- Escobar On Battleground Beirut: Western Colony Or Back To The East?
Escobar On Battleground Beirut: Western Colony Or Back To The East?
Tyler Durden
Sat, 08/15/2020 – 00:00Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,
Post-blast Lebanon has everything to gain from rejecting the West’s neoliberal demands and embracing China’s Belt and Road…
As much as Covid-19 has been instrumentalized by the 0.001% to social engineer a Great Reset, the Beirut tragedy is already being instrumentalized by the usual suspects to keep Lebanon enslaved.
Facing oh so timely color revolution-style “protests”, the current Lebanese government led by Prime Minister Diab has already resigned. Even before the port tragedy, Beirut had requested a $10 billion line of credit from the IMF – denied as long as trademark, neoliberal Washington consensus “reforms” were not implemented: radical slashing of public expenses, mass layoffs, across the board privatization.
Post-tragedy, President Emmanuel Macron – who’s not even capable of establishing a dialogue with the Gilets Jaunes/Yellow Vests in France – has opportunistically jumped in full neocolonial mode to pose as “savior” of Lebanon, as long as the same “reforms”, of course, are implemented.
On Sunday, France and the UN organized a videoconference to coordinate donor response – in conjunction with the European Commission (EC), the IMF and the World Bank. The result was not exactly brilliant: a paltry 252 million euros were pledged – once again conditioned by “institutional reforms”.
France came up with 30 million euros, Kuwait with 40 million, Qatar with 50 million and the EC with 68 million. Crucially, neither Russia nor Iran were among the donors. The US – which is harshly sanctioning Lebanon – and GCC allies Saudi Arabia and UAE pledged nothing. China had just a pro forma presence.
In parallel, Maronite Christians in Brazil – a very powerful community – are sending funds for the color revolution protests. Former President Michel Temer and industrialist tycoon Paulo Skaf even flew to Beirut. Former Lebanese President Amin Gemayel (1982-1988) maintained a lot of businesses in Brazil with funds he skimmed when in power.
All of the above points to neoliberalism taking no prisoners when it comes to keeping its deadly grip on Lebanon.
The Hariri model
Lebanon’s profound economic crisis, now aggravated by the Beirut port blast, has nothing to do with Covid-19 or the US proxy war on Syria – which brought a million refugees to the nation. It’s all about proverbial neoliberal shock and awe, conducted non-stop by the Hariri clan: former Prime Ministers Rafiq, assassinated in 2011, and Saad, chased out of power last January.
The Hariri model was focused on real estate speculation and financialization. The Solidere group, controlled by Arab investors and a few Lebanese, Hariri included, destroyed Beirut’s historical downtown and rebuilt it with luxury real estate. That’s the classical rentier neoliberalism model that always profits a tiny elite.
In parallel, the Bank of Lebanon was attracting funds from the tony Lebanese diaspora and assorted Arab investors by practicing very generous interest rates. Lebanon suddenly had an artificially strong currency.
A small middle class sort of flourished throughout the 2000s, comprising import-export traders, the tourism sector and financial market operators. Yet, overall, inequality was the name of the game. According to the World Inequality Database, half of Lebanon’s population now holds less wealth that the top 0.1%.
The bubble finally burst in September last year, when I happened to be in Beirut. With no US dollars in circulation, the Lebanese pound started to collapse in the black market. The Bank of Lebanon went berserk. When the Hariri racket imposed a “Whatsapp tax” over calls, that led to massive protests in October. Capital embarked on free flight and the currency collapsed for good.
There’s absolutely no evidence the IMF, the World Bank and assorted Western/Arab “donors” will extricate a now devastated Lebanon from the neoliberal logic that plunged it into a systemic crisis in the first place.
The way out would be to focus in productive investments, away from finance and geared towards the practical necessities of an austerity-battered and completely impoverished population.
Yet Macron, the IMF and their “partners” are only interested in keeping monetary “stability”; seduce speculative foreign capital; make sure that the rapacious, Western-connected Lebanese oligarchy will get away with murder; and on top of it buy scores of Lebanese assets for peanuts.
BRI or bust
In stark contrast with the exploitative perpetuation of the Western neoliberal model, China is offering Lebanon the chance to Go East, and be part of the New Silk Roads.
In 2017, Lebanon signed to join the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
In 2018, Lebanon became the 87th member of the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).
Over the past few years, Lebanon was already taking part in the internationalization of the yuan, offering bank accounts in yuan and increasing bilateral trade in yuan.
Beijing was already engaged in discussions revolving around the upgrading of Lebanese infrastructure – including the expansion of Beirut harbor.
This means that now Beijing may be in the position of offering a renewed, joint rebuilding/security deal for Beirut port – just as it was about to clinch a smaller agreement with Diab’s government, focused only on expansion and renovation.
The bottom line is that China has an actual Plan A to extricate Lebanon from its current financial dead end.
And that’s exactly what was, and remains, total anathema to US, NATO and Israel’s interests.
The Trump administration recently went no holds barred to prevent Israel from having China develop the port of Haifa.
The same “offer you can’t refuse” tactics will be applied with full force on whoever leads the new Lebanese government.
Beirut is an absolutely key node in BRI’s geopolitical/geoeconomic connectivity of the Eastern Mediterranean. With Haifa temporarily out of the picture, Beirut grows in importance as a gateway to the EU, complementing the role of Pireus and Italian ports in the Adriatic.
It’s crucial to note that the port itself was not destroyed. The enormous crater on site replaces only a section quayside – and the rest is on water. The buildings destroyed can be rebuilt in record time. Reconstruction of the port is estimated at $15 billion – pocket money for an experienced company such as China Harbor.
Meanwhile, naval traffic is being redirected to Tripoli port, 80 km north of Beirut and only 30 km away from the Lebanon-Syria border. Its director, Ahmed Tamer, confirms “the port has witnessed during the past years the expansion work by Chinese companies, and it has received the largest ships from China, carrying a big number of containers”.
Add to it the fact that Tripoli port will also be essential in the process of Syria reconstruction – to which China is totally committed.
BRI’s Southwest Asia connectivity network is a maze including Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.
China is already planning to invest in highway and railroads, further to be developed into high-speed rail. That will connect BRI’s central China-Iran corridor – fresh from the $400 billion, 25-year strategic partnership deal soon to be signed – with the Eastern Mediterranean.
Add to it the role of the port of Tartus in Syria – bearing a strong Russian naval presence. Beijing will inevitably invest in the expansion of Tartus – which is crucially linked by highway to Lebanon. The Russia-China strategic partnership will be involved in the protection of Tartus with S-300 and S-400 missile systems.
Historically, in a larger axis that went from Samarkand to Cordoba, with strong nodes such as Baghdad and Damascus, what slowly evolved in this part of Eurasia was a syncretic civilization superimposed over an ancestral regional, rural and nomad background. The internal cohesion of the Muslim world was forged from the 7th century to the 11th century: that was the key factor that shaped the lineaments of a coherent Eurasia.
Apart from Islam, Arabic – the language of religion, administration, trade and culture – was an essential unifying factor. This evolving Muslim world was configured as a vast economic and cultural domain whose roots connected to Greek, Semitic, Persian, Indian and Arab thought. It was a marvelous synthesis that formed a unique civilization out of elements of different origin – Persian, Mesopotamian, Byzantine.
The Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean were of course part of it, totally open towards the Indian Ocean, the Caspian routes, Central Asia and China.
Now, centuries later, Lebanon should have everything to gain by ditching the “Paris of the Orient” mythology and looking East – again, thus positioning itself on the right side of History.
- From Bean To Brew: Visualizing The Coffee Supply Chain
From Bean To Brew: Visualizing The Coffee Supply Chain
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/14/2020 – 23:40What Does The Coffee Supply Chain Look Like?
There’s a good chance your day started with a cappuccino, or a cold brew, and you aren’t alone. In fact, coffee is one of the most consumed drinks on the planet, and it’s also one of the most traded commodities.
According to the National Coffee Association, more than 150 million people drink coffee on a daily basis in the U.S. alone. Globally, consumption is estimated at over 2.25 billion cups per day.
But, as Visual Capitalist’s Omri Wallach points out, before it gets to your morning cup, coffee beans travel through a complex global supply chain. Today’s illustration from Dan Zettwoch breaks down this journey into 10 distinct steps.
Coffee From Plant to Factory
There are two types of tropical plants that produce coffee, both preferring high altitudes and with production primarily based in South America, Asia, and Africa.
-
Coffea arabica is the more plentiful bean, with a more complex flavor and less caffeine. It’s used in most specialty and “high quality” drinks as Arabica coffee.
-
Coffea canephora, meanwhile, has stronger and more bitter flavors. It’s also easier to grow, and is most frequently used in espressos and instant blends as Robusta coffee.
However, both types of beans undergo the same journey:
-
Growing
Plants take anywhere from 4-7 years to produce their first harvest, and grow fruit for around 25 years. -
Picking
The fruit of the coffea plant is the coffee berry, containing two beans within. Ripened berries are harvested either by hand or machine. -
Processing
Coffee berries are then processed either in a traditional “dry” method using the sun or “wet” method using water and machinery. This removes the outer fruit encasing the sought-after green beans. -
Milling
The green coffee beans are hulled, cleaned, sorted, and (optionally) graded.
From Factory to Transport
Once the coffee berry is stripped down to green beans, it’s shipped from producing countries through a global supply network.
Green coffee beans are exported and shipped around the world. In 2018 alone, 7.2 million tonnes of green coffee beans were exported, valued at $19.2 billion.
Arriving primarily in the U.S. and Europe, the beans are now prepared for consumption:
-
Roasting
Green beans are industrially roasted, becoming darker, oilier, and tasty. Different temperatures and heat duration impact the final color and flavor, with some preferring light roasts to dark roasts. -
Packaging
Any imperfect or somehow ruined beans are discarded, and the remaining roasted beans are packaged together by type. -
Shipping
Roasted beans are shipped both domestically and internationally. Bulk shipments go to retailers, coffee shops, and in some cases, direct to consumer.
Straight to Your Cup
Roasted coffee beans are almost ready for consumption, and by this stage the remaining steps can happen anywhere.
For example, many factories don’t ship roasted beans until they grind it themselves. Meanwhile, cafes will grind their own beans on-site before preparing drinks. The rapid growth of coffee chains made Starbucks the second-highest-earning U.S. fast food venue.
Regardless of where it happens, the final steps bring coffee straight to your cup:
-
Grinding
Roasted beans are ground up in order to better extract their flavors, either by machine or by hand. The preferred fineness depends on the darkness of the roast and the brewing method. -
Brewing
Water is added to the coffee grounds in a variety of methods. Some involve water being passed or pressured through the grounds (espresso, drip) while others mix the water and grounds (French press, Turkish coffee). -
Drinking
Liquid coffee is ready to be enjoyed! One average cup takes 70 roasted beans to make.
The world’s choice of caffeine pick-me-up is made possible by this structured and complex supply chain. Coffee isn’t just a drink, after all, it’s a business.
-
- The Evolution Of Fiat Money, Endless War, & The End Of Citizenship (Part 1)
The Evolution Of Fiat Money, Endless War, & The End Of Citizenship (Part 1)
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/14/2020 – 23:20Authored by ‘ICE-9’ via The Burning Platform blog,
Part one of a two-part series.
One topic missing from historians’ analysis of the West’s transition from a physical gold and silver based money system to a fiat money system is the defining events that facilitated and enabled this transition. One can find no detailed and critical political / historical assessment of this transition, and it would be not for lack of effort. The transition is always presented as if it is prima facie the refined and evolved state of things that warrants no investigation other than superficial praise followed with dogmatic platitudes. But has this transition away from the “barbarous relic” money system actually made mankind more refined and evolved, or has it instead plunged mankind into an even more heightened and efficient state of barbarism?
One encounters additional blank pages when searching for any attempt at correlating the evolution and spread of fiat money to the prevalence and severity of war. A collective learned silence descends when attempting to identify why it is, as money evolves, that war become more ideological, destructive, widespread, and prolonged. We are all familiar with the endless adulations describing the global spread of “democracy”, but why is it so many are unwilling converts and it became imperative to spread “democracy” via war and regime change? And closer to home, as our own nation “evolves” from a Constitutional Republic into pure “democracy”, how is it we as “citizens” feel more and more disenfranchised rather than empowered despite even greater doses of “democracy” at home?
This essay attempts to identify the defining events that facilitated and enabled the West’s transition to a fiat based money system, examines cause and effect between the evolution of money and the prevalence and severity of war, and binds together money evolution with the history of warfare by demonstrating cause and effect between money’s evolution, the rise and necessity of endless war, and the inevitable transition from “citizens” to subjects.
Physical Money, the Limits of War, and the Ancient World
For centuries following the Dorian Invasion, the Greek peninsula in the context of contemporaneous civilizations was of minor influence. Limited wars between city states, the rise and fall of tyrants within these city states, a Lawgiver here and there, and a steady outflow of residents to the Mediterranean and Black Sea colonies were the main stories for 600 years until a rich silver deposit was discovered in southern Attica. The wealth derived from these mines was initially distributed to the citizens and used for the great public building projects we see still standing today. The flow of silver was also used to not only hold the Persians at bay and confine them to Ionia – and thus preserve Western Civilization as we know it today – but to also purchase slaves to work the silver mines, purchase imported goods, produce manufactured wares for export, commission triremes to transport manufactured wares, and hire highly paid rowers to man the triremes. Trade and prosperity flourished and the Greek world rose quickly in the context of comparative global civilizations, all due to the abundant supply and liberal distribution of silver.
Then in 483 BC, soon after the discovery of a particularly rich silver deposit, the Athenian archon Themistocles convinced his fellow citizens to commission 200 triremes to fight the Persians and in 479 BC the Greek confederacy defeated Persia once and for all at the Battle of Plataea. Rid of the Persian menace, fresh off defeating the world’s most formidable military force, and armed with 200 triremes with nothing to do, that silver now went more and more into Athenian empire building throughout the Aegean. The cycle of conquest funded with silver was set – newly mined silver went into funding expeditions of conquest, tribute was extracted from the vanquished and flowed into Athens, and the combined silver from mined and tribute went to defending the city against jealous rivals and towards mounting even larger expeditions of conquest to extort even more tribute. That is, until the reliable source of silver from the mines began to run out.
Just as silver mining output went into decline, and the tribute became harder and more expensive to extract, in 415 BC the Athenians made the disastrous decision to invade Syracuse at an eventual loss of 10,000 hoplites, 30,000 oarsmen, and over 100 triremes. Thousands of captured Athenians held as prisoners of war were ransomed by the Syracusians at great expense to their families and effectively drained nearly all Attica’s surplus financial resources. Most poor Athenians, unable to raise a ransom, permanently lost heads of household to enslavement and death in the Syracusian quarries. Revolts from tribute paying vassals immediately followed and tribute dried up, and in 404 BC these accumulating losses saw Athenian empire and Aegean hegemony ceded to Sparta. Thus when the silver ran low, the empire was lost as limited resources were concentrated more and more on defending against Attica’s immediate neighbors. And that is the main point– when a nation in the ancient world could no longer fund wars of empire with physical money, it could no longer prosecute wars of empire and thus some form of peace attempted to descend. It is as if a law of economics was at work and in a sense, the exhaustion of silver supplies was ancient empire’s built-in self-destruct mechanism.
We also learn from ancient Attica between the victories over Persia, to the rise and loss of empire, to its eventual defeat by Philip II and incorporation into the Hellenic League, that as the wealth of Attica rose and then declined, the reason its citizens fought wars changed. Although the Greek city states are referred to by historians as democracies, of practicality only Greek men of means could participate in government to the extent they could afford the time required to build influence. The average Greek man had to work and earn a living and had no time for civics until a tyrant needed overthrow or war threatened from outside aggressors. What we observe before the Persian Wars is a nation of modest means and substantial freedom where citizens fight for kinfolk, land, and shared history with their alternatives being death, confiscation, and enslavement. This is the nature of defensive war, embodied in that which the Athenian / Spartan coalition fought to defeat the Persians. As Attica increased silver production and extracted more tribute via empire, we see a change in the reason for fighting war, with war then assuming a mercenary objective for many of its citizens. Citizens were now incentivized to fight wars of conquest with high pay when there was no immediate threat from outside aggressors and instead of citizen soldiers defending kinfolk, land, and shared history, citizens became hired rowers and hoplite combatants. Thus, as war transitioned from defensive to offensive as wealth increased, a citizen’s motivation for participating in war transitioned from patriot at the start of empire, to mercenary by choice at peak empire, to mercenary by necessity after the collapse of empire.
Ancient defensive wars continued until the threat was eliminated, the food supplies or health of the combatants were exhausted, or one side was vanquished. Ancient mercenary war, on the other hand, generally continued so long as there was ample silver. It was as if silver could conjure armies and armaments at will until it ran out, and then in that instant these same armies and armaments dissolved away. For a powerful ancient nation that had not been subject to invasion for some time, the mercenary incentive became the primary reason citizens fought wars, as all wars, absent any outside threat, became wars of conquest. As Attica’s wealth and influence waned between the end of the Peloponnesian War and its defeat at the hands of Macedon, more and more of its citizens turned to mercenary expeditions commanded by whomever was paying. Eventually many formerly powerful cities were depleted of its fighting fit men and lay open to conquest from outside aggressors and tyrants within. Combined with sustained decline in silver production and its resulting decline in foreign influence, after the final conquest at the hands of Macedon we find Attica’s transition complete – nearly all wars were henceforth fought by mercenaries on campaigns unrelated to Attica as the resulting collapse in trade due to depleted silver resources left few other means for young men to earn a living.
When there is total collapse of resources, and then influence, the citizens then become nothing more than mercenaries, and it was these legions that made up the entirety of Alexander’s forces. But as mercenaries, they fought for pay, in physical money, and maybe for a bit of glory thrown in – but they did not fight for ideals.
Rome’s history initially followed a similar path to that of Attica regarding why its citizens waged war in its early days – immediate enemies necessitated over 450 years of continuous defensive war and civil uprisings to fend off or overthrow foreign rule. The small state of Latium despite all odds managed to eventually defeat its surrounding aggressors, and when it realized it was a truly formidable fighting force it decided to put an end to outside aggression once and for all. Thus began a protracted series of conquering wars throughout the Italian peninsula. But Latium had no silver mines and their system of physical money extraction from the vanquished differed from the Greek system of tribute. Rome instead integrated its vanquished states and, with the exception of Carthage, granted select families Roman citizenship, contracted many of these families as magistrates to maintain internal order on behalf of Rome, and enacted a system of tax farming on the provincial non-citizens. It was this system of taxation that played the same role as the silver mines of Attica, and the more territory Rome conquered the more taxes it could collect to embark on further wars of conquest.
Once Roman territorial expansion had engulfed both Iberia and Anatolia, it controlled the only sources of gold and the richest silver mines in the Mediterranean. From about 200 BC to 230 AD, this gold and silver, together with ever increasing tax collection from its expanded portfolio of conquered and integrated provinces, funded a standing professional army with career soldiers paid in silver. Rome had entered its period of “endless war”, funded by supplies of gold and silver obtained from mining, conquest, and taxes. However, the immense size of the Roman standing army – about 450,000 troops under Severus in 211 AD – and the tremendous cost of endless war guaranteed expenses always exceeded income to the imperial treasury. So starting around 60 AD the Romans embarked on a policy of currency debasement and pay raises for soldiers that triggered severe price inflation for basic goods and plunged much of the populace into poverty but did not slow the pace of endless war. The inflation suffered by the people financed the continuous prosecution of endless military campaigns as the only wages that increased in step with Roman inflation were those paid to soldiers. It was empire regardless of cost at this point. Mutinies, civil wars, border incursions, and insurrections were now added to the expense of wars of conquest and endless war didn’t end until 410 AD when the Visigoth king Alaric sacked a nearly bankrupt Rome. But by that time the empire’s boundaries and tax base and mine holdings had shrunk so considerably that Rome could not finance a defense against the German invaders, and thus we see again another example of ancient empire’s self-destruct mechanism at work – the process of building empire depletes the resources of the nation, and the depleted resources preclude securing that empire indefinitely. Thus all ancient wars of conquest were ultimately futile.
Unlike the early days of Roman conquest, during their period of endless war Rome dropped the property ownership requirement for military service and the ranks were opened up to landless peasants. We observe in this period a shift in the allegiance of the soldiers away from the state – whereby the state represents the combination of kinfolk, land, and shared history – towards allegiance to the generals who commanded and paid their respective legions. But as professional soldiers, they fought for pay, in physical silver, held allegiance to the general who paid them, and maybe received a bit of glory thrown in here and there – but they too did not fight for ideals.
Transition to Fiat Money, Constant War, and the Rise of the Freemen
After the wave of German invasions subsided and with their annexation of the Western Roman Empire complete, the conquering Teutonic armies continued the core Roman system of allegiance to the generals. The state, as embodied in the king and his noble lieutenants, now existed as the means of extorting revenue to wage war so to secure territorial boundaries and prerogative for the ruling class from a wholly disenfranchised populace.
One major German difference to the deposed Roman system was the elimination of citizenship and the establishment of military service obligations upon a class of peasants who were permanently disenfranchised through heredity. With citizenship eliminated by the advent of serfdom, nearly all Western Europe’s inhabitants were subjugated and entirely without rights. These serfs owned little or no property and gained no benefit from existence of the state yet owed taxes and military service to the state. Thus in early medieval Europe the citizen soldier of the ancient Mediterranean was transformed into a servant soldier, who defended only royal prerogative, by the coercion of military obligation and elimination of property ownership inherent within serfdom. With no allegiance to this wholly extractive and inimical state, we observe the medieval rise in peasant allegiance to the Catholic Church, replacing the former allegiance to kinfolk, land, and shared history embodied in citizenship with a surrogate “citizenship” comprised of the “righteous” in the “Kingdom of Heaven”. This marks the beginning of the transition from an outward allegiance to physical things (e.g., kinfolk, land, and shared history) to an inward allegiance towards abstract ideals (e.g., belief, righteousness, piety) and thus lays the collective psychological groundwork for the coming Wars of Ideals in the 18th through 20th centuries.
This new relationship between absolute rulers and abject subjects, together with the collapse of intra-European trade, the loss of gold and silver mines, and the cessation of upward mobility significantly reduced the amounts of physical money going into the royal Germanic treasuries across Western Europe. Although war continued unabated, its scale and severity never reached the intensity and wide distribution of the Roman Empire and these reduced scale conflicts prevented the establishment of vast, lasting empire by the various Germanic sovereigns. Thus Europe entered a phase of “Balkanization” into petty fiefdoms connected through confederations of language and culture, held loosely together by the descendants of the invading Germanic tribes and the machinations of the new Papal Empire.
But not all was plague, malnutrition, and misery. The European medieval period saw great technological advances in agricultural production – e.g., three field crop rotation system, ridge and furrow, horse replace ox, the horse collar, iron ploughs and horseshoes, et cetera. Over the centuries after western Roman collapse, as these improved farming methods spread, a reliable crop surplus was produced and slowly, trade throughout Western Europe revived. It was this trade revival that underpinned the eventual rise of the class of freemen within the Third Estate, and it was these freemen that built cities throughout formerly rural Western Europe that provided central hubs for the practice of trades, crafts, and commerce. Fewer serfs were needed to produce agricultural surplus so people began to fill these cities, and we see some freemen transition into rentiers and creditors whereby the physical money derived from rents could support a new form of pseudo-money in the form of credit “produced” independently from the sovereign.
Along with increasing prosperity of the growing class of Bourgeoisie / Burghers / Borghese and craftsmen rose the increase in the tax base, not only for the state but for the Catholic Church which by the 13th century had established itself as Europe’s first Federal state as it held taxation jurisdiction via tithes over the entirety of Roman Catholic Europe. For the first time we observe a multi-tiered taxation system where paying taxes to the state keeps the mortal physical body from going to jail, and paying tithes to the Church keeps the immortal spiritual soul from going to purgatory. Thus the physical / spiritual duality of rule in Europe is established for future exploitation by the proponents of 19th and 20th century ideal based “revolution”.
It is no coincidence that this period of increased population, trade, and tax take saw the reformation of powerful super-states – Spain, France, Britain, Sweden, and Papal – as the revived flow of taxes in physical gold and silver could once again pay soldiers to fund wars of conquest, put down rebellion, and for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire, fund the commission of Navies. Colonial conquest and wealth extraction consolidated this growth and wealth of super-states.
As the wealth generated from proto-industrialization and colonialization grew, the rentier, creditor, and now merchant classes grew to be the wealthiest freemen in Europe, and this class together with other nobles were the core providers of credit to the sovereign needed to fund its wars and growing opulence. As the sovereign grew to rely more heavily on credit to prosecute these projects of ego, it commissioned proto- central banks within its administration serving to facilitate its credit needs and its needs alone. Some in this new creditor class began to serve full time as “executives” to the crown forming the genesis of the modern “central banker”. Royal defaults on its domestic creditors were common, as it was royal prerogative to default, so these nascent central banks had to turn more and more to cross border lending agreements with the nascent central banks of other countries. Thus by the end of the 18th century, Europe had “evolved” into another phase of endless “Classical” war but this time, funded not by silver but by credit provided by cross border proto-central banks managed by a nascent “central banker” class drawn from the increasingly wealthy and powerful rentier / creditor / merchant pool that grew to maturity out of the freemen of the medieval period.
It did not take long for these nascent central bankers to realize the power that the extension or withholding of credit and setting of interest rates granted to those in control of credit. But if it weren’t for the intervening sovereign, the power this credit held would be tantamount to the power to choose winners and losers in war and opulent society. The prime example before these nascent central bankers was the conquest, subjugation, and material strip mining of entire overseas civilizations using almost nothing but credit. So if this model of conquest by credit could work in faraway foreign lands, it could also work on European soil and creditors could, potentially, usurp the sovereign. But a direct assault on the sovereign would require a large professional army paid in silver, and these nascent central bankers did not yet fully control the royal treasuries. They needed to create their own army that was paid in credit, and to do that they needed the assistance of the only group that would accept payment in credit – the peasants.
Some description here is warranted regarding the evolution of professional armies in Europe during the transition from medieval to Classical periods. The ancient mercenary Greek hoplite and Roman centurion were close quarter fighters requiring great strength, training, and endurance. One’s rank and pay level was directly contingent upon these qualities. For the most part, this relation between physical strength and pay rate carried into the medieval period up to the advent of cannon – physically fit peasants of fighting age were hired and provisioned as substitutes to fight in place of the wealthy freemen. As the technology of the instruments of war advanced, many military occupations transitioned into technicians who were increasingly responsible for the maintenance, transport, and operation of cannon, muskets, and siege engines. Physical strength played less of a factor as weapons technology advanced. Thus the professional armies of the Classical period were “democratized” and peasants with no special physical attributes comprised the bulk of military campaigns. And still, these mercenary substitutes held allegiance to the paymaster, and were paid in silver as were their predecessors in antiquity.
This traditional payment in silver was a great obstacle to the nascent central bankers who had eyes on usurping the sovereign. But as they did not command the amounts of silver required to mount a successful revolt, some other form of payment had to be devised and a new class of soldier created that would fight against his sovereign for this new form of payment. The democratization of Classical armies left no scarcity of supply of soldiers, but their demands for payment in physical silver did. Thus enter the series of religious and later, democratic wars that would sweep across Europe as cover for the usurpation of the sovereign by these nascent central bankers…
* * *
In Part 2 we discuss the “victory of fiat money” in enabling “endless wars”, “Where is this all going?” and “What is to be done?”…
- Could This Be America's Most Expensive Combat Drone Ever?
Could This Be America’s Most Expensive Combat Drone Ever?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/14/2020 – 23:00The US has spent trillions and trillions of dollars under the Trump administration to modernize the military, ahead of what could be a stealth war with either China and or Russia. The Pentagon has been upgrading the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, an all-weather stealth multirole combat aircraft, with advanced technologies, enabling it to conduct a wide range of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions.
The National Interest suggests all this new technology packed into the F-35, that being an advanced suite of long-range sensors and targeting systems, could allow it to become a “long-range drone.”
The idea would be to leverage its advanced suite of long-range sensors and targeting technologies. In fact, it would not be a stretch to say that the F-35 can function as a long-range drone, aerial relay node, missile tracker or surveillance plane. – The National Interest
The F-35 costs between $94 million (F-35A) and $122 million (F-35B) per plane. The entire program is expected to cost $1.5 trillion over its 55-year lifespan. There are no figures publicly available that shed light on how much it would cost taxpayers to transform one of these stealth jets into fully a fully autonomous aircraft.
While not much is known about the full capabilities of the F-35 potentially operating in autonomous mode, it certainly suggests these planes are double the price of the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper ($64 million per unit).
The National Interest lists some of the technologies embedded in the F-35 that would allow it to conduct a wide range of missions:
Its 360-degree surround cameras, called the Distributed Aperture System, and its long-range Electro-Optical infrared targeting technologies were initially conceived as a way to inform pilots about far away enemy aircraft and provide navigational information to empower its multirole attack mission set.
Its 360-degree surround cameras, called the Distributed Aperture System, and its long-range Electro-Optical infrared targeting technologies were initially conceived as a way to inform pilots about far away enemy aircraft and provide navigational information to empower its multirole attack mission set.
While all of this is still true and quite relevant, the Pentagon has increasingly been discovering new uses for the F-35 when it comes to an ability to function as an “aerial node” performing ISR and datalink missions. With a fleet-wide data link and growing “threat library,” the F-35s can network to one another at great distances, enabling an ability to establish a continuous track on traveling threats moving from one field of view to another.
Moreover, the Pentagon recently utilized the F-35 in a host of multi-domain combat attack missions, including networking threat information from incoming air attacks with maritime, air and ground assets. Ultimately, would involve an integrated mesh of sensors and radar called Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS). Alongside connecting with IBCS, an F-35 was also able to connect with a U-2 spy plane to form an “airborne relay” using Lockheed’s Airborne Sensor Adaptation Kit. – The National Interest
With a stealth war looming, manned, and potentially unmanned F-35s, could be deployed onto the frontlines of the modern battlefield to combat China’s Chengdu J-20 stealth jet and Russia’s Sukhoi Su-57 stealth bomber.
- Sellin: Unless True Origin Of COVID-19 Is Identified, Another Chinese Pandemic Is Assured
Sellin: Unless True Origin Of COVID-19 Is Identified, Another Chinese Pandemic Is Assured
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/14/2020 – 22:40Authored by Lawrence Sellin via WION.com,
To date, no one has stated the urgent universal need to aggressively investigate the true origin of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19, better than Karl and Dan Sirotkin in their August 12, 2020 article “Might SARS‐CoV‐2 Have Arisen via Serial Passage through an Animal Host or Cell Culture?”
“Despite claims from prominent scientists that SARS‐CoV‐2 indubitably emerged naturally, the etiology of this novel coronavirus remains a pressing and open question: Without knowing the true nature of a disease, it is impossible for clinicians to appropriately shape their care, for policy‐makers to correctly gauge the nature and extent of the threat, and for the public to appropriately modify their behaviour.”
As the authors correctly note, serial passage, that is, the repeated re-infection within an animal or human population allows a virus to specifically adapt to the infected species.
That process occurs naturally in the wild, but it can be greatly accelerated in the laboratory by deliberate serial passaging of viruses in cell culture systems or animals, potentially leaving few or no traces as to whether the adapted viruses are naturally-occurring or laboratory-manipulated.
That type of “gain of function” experimentation can become particularly dangerous if viruses are adapted for human infection by serial passaging them through cell cultures and animal models that have been genetically-modified to express human receptors.
There are numerous scientific publications describing serial passaging of coronaviruses through “humanised” cell cultures and animal models, thus potentially creating a new coronavirus “pre-adapted” for human infection.
At present, the scientific consensus is that SARS-CoV-2 came from bats, but how it evolved to infect humans remains unknown.
China has claimed that a bat coronavirus named RaTG13 is the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2, but RaTG13 is not actually a virus because no biological samples exist. It is only a genomic sequence of a virus for which there are now serious questions about its accuracy.
In contrast, Dr Li-Meng Yan, a Chinese virologist and whistleblower, has implied that RaTG13 may have been used to divert the world’s attention away from the true source of the COVID-19 pandemic, a novel coronavirus that originated in military laboratories overseen by China’s People’s Liberation Army and created by the manipulation of Zhoushan coronaviruses ZC45 and/or ZXC21.
SARS-CoV-2 has signs of serial passaging and the direct genetic insertion of novel amino acids sequences for which no natural evolutionary pathway has been identified.
Although SARS-CoV-2 appears to have the “backbone” of bat coronaviruses, its spike protein, which is responsible for binding to the human cell and its membrane fusion-driven entry, has sections that do not appear in any closely-related bat coronaviruses.
SARS-CoV-2’s receptor binding domain, the specific element that binds to the human cell, has a ten times greater binding affinity than the first SARS virus that caused the 2002-2003 pandemic.
Furthermore, SARS-CoV-2 appears to be “pre-adapted” for human infection and has not undergone a similar natural mutation process within the human population that was observed during the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak.
Those observations plus the inexplicable genetic distance between SARS-CoV-2 and any of its potential bat predecessors suggest an accelerated evolutionary process obtained by laboratory-based serial passaging through genetically-engineered mouse models containing humanised receptors previously developed by China.
The other unique feature of SARS-CoV-2 is a furin polybasic cleavage site that facilitates membrane fusion between the virus and the human cell and widely known for its ability to enhance pathogenicity and transmissibility, but also is not present in any closely related bat coronaviruses.
There are no readily-available animal models to produce a unique furin polybasic cleavage site by serial passaging, but techniques for the artificial insertion of such furin polybasic cleavage sites by genetic engineering have been used for over ten years.
To paraphrase Karl and Dan Sirotkin, unless the zoonotic hosts necessary for completing a natural jump from animals to humans are identified, the dual‐use gain‐of‐function research practice of viral serial passage and the artificial insertion of unique viral features should be considered viable routes by which SARS-CoV-2 arose and the COVID-19 pandemic was initiated.
* * *
Lawrence Sellin, PhD is a retired US Army Reserve colonel. He has previously worked at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and conducted basic and clinical research in the pharmaceutical industry.
- Americans Are Now Renting Private Swimming Pools
Americans Are Now Renting Private Swimming Pools
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/14/2020 – 22:20The virus pandemic has led to the closure of many public pools across the country. The latest surge in COVID-19 cases and deaths across Sun Belt states sealed the deal in postponing the reopening of pools. With only a month left of the swimming season, Americans have resorted to an Airbnb-style app that allows them to rent private residential pools.
Readers living or visiting the Mid-Atlantic or Northeast area have been scorched this summer by absolutely brutal June and July temperatures. Going to the beach has been met with many challenges, especially strict social distancing, and most oceanside restaurants are only open for carryout. The point about going to the beach is being with family and enjoying a delicious meal while watching the sunset. Not this year…
So given the truly remarkable will of the consumer to shift habits, that is, with beaches under strict social distancing rules, public pools closed and traveling on airplanes to resort towns out of the question, there’s been a massive surge in activity in people not just staying at home but are renting private pools from homeowners using an app described as Airbnb for swimming pools, called Swimply.
CNBC said the 2-year-old app saw a 2,000% jump in growth this summer, according to its founder.
The process in reserving a pool works on a smartphone app is a contactless way to rent a pool from residential homeowners on a per hour basis. Prices range from $15 to $300 per hour, all dependent on the pool size, location, and additional amenities.
Swimply makes money by facilitating the booking and then takes a 15% finders fee.
“We’ve seen demand skyrocket. We simply cannot keep up,” said Asher Weinberger, co-founder of Swimply.
Weinberger said, “There are people who are now desperate to get out of their homes. They’re working from home. There’s no school. There’s no camp. What are parents supposed to do with their kids?”
He said some hosts “are making $30,000 to $40,000 in the summer. This is not just — rent out your home for $200 bucks a night — you can make $1,000, $2,000 a day, and that’s real money that’s not just paying for your pool’s upkeep but it’s even paying for your whole mortgage.”
Here are some of the examples of pools for rent on the app:
Pools in the Miami area ranged from $45 to $60 per hour.
Pools in San Diego ranged from $45 to $60 per hour.
Pools in Vegas ranged from $15 to $60 per hour.
Swimply’s appears to be launching a new platform called “JoySpace,” where users of the app can rent or share “all kind of unique private spaces from tennis and basketball courts to home gyms and decked out backyard.”
With much of the country having paused or taken steps to reverse reopenings, Americans have found creative ways to still have fun during a pandemic, even if that means renting a stranger’s pool while public ones are closed.
- Trump Versus Pavlov: A Social Experiment
Trump Versus Pavlov: A Social Experiment
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/14/2020 – 22:00Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,
Might as well call it a social experiment. Any other name, like “coup” or “fishing expedition” or “hookers peeing on a bed” or “justice being done” would just inflame “passions” and lead away from what should be the actual topic.
Whatever you call it, the fact remains that Donald Trump has been the first US president to be under continued investigation for the entire 4 years of his first term, and for about a year before it as well. And that should be a cause for alarm for anyone who cares even a little bit about the American political system, including those who abhor Trump.
Because once you do that, it’s no longer about just one president, it’s about all who will follow him, and inevitably about the integrity and validity of the system as a whole.
In principle, there should be no investigations of a sitting president, and not even of a presidential candidate, because this risks endangering 1) the entire electoral process, and 2) the Office of the President (not for once, but for ever). In principle. If there must be an investigation, it must be based on solid evidence available beforehand, it must be short, and the President must be removed. If all of these three things are not guaranteed, no investigation is warranted, and the accusing parties should be “liberated” from the positions they held when they initiated the investigation regardless. Skin in the game.
It gets increasingly harder to write about American politics, or express an opinion in any other way, without being dumped into one of two camps, never to be heard from again in the other (except for ridicule or slander). There is no such thing as a neutral or objective viewpoint anymore. You’re either with us or you’re against us – or them.
Seeing -and projecting- the world in black and white is a tempting proposal for anyone afraid of being confused; it should, however, never be an excuse for the media to not present its viewers and readers with a full color palette. But we can see every single day how that went. Black and white it is. And in that environment, too claustrophobic to be put in a box, I might as well paint the picture as I see it. Yes, in color.
The “social experiment” I see progressing has two parts:
1) can a political party, aided and abetted by the media and intelligence services, unseat an elected president it has just lost an election to?
2) can a presidential candidate be elected while shunning the media, debates, etc., and only appear at times and in forms that have been pre-selected by her/his handlers for maximum effect, while hiding his/her weaknesses?
As for no. 1, it has evidently not succeeded, but that is certainly not for lack of trying. One investigation has followed the other non-stop since 2016, in public and behind the scenes, and they have all come up empty. Of course one side would contest that and still say there was lots of evidence, but if so, it obviously wasn’t very strong, or Trump would have been gone.
People may also claim that the mandate of the Mueller investigation was too narrow, but really, go back and watch the man’s pathetic (sorry, but it was) testimony in Congress after the fact, that should be enough. Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler and others have promised solid and inconvertible evidence many times, but we never saw any. Rest assured, whatever Trump may have done wrong, you would have heard about it by now.
Or to put it another way: he probably did many things wrong, but not the things he was accused of. In fact, the entire Putin puppet narrative is so idiotic it’s impossible not to ponder from time to time that it was designed from the get-go to support Trump, not hurt him.
As for no. 2, that looks even more experimental. The approach is helped along “wonderfully” by the pandemic, which provides plenty excuses to keep Biden hidden, but it goes against everything presidential campaigns have been built upon throughout American history: contact with voters. That very few people would believe Biden is his own man, and not a sock puppet, can’t help.
But there is more at stake. Presidential campaigns are one element of a much bigger process, and you can’t separate the two. Both parts of the “social experiment” seem to run afoul of the respect that bigger process, and ultimately the entire political system, necessarily demands from all participants, from an individual voter to a President. And that is much more important than either candidate. You can’t temporarily switch off that respect if and when that might suit your purpose, because you risk for it never to be switched on again.
You may dislike a presidential candidate, perhaps even intensely so, but that should never make you lose sight of the integrity, if not the sacredness, of the election process, of the political system, of the institutions, of the Constitution, and certainly not of the Office of the President of the United States. Because once you do that, you open the door for everyone to do the same in the future. And no, you can’t blame that on the candidate you don’t like, you do it.
When a candidate is selected through the primaries of his/her party, you must respect that, because if you don’t respect the process, you are lost, the system is lost, and there’s no telling when you’ll see it back, if ever. If that candidate is then elected President, a lot of doors that before allowed you to question and criticize him/her, should be closed. The country at that point has either a new President, or a second-term one. A different phase of the political process starts.
The House and the Senate become the critics, empowered by the system to hold the President accountable. But only the House and the Senate. Not the media, whose role it is, other than in the occasional opinion piece, to report on decisions made; not intelligence services, whose role it is to serve the country, and the new President it just elected; and not the opposition party, whose role it is to prepare for the next election, and to provide a degree of counterbalance, depending on how bad their loss was, on Capitol Hill.
The entire picture is crystal clear. So is everybody’s role in it. But now and then people -try to- refuse to accept their roles, obviously believing that they are more important than the integrity of the political system, and ignoring that in doing so they put the whole system at risk.
What was happening first became apparent in late 2015 – early 2016, when the New York Times began running multiple stories every day directed against Donald Trump. Mostly small bits, based on innuendo about his past, with a whiff of truth perhaps, but not more. The word “gratuitous” comes to mind. At a certain point, they did a dozen per day of the stories, it became assembly line work for the writers and editors..
The Washington Post chimed in, and so did CNN, MSNBC and others, including international press. It turned into a feeding frenzy, with all of them completely losing sight, voluntarily or not, of their roles as news providers. They all shape-shifted into opinion-only-makers, confident that their audience would not notice the difference, at least not at first. At that point it became a very Pavlovian thing.
Which is why I was initially going to name this essay “Trump vs Pavlov”. 100+ years ago, Ivan Pavlov “found” that if he rang a bell in front of a dog, and then gave her food, she would start to associate the two. When he increased the time-lapse between first, the bell, and then, the food, the dog would salivate in expectation of food at just the sound of the bell. In the end, all he had to do was ring the bell, with no food around, and the dog would salivate. So he had nothing to offer, no food, no substance, but the reaction was the same.
That is a very accurate description of what a large part of the US media have done -and become-. All they have to do at this point is mention Trump, or just show his picture, and their public will react the same every single time: Orange Man Bad. There doesn’t have to be any substance, any factual journalistic reports of wrongdoing. The “conditioned reflex” as Pavlov described it, has set in.
And their readers and viewers have become addicted to this. How could they not? They’ve been bombarded with 1000s of these bells ringing, and the substance may not be there, but the expectation of it is. If you’re a regular viewer of Rachel Maddow, what are the odds that your opinion is still your own after hearing RussiaRussia a million times? The only way it could be yours is if you switch her off.
I’ve written before that I don’t even think they really set out to do this. Initially, there were probably just some CEOs and owners and editors who didn’t like Trump and/or were affiliated in one way or another with the other party -and later candidate-. Who was counted on to win big anyway, so why not (well, because of the integrity of the political system!).
It was only later that they found out 24/7 anti-Trump “reporting” was a great business model for them. CNN was dying in early 2016, the New York Times was nor far behind, and all of a sudden numbers of viewers and readers and subscribers went through the roof.
Their problem is that if they succeed in making Trump lose in November, they will be back to where they came from before he appeared on the political scene. All of their “reporting” on US politics has devolved into a scheme based on ringing a bell, and on the scandal and anger their non-stop salivating audience have become addicted to, and mistake for substance.
If Joe Biden should win, that scheme is dead. They may hope to last a bit longer on the angry scandal of a possible persecution of Trump if he leaves office, but that would be it, and that’s not a business model. They can’t very well now turn on Biden and his puppeteers.
New York Times writer and editor Bari Weiss said it very well when she left the paper a few weeks ago, she summarized the essence of the MSM problem in just a few words:
“[..] the lessons that ought to have followed the election – lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else”.
Why edit something challenging to our readers, or write something bold only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher, when we can assure ourselves of job security (and clicks) by publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world?
That’s the media.
Second in line is US intelligence.
Which, there’s no other way to put it, conspired against a presidential candidate and, when he was elected, a sitting president. The Strzok-Page “insurance policy”, the Obama Oval Office conversations where Comey, Brennan, Clapper, Susan Rice were present, plus 1,000 other things, the overall picture doesn’t exactly point to that famous seamless transition, and US Intel played a pivotal, because accommodating, role in that.
The best way to show this is perhaps that US intelligence themselves did not (could not) come up with a report on alleged links between the -prospective- president’s team and Russia, but took a dossier paid for by the president’s opposition and used it to discredit and persecute him and people in his team. The dossier was written by a two-bit MI6 hustler who hadn’t set foot in Russia in at least a decade, and whose main ‘Russian source’ wasn’t there either, but sitting in an office in the US.
That source in turn had contacts with a group of Russians whose very business model it was to make up and embellish whatever stories the highest bidder required, while failing to deal with their own severe drinking problems. That dossier was the entire foundation (or 99% of it) behind Rod Rosenstein appointing Bob Mueller as a Special Counsel. The appointment would never have been made, never have been possible, without the Steele dossier.
How was the dossier vetted by US intelligence, if at all? It’s very clear now what was wrong with it, but the all knowing and very clever intelligence people could not have figured that out 4 years ago, and instead cleared it for Mueller, for further FBI use, for FISA applications? How about their treatment of Michael Flynn, who they had already cleared only to resurrect the dead corpse of their investigation into his talks with Russian ambassador Kislyak? How would you, personally, spell “in good faith”?
We will see in the near future what the Durham investigation into all Russiagate players will come to. Apparently, Durham has just another three weeks to present at least something, because there is a two-month “no-go-zone” before the election, during which he would be accused of tampering with the election. And the premise for the Democrats and their sympathizers is that if Biden wins, all slates will be wiped clean.
They won’t, by the way. America still has a justice system, even if it is oftentimes crippled and grinding(ly) slow. Just watch Michael Flynn attorney Sidney Powell and her team. They have vowed to not only have their client be exonerated, but to fully clear his name, which according to their view has been besmirched by everyone up to and including Joe Biden and Barack Obama.
The third leg of the “creature” is the Democratic party. Who have stepped so far over their boundaries, nobody recognizes anymore that there were any. Or that the political system they are an integral part of, dictates that there are things they cannot do, lest they corrupt that system to the core.
Once you lose a presidential election, you prepare for the next one. You don’t use the next 4 years to try and frustrate the president you just lost to with all you got. The system should not allow it and can not tolerate it. There should be skin in the game for opposition politicians, who when they come with accusations of gross misconduct serious enough to remove a president, should be forced to step down when the accusations don’t lead to the intended result.
It should never be a free for all, in which you can simply try again the next morning. Because the system cannot work if that is possible. It can’t be that if you win a midterm election and get a majority in the House, you can then use that majority to make it impossible for a president to work on the agenda that made millions vote for him/her. That would cause the system to grind to a halt, and the system must always be more important than its temporary participants (even those who “sit” for 40-50 years).
When you look at the speaker’s list for the Democrat -non- convention next week where Joe Biden will be confirmed as their -virtual- candidate, you see that other than AOC, it’s just a long list of the same old people who were already there when they lost in 2016, and co-losers Hillary and Obama still have a very tight grip on the power and the purse strings.
Why they stick with Joe Biden, g-d only knows, and the same goes for whichever highly unpopular black woman they pick as VP who could soon be president. And sorry, but they all are. Kamala Harris was among the first to step down during the primaries because she didn’t get any votes. Susan Rice is not exactly “loved by the people” either, and the rest are no-names, except for Warren, but she’s both too left and much too white.
So you’re thinking: what’s going on there? That’s really the best you can do? But it does seem to be, likely because Barackillary have a small group of confidantes to choose from who they themselves are confident will be willing to cede all actual power to them once elected. And if Harris and Rice don’t get picked as VP, they’ll still exert a lot of power.
As will Pelosi, Schiff, Nadler, there’s more new blood at Madame Tussaud’s than at the upper echelons of the Democratic party. Yes, AOC can come in to represent the squad in a cynical move (no power but brings in lots of votes), but that’s it. For the rest it’s still just the broken left wing of the war party. But you’re right, they’re none of them, Trump. And that at the same time is the sole identity they possess.
Anti-Trumpism has become a political religion.
Because Trump is the only topic that attracts clickbait and viewers. The only topic that rings a bell. Joe Biden rings no bells whatsoever. A while back Donald Trump jr tweeted:
Trump is really running against the media, Silicon Valley, the establishment, the swamp, Hollywood and maybe Joe Biden.
While investor GreekFire23 did even better:
Trump is running against himself in this election. The vote will come down to those who love him vs those who hate him. Biden is totally irrelevant and not even campaigning. Biden has no platform, no slogan, no stickers, no signs, no rallies, no followers. It’s Trump vs Trump.
What can still sink Trump is obvious: it’s the economy and the pandemic. America’s problem is that no matter who wins, those will still be its main problems by January 2021. And another problem has been added in the course of 2020: protests and violence in the streets.
Update: I thought I could leave it at that for now, step out for a moment, have a glass of wine, let it all sink in, and write a closing paragraph. But then I was sitting outside in gorgeous Athens and this popped up, which I very obviously can’t leave out:
Senate Chairman Subpoenas FBI Director Wray For Russiagate Records; Puts Bidens On Notice
FBI Director Christopher Wray has been subpoenaed by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs to produce “all documents related to the Crossfire Hurricane Investigation,” which includes “all records provided or made available to the Inspector General” regarding the FISA probe, as well as documents regarding the 2016-2017 presidential transition..
[..] The subpoena was issued by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) as part of his investigation into the origins of Russiagate. It gives Wray until 5 p.m. on Aug. 20 to produce the documents. Johnson also released a lengthy letter on Monday in which he defended his Committee’s investigation and accused Democrats of initiating “a coordinated disinformation campaign and effort to personally attack” himself and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) in order to distract from evidence his committee has gathered on Joe and Hunter Biden’s Ukraine dealings.
[..] Johnson’s committee has secured testimony from at least one State Department official who worked in Ukraine, and says the Bidens’ conduct created the appearance of a conflict of interest. “The appearance of family profiteering off of Vice President Biden’s official responsibilities is not unique to the circumstances involving Ukraine and Burisma,” wrote Johnson. “Public reporting has also shown Hunter Biden following his father into China and coincidentally landing lucrative business deals and investments there.
“Additionally, the former vice president’s brothers and sister-in-law, Frank, James and Sara Biden, also are reported to have benefited financially from his work as well.
I can’t let that go because it addresses exactly what my closing paragraph would have been about. Which is the risk of the giant divide that has developed in US society, getting even wider, and potentially leading to utter mayhem. Actually, it’s not even ‘potentially’ anymore, there already has been a lot of violence.
The Democrats think they will win easily on November 3, and then push through all of their their policies, after dumping on Trump for 4 years with their media and intelligence friends, but the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump, and most of their family and friends with them, don’t think so. That’s not a threat, it’s an observation.
They feel cheated out of their 2016 victory. They realize (or should I say “suspect”) that Russiagate and the Mueller probe and the Zelensky-linked impeachment “hearings” were empty vessels directed against the election outcome that they won fair and square, and I guarantee you they won’t take it sitting down.
Which means that no matter who wins, polarization will reach levels America has never seen, and, frankly, should never wish to. Because all of the people involved, bar just a precious few, will have to live together in the same country, and share the same society, streets, highways, stores and resources.
And sometimes I wonder: how are they going to do that?
If Trump should win, how will the entire so-called left react, from the Democrats through the MSM to BLM? Will they just increase the protests and the violence in the streets?
Alternatively, if Joe Biden wins, how will the Conservative side of America react? Will they all go home and wait for what the DNC has in store for them, or will their reaction be pro-active? I know which reaction I would see them lean towards.
You have these two sides in society who appear further apart than even Moses could have hoped to bring back together again, you have the media who thrive on widening that divide even further, it’s a scary picture.
And in the meantime, while everyone’s busy blaming each other, who’s going to take care of the country?
* * *
- Lake Tahoe Real Estate Booms 'Like Never Before'
Lake Tahoe Real Estate Booms ‘Like Never Before’
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/14/2020 – 21:40Readers may recall our earlier notes identifying the mass exodus of folks abandoning US metro areas, fleeing to suburbia and or rural communities, first due to the virus pandemic, then social unrest.
City dwellers began the journey out of metros in late March/early April, at the start of the virus pandemic lockdowns. When late May/early June rolled around, just as the social unrest erupted across major metros, the second exodus round was seen.
For more color on this evolving trend, and the importance of understanding the exodus, could, at some point, correct metro home prices, Coast to Coast Network, a real estate team of agents affiliated with Compass, is reporting a massive “boom” in the second home real estate market.
Nicole Blair from the Compass Tahoe team said Bay Area folks are quickly exiting the metro area for Lake Tahoe as they now have the ability to work remotely, reported Tahoe Daily Tribune.
Blair said this has led to a massive demand surge for the rural area located in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
“The Lake Tahoe market has never seen activity like this,” said Blair. “Bay Area residents are flocking to the area as they realize they can work from home and they also want more space around them.”
She said, “for example, in the month of July, our Multiple Listing Service has gone up 4% in new listings, up 60% in sold listings, down 28% in average days on the market, and up 30% on average listing price which is now equated to $1,140,000.”
Lake Tahoe real estate “The biggest problem realtors are facing right now is too many buyers with not enough inventory,” Blair added. “We would have never predicted this outcome back in March.”
Lake Tahoe real estate On the East Coast, Joan Witter of Witter & Witter Boston Cape Cod Connection at Compass said the real estate market is on fire:
“The Cape Cod Market is bustling, I have been selling real estate in this market for over 26 years and have never seen anything like this,” said Witter.
And the question every reader has to ask: How long will this exodus from cities last?
We might have found the answer in our latest piece titled “Real Estate Expert Warns’ Exodus’ From Cities Will Last Two Years.”
- Once We Have An Approved COVID-19 Vaccine, Then What?
Once We Have An Approved COVID-19 Vaccine, Then What?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/14/2020 – 21:20Authored by Andrew I. Fillat and Henry I. Miller via HumanEvents.com,
It’s not as simple as snapping your fingers and getting herd immunity…
Here’s a thought experiment: after the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg, it became necessary to allocate seats on the lifeboats; there were only about 700 places for the 2208 passengers. What if seats had been auctioned, with the price determined by supply and demand—i.e., by market forces? Clearly, the wealthiest would have crowded out the others. Instead, the Captain decided that women and children should take precedence. Of course, children had the most life to lose, but why women over men? Chivalry? We will likely never know.
A contemporary example of the limitations of purely free-market distribution models is quickly approaching, as one or more vaccines to prevent infection by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, come to market.
The situation is exceedingly complex in many ways, and the “solution” will inevitably involve elements of medicine, science, ethics, and politics.
The clinical results from the testing of different vaccines, which have been created using a variety of platforms, will inevitably vary in ways that we cannot foresee, and that will raise many questions. For example, how effective will the vaccines be for different demographic groups—particularly the elderly, who are most vulnerable to severe illness and death, but who mount a less vigorous immune response?
One thing seems clear, however: we have seen no enthusiasm from any quarter for allowing the price of the vaccine (i.e., market forces) to determine who should get priority in obtaining protection from COVID-19. But that still leaves many possible strategies to allocate what will inevitably be a scarce resource for some time—despite attempts to anticipate the conundrum and produce many millions of doses, beginning large-scale production even before safety and effectiveness have been demonstrated to a level acceptable to regulators.
In several cases, this early production is being subsidized by the U.S. government. Its Operation Warp Speed aims to begin delivery of 300 million doses of an FDA-authorized, safe and effective vaccine for COVID-19 by the end of the year (an admirable but probably overly ambitious goal). As part of that initiative, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Department of Defense (DoD) jointly announced on July 7th a $1.6 billion agreement with Maryland-based Novavax Inc., to demonstrate commercial-scale manufacturing of the company’s COVID-19 investigational vaccine. By funding this manufacturing effort, the federal government will own the 100 million doses of investigational vaccine expected to result from those demonstration projects. On July 22nd, the feds announced a $1.95 billion deal with U.S.-based Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech for large-scale production and delivery of 100 million doses of an FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccine. Additional federal funding of COVID-19 vaccine development has gone to Massachusetts-based Moderna (almost half a billion dollars) and to British drugmaker AstraZeneca (more than $1 billion).
These and other similar initiatives are some of the U.S. government’s wisest “corporate welfare” subsidies within memory. They accelerate the realization of remedies to a societal calamity, without which progress would be much slower. Unfortunately, although they might mitigate some of the most difficult vaccine allocation choices, others will remain.
WHO IS “ESSENTIAL” AND WHO IS “MOST VULNERABLE?”
Triaging vaccine distribution raises many possible options concerning whom to prioritize and why.
One obvious priority would be to vaccinate the “most vulnerable” populations.
But how do we define vulnerability? By age and comorbidities, or, perhaps, by occupation or living situation (such as residents of nursing homes, or to people working in tight quarters like meatpacking plants).
Or should “value to society in mitigating the pandemic” trump other considerations, with front-line medical personnel and staff at long-term care facilities going to the head of the line? Those whose work is both essential and hazardous? And how about those involved in keeping the food supply chain intact, such as farmworkers, truck drivers, and food-store workers? (The head of our line is starting to get pretty crowded.)
Still, another question is to what extent the results of clinical trials should affect our priority-setting.
For example, if a trial revealed that subjects with blood type A obtain the greatest benefit, should they get priority for that vaccine? What about various racial, ethnic, or gender groups that have a statistically higher incidence of mortality from COVID-19? For example, should Blacks be considered a higher priority for vaccination because they are dying from COVID-19 at a rate 2.5 times higher than whites? And what about the political considerations: should Americans automatically receive higher priority, simply because our government subsidized the development of the vaccine?
The allocation criteria could theoretically become a complex algorithm, perhaps something analogous to the National Association of EMS physicians SALT Mass Casualty Triage Algorithm, which sorts patients into three categories based on the severity of their condition and determines the interventions they should get and in what order. In the case of vaccination, on the basis of the variables mentioned above, individuals could be placed in a category of the appropriate category, and within the category, would then receive vaccine in random lottery order. Of course, such an approach would not eliminate value judgments or squelch controversy.
We hope that, to the extent possible, these decisions will be made based on medical evidence and plausible rationales rather than political interests. To return to our analogy, imagine if only members of one political party or British citizens were permitted on the Titanic’s lifeboats. (It was a British ship, after all.)
In today’s hyper-partisan times, nothing seems too implausible or cynical.
SCIENCE, NOT PARTISAN PERFORMANCE, SHOULD DETERMINE VACCINE ALLOCATION DECISIONS
In order to muddle through (“resolve” would be too optimistic) these conundrums, the feds will receive formal advice from at least two sources. National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins has asked the National Academy of Medicine to develop guidelines for who should get priority for the first doses of a coronavirus vaccine.
A second panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccine issues, has also been tasked to formulate guidelines. Last month, the ACIP convened a meeting electronically to discuss “who counts as an essential worker, where teachers should fall in the priority list, vaccinations for pregnant women and whether race and ethnicity should factor into priority considerations.”
It remains to be seen how and who in the administration will reconcile two independently crafted sets of recommendations, and to what extent other parties will be allowed to participate in the process. In the end, the FDA could specify which groups get priority if it grants an emergency use authorization for a vaccine. That would be similar to the FDA’s having directed that Gilead Sciences remdesivir, a COVID-19 drug treatment, be used exclusively for “patients hospitalized with severe disease,” when regulators granted an emergency use authorization.
Questions will also arise about the cost of vaccines to consumers—and the posturing and virtue-signaling by politicians have already begun. In early June, before a vaccine was even on the horizon, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said in a statement,
“We can’t allow American families—who are already struggling to make ends meet during this public health emergency—to be squeezed even further by companies out to make a quick buck.”
And Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) echoed her comrade, “We need to have confidence that no one is making billions in a back room somewhere.” These gratuitous broadsides are part of their ongoing disparagement of one of the nation’s most innovative and successful industries. (Thankfully, the major vaccine manufacturers seem to have accepted that the pandemic is not a time for profiteering. The deals vaccine makers have struck with the feds suggest the cost will be modest, in the range of $4-$37 per dose.)
Several things are certain, however.
First, no allocation scheme will please everyone, and despite all the attempts at rational analysis and planning, there will be unintended consequences.
Second, the vaccine debate will re-inflame the passions about drug pricing and drug companies’ profits.
Finally, we can be sure the companies that are working furiously on therapies and vaccines to rescue the world from the throes of the worst pandemic in a century won’t receive any gratitude from progressive politicians.
The bottom line: insofar as it’s possible, the scientific and medical evidence should inform the allocation process.
- After Trump Called It A Hoax, Pompeo Warns Russians Against Offering Bounties To Kill US Troops
After Trump Called It A Hoax, Pompeo Warns Russians Against Offering Bounties To Kill US Troops
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/14/2020 – 21:00The late June ‘Russian bounties in Afghanistan’ story lasted no longer than a mere week given that some of the very publications pushing it were forced to walk it back based on not only key claims not bearing out, but a slew of top intel officials and Pentagon generals saying it was baseless.
And then like many other ‘Russiagate’-inspired narratives (in this case Trump was accused of essentially ‘looking the other way’ while Russians supposedly paid the Taliban to kill US troops), it was memory-holed.
But this apparently hasn’t stopped the State Department or the Pentagon from using it as leverage while talking to the Russians. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned his counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, that “there will be an enormous price to pay” if the Kremlin did indeed pay Afghan fighters to attack Americans or other Westerners.
Pompeo revealed the warning in an interview with Radio Free Europe on Wednesday:
“That’s what I shared with Foreign Minister [Sergey] Lavrov,” Pompeo said. “I know our military has talked to their senior leaders as well. We won’t brook that; we won’t tolerate that.”
Russia has of course, denied involvement in any such operation, which many analysts have pointed out would carry major risk of stoking military conflict with the United States but with little positive gain in the region.
Pompeo also said in the interview: “We will do everything we need to do to protect and defend every American soldier and, for that matter, every soldier from the Czech Republic or any other country that’s part of the Resolute Support Mission to make sure that they’re safe.”
Importantly, it marks the first time any US official has broached the Russian bounties story with a Kremlin officials.
But again, it’s somewhat strange given the US administration (and multiple US intelligence agencies) has repeatedly denied that it has any merit. Trump has gone so far as to all it a “hoax”. Thus Pompeo’s message to the Russians appears a pure tactic for achieving leverage.
Or alternately, it could be that Pompeo is just plain undermining Trump on this one.
- Why Socialism Is The Pursuit Of Unhappiness
Why Socialism Is The Pursuit Of Unhappiness
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/14/2020 – 20:40Authored by Noel Williams via AmericanThinker.com,
Where are the happy socialists? The socialists I spot are either snarling with anger or shrieking with hubris. In fact, they seem intent on pursuing unhappiness as their misguided dictums controvert nature — human and physical. It’s simply hard to be sanguine when going against nature.
For sure, socialism attracts a “fair number of cranks.” Indubitably, it shackles the human spirit and foments misery. So what is it about this desperate ideology that’s so disparate to nature, and so antithetical to happiness — besides the fact it creates nothing except poverty?
There is much wisdom behind the notion that happiness is a journey, not a destination, so enjoy the ride. An analogy is a ship sailing the seas, seeking temporary refuge in port before embarking on another exciting expedition. There’s brief allowance for reveling upon attaining a goal, but then there’s another…and another, so don’t get too complacent in port.
If we obsess about outcomes, about reaching port, satisfaction and lasting happiness remain elusive. Yet that’s what socialists demand — equality of outcomes. Rather than embracing the journey by equipping explorers with equality of opportunity, they’re fixated on reaching the port of communism before mutiny festers. Once there, everyone except the dictator’s sycophants finds equality, all right — all become equally impoverished. Turns out so-called “equality” is just not everything it’s cracked up to be as the proletariat are dictated to — not in some salubrious transition on the way to utopia, but an indefinite dictatorship in dystopia. Rather than an abundance mindset, which grows the pie for all thanks to technological advances, it presumes a zero-sum scarcity reminiscent of the dark ages.
While we seek some cooperation as civil society emerges from an unforgiving state of nature, equally powerful are our competitive instincts and our natural desire to excel in exceptional America. But in addition to human nature, physical nature itself contravenes socialist orthodoxy, which breeds a kind of morass. In his article “Physics can explain human innovation and enlightenment,” Ephrat Livni points out that “[h]uman ingenuity is simply our way of partaking in a natural flow of life[.]” But ingenuity sustains in the broad, sunlit uplands of free-market capitalism, not in the squalor of sullied socialism. For socialists, necessity isn’t the mother of invention; it’s the requirement to hack, spy, and steal intellectual and physical property.
Concocting quotas and oppressive regulations oblivious to market-driven forces, they are like busy-body beavers clogging up the natural flow of things, but not nearly as endearing. This unhappy state of affairs is not conducive to the flourishing flow of ideas which cascade and splash around in a vibrant, free-market society leading to new products, jobs, and markets. New wealth begets more wealth as the river of ideas nourishes the plains.
By contrast, collectivism subdues our essential essence; our very consciousness is quelled. It destroys human creativity, which is necessary to wrestle prosperity from a state of nature. You see, individuals thrive when we are free — free — to enjoy the fruits of our labor; governments thrive when baleful bureaucrats coalesce power in order to institute centralized planning.
Socialism is clearly a state of unhappiness floundering in its futile resistance to the imperatives of physical and human nature. By subjugating the human spirit to the will of the organic state, it also restricts the flow of thoughts in our neuronal networks. No ingenuity, minimal invention — mostly theft. Synapses remain dormant, and cortical connections are tenuous and ambiguous; rather than pulses of energy transmitting every which way, socialist brains go dark. Where socialism prevails, human consciousness is literally repressed, and enlightenment is futile. Quite simply, the scourge of socialism surely ensures a dark-age mentality. No wonder all the socialists I know are so dour and dark: socialism, after all, is the pursuit of unhappiness.
- American Airlines Slated To Drop Dozens Of Flights To Smaller Cities As Government Aid Dries Up
American Airlines Slated To Drop Dozens Of Flights To Smaller Cities As Government Aid Dries Up
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/14/2020 – 20:20With the government set to stop subsidizing the industry, airlines are <gasp> actually going to have to make operational changes to effectively deal with the lack of demand. Oh, the horror of free market forces actually forcing companies to make business changes!
This starts with American Airlines, who is reportedly preparing to drop two dozen small and medium city flights as federal coronavirus aid is set to end. The aid had previously mandated that airlines were not allowed to cut service approaches.
Carriers were previously required to maintain minimum levels of service through September 30 as part of a $25 billion aid package, according to CNBC. They were also prohibited from making layoffs. Under the aid package, American Airlines received $5.8 billion.
The purpose of the deal was to provide both payroll assistance and continued air service around the country despite the fact that planes didn’t have any passengers.
American’s forthcoming cancellations could start showing up in fall schedules that are set to begin next week, the report said. Changes still have not been finalized and the list of cities that could be cut has not been released. Both airlines and their respective unions have continued to push Congress for another $25 billion in support to keep paying workers through the end of next March, when hopefully demand can recover.
Both the Democrats and Republicans seemed to be in favor of such a deal weeks ago, but negotiations have stalled in Congress for the time being. As a result, the Department of Transportation had informed American Airlines that a planned extension of the benefits was not going to happen for the time being.
A DOT spokesperson commented: “The Department did not propose to extend the obligations, but will use the authority in the CARES Act to monitor ongoing access by the traveling public to the national air transportation system. The Department is also prepared to implement any new provisions of law in this area if enacted by Congress.”
United and Delta have not announced changes to their schedule yet. However, one source told CNBC, the “situation is fluid”.
- 9/11 NYC Tribute Canceled Over COVID Concerns Despite De Blasio Allowing BLM Mural Without A Permit
9/11 NYC Tribute Canceled Over COVID Concerns Despite De Blasio Allowing BLM Mural Without A Permit
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/14/2020 – 20:00Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
The iconic memorial display in NYC that features two beams of light to honor the victims of 9/11 has been canceled over coronavirus concerns just weeks after Mayor Bill de Blasio allowed a Black Lives Matter mural to be painted outside Trump Tower.
The “Tribute in Light beam won’t shine for the first time in 18 years because health risks posed to the large crew required to oversee it “were far too great,” according to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum.
The same concerns were completely absent when a similarly large crew was on hand to paint the giant Black Lives Matter mural, a process which De Blasio himself took part in for a photo-op.
The mural was also painted without permission from the city, with de Blasio allowing activists to skip the permit process.
As we previously highlighted, at a time when NYC is experiencing soaring shootings and violent crimes (partly thanks to de Blasio emptying the prisons), the BLM mural also required 27 cops working in shifts to protect it.
Lol government is funny pic.twitter.com/etHGKoD3lM
— Luke Rudkowski (@Lukewearechange) August 14, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The 9/11 Memorial and Museum also scrapped the in-person reading of 9/11 victims’ names at the annual Ground Zero ceremony over coronavirus concerns.
Similar concerns were not expressed when tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter protesters repeatedly marched through New York City in close proximity.
Twitter respondents expressed their disgust at the double standard.
“This is a slap in the face to America,” said one.
“No permit but yet arrest people for “vandalizing” what they vandalized in the first place!” added another.
“Remember you can’t get corona at a #BLM event but you can at a light show,” said another.
“Could we just call it the George Floyd Lightshow or something? There’s gotta be a way around this,” joked another.
* * *
My voice is being silenced by free speech-hating Silicon Valley behemoths who want me disappeared forever. It is CRUCIAL that you support me. Please sign up for the free newsletter here. Donate to me on SubscribeStar here. Support my sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown.
- Nearly A Third Of Americans Had Unpaid Housing Bills In August
Nearly A Third Of Americans Had Unpaid Housing Bills In August
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/14/2020 – 19:40Nearly a third of Americans for the fourth consecutive month failed to pay rent or mortgage payments in full. Personal finances of millions of folks have quickly deteriorated through summer. Unpaid housing bills are mounting as the virus-induced downturn continues to unleash the worst employment crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
A new survey via Apartment List, an online rental platform, found 32% of renters (and homeowners) entered August with unpaid housing bills. At least 20% of respondents owed more than $1,000. Among renters with back rent due, 49% have renegotiated lease agreements with their landlords or are doing so.
Here’s the percentage of renters and homeowners with unpaid housing bills.
Renters and landlords are renegotiating lease agreements over unpaid rent obligations.
“As the pandemic rages on, missed housing payments are continuing to pile up. For the fourth straight month, we found that roughly one-in-three Americans failed to make their full rent or mortgage payment in the first week of the month,” Apartment List said.
The website added, “many of the protections and benefits put in place at the outset of the pandemic are now expiring, and the prospects for another round of stimulus remain uncertain. As unpaid housing debt builds, concerns around eviction and foreclosure are mounting. Although landlords and lenders are showing a willingness to negotiate, housing security is currently in jeopardy for an unprecedented number of Americans.”
The survey (of about 4,000 people) sheds more light on the finances of the average American has rapidly deteriorated over the summer with deep economic scarring realized as depressionary unemployment levels risks derailing the economic recovery.
Even before the virus-induced recession, the bottom 90% of Americans had insurmountable debts and limited savings. As soon as the mass layoffs hit in late March, tens of millions of folks saw their incomes quickly evaporate, unable to service bills, buy food, or like we’re focusing on this piece, pay rent, or mortgage payments.
The Trump administration quickly responded to this distress by handing out $600 per week stimulus checks, imposing an eviction moratorium, and allowing homeowners to defer mortgage payments in a forbearance program.
At the moment, a quarter of all household income is derived from the government.
So when stimulus checks stopped on July 31, and the eviction moratorium expired a couple of weeks ago, this means millions of Americans are greatly suffering in August.
With no timeline on the next round of stimulus, and or even if the rent eviction moratorium will be reimposed, the poor financial health of Americans doesn’t lend credibility a V-shaped recovery will be seen this year.
- School In The 'New COVID Normal': Plastic Bubbles, 8-Year-Old Arrests, & Woke Math
School In The ‘New COVID Normal’: Plastic Bubbles, 8-Year-Old Arrests, & Woke Math
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/14/2020 – 19:20Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, risks to your prosperity… and on occasion, inspiring poetic justice.
NASA to rename insensitive cosmic objects
You may think NASA’s mission is to take humanity to Mars and beyond.
But remember, we no longer live in a society which prioritizes actual advancement.
Far more important is making sure no one is offended.
So we may not make it to Mars, but at least the Innuit people will not be offended.
NASA announced that it will rename the “Eskimo Nebula” as well as the “Siamese Twins Galaxy” because they include racially insensitive terms, apparently rooted in colonialism.
But what about the constellation Orion– named after a Greek mythological hunter god who is alleged to have raped the Princess Merope.
Or the constellation Gemini– named after Green twins Castor and Pollus, who were part of that Argonaut band of capitalist swine who terrorized ancient civilizations in search of the Golden Fleece. . .
And isn’t the name Mars also offensive– because it celebrates the patriarchal, heteronormative violent God of War?
What about Jupiter– a notorious rapist who slept with his children?
In fact, every planet named after a Roman god should be considered offensive– Rome was the biggest colonizer of its day and routinely enslaved captives and lower class Romans.
Luckily the Visogoths held a ‘peaceful protest’ in Rome in the year 410 which resulted in much more equality– everyone was equally impoverished and defeated.
Click here to read the full story.
* * *
California to raise income taxes RETROACTIVELY
California just doesn’t seem to understand.
The rich continue to flee the state in droves. Companies like Tesla are out. Moving companies are overwhelmed.
And what does the state legislature do? Raise taxes on the rich. Retroactively.
A bill passed the Assembly that proposes increasing tax rates on high income Californians by up to 3.5%.
And if the bill passes, it will be effective retroactively to January 1, 2020.
California already had the highest income tax rate of any state in the US by far. But this tax hike will bring the top rate for those earning more than $5.9 million to 16.8%.
On top of that, yesterday several state lawmakers introduced a wealth tax– which would take a slice of someone’s net worth, instead of just their annual income.
Most of the people who are subject to paying these taxes are already working from home and incredibly mobile. They can easily leave the state, which will result in a tax LOSS for California. Another victory for socialism!
Click here to read the full story.
* * *
Kindergarteners in Thailand sealed in plexiglass cubicles
Thai kindergarteners’ days are so structured now because of Covid, that any semblance of free play and exploration is gone.
Take a look at the pictures from one elementary school, and you will think you’re looking into a dystopian future– maybe that’s where we are.
Children are separated by plexiglass barriers at desks, and isolated in plastic cubicles to play. They stand where they’re told and wear masks and face shields all day long.
This is not an education– it is indoctrination.
But in Thailand, just like in the US, homeschooling is legal– no one has to put up with this.
Especially when the psychological factors may be worse than the disease.
Click here to read the full story.
Cop can’t fit handcuffs on 8 year old arrested in school
Body camera footage has been released from an incident in December 2018 where a police officer arrested, fingerprinted, mugshotted, and charged an 8 year old boy with battery.
It took nine months in court before it reached a rational adult– a judge who dismissed the case.
To be clear, this is a different incident from others we have discussed, like the cop who arrested a six year old girl in school, and a cop who handcuffed an 8 year old autistic boy.
But the similarity in every case is that no one stepped in to say, “hey maybe we shouldn’t be arresting children for basic childhood misbehavior.”
In this case, the boy wasn’t sitting properly at lunch, whatever that means.
A teacher thought it was appropriate to intervene physically, upon which the boy yelled, “don’t put your hands on me!” and punched the teacher in the chest.
She wasn’t injured because this is a tiny eight year old we are talking about.
Still, that was enough for police to respond, and attempt to handcuff the boy– but the boy’s wrists were too small.
Then the officer pats down the crying boy, putting his hands all over him, and escorts him to a police car. Meanwhile the cop seems to delight in telling the boy that “this is very serious” and “you’re going to jail.”
Apparently there was no sane adult to be found anywhere in this school or police department.
Click here to read the full story.
“Kindergarten Cop” cancelled
We thought the 1990 Schwarzenegger movie Kindergarten Cop would be cancelled at some point for insensitivity to non-conforming-gender identity.
At one point in the film, as Schwartzenegger teaches, a boy exclaims, “boys have a penis, girls have vaginas.”
But no, that’s not why Kindergarten Cop is being cancelled.
A planned 30th anniversary drive-in showing of the film was cancelled because it apparently glorifies police officers.
The sentence was passed, you guessed it, in a Tweet from an angry local author:
“What’s so funny about School-to-Prison pipeline . . . in which African American, Latinx and other kids of color are criminalized rather than educated. Five- and 6-year-olds are handcuffed and hauled off to jail routinely in this country.”
As the last story shows, we also recognize the problem with overzealous cops in schools. (Not that it should matter, but the boy from the last story was White.)
We’re just not sure censoring a playful Schwarzenegger film is going to deliver the revolutionary change required to tackle the problem.
But homeschooling might.
Click here to read the full story.
Math “reeks of white supremacist patriarchy”
First it was a PhD student studying mathematics who Tweeted that 2+2=4 is “because of western imperialism/colonization. . .” (we wrote about this last month.)
But this idea is catching on.
Math professors and PhD candidates from various academic institutions eagerly agreed on Twitter–
One professor who teaches math education at Brooklyn College said: “um, ya’ll must know that the idea that math is objective or neutral IS A MYTH.”
The professor also claimed that math “reeks of white supremacist patriarchy. . .” (nevermind that many early advances in arithmetic were from Persian, Arabic, Indian, and Chinese mathematicians.)
This was met with agreement from a professor of Sociopolitical Perspectives on Mathematics and Science Education at the University of Illinois; a Harvard University PhD student; and others.
In line with everything we have been saying this week, the actual objective reality that 2+2=4 takes a back seat to the “woke” belief that math is yet another racist tool of oppression.
Click here to read the full story.
San Francisco Covid relief includes funding meth lab
San Francisco has put up 2,500 homeless people in hotel rooms as part of an effort to help them social distance during Covid lockdowns.
That provided the opportunity to, for instance, start a meth lab in a tax funded hotel room.
Run a business during Covid? No.
Start a meth lab with taxpayer funds? Yes.
Click here to read the full story.
* * *
On another note… We think gold could DOUBLE and silver could increase by up to 5 TIMES in the next few years. That’s why we published a new, 50-page long Ultimate Guide on Gold & Silver that you can download here.
- Hillary Clinton Willing To Serve In Biden Administration
Hillary Clinton Willing To Serve In Biden Administration
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/14/2020 – 19:00Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is ‘ready to help’ the Biden administration ‘in any way I can.’
Speaking from ‘The 19th Represents Summit,’ on Thursday, Clinton told Biden: “I think this will be a moment where every American — I don’t care what party you are, I don’t care what age, race, gender, I don’t care — every American should want to fix our country … So if you’re asked to serve, you should certainly consider that,” said the twice-failed presidential candidate who enabled her husband’s sexual addiction and allegedly worked to intimidate and discredit his accusers.
Just don’t put her in charge of rapid response when American consulates are under attack.
Earlier in the week, Clinton offered her support for Biden’s running mate, Kamala Harris.
“I’m thrilled to welcome @KamalaHarris to a historic Democratic ticket. She’s already proven herself to be an incredible public servant and leader. And I know she’ll be a strong partner to @JoeBiden. Please join me in having her back and getting her elected.”
I’m thrilled to welcome @KamalaHarris to a historic Democratic ticket. She’s already proven herself to be an incredible public servant and leader. And I know she’ll be a strong partner to @JoeBiden. Please join me in having her back and getting her elected. pic.twitter.com/cmtOO8Gqqv
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 11, 2020
Hillary previously served alongside Joe Biden in the Obama administration – drawing sharp criticism over he handling of the 2012 terrorist attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, as well as her private email server – from which she deleted over 30,000 emails which were the subject of a subpoena.
“I want to add my voice to the many who have endorsed you to be our president,” Clinton said of Biden earlier this year, adding “Just think of what a difference it would make right now if we had a president who not only listened to the science, put fact over fiction, but brought us together, showed the kind of compassion and caring that we need from our president and which Joe Biden has been exemplifying throughout his entire life.”
- As Ethereum Surges, Futures Open Interest Hits A Record $1.5 Billion
As Ethereum Surges, Futures Open Interest Hits A Record $1.5 Billion
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/14/2020 – 18:40By Liam Frost of Decrypt
-
The total value of outstanding Ethereum futures contracts reached a new high of $1.5 billion.
-
This was spurred by ETH’s price finally breaking above $400.
-
The value of open Ethereum futures grew twice as fast as Bitcoin’s since February.
The total value of outstanding Ethereum (ETH) futures contracts has reached an all-time high of $1.5 billion today, according to crypto analytics platform Skew.
⬆️ Another new ATH in ETH Futures Open Interest, crossing the $1.5bn mark for the very first time across the exchanges https://t.co/0KkntYiyQp tracks. pic.twitter.com/bnh2WcWixT
— skew (@skewdotcom) August 14, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Also known as open interest, this figure reflects the current total value of Ethereum futures that have not been settled yet. Futures are a form of financial derivatives where parties agree to sell/buy an asset at a specific price on a set date. Unlike options contracts, where buyers might choose to not purchase the asset, futures are contractually binding and must be settled on the expiration date.
The overall growth of the futures volume combined with the rising price of ETH, which is currently up roughly 9% on the day and trading at around $428, signifies a strong market amid an upward trend, said Bobby Ong, a co-founder of crypto metrics platform CoinGecko.
“Ether finally broke past the $400 resistance level today. It has been trying to break past the $400 level unsuccessfully since the start of August. The successful breakout led traders using technical indicators to view this as a bullish indicator and traders started leveraging long on the futures market leading to it reaching its all-time high of $1.5 billion today,” Ong told Decrypt.
Nicholas Pelecanos, the head of trading at NEM Venture Fund, also cited the break above $400 as the main catalyst for the latest Ethereum futures all-time high.
“Since [2017] the $400 range has acted as a key level in ETH’s price history. The break of this level technically is very bullish and is likely the cause of the large volume on ETH futures,” Pelecanos told Decrypt.
Yet, he also noted that there is currently friction within the Ethereum community caused by continuing debates about supply and transaction fees. Researchers at Santiment wrote:
“On Tuesday, #Ethereum fees reached all-time high values in both $USD and $ETH. Since this record breaking statistic was hit, the #2 ranked market cap #crypto asset has risen +13% and sentiment has remained positive. This is an indication that although traders obviously prefer fees to be lower, the ramifications on people’s willingness to transact via an asset they believe in (at least in the short-term) are fairly minimal.”
Pelecanos added that such disconnects “between the hype around the technology and what it can do can lead to bubbles,” but also simultaneously could result in an even more bullish market if these issues to be resolved.
Outpacing Bitcoin
In the last six months, the ratio of Ethereum to Bitcoin has increased significantly (to its highest since January 2019).
Additionally, the open interest of Ethereum futures grew twice as fast compared to Bitcoin (BTC), noted Larry Cermak, director of research at The Block.
“Bitcoin’s futures OI was 8 times higher than ETH’s in February. Only 6 months later, it’s now about 4 times higher. OI of ETH grew relatively twice faster than BTC,” Cermak tweeted.
This somewhat mirrors the two currencies’ increase in prices since February. Six months ago, BTC was trading at roughly $10,233 while ETH’s price hovered around $268. Since then, Bitcoin and Ethereum have gained roughly 15% and 45%, respectively, with the latter outperforming BTC by around 200%.
“Ethereum has been on fire lately. The industry of tokenization and new-wave finance seems to be in a sort of consolidation around this network and continue to build a vast majority of new crypto-fanlged projects on the Ethereum blockchain,” summarized Mati Greenspan, a popular analyst and the founder of Quantum Economics, speaking to Decrypt.
-
- Empty Apartments in Manhattan Hit Record High As Two Year Crisis Begins
Empty Apartments in Manhattan Hit Record High As Two Year Crisis Begins
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/14/2020 – 18:20New York City’s rental market, the largest in the US, has fallen under severe pressure over the last four months as city-dwellers make a run for the exit. The outbound migration flow has resulted in a record number of empty apartments.
Douglas Elliman and Miller Samuel published a new report this week (seen by CNBC) outlines how New York City has a whopping 13,000 empty apartments as landlords struggle to find tenants. The amount of vacant apartments supersedes the financial crisis a decade ago, which many landlords and multifamily operators are in for a rude awakening as their rental income streams evaporate.
The number of apartments for rent, or listing inventory, more than doubled over last year and set a record for the 14 years since data started being collected, according to a report from Douglas Elliman and Miller Samuel. As the number of apartments listed for rent hit 13,117, the number of new leases signed fell by 23%.
July also saw the largest fall in rental rates in nearly a decade, dropping 10%. Landlords are now offering an average of 1.7 months of free rent to try to lure tenants, according to the report, which is also a recent high.
While hundreds of thousands of residents left the city in March and April in the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, brokers and landlords hoped many would start returning in July and August, as the city’s lockdown eased and brokers could start showing apartments again. July and August are usually the busiest rental months of the year, as families get ready for school. But July’s weakness, and what brokers say is already a slow August, suggests that Manhattan’s real estate and economic troubles could extend well into the fall or beyond. – CNBC said, citing the report
Manhattan rents are slumping this summer and are expected to keep declining well into 2021. The average rental price of a two-bedroom apartment is about $4,620.
The surge in empty apartments was widespread across the borough. Declines in new leases were seen across the board, from the high to low end segments. The report said the Upper East Side was hit the hardest, saw a 39% decline in new leases over the month.
A record number of empty apartments in Manhattan will have ripple effects industrywide and on indirect industries.
Miller warned: “This could be a difficult couple of years for landlords.”
With landlord rental streams quickly evaporating, many will have trouble paying their mortgages and could result in a wave of selling over the next couple of years, sending real estate prices citywide into a possible correction.
- What You Will Find When You Follow The Money
What You Will Find When You Follow The Money
Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/14/2020 – 18:00Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,
It has been a rough go for California Governor Gavin Newsom. Late last week it was revealed that the state Department of Public Health had tickled the poodle on its COVID-19 record keeping. Somehow the bureaucrats in Sacramento undercounted new coronavirus cases by as many as 300,000.
Perhaps this oversight prompted Newsom to imbibe in a little meditation and reflection. At his Wednesday coronavirus news conference, shortly after quoting Voltaire, Newsom offered the following epiphany:
“Businesses can’t thrive in a world that’s failing.”
Often the simplest insights into reality are the most essential. We’ll give Newsom that. Yet, this is hardly an insight. Rather, it’s readily obvious…even to a numskull.
The world that’s failing, where businesses can’t thrive, is a direct consequence of government lockdown orders. And Newsom, more than any other public official, has his fingerprints all over the offense. If you recall, California, under Newsom’s command, was the first state to order lockdowns. It’s a shame he didn’t pause for meditation before committing the state to ruin.
The dynamics of what would follow Newsom’s lockdown orders were predictable. When government decrees froze the economy, bills were still due. Yet many people’s incomes, in the form of paychecks, disappeared.
For businesses, outstanding accounts payable were still due. Though accounts receivable quickly became overdue. In short, the flow of cash, as delivered by an open economy of give and take, broke down.
Certainly, Newsom thought he was doing the right thing. He had to keep everyone in the Golden State safe by locking them down. Many governors followed Newsom’s lead, having the same disastrous results.
But that was just the beginning. Soon the uplifters in Washington swung into action…
Printing Press Money
The opportunity to face the economic depression honestly – through bankruptcies, write downs, and a broad financial purge – came and went with the rollout of massive fiscal and monetary stimulus programs. Crackpot schemes like the CARES Act, the PPP, the PMCCF, and the SMCCF, among others.
The general objective of these programs was to replace the personal and business cash flows that the lockdown orders destroyed. The intentions may have been good. But they paved the road to hell, nonetheless.
Zealous efforts to paper over the drop off in what people and businesses earn and what they owe, could never be covered for long. What’s more, these programs were flawed from the get go. Because they relied on printing press money – credit conjured from thin air – to make them work.
This, no doubt, is a serious flaw. Printing press money may appear to work, in the short term. But it’s not without consequences. First, it destroys money that has been earned and saved. Second, it turns the stock market into a barometer for the expansion of the money supply.
Yet the relationships between printing press money and the financial and economic distortions it causes are increasingly perilous. The stock market may be the barometer for the expansion of the money supply today. But tomorrow, the stock market could crash, and consumer price inflation could assume the role of money supply expansion barometer.
The consequences of mass money debasement are impossible to undo. Once fake printing press money has mixed with the money that’s been earned and saved, it cannot be backed out. The veracity of all dollars becomes questionable. The value of all dollars becomes suspect.
What’s next?
What You Will Find When You Follow the Money
Well, what’s next is an extension of what came before. And what comes next can be summed up with one word: “More”.
More monetary stimulus. More fiscal stimulus. More spending programs. More federal unemployment checks. More bailouts. More government subsidized loans. More money supply. More Fed purchases of corporate bonds. More debts. More deficits.
More of this. More of that. All of which will be paid for with more printing press money.
Of course, more printing press money means more distortions. Which means more asset bubbles. Which means more inflation. Which means more wealth inequality. Which means more protests. Which means more riots. Which means more chaos.
Which means much, Much More – of More.
We always knew this day would come. But we thought it would be much more sensational when it arrived. We watched the Fed, through willful cleverness, paint itself into a corner over the course of several decades. There’s no escape.
So the Fed will keep doing more of what it does. More money printing. More dollar debasement. More economic destruction.
Finally, more and more people are catching on. They’ve suspected there’s been something wrong. That things don’t quite add up. However, for many years, political and class divisions served as a great distraction to channel their discontents.
Slowly, that is changing. More and more people are following the money back to its genesis. And what they’re finding is something so utterly crude, grotesque, and revolting that, like the devil, it hardly seems real.
But it is…and it’s a catastrophe.
Digest powered by RSS Digest
Saving...![<!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>](https://i0.wp.com/www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/lake%20tahoe.jpg?ssl=1){kind=link}
![<!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>](https://i0.wp.com/www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/lake%20tahoe%20real%20estate%202.jpg?ssl=1){kind=link}