- Is There Such A Thing As A "Shithole Country"?
Authored by Andrew Korybko via Oriental Review,
The question should be rephrased to whether there’s such a thing as a “shithole” period, and yes, there is, but the stereotypical “Third World” socio-economic and physical conditions that the word often embodies are also widely present in parts of the US.
Another day, another Trump controversy, and this time it’s the Mainstream Media going bonkers because of the President supposedly referring to some countries as “shitholes” and questioning why the government has allowed so many of their people to immigrate to America. Knowing Trump’s personality and speaking style, it’s believable that he did in fact say this, though what’s less believable is the insincere virtue signaling that’s sprung up all over social media ever since.
Defining A “Shithole”
Some people are predictably slamming Trump as a “racist”, “fascist”, and “white supremacist”, outraged that he would dare use such language when referring to the “Third World” conditions of Haiti and most of Africa and convinced that he was actually exploiting that as an excuse in order to have the “plausibly deniable pretext” for implying that their majority dark-colored populations are “shit”. He wasn’t, but that’s not going to stop agenda-driven individuals and organizations from pretending that that’s what he meant.
What Trump really had in mind was the stereotypically (key word) underdeveloped economic and physical infrastructure in those places, as well as the unstated “backwardness” of their people that he thinks contributes to never-ending violence there. Using the first pair of criteria, the same “shithole” label is also very relevant in objectively describing parts of the US and the broader West as a whole, especially neglected inner-city areas with large minority populations.
The problem is that the idea of “backwardness” is relative, and for as much as Trump and some Americans might think that African-Americans, Haitians, and Africans fit that description, they and others might feel just as strongly that the US in general is a “backwards” place as well, though for totally different reasons. “Shitholes”, whether inside the US or elsewhere, are devastated communities whose problems aren’t easily attributable to one source and are commonly the result of many factors, some of which aren’t the fault of those who were born there into those deplorable conditions.
“Backwardness” Is In The Eye Of The Labeler
“Backwardness”, however, is an entirely subjective comparison made at the individual level and used to generalize other people as well as societies, regions, countries, continents, and even civilizations. Just as some Americans might feel that a different category of their compatriots are “backwards”, so too might non-Americans feel the same about Americans, and whether or not this is “racist” is up to each person to determine on their own. Take for example the US’ well-known racial tensions – some “whites” might think that the “gangsta rap” prevalent in “black” culture is a “backwards” display of social “values”; likewise, some “blacks” might think that flying the Confederate flag is “backwards” behavior stemming from the Civil War period when slavery was still legal.
There are of course uncontestably racist examples that can be mentioned in this vein, but such hatred deserves no place in a respectable analysis and therefore shouldn’t be the subject of any discussion.
As for the larger conception of “backwardness”, some Americans firmly believe that Islam is the epitome of this idea, but some of these very same Muslims think that it’s Americans themselves who live a “backwards” lifestyle due to many examples of their cultural behavior being contradictory to the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings. Americans might retort that the “tribal conditions” of Libya, “Syraq”, Yemen, and Afghanistan play a major role in perpetuating violence there (forgetting their own country’s role in this), but these people could just as easily point to the US’ “identity politics” being responsible for why no one has yet to stop the mostly black-on-black gangland killings in Chicago or other big American cities.
Moving From “Shithole” To “Shithole”
Accepting that the objective (economic and physical infrastructure) and subjective (“backwardness”) conditions of a “shithole” can be found anywhere in the world, including in the American heartland itself and especially its inner cities & the “Rust Belt”, it’s time to ponder why people move from “shithole” to “shithole”. This phenomenon is interestingly observable not just in relation to people from foreign “shitholes” immigrating to the US, but also in terms of Americans leaving for other “shitholes” inside their own country.
Foreign “Shitholes”:
Haitians and Africans, to use the examples that Trump was originally referring to, depart from their “shitholes” for America because they expect that their intended destination has higher living standards in the economic, physical, and/or social senses. It’s true that the average (keyword) all-around conditions in the US are oftentimes better than in most other places due to its more effectively functioning civil society, which includes its courts and police, though serious abuses still occur in these spheres. Most attractive of all and capable of getting many immigrants to overlook these very real problems is the country’s currency, the dollar.
The possibility of a “petroyuan” poses a latent threat to the dollar’s worldwide dominance, but for now at least the dollar is still king, and that’s why people from “shitholes” all across the world want to work in America. To put it bluntly, they’d rather be paid in dollars than whatever their national currency may be, and that explains why these migrants oftentimes support their families back home through remittances prior to abusing the immigration system to bring them to the US through legalized “chain migration” schemes. It doesn’t matter if their physical and working conditions are worse in America than back home in some cases, what’s seemingly most important to them is that they’re paid in dollars.
American “Shitholes”:
The same cynicism is what drives some Americans to move from one “shithole” to the next in search of what they naively believe could be a “better life” that would allow them to finally live the “American Dream”. People from the “Rust Belt” can’t easily move to the California coast without already having a job lined up because it’s too prohibitively expensive for them to do so, which is why they sometimes spend all of their meager savings and even borrow money from their families to make what they hope would be a life-changing trip for the “better”. Unfortunately, due to their limited means, they oftentimes find themselves trading one “shithole” for another because of their economic inability to climb out of the social gutter that they usually have to inhabit in order to barely make ends meet there.
“Chain migration” is the exception once again because having a family member or close friend in the destination state could help the internal migrant cut down on costs by splitting living expenses with their hosts, thus helping the whole household. Each person could then more quickly save up money and begin planning for their next step in life as they attempt to “climb the ladder of success”, provided of course that they’re willing to sacrifice on their social conditions for the time being in order to make it possible. This could entail living in very cramped conditions inside what are popularly described as “ghettos” (colloquially known as “the hood” in the US), which are usually characterized by the proliferation of drugs, violence, and naturally, the seemingly never-ending consequent cycle of poverty.
Dollar Delirium:
The common thread explaining why many people (whether foreigners or Americans) move around from “shithole” to “shithole” within the US is because they’re infected with “dollar delirium”, or the fallacy that a higher gross income automatically translates to a “better life”. For people coming from the “shitholes” of inner-city Cleveland or the rural villages of the Congo, simply earning more money is assumed to be the secret to “succeeding” in life, overlooking the fact that their desired destination also has higher living expenses that may in some cases leave them with a proportionately lower disposable income than if they just stayed home. This might not bother them so long as their basic needs are taken care of and they still have some money left over to spend on entertainment or save for later, but others might come to regret it if their social expectations aren’t adequately met.
The Social Solution To All “Shitholes”
Silk Roads:
Not everybody moves because they want to “get rich” or make a “quick buck”, since buying the newest iPhone isn’t as important to some people as having a stable and respectable livelihood for themselves and their families. “Shitholes” don’t typically provide this, or at least not in a way that satisfies most people, which is why they decide to move elsewhere in search of a “better life”. It would be wrong to imagine that immigrants, whether foreigners to the US or Americans within it, are all “greedy”, and the “safest assumption” is that they’re motivated by social push-and-pull factors more so than economic ones.
That said, an obvious solution to migration presents itself in the form of encouraging socio-economic development in migrant-originating areas, which is exactly what China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) global vision of New Silk Road connectivity and Trump’s infrastructure plan– both of which are conceptually compatible with one another – aspire to do. A comprehensive strategy involving local, state/provincial, and national governments alongside state-owned and private businesses is the only conceivable way forward, but it’ll still take a while to yield results even if the most masterful plan was flawlessly executed, which is in any case unlikely.
Belief System Compromises:
Because this solution will take a long time to implement, if ever, the next best thing is to discuss the details of the infrastructural and metastructural social reasons behind migration. Social infrastructure can be described as schools, healthcare, and welfare benefits, for example, while social metastructure is culture and its related intangibles. Most socially motivated migrants are willing to compromise on social metastructure in order to reap the benefits of its infrastructural counterpart, meaning that they’ll “grin and bear it” if they dislike their new cultural conditions so long as they receive their expected access to certain “hard benefits” such as what they believe to be a better education system and state subsidies.
Considering this, it makes sense why people who hate America’s cultural-political system still migrate there because they’re tacitly compromising on their (sometimes publicly proclaimed) beliefs in exchange for receiving expected economic and social infrastructure “rewards”, and the same goes for Americans migrating to other states or countries. To reference the example mentioned earlier in this analysis, some Muslims think that American culture is “backwards”, but they’re willing to deal with it if the pay and social infrastructural conditions are right.
As for Americans, an “enlightened” liberal might escape from California’s dysfunctional society to seek refuge in the rural “backwaters” of a “red state’s” much more stable one despite their new destination restricting abortion and therefore being “ideologically incompatible” with one of their core beliefs. Another domestic example could be a conservative from “Middle America” moving to the liberal dystopia of New York City in the hopes of finding a better job. As for external manifestations of this “social compromise” in action, elderly Americans who look down upon what they may believe to be the “backwards” people of Latin America might “suck it up” and retire in that region simply because it’s more affordable.
Sacrificing For The Next Generation:
The last “solution” to the world’s “shitholes” is the passive one that’s been employed since time immemorial, and that’s migrants sacrificing their living standards by knowingly accepting that they’ll likely spend the rest of their lives in suboptimal social conditions in order to give their descendants that are born there a “better chance” at “climbing the ladder’ and “succeeding” in ways that their parents weren’t ever able to. This is the quintessential story of most American immigrants throughout history and especially from the late-19th century until the present day, and it also describes why many civilizationally dissimilar migrants are willing to put up with Europe’s different social metastructural standards in spite of this contradicting the strict requirements of their religion.
Another relevancy of this principle is when Americans migrate from their rural “shitholes” to urban ones, or from one “hood” to another in different cities, hoping that their children can seize the socio-economic opportunities there that their parents either weren’t able to or which didn’t exist in their hometowns.
Sacrificing for the next generation doesn’t “solve” the problem of “shitholes” – it ignores them – though sometimes there are “activists” who try to change things for the better in their own “shitholes” or the ones that they just moved into, but their freedom of action is severely constrained by the laws of their host society. Muslim migrants wanting to impose sharia in their new European neighborhoods or build mosques there are increasingly finding it more difficult to do so, but they still have it comparatively better than a Syrian Christian refugee that somehow ends up in a Gulf Kingdom and wants to hold public church services or build their own house of worship there.
In America, social and workplace activism is the most common form of struggle for people who have been born and raised in “shitholes” or internally migrated to them, and while they have a greater chance of succeeding with their cause inside the US than “shithole”-inhabiting people elsewhere in the world, it’s becoming increasingly more difficult by the year for them to do so.
The Myth Of “Equality”
Theoretically and in terms of “international law”, all countries and cultures are “equal” to one another as seen from the eyes of the UN and its related UNESCO body, though in reality many people have their own personal preferences and accordingly believe that some countries and cultures are “better” than others. Someone indoctrinated with “American Exceptionalism” might truly think that the US is the “best” place on earth by all measures, while some Muslims might think that their own societies are the “best” to live in for cultural-religious reasons. Each of these two might have nothing but disdain for the other, but that’s their personal right, in fact, whether one agrees with it or not. It’s up to each individual to judge on their own whether this or any of its manifestations constitute “racism”, though it must be noted that there are indeed some undeniable examples of racism that should always be condemned.
That said, screaming “racism”, “fascism”, and “supremacism” just because someone has an individual opinion – no matter how disrespectful and offensive, though given that it doesn’t objectively conform to any of those three aforementioned terrible terms – is hypocritical because one can be certain that the person casting the stones also has their own “hierarchical” views on something or another, even if they’re more “politely” expressed. The Haitians and Africans that Trump so derogatorily described as coming from “shitholes” might think that some parts of their home region are “better” than others, just as they apparently think the US is the “best” because they’ll willing to leave their homelands to migrate there. The same can be said for Americans who favor one place of living within their own country over another, for whatever given reason, whether it’s the “shithole” that they moved to or their new place of living after escaping from a “shithole”.
Mixed Motivations For Migration
It’s crucial to understand that those who migrate from one “shithole” to another don’t always believe that everything in their place of residence is the “best”, but might be willing to “compromise” on certain aspects of it either due to “dollar delirium” or because they intend to sacrifice for the next generation. For example, it’s entirely natural for immigrants to retain their native culture and values inside their homes while trying to publicly assimilate and integrate into their host societies at large, such as some Arabs do when migrating to the West or some Westerners do when moving outside of their civilizational sphere (or even within it, with Poles being a perfect example). The complexity of the millennia-long phenomenon of migration means that there’s no simple explanation for why people decide to move away from their place of birth, with each instance being unique and usually motivated by multiple factors.
Concluding Thoughts
At the end of the day, using the word “shithole” to describe somewhere is a crass way of making objective points about economic & physical infrastructure and socially subjective ones about “backwardness”, but nevertheless is the right of every individual to use according to their taste so long as they’re not promoting actual racism or any of its related toxic ideologies such as fascism or supremacism. It’s not just Trump and “whites” in America who use this term, but other people across the world employ it or whatever the local analogue is in their language when making similar types of comparisons, and even in the absence of actual words, internal value judgements about other countries and cultures are still being formulated. It’s natural for people to have their own personal hierarchy of national-cultural preferences no matter how “politically incorrect” it may be to openly admit in some societies, meaning that the concept of the “shithole” is here to stay whether one likes it or not.
- These Are The 10 Companies That Dominate the Global Arms Trade
The world puts $1.69 trillion towards military expenditures per year, and about $375 billion of that goes towards buying arms specifically.
Whether it is guns, tanks, jets, missiles, or ships that are on your shopping list, in the international arms community, as Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardin notes, there is a supplier for any weapon your country desires.
Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist
ARMS DEALERS, BY SALES
Today’s chart organizes the world’s top arms companies by sales, location, and arms as a percentage of sales:
Note: Airbus considers itself a European company. It’s registered in the Netherlands, and its main HQ is in France.
The above data comes courtesy of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), which tracks arms deals and companies extensively.
USA, USA!
While it is common knowledge that the United States plays a big role in the global arms trade, the numbers are still quite astounding.
Of the top ten companies by sales, firms based in the U.S. make up seven of them. That includes the clear #1, Lockheed Martin, which had $40.8 billion in arms-related sales in 2016, as well as the remaining constituents of the top three: Boeing and Raytheon.
Further, on SIPRI’s wider top 100 list, a good proxy for total arms sales globally, U.S. defense companies accounted for a whopping 58% of total global arms sales. That adds up to $217.2 billion in 2016, a 4.0% rise over the previous year.
ROUNDING OUT THE TOP 10
Only three companies make the top 10 leaderboard from outside of the United States.
That group includes Airbus, the massive European commercial airline manufacturer that gets 17% of its sales from arms-related deals, as well as BAE Systems (U.K.) and Leonardo (Italy).
As a final caveat, it’s worth mentioning that SIPRI notes that some Chinese companies would likely make its Top 100 list as well – but for now, the list excludes Chinese companies as the available data is not comparable or accurate.
- Customs And Border Protection Clarifies: You Have No Rights While Traveling
Submitted by Sovereign Man
The government is like a poorly trained dog. If you let one bad behavior go, it just escalates until they bite.
The government has been searching electronics like cell phones and laptops at the border since early in the Bush administration. But because the 9/11 attacks were fresh, and because the practice was not widespread, it went largely unnoticed.
Fast forward to fiscal year 2015 and the Customs and Border Protection searched 8,503 airline passengers’ electronic devices. In FY 2016 they searched 19,033. And in FY 2017 CBP searched the devices of 30,200 travelers.
The CBP obtained no warrants for these searches. Many people searched were foreign travelers to the U.S. but last year over 6,000 were American citizens.
In response to growing complaints Customs and Border Protection revised their policy. Last week they issued a new directive. But in some ways, it is worse.
For starters, their guidance claims the authority to search a traveler’s electronic devices “with or without suspicion.”
The guidance now claims passengers are “obligated” to turn over their devices as well as passcodes for examination. If they fail to do so, agents can seize the device.
That is all considered a “basic search.” Agents must have suspicion in order to conduct an “advanced search.” This includes copying information from devices, or analyzing them with other equipment.
Finally, CBP agents can not “intentionally” search information stored on the cloud, versus on the device’s hard drive.
What this means:
It actually adds insult to injury that the new guidance starts: “CBP will protect the rights of individuals against unreasonable search and seizure and ensure privacy protection while accomplishing its enforcement mission.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. This is clearly a violation of the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. This violates the privacy of everyone searched.
Then they demand you forgo your Fifth Amendment rights against self incrimination. If you refuse to give out your password, they further violate the Fourth Amendment by seizing your device.
CBP agents are human. There is no inherent reason that they can be trusted with information like passwords. There is no reason why passengers should have to trust that their copied information will actually be destroyed according to CBP policy.
There is no legal justification to threaten the contacts and sensitive information that journalists might be transporting. This further adds First Amendment concerns to this intrusive policy. It could easily be used to chill free speech and freedom of the press.
Luckily there is a lawsuit in the works challenging this policy, but a ruling cannot happen quick enough.
In the meantime, prepare carefully for international travel. You may even want to travel only with “burner” devices; meaning you don’t mind if they are confiscated for refusing an unconstitutional search.
- Who Do Russians Consider Their Greatest Enemies?
According to a new poll from The Levada Center, 23 percent of Russians believe their country is surrounded by enemies.
While, the list of who Americans consider their enemies has been covered by Statista before, Niall McCarthy wonders what do Russians think?
You will find more statistics at Statista
The research shows that 68 percent of people in Russia consider the United States a threat.
Considering the annexation of the Crimea and the war in Eastern Ukraine, 29 percent of respondents also said that Ukraine is an enemy.
Even though the Russian military is heavily committed to the war in Syria, only 5 and 4 percent of people respectively say Islamic extremists are a threat. That’s less than Germany, the UK and NATO which are all labelled enemies by 6 percent of Russians.
Internally, only two percent of respondents consider oligarchs and bankers enemies and one percent think Vladimir Putin is a threat.
- Japanese Purchases Of US Treasurys Tumble
In the last days of 2017, we showed something surprising: as a result of suddenly exploding USDJPY funding costs, there had never been a worse time for Japanese investors, traditionally some of the most ravenous purchasers of US paper, to buy US Treasurys.
As we explained on December 27, USD funding costs for Japanese insurers and banks to invest in US Treasuries – which had surged reaching a post-financial-crisis high of 2.35% on 15 Dec – are determined by three things, namely (1) the difference in US and Japanese risk-free rates (OIS), (2) the difference in US and Japanese interbank risk premiums (Libor-OIS), and (3) basis swaps, which illustrate the imbalance in currency-hedged US and Japanese investments.
In this particular case, widening of (1) as a result of Fed rate hikes and tightening of dollar funding conditions inside the US (2) and outside the US (3) have occurred simultaneously. This is shown in the chart below.
Whatever the cause behind these sharp funding shortages, one thing was clear – dollar funding costs (FX hedging costs) for both Japanese insurers, banks and other investors to buy US Treasuries were surging (with Japanese buyers and reached a post-financial-crisis high of 2.35% on 15 Dec. And in terms of practical implications for the treasury market this means that, all else equal, marginal demand for US paper is about to plunge for one simple reason: the FX-hedged yields on US Treasurys have plunged to (negative) levels never seen before (unless of course foreign investors buy US Treasurys unhedged).
To demonstrate this point, the chart below from Deutsche Bank shows the yields on currency-hedged US Treasuries from the perspective of Japanese investors. Annualized hedge costs had risen to 2.33% at the end of December, which means that investments in 10y US Treasuries would result in virtually no yield. Furthermore, yields from investment in shorter than 10y US Treasuries would be less than JGBs and result in negative spreads.
And while TSY funding costs, and various X-CCY basis swaps in the past two weeks has dropped, Japan’s lack of appetite for US Treasurys will only continue to rise.
The reason is that as the Nikkei reports, Japanese investors – traditionally the most enthusiastic foreign buyers of US Treasurys – have become far less enthusiastic about buying US debt last year on growing concern about rising U.S. Treasury yields. According to Ministry of Finance data released on Friday, Japanese investors’ net purchases of mid- to long-term foreign bonds tumbled 94.6% on the year to 1.1 trillion yen ($9.9 billion) in 2017, the first annual decline in four years.
In prior years, Japanese institutional investors such as banks and life insurance companies had actively pursued foreign bonds in search of higher returns, finding few alternatives in Japan, where interest rates remained extremely low, and Europe providing few options as a result of the ECB’s NIRP policies. As a result, the only option for many was US paper.
But the November 2016 election of Donald Trump as U.S. president sent the 10-year Treasury yield shooting up from around 1.8% to almost 2.6% in just over a month, and the yield stayed above 2% throughout 2017. Any investors holding onto Treasurys during the yield surge would have incurred significant losses as prices tumbled.
Life insurers’ net purchases declined 8.4 trillion yen last year, and banks collectively turned into net sellers, with their net sales reaching a record 7.6 trillion yen. Over 2015 and 2016, in contrast, they bought 20.6 trillion yen more than they sold.
In March 2017, Japan’s Financial Services Agency announced stricter oversight on foreign bond investment by regional banks. The following month, net sales of mid- to long-term bonds by Japanese investors hit a monthly record of 4.2 trillion yen.
And, of course, as discussed at the top, the higher cost of buying the U.S. dollar is also at play. Life insurers often hedge against a strengthening yen via foreign exchange swaps when investing in foreign bonds. But hedges have become more expensive due to higher U.S. interest rates and other reasons. So the appeal of investing in U.S. bonds has faded overall, unless of course, Japanese investors bid up US paper unhedge, which however could backfire dangerously should FX volatility pick up, or if the dollar continues to devalue against most G-10 peers.
The bottom line: foreign, and certainly Japanese demand for US Treasurys appears to be sliding, whether due to rising yields and P&L losses, or blowing out funding costs, at the worst possible time: just as net supply of US Treasurys is set to double from $488BN in 2017…
… to $1,030BN in 2018, as Goldman calculated last Friday.
Which means that just one hiccup, and yields will soar. It also means that we are one not so major bond tantrum away from the Fed begging preparations for the next massive bond monetization episode, also known as QE4.
- "I Paid To See A Movie About Singing. I Got Ninety Minutes Of Pentagon Propaganda."
Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,
To cap off a long, strange day, my husband and I took the kids out last night to see Pitch Perfect 3. The first Pitch Perfect is a firm favorite in our household, the kind of movie we end up watching when we can’t agree on what to watch. We’d been waiting til we all had a night to see the latest one together, so we made a night of it and went out for some dinner, too. I even had a Coke. The sugary kind. This was a big night, people! So we were all in high spirits and I entered the theater excited to see some good music and have a good time.
I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece, but I also wasn’t expecting to be blasted in the face with ninety minutes of blatant war propaganda from the United States Department of Defense.
Before I go on I should mention that a group called Insurge Intelligence published a report a few months back on thousands of military and intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act which showed unbelievably extensive involvement of US defense and intelligence agencies in the production of popular Hollywood movies and TV shows. Just from the information this group was able to gain access to, the scripts and development of over 800 films and 1,000 television titles were found to have been influenced by the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA to advance the interests of the US war machine. We’re talking about big, high profile titles you’ve definitely heard of, from Transformers to Meet the Parents.
So it’s an established fact that these depraved agencies of destruction and domination are balls-deep in Hollywood production. You can understand my discomfort, then, as it became evident that the movie I’d sat down to watch with my family was set on US military bases for no reason whatsoever. There was nothing about the plot of Pitch Perfect 3 that required this; any music tour of any kind would have worked just as well. The antagonist had nothing to do with the military, the protagonists were a civilian a capella singing group, and the general conflicts and resolutions of the film were entirely uninvolved with anything related to the armed forces of any nation.
Indeed, the film looks like it was initially written to have taken place in a civilian setting, then after many rewrites and the involvement of God knows what agencies managed to force itself onto US military bases. As Insurge Intelligence noted in its report, once that happens the war machine is granted what amounts to total creative control of the film’s production, up to and including the ability to cancel production altogether by withdrawing support.
Sure enough, retired Army lieutenant colonel Thomas Lesnieski, who was involved with the production of the film, says that in order to “make sure that the way the military is portrayed is done right,” changes were made to the script of Pitch Perfect 3 after the film enlisted “DoD support”.
As far as the film in question is concerned, “the way the military is portrayed” could not have been more propagandistic. The heroines were constantly drooling over the handsome, sexy servicemen, there was nonstop saluting, flag-waving and patriotic “thank you for your service” lines, the lead cast did an entire number dressed in camouflage, a lesbian character said she wanted to enlist “now that they let gay people join,” servicemen were portrayed as charming heroes and protectors of women, and life on a military base was portrayed as a fun party where you get to go to awesome concerts and have a great time. You could not possibly pack more glorification of the US war machine into a movie if you tried.
Air Force Captain Meredith Kirchoff, a public affairs officer at Dobbins Air Reserve Base where the film was shot, gushes over the movie for the way it “humanizes” (read: normalizes) the human resources used to power the American war machine while US civilians are deprived of the basic social safety nets accorded to everyone else in every other major country on earth.
The US Department of Defense was given a “special thanks to” line at the tail of the end credits.
Again: there was no discernible reason for this film to be set on military bases. At all. Anyone who gets involved in filmmaking for love of that artistic medium loathes the involvement of any outside influencer putting pressure on them to change their script and produce their movie in a certain way to advance their own agendas, but this film deliberately sought that influence out. From top to bottom, a sequel to a popular movie about an all-female singing group was built to normalize the globe-spanning war machine that is closely approaching a trillion dollar budget and recruit teenage girls into its ranks to be used for slaughter and destruction.
I love Pitch Perfect. It’s honestly one of my favorite movies ever. It’s an effortless romp of a film about the joy of delightfully unique individuals not overcoming those differences but enthusing about them in each other, enjoying them, embracing them and collaborating together to create something beautiful, inspired, healthy and new. It speaks to my heart about what we have to do as a species to create utopia and avoid self-destruction. To take that and twist it into another advertisement for the blood-thirsty, child-killing, empire building war machine was all kinds of heartbreaking to me.
When we came home and the kids were out of earshot my husband and I started angrily fuming about what manipulative, disgusting, art-killing parasites these people are, then remembered we have a podcast now so we hit record before we ran out of rage:
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- Citi Reveals The Reason Behind The Market's Meltup
It is hardly a secret, that one of the biggest threats facing risk assets in 2018 and onward, is the great central bank QE/balance sheet unwind, something we have discussed extensively in the past year, and as a recent example, in “This Is Most Worrying”: In One Year, Central Bank Liquidity Will Collapse From $2 Trillion To Zero,” in which Deutsche Bank said that “the most likely causes of a shift to ‘flight mode’ and a rise in volatility” is that by the end of [2018], the combined expansion of all the major Central Bank balance sheets will have collapsed from a 12 month growth rate of $2 trillion per annum to zero.”
This is shown in the following chart depicting the total shrinkage in central bank asset growth:
And yet, despite the Fed’s methodical, if slow balance sheet shrinkage and the ECB’s recent QE tapering from €60 to €30BN per month, followed by the BOJ’s latest “stealth tapering” last week, stocks have started off the new year with a panicked melt-up euphoria the likes of which haven’t been seen in decades as the flurry of recent “serious” headlines suggests.
The term of the week is ‘melt-up’ pic.twitter.com/6phpDc47uW
— Mark Constantine (@vexmark) January 12, 2018
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
How does one reconcile this historic stock surge at a time of shrinking central bank balance sheets?
The answer comes from Citigroup’s credit research team, which points out something most central bank unwind projections have missed, namely that while risk assets on central bank balance sheets may indeed be shrinking, other reserve managers are going in the other direction.
According to Citi’s analysts, the answer is that although both the Fed and ECB are scaling back their balance sheets, the increase in EM FX reserves recently, with Chinese FX reserves doing the majority of the heavy lifting, has largely offset all of this. This is highlighted in the left-hand chart below. In fact, as the right-hand chart shows, on a rolling 3 month basis FX reserve purchases by EMs have largely offset all of the implied downward risk impulse from the past year.
As a reminder, last week China reported that its foreign-exchange reserves posted an 11th straight monthly increase, capping a year of recovery amid tighter capital controls, a stronger yuan and resilient economic growth (even if as Goldman calculated much of the reserve increase has been due to valuation effects). At the end of 2017, Chinese reserves climbed by $20.7 billion in December to $3.14 trillion, bringing the full-year increase to $129 billion.
Somewhat coincidentally, the theory that China may be goosing the markets was proposed last week by a different group of Citi analysts, who proposed that “it looks like the PBoC has been adding quite a lot of liquidity in the shorter end of the curve in recent days -with a variety of interbank rates softer, and the 1y CGB yield notably lower by 21bps YTD whereas 5s and 10s yields have stayed broadly flat.”
As we said last week, “assuming that Citi is correct, it would explain many things, not least of all the stunning surge higher in Chinese, global and even US stocks.” Here is Citi’s own “conspiratorial” take:
“Against that background, it is no surprise that equity markets have been so well supported and the SHPROP has exploded upward.”
In other words, just like China’s aggressive policy change after the Shanghai Accord of February 2016 unleashed a record 21 of 22 positive months for the S&P…
S&P is up 21 of the past 22 months, starting with the Shanghai Accord in Feb 2016 pic.twitter.com/LOngt5A4ba
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 29, 2017
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… so it again appears to be China’s stealthy asset purchases across global capital markets that has resulted in the market melt-up observed in the end of 2017 and start of 2018.
Of course, in light of recent vocal warnings from China that its Treasury purchases may be discontinued soon, extrapolating China’s generous intervention in risk assets for the foreseeable future would be dangerous. Meanwhile, even as Beijing may flip and halt accumulating reserves, one thing is certain – at least for now – that central banks will keep on unwinding their balance sheets. Here’s Citi once more:
given that this aggregate central bank liquidity measure has had a significant degree of correlation with risk asset performance over the past few years, we are if anything reaffirmed in our cautious stance on 2018 as a whole. Even if EM FX reserves were to continue accumulating at close to their current rate, that would be outweighed by the almost $1 trillion reduction in DM central bank balance purchases due to occur this year.
Citi’s concludes by appropriately wrapping up the balance sheet unwind narrative in the story about the frog – stuck in boiling water – that did not realize how hot the water was until it was too late:
As the old parable goes, a frog that has the misfortune to find itself in a pot of boiling water will generally have the sense to jump straight back out. But if the water is initially tepid and subsequently brought to boil slowly, the frog won’t realise what’s happening until it’s too late.
* * *
The announced trajectories of the major central bank balance sheets indicate that the level of aggregate net asset purchases will reach its 2018 lows in the latter part of the year. But while we may only reach boiling point then, we’re already heating up: the delta in tapering is currently very large, with the Fed increasing its pace of net selling and the ECB having halved its net purchase volumes already.
Citi’s punchline: “the frog may end up getting cooked well before boiling point.” For now, however, the market’s daily record highs make a mockery of any warning, and any references to frogs stuck in boiling water are promptly deflected with tantalizing images of massaging bubbles and “nice warm Jacuzzis.”
- Caught On Video: Chinese Rocket Booster Crashes To Earth, Erupts In Massive Fireball
A booster from a Chinese Long March 3B rocket created a massive explosion outside a town in Guangxiv, southwest China on Friday- and the explosion was all caught on video.
According to the Global Times, the Long March 3B rocket lifted off from Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in Sichuan Province at 07:18 local time on Friday, catapulting two Beidou-3 GNSS navigation satellites to earth’s orbit.
It is no secret that China’s growth in its space program has been accelerating with the development of the Long March rocket family launching satellites into space. An expanding space program comes in addition to the country’s rising economic power and international influence, which has alarmingly challenged Western space programs.
As the three-stage rocket with four-strap-on boosters soared towards the heavens, the four boosters separated from the rocket’s core and fell back to earth. One of the boosters landed near a town, while residents panicked as the impact caused a major explosion.
The village of Xiangdu in Tiandeng Country, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, is around 700 kilometers from the launch site and considered a “designated drop zones for debris for the launch,” according to the Global Times.
This is probably why the Chinese need to recover their rockets stages soon….and for reasons other than price:
(video of booster falling in planned drop zone from Chinese social media for today’s Long March 3B launch, taken at Baise, Guangxi, China) pic.twitter.com/SLqaDeoPf7
— Cosmic Penguin (@Cosmic_Penguin) January 12, 2018
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While the booster smashed into the town, the launch seems to have succeeded in propelling two satellites into orbit. The video below shows the moment the booster slammed into a hillside releasing a toxic plume of hazardous fumes.
Here’s the end of the close-up video of the booster that fell from the Long March 3B today. There’s bang then everyone runs away. Gets them away from the hydrazine for a while at least… pic.twitter.com/CbYKkDsvsO
— Andrew Jones (@AJ_FI) January 12, 2018
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While there were no reports of human casualties; more video has surfaced of curious residents examining the booster up close.
However, unbeknownst to the observes, the “boosters are filled with unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) and dinitrogen tetroxide (N2O4) hypergolic propellant, which is highly toxic,” said the Global Times.
The Global Times calls Friday’s event “all too common,” as China’s space program continues to expand.
The footage comes in stark contrast to United States launches, which send launch vehicles over the ocean, while private company SpaceX has mastered landing its Falcon 9 first stages back at launch sites and on drone ships off the coast.
This means that today’s space launches pass over inhabited areas. Though drop zones for Long March rocket stages are carefully calculated and launch notices and procedures put in places, events like the above are all too common, especially with China’s space activities expanding greatly in recent years.
An unidentified man stands in his living room next to an engine from a Long March rocket in August 2015.
The Long March 3B rocket has about a 93% success rating, unlike Elon Musk, who has a history of fiery failures with his SpaceX program. Just last week, Musk’s Falcon 9 rocket failed to reach earth’s orbit, therefore losing a billion dollar secretive spy satellite for the United States Government.
It’s never good when parts of a rocket coming crashing down to earth, never mind almost smashing into a town. However, the next fireball from the heavens could in the coming months, when a Chinese space station is expected to lose orbit.
- Burning Iranian Oil Tanker Off China Coast Sinks After One Week
The Iranian oil tanker burning in the East China Sea for more than a week has finally sunk, Chinese media reported on Sunday. The Sanchi tanker and a cargo ship collided 260km (160 miles) off Shanghai on 6 January, with the tanker then drifting south-east towards Japan. China Central Television said that the Sanchi had gone down after “suddenly igniting” around noon (04:00 GMT).
Earlier, the Iranian press reported that all 32 crew members – 30 Iranians and two Bangladeshis – on the tanker are dead. The tanker was carrying 136,000 tonnes of ultra-light crude but Chinese officials, credible as always, said there is no major slick.
Even though some 13 vessels and an Iranian commando unit had been taking part in the salvage operation, amid bad weather, no survivors were found, and according to a spokesman for the Iranian team, Mohammad Rastad, there was no hope of finding any survivors.
According to BBC, on Saturday, salvage workers had boarded the vessel and found the bodies of two crew members in a lifeboat. Only one other body had been found during the week of salvage operations. The rescue workers retrieved the ship’s black box but had to leave quickly because of the toxic smoke and high temperatures.
A map showing the collision point and approximate location a week later: BBCThe Panama-flagged Sanchi was bringing the condensate from Iran to South Korea when the collision with the Hong Kong-registered freighter CF Crystal, carrying grain from the US, happened in the East China Sea. The crewmen of the Crystal were all rescued.
The cause of the collision is still not known.
After the collision the Sanchi drifted at about 2.2km/h (1.4mph), south-eastwards towards the Japanese island of Amami Oshima.
Condensate is very different from the black crude that is often seen in oil spills. It is toxic, low in density and considerably more explosive than regular crude. Condensate creates products such as jet fuel, petrol, diesel and heating fuel.
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