public policy good. Steepen the curve out, I’m not saying rates going from zero on the front end to 10 on the back but putting the back end at three, four or five is not a disaster, I don’t think, for the overall macro economy.

  A quick look at what forward rates are doing clearly shows that, at this point, Fed tightening is already being built into the system.

  

  But does that mean the Fed will be raising the Fed funds rate two years from now? No – in fact, Bassman believes the smarter policy would be to taper first. This would allow the curve to steepen while still keeping front-end rates anchored, which is a “better way to bring the world into line, rather than taking the front end up”, Bassman said.

  As the conversation moved toward an analysis of the risks introduced by the Fed’s policy of “financial repression” – as Green termed it – the two men came to their first disagreement of the evening: whether the inevitable inflationary fallout from the Fed’s policy decisions would be “worth it.” As Bassman acknowledged that his mantra is “it’s never different this time” – a sign he has no illusions about where all of this is headed.

  HARLEY BASSMAN: Circling back to our first two sentences here, it’s never different this time. That’s my mantra. It’s never different this time. I can’t explain why or how but I just do not think that we’ve reinvented human tragedy. Hubris, greed, ego. We wrote about it, the Greeks wrote about it, Shakespeare wrote about it. It just hasn’t changed, and it’s this idea that we’ve invented a new paradigm I just don’t believe it. It’s a different song, but it’s still music and I think that we’ll find some way to go and cause trouble, which is why I believe in inflation ultimately.

  Is it next year? No. Is it in 20 years? I don’t know. What I do think, it’s going to happen in two to four years when the demographic bubble rolls over. We could do that later on. I think we’re going to get it because I don’t think you could print the coin of the realm at a faster pace than the overall growth of the economy without inflation at some point. Now, could it take 20 years? Why not? It took 400 years for the Roman Empire collapsed, so in the grand scheme of things, maybe not.

  This policy of money printing is not going to end well. That doesn’t mean it was a bad public policy, by the way, because having the economy totally collapse either in 2009 or last year is certainly a bad idea, so maybe deferring the pain or spreading the pain out. I think that inflation is the ultimate solution. Because inflation is a beautiful tax. It taxes, everybody. It taxes them silently, and the politicians dumped a vote on it. As a tax, everyone — well, I wasn’t happy, but it’s the easiest one to live with in a democracy.

  While that’s certainly one way to look at it, some listeners were put off by Bassman’s take.

  I wanted to like this.

  Good thing I wasn’t driving when Mr. Bassman completely lost me with these paragraphs.

  Rather than attempt to address problems before they’re hopeless, it’s all gonna blow up someday, so let’s get richer now!

  I hate this.https://t.co/15Fpukhk4K pic.twitter.com/jzqWTFbkzI

  — Rudy Havenstein, more inclusive. (@RudyHavenstein) March 8, 2021

  At any rate, readers can read the transcript of the interview below, and decide for themselves. Anybody interested in watching or listening to the interview will need to subscribe.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 03/13/2021 – 15:00

• Fentanyl Flowing Into United States At Record Volume
  Fentanyl Flowing Into United States At Record Volume

  Authored by Charlotte Cuthbertson via The Epoch Times,

  The amount of fentanyl seized while coming through the southern border during the first 5 months of fiscal year 2021 is already higher than all of fiscal year 2020, according to the latest statistics from Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

  

  CBP has seized more than 5,000 pounds of fentanyl since Oct. 1, 2020, said acting CBP Commissioner Troy Miller during a March 10 media call.

  “We are seeing a dramatic increase in fentanyl seizures this fiscal year, more than 360 percent higher than this time last year,” Miller said.

  “Nationwide drug seizures increased 50 percent in February from January. Cocaine interceptions increased 13 percent, seizures of methamphetamine increased 40 percent, seizures of heroin went up 48 percent.”

  Fentanyl is the synthetic opioid attributed to the escalating overdose death rate in the United States. It is most often manufactured in Mexico using chemicals supplied by China. It’s mixed with other narcotics to increase potency as well as pressed into counterfeit pain pills commonly known as “Mexican oxys.”

  “The cartels are dominating the distribution of this poison and it’s really, really alarming,” Derek Maltz, former head of the DEA’s special operations division, told The Epoch Times.

  “I do anticipate the crisis continuing on this escalating path. And to be honest with you, it’s really sad, because I’ve been communicating with a lot of parents who have lost their young kids, especially to the counterfeit pills. And it’s all coming from Mexico.”

  

  Overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids (other than methadone) between 2005 and 2018. (DEA 2021 report)

  The Rio Grande City Border Patrol station takes care of a 68-mile strip of international border in south Texas. It sits within the Rio Grande Valley Sector and in 2019 was the busiest of the nation’s 135 stations for drug seizures and the second busiest for illegal alien apprehensions.

  Then-deputy chief Border Patrol agent for the Rio Grande Valley sector Raul Ortiz, said in March 2019 “we’re not even probably catching about 10 percent of it [drugs].”

  Border experts have said it’s likely Border Patrol drug seizures will decrease as illegal immigration surges—agents will be tied up with large groups of people rather than interdicting drugs. Border Patrol highway checkpoints are also closing in many areas as agents are sent to the border to help with processing the increased numbers.

  The Biden administration has said there’s no crisis on the border and urges potential migrants not to come in illegally. But the latest illegal crossing numbers show that February hit a 14-month high with more than 100,000 Border Patrol apprehensions.

  Mexico’s president has expressed concern that President Joe Biden’s policies are encouraging illegal immigration and human trafficking along the border with the United States.

  “They see him as the migrant president, and so many feel they’re going to reach the United States,” Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said of Biden the morning after a virtual meeting with his U.S. counterpart on March 1, according to Reuters.

  Maltz said, “perception is reality. People around the world look at Biden as a softie on immigration.”

  “The open border is a disaster. It just increases the [cartels’] ability to move drugs freely into America,” he said.

  “Also, most importantly, it allows them to get their command and control operatives in the [United States] to establish the stash houses, the distribution outlets, the money collection points, so they have lots of people in America who are able to operate freely around the country.”

  

  Areas of influence of major Mexican cartel within the United States. (DEA report 2021)

  The cartels control the south side of the U.S.–Mexico border and anyone who crosses illegally has to pay them. Many can’t afford the smuggling fees and become indentured to the cartels once they reach the United States. Others realize it’s more lucrative to become involved in transnational crime rather than get a job at a fast food restaurant, for example, Maltz said.

  “This didn’t start under Donald Trump. It didn’t start under Barack Obama. It didn’t start under George Bush. This drug crisis has been escalating for years,” he said.

  “But they’re doing it at levels that we’ve never seen in the history of the country.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 03/13/2021 – 14:30

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