- The Gray Curtain Descends, Part 2
The Gray Curtain Descends, Part 2
Authored by Robert Gore via Straight Line Logic
It’s secession or war…
Four days after the election, a woman calling herself OHMama posted “I Am Done” on The Burning Platform website. It was the site’s most read article of 2020. SLL and many other websites reposted it. It was raw, explosive anger and a profoundly moving lament; OHMama was clearly at the end of her rope. The closing paragraph packed a wallop.
I was raised to be a lady, and ladies don’t curse, but fuck these motherfuckers to hell and back for what they’ve done to me, and mine, and my country. All we Joe Blow Americans ever wanted was a little patch of land to raise a family, a job to pay the bills, and at least some illusion of freedom, and even that was too much for these human parasites. They want it all, mind, body and soul. Damn them. Damn them all.
OHMama gave voice to what’s beneath the surface for so many of us—abject disgust, barely contained fury, and dread of what’s to come. She claimed her own life to live it as she sees fit, and damn them, damn them all, who presume to rule us.
That anger surfaced in Washington on January 6. The protest and raid of the Capitol were illuminating in several ways. They defined the two sides: the government, its string-pullers, and its allies versus those who despise and oppose them.
The Saul Alinsky line was crossed, setting an important precedent. His acolytes insist their enemies live by their own rules while exempting themselves from any rules other than those that secure power. Playing by the rules when the opposition doesn’t is a guaranteed loser. Caring what they think of you is craven. Cowering when they call you hypocrites is unilateral surrender. Going forward, Alinsky’s acolytes may face an opposition that plays by the same rules they do—those necessary to secure power.
The Capitol raid scared the crap out of uniparty politicians, witness the hysterical overreaction. Given what they and their accomplices have done to Americans and people around the world, they should live in perpetual, mortal terror. Unfortunately, their cowardice outruns their brains. Instead of responding to the message they’ll shoot the messenger and clamp down harder.
Legacy media was filled with paeans to our “sacred” government and its “temples,” deploring the “sacrilege” of those who “desecrated” and “defiled” them. What absolute tripe! Washington is a Corruptocracy, a moral cesspool. Anything sacred would have been vandalized or torn down by the mobs allowed to run riot last year. They would have toppled the Washington Monument if they could have figured out how.
Americans who build businesses or pursue careers honestly producing goods and services for voluntary trade are engaging in activities far more sacred than anything that goes on in the capital. Millions of parents instill moral principles in their children, only to see those principles defiled daily by the government. Washington delenda est—if it were leveled and sown with salt America and the world would be better for it.
The corruptocrats’ ability to shore up the debt-riddled global financial and economic systems with ever more debt has astounded skeptics, among them SLL. The debt load is many times annual global production and debt service is sucking up that production like a tapeworm sucks up its victim’s meals. Every financial asset is a debt or equity claim, and virtually every income stream and real asset—factories, real estate, houses, warehouses, inventories, office buildings, malls, etc.—has been pledged or mortgaged, often several times over.
We saw the global daisy chain unravel in 2008 and 2009 and the system is daisy-chainier now. If you’re looking for canaries in the coal mine, watch the yields on sovereign debt. Once they really start to climb it’s game over. The devastation will be unprecedented and epic.
Collapse will decimate over-indebted, non-productive governments that have made promises they can’t keep to millions of their citizens. That may be part of a plan to destroy national governments and generate clamor for totalitarian global government. Yet, every tyranny confronts the question: who is going to host its predation and parasitism if the disobedient but productive (there is a correlation) have been imprisoned or executed? Slavery is notoriously unproductive.
Globo-government will be in the same position as the national governments it supersedes—bankrupt, bereft of resources, and unable to produce anything other than fiat debt instruments. Dispensing a steadily depreciating universal basic income will be problematic. Not that it will bother globo-government if billions of its wards die of poverty and starvation. The bigger concern will be securing the resources necessary for surveillance and suppression of the remaining enslaved.
Enfeebled or failed governments of any stripe engender both chaos and opportunity. Collapse and chaos will be huge blows to governments, the perpetual enemies of liberty, but could be a game changer for the liberty-minded, who are well-advised to wait for the bubble to burst.
Chaos will require preparation by those who want to capitalize on the opportunity. Many alternative media sites stress personal preparation and establishing local networks, and offer valuable strategies and advice. Readers are invited to list their favorites in the comments section. No one can prepare for every contingency, but if you haven’t prepared for the most obvious ones—grid down, lack of access to food and water, etc.—now is the time to do so.
If governments are the enemy and are destined to collapse, then the opposition should do everything possible to hasten that collapse. In the US, twenty-five million people, about a third of Trump’s voters, simultaneously withdrawing their financially intermediated assets would spread panic across our massively over-leveraged, inextricably interconnected globe. (For more, see Revolution in America, Robert Gore, SLL, January 7, 2015.)
There’s a powerful inducement for preemptive withdrawal: the front of the line is the best place to be during a bank run (other than not being in line at all). The bank run is inevitable, the question is whether or not you want to be its victim. This strategy is legal, effective, nonviolent, and hits governments where they are weakest—their insolvency and inability to produce.
Our opponents have clearly defined goal—absolute power—and they are absolutely committed to subjugating or eliminating anyone who stands in their way. Until recently most of those on our side didn’t even realize we were at war.
Before such a war goes kinetic (the modern term for old-fashioned war where people get killed) and in the hope that it doesn’t, we need a clearly defined goal and a strategy to achieve it. The goal is the fundamental right of every human: the liberty to peaceably live one’s own life and pursue one’s own happiness. The strategy is more complicated.
Peacefully splitting the US into two or more countries when it is so irretrievably and irreconcilably riven is almost breathtaking in its common sense. You go your way and we’ll go ours appeals to both logic and justice. What could be fairer than to give people a choice?
Our side should never stop advocating for a peaceful split and our own territory. This does not mean advocating for insurrection and revolution, which would imply replacing the current government with one of our own. Why would we want to take possession of a cesspool government and rule over so many who hate us? Secession and liberty, not insurrection and revolution, are the goals. Leave the present government to the corruptocrats, their minions, and their dependents.
Most productive people would opt for liberty. Absolute power would have to feed, subjugate, and terrorize masses of subsistence-level slaves. It would be counting on enslaving the productive without reckoning on what replacing incentives with fear and coercion would do to their willingness to produce or their desire to stay. The totalitarians cannot allow a free alternative to coexist just across the border. Unfortunately, peaceful secession is a remote possibility, which means contemplating the alternative.
The government’s many senseless wars have demonstrated the effectiveness of guerrilla warfare against forces superior in every conventional metric: manpower, firepower, and technology. Among tens of millions of potential secessionists, many of them well-armed, there are members or veterans of the military with counterinsurgency experience. They’ve gone to school on guerrillas and their tactics. They’ll likely provide secessionist military leadership once the totalitarians’ war (and they will start it) goes kinetic.
Modern, decentralized technologies and weaponry will be a key component of secessionist strength. The war will be won more with brains and creativity than troop strength or bravado. Teams that can design and assemble weaponized drones and robots, experts in artificial intelligence, remote-control munitions specialists, and computer hackers will be more important military assets than platoons of AR-15 toting commandos.
These technologies will be essential to counter the opposition’s surveillance capabilities, infrastructure, and command and control systems. Secessionists who ignore next-generation technologies, believe they won’t be deployed against them, or fail to realize their offensive potential will be fighting the last war…and they will lose. These technologies are relatively cheap compared to traditional superpower weaponry; their biggest expense is the brainpower they incorporate. It’s a safe bet that among 70 plus million Trump voters and otherwise disaffected that kind of brainpower can be found.
Don’t assume that those within the present power structure, or the emerging globalist one, won’t use every weapon in their arsenal to preserve their hold on power, even at the cost of their own and humanity’s extinction. While the police and military may refuse to fire on their own kin and countrymen, it’s impossible to overestimate the suicidal depravity of the so-called humans issuing their orders. Thus, while conventional armaments, remote technologies, committed secessionists, and guerrilla warfare will be important and essential when kinetic war breaks out, they won’t, in and of themselves, guarantee victory. Too much faith that they will could in fact lead to the opposite outcome.
Along with a straightforward assessment of the opposition’s weaknesses and strengths and a realistic strategy for capitalizing on the former and neutralizing the latter, it’s time to convert current rage into a full-scale political movement. That doesn’t mean the pound-your-head-against-the-wall strategy of trying to win rigged elections. It does mean informing, persuading, and recruiting—the nitty gritty of building a political movement. Much of that building will have to be underground as public dissidence is canceled, corrected, and punished. One of the Viet Cong’s key assets was its political arm, the National Liberation Front, to which they gave much of the credit for their success in the Vietnam war.
Most of the necessary technical brainpower will be found among the young. Right now, the average secessionist is over sixty, voted for Trump, owns plenty of firearms, and has vague notions of a mass movement of the like-minded either miraculously defeating the government or going out in a bolt-hole blaze of glory. That’s not a strategy, it’s a death wish.
It’s easier to carp about snowflakes and SJWs than it is to reach out and educate the open-minded among the young (yes, they are out there) to show them that they will be the primary victims of totalitarianism. The gray curtain is descending over their futures. They have to be inspired by the vision of something far better—their own freedom—if that gray curtain is not to become their gray shroud. You can do worse than give them copies of the Declaration of Independence, The Road to Serfdom, and Atlas Shrugged.
It’s not necessary to change the thinking of every member of Generations X, Y, and Z, or even a majority. What’s essential is to make connections and form alliances with some of the best, brightest, and bravest, to inspire their commitment to their own freedom and future. Start with your own children and grandchildren, and remember that listening is a big part of persuasion. To be understood one must first understand.
Nothing will be fair about the coming fight. It’s no use whining about the other side’s lack of principles, its lies, hypocrisy, unfairness, ruthlessness, and control of virtually every important institution. They’re evil totalitarians, what the hell do we expect? Their principle is absolute power and they’ll do whatever is necessary to acquire and keep it.
Ashli Babbitt’s death, if it is to mean anything at all, should be the cold slap of reality across the faces of those who haven’t grasped the nature of what we face. To ignore the risk that breaching an Imperial Sanctum would be met with violence was pure foolishness. The demonstrators who entered the Capitol could have been murdered en masse. Any expectation that their murderers would receive justice from the Corruptocracy would be delusional naiveté.
No more foolishness or naiveté. Any supposedly peaceful protest will be infiltrated by agent provocateurs bent on making trouble for our cause (including the protests being advertised for next week). The totalitarians will do what they do until they’re completely defeated. This is war, which calls for the unremitting exercise of cold, ruthless rationality. We will administer justice and show mercy when appropriate, but we will expect or receive neither from the other side.
Let’s get on with it.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 01/17/2021 – 00:00 - 2020 Saw Unprecedented Murder Spike In Major U.S. Cities
2020 Saw Unprecedented Murder Spike In Major U.S. Cities
In late December the Associated Press reported that 2020 was on track to become the deadliest year in U.S. history with the total number of deaths forecast to rise 15 percent compared to 2019, primarily due to the coronavirus pandemic. There were also several other smaller contributory factors, however, including higher death tolls from heart & circulatory diseases as well as from the country’s opioid crisis. Additionally, as Staista’s Niall McCarthy notes, the U.S. also experienced its most violent year in decades with an unprecedented rise in homicides.
The Gun Violence Archive reported that more than 19,000 people died in shootings or firearm-related incidents in 2020, the highest figure in over two decades.
New Orleans-based crime analyst Jeff Asher took a closer look at the number of murders in 57 major American cities and he found that the number of offenses grew in 51 of them. He only focused on agencies where data was available and most of them had figures through November or December of 2020.
Growth in violent crime varied by city with Seattle seeing a 74 percent spike in homicides between 2019 and 2020 while Chicago and Boston saw their offenses grow 55.5 percent and 54 percent, respectively. Elsewhere, Washington D.C. and Las Vegas saw growth in their murder offences, albeit at a slower pace of less than 20 percent.
You will find more infographics at Statista
New York’s homicide count went up by nearly 40 percent with Mayor Bill de Blasio stating that the figures should worry all New Yorkers and it has to stop.
He attributed the situation “in part, to the coronavirus and to the fact that people are cooped up”, according to NPR, adding that “it’s certainly related to the fact that the criminal justice system is on pause and that’s causing a lot of problems”.
The rise in homicide has not been confined to cities and Asher says that the problem is also increasingly rural. He told NPR that the numbers for 2020 are by no means final and that the official end of year statistics will tell a startlingly grim story. He also said that the U.S. is on course for the largest one-year rise in its murder count ever recorded.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/16/2021 – 23:30 - What's The True Agenda Behind The Movement To Abolish The Electoral College?
What’s The True Agenda Behind The Movement To Abolish The Electoral College?
Authored by Trent England via InsideSources.com,
One of Georgia’s 16 presidential electors cast her Electoral College vote for Joe Biden but says, if she had it her way, the United States would do away with the constitutional election process altogether—a radical and dangerous position.
“I support abolishing the Electoral College,” former Atlanta City Council President Cathy Woolard said during a recent interview.
“I think all too often the popular vote has been overturned by the Electoral College and that doesn’t seem right to me.”
It may not seem right to Ms. Woolard, but the Electoral College purposefully forces would-be presidents to build nationwide coalitions, courting diverse voters across the country. It should remain in place. Otherwise, politicians would ignore the needs of people in ‘flyover country’ and focus even more on big cities and the coasts.
Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was another elector who, like Ms. Woolard, called for eliminating the Electoral College even as she cast one of New York’s electoral votes for Democrat President-elect Joe Biden.
“I believe we should abolish the Electoral College and select our president by the winner of the popular vote, same as every other office,” she said in a tweet. “But while it still exists, I was proud to cast my vote in New York for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”
Clinton is missing the fact that the presidency is not like other offices. Most major democratic nations use a two-step process (usually a parliamentary system) to elect their top executive. Our Electoral College, like those other systems, balances the interests of everyone across a diverse country while limiting the power of big-city elites.
Our system also limits the power of Washington, D.C. As Thomas S. Kidd, history professor at Baylor University, says, “2020 has shown that the states still possess powerful checks on national executive power. That’s a good thing, and we should be exceedingly cautious about cutting the states out of the process of electing the president (i.e. the Electoral College).”
Complaints about the Electoral College often stem from Clinton’s loss in 2016. At various times, Clinton has blamed former FBI Director James Comey, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), President Barack Obama, Russia and, of course, the Electoral College for her loss.
Really it was Clinton’s own decisions that cost her the presidency, and the Electoral College worked just right. By design, the Electoral College rewards candidates who do the hard work of winning over Americans in many states, not just winning huge margins in a few states or giant cities. The American Founders believed the president should be a national candidate, not a regional one.
In 1888, Grover Cleveland won the popular vote but was blown out in the Electoral College because his support was concentrated in the South; he won huge margins there but lost almost everywhere else. Similarly, Clinton ran up huge margins in coastal states while failing to connect with middle America.
Clinton dismissed struggling voters as “deplorables” and lost their votes as a consequence. Marc Thiessen of The Washington Post argues, “Clinton still can’t seem to tell the difference between a white nationalist and working-class voters who are upset because their family incomes are stagnant or falling, they feel shut out of the labor force, and their communities are mired in substance abuse and despair. These ‘forgotten Americans’ had legitimate grievances that Democrats ignored.”
The Clinton campaign also squandered its monetary advantage by failing to invest enough in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. According to one liberal activist, the candidate’s team was, “very surgical and corporate. Their thing was, ‘We don’t have to leave [literature] at the doors, everyone knows who Hillary Clinton is.’”
Joe Biden corrected Clinton’s errors, cultivating a working man persona and investing heavily in turning out the vote in key states. He received the Democratic nomination in part because primary voters believed he would appeal to those “forgotten Americans” who Clinton had ignored and demeaned.
In both 2016 and 2020, the Electoral College worked as intended. Serious presidential candidates were forced to build diverse coalitions rather than relying on one region or demographic group. For close to 250 years, the Electoral College has fostered a healthy and vibrant electoral system, and we shouldn’t throw that away because Hillary Clinton mismanaged her campaign.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/16/2021 – 23:00 - Bill Gates Becomes America's Largest Farmland Owner While 'Great Reset" Says Future Is 'No Private Property'
Bill Gates Becomes America’s Largest Farmland Owner While ‘Great Reset” Says Future Is ‘No Private Property’
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
While Americans are being told by ‘Great Reset’ technocrats that the future is one without private property, Bill Gates and other billionaires have been buying up huge amounts of farmland.
Indeed, Gates is now the biggest owner of farmland in America, according to a Forbes report.
“After years of reports that he was purchasing agricultural land in places like Florida and Washington, The Land Report revealed that Gates, who has a net worth of nearly $121 billion according to Forbes, has built up a massive farmland portfolio spanning 18 states.”
“His largest holdings are in Louisiana (69,071 acres), Arkansas (47,927 acres) and Nebraska (20,588 acres). Additionally, he has a stake in 25,750 acres of transitional land on the west side of Phoenix, Arizona, which is being developed as a new suburb.”
Gates now owns 242,000 acres of farmland across the U.S., mostly “through third-party entities by Cascade Investments, Gates’ personal investment vehicle.”
America’s biggest owner of farmland is now Bill Gates https://t.co/j9gW4zQ0Yh pic.twitter.com/0tZLJcGXfg
— Forbes (@Forbes) January 14, 2021
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According to Forbes, it is not known what Gates is doing with the land and Cascade Investments refused to comment on the issue.
In terms of individual land owners, Gates is still far behind media mogul John C. Malone, who is in top spot with 2.2 million acres of ranches and forests and CNN founder Ted Turner, who owns 2 million acres of ranch land.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is also “investing in land on a large scale,” according to the report.
What billionaire philanthropists and technocrats are acquiring land at an accelerating speed, they appear to be telling the general public that in the future private property will virtually cease to exist.
In his books, World Economic Forum founder and globalist Klaus Schwab makes clear that the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ or ‘The Great Reset’ will lead to the abolition of private property.
That message is echoed on the WEF’s official website, which states, “Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city – or should I say, “our city”. I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes.”
Apparently, you won’t be allowed to own any private property and your only recourse will be to live in a state of permanent dependency on a small number of rich elitists who own everything.
That used to be called feudalism, which is a form of slavery.
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Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/16/2021 – 22:45 - Biden To 'Immediately' Send Congress Bill That Would Offer Citizenship To 11 Million Illegals
Biden To ‘Immediately’ Send Congress Bill That Would Offer Citizenship To 11 Million Illegals
President-elect Joe Biden will ‘immediately’ send a legislative package to Congress which would provide a pathway to citizenship for some 11 million illegal immigrants, according to the Los Angeles Times, according to “immigrants rights activists in communication with the Biden-Harris transition team.”
The bill would also provide a shorter pathway to citizenship for hundreds of thousands of people living in the United States under a temporary protected status and/or who qualify under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program who were brought into the US as children.
And in what the Times calls a “significant departure from many previous immigration bills under both Democratic and Republican administrations,” the Biden plan would contain zero provisions for stepped-up immigration enforcement and security measures, according to Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center Immigrant Justice Fund, who was informed of the details by Biden staffers.
Both Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have said their legislative proposal would include a pathway to citizenship for millions of immigrants in the U.S. without legal status, and The Times has confirmed the bold opening salvo that the new administration plans in its first days doesn’t include the “security first” political concessions of past efforts.
Hincapié, who was co-chair of the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force on Immigration — part of Biden’s outreach to his top primary rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and his progressive base — said that Biden’s decision to not prioritize additional enforcement measures was probably a result of lessons learned from the Obama administration’s failed attempt to appease Republicans by backing tighter immigration enforcement in hopes of gaining their support for immigration relief. –Los Angeles Times
“On Inauguration Day, President-elect Biden will sign roughly a dozen actions to combat the four crises, restore humanity to our immigration system, and make government function for the people,” reads a Saturday memo by incoming Biden chief of staff, Ron Klain, who said the incoming president’s agenda included “the immigration bill he will send to Congress on his first day in office.“
If Republicans don’t stop this in the Senate, it’s GG for the GOP https://t.co/LEE5OkqqpD
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) January 16, 2021
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Under BIden’s plan – the most sweeping and comprehensive since President Regan’s 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act granting some 3 million people legal status (after which California flipped blue), immigrants would be eligible for legal permanent residence after five years, and US citizenship after three more years.
Several immigration activists who spoke with The Times praised the reported scope and scale of the bill and expressed surprise at its ambition. A number of legislators and analysts had predicted that the new administration, at least in its first months in power, would be likely to pursue immigration measures that would stir the least controversy and could be achieved by executive actions rather than legislation. -LA Times
Will it pass?
Given the sweeping changes, Democrats are likely to face serious pushback despite holding slim majorities in both chambers of Congress – and the bill will likely face months of political debate as conservative members and immigration hard-liners push back.
Meanwhile, Texas Democratic Rep. Juaquin Castro said in a Friday call with reporters that he’s formulating a bill which would offer illegals immediate protection from deportation and a fast-tracked path to citizenship for essential workers who are undocumented.
“It’s time for essential workers to no longer be treated as disposable, but to be celebrated and welcomed as American citizens,” said Castro, adding “If your labor feeds, builds and cares for our nation, you have earned the right to stay here with full legal protection, free from fear of deportation.”
And look at this – just in time:
A Honduran migrant caravan is heading to the United States.
Arriving just in time for Joe Biden’s inauguration.
This is the future Democrats’ voted for.
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) January 15, 2021
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/16/2021 – 22:30 - An OrWELLSian Purge? Why H.G. Wells' "The Shape Of Things To Come" Has Arrived Today
An OrWELLSian Purge? Why H.G. Wells’ “The Shape Of Things To Come” Has Arrived Today
Authored by Cynthia Chung via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
It is no coincidence that our entertainment industry today, so heavily saturated with the influence of Wells’ propaganda, is obsessed with the theme of a post-apocalyptic world…
“It has become apparent that whole masses of human population are, as a whole, inferior in their claim upon the future, to other masses, that they cannot be given opportunities or trusted with power as the superior peoples are trusted, that their characteristic weaknesses are contagious and detrimental to the civilizing fabric, and that their range of incapacity tempts and demoralizes the strong. To give them equality is to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped in their fecundity. “
– H.G. Wells’ in “Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought” 1901
In “The Shape of Things to Come: The Ultimate Revolution” (published in 1933), H.G. Wells writes of the future predicting, rather optimistically, that there will be another world war in just a few years, followed by epidemic and famine. In this fictional future, war continues for thirty years into the 1960s, despite the people having forgotten why they started fighting. Humanity enters a new Dark Age. In a last bid for victory, the enemy deploys a biological weapon resulting in the “wandering sickness,” producing the first zombies, and by 1970 the global population has dropped to a little under one billion.
Though this is depicted as horrific, it is at the same time depicted as a necessity – a “great reset,” to restore the “balance” so to speak. It is only with this reduced population size that the world can begin to build itself back together from the chaos that it was, and enter into its new phase of evolution as a biologically superior species (the inferior having been culled by war and disease), managed by a bureaucratic system under the form of a world government.
This is the sci-fi fantasy of H.G. Wells and is the central theme to everything he wrote including his works of non-fiction. The subject on ways to reduce the world population was a troubling dilemma for Wells…not the reducing part, but the thought that there would be those so foolish as to forbid it.
You see, it was considered by some that the human species had found itself in a crisis by the 1900s. Europe, up until the 17th century had a population size that never exceeded roughly 100 million. But nearly doubled to 180 million in the 18th century, and doubled again to 390 million in the 19thcentury. H.G. Wells wrote of this “the extravagant swarm of new births” as “the essential disaster of the nineteenth century.” Not war, not disease, not starvation, not abject poverty, but population growth was determined as the disaster of an entire century.
Today the world population is 7.9 billion people, a far cry from Wells’ hopeful 1 billion. However, there is good news! The worldometers.info site predicts a decreasing net change in population growth, such that by year 2050 the yearly change will be 0.50% of what it is now! In other words, the rate of population growth will be cut in half 29 years from now! Those are striking projections and would entail a massive cap on growth! Obviously, this is a projection based off of the presumed success of “educational reforms.” Though I do wonder…what will we do if not all of the individuals agree to abide by these reforms? And what will we do if not all of the nations agree to abide by these reforms? Will we enforce it nonetheless, and if so…by what methods?
The Ghosts of Wells’ Past
“The knowledge of today is the ignorance of tomorrow”
– H.G. Wells
The Wells that we have come to know today started his journey as a young boy winning a scholarship to study at the prestigious Normal School of Science (now called the Royal College of Science). His subject of choice was biology and his teacher, and quickly thereafter mentor, was none other than Thomas Huxley, otherwise known as “Darwin’s bulldog” (his words).
Through Huxley, Wells’ conception of the nature of humankind was formed with its foundation built upon the philosophies of Charles Darwin and Thomas Malthus.
Because Wells is so very influenced by these men, in fact they form the very basis for his ethics; I thought it apt to share with you a few quotes.
In Thomas Malthus’ “Essay on the Principle of Population” (1799), he wrote:
“We should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague.” [emphasis added]
This approach seems not too different from a proposal to crowd people into a building with kindling and then proceed to light it on fire. After all, fire is a natural phenomenon. A much quicker and more effective remedy, I would think, if one is to take such an approach…
In Charles Darwin’s “The Descent of Man” (no not his autobiography! Though he was very much spiritually conflicted with the social consequences of his philosophies…) stated his thoughts on directed breeding as such:
“No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man itself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” [emphasis added]
To the credit of Darwin (though the damage was already done), he included a disclaimer in his “The Descent of Man,” that if humankind were to take upon itself the enforcement of the so-called “forces of nature,” it would be at the cost of our “most noble qualities”, as Darwin states:
“Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.” [emphasis added]
Out of Malthus, Huxley and Wells, Darwin was by far the most troubled by the social consequences of what he believed to be an unavoidable necessity. Yet he could never resolve why something necessary could be so morally destructive and this failure to rectify the two opposing veins of thought would cost him dearly. In his later years he described his spiritual crippling inability to find joy in anything he once did, as he states in his autobiography:
“I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds…gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays…music [was a] very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for…music…My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive… The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”
What is the value of life, if in striving for our supposed “survival” we lose our most noble qualities? Why should we sacrifice our best qualities in a humiliating trade-off for a “contingent benefit” and “an overwhelming evil”?
Britain’s Ministry of Propaganda
Soon after the outbreak of the First World War (1914), the British government discovered that Germany had a Propaganda Agency- and thus it was only reasonable that a British War Propaganda Bureau be established. David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was to head the task.
On Sept. 2nd, 1914, H.G. Wells (who was 48 by then) was invited amongst twelve other participants (including Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling) to discuss ways of best promoting Britain’s interests during the war. All the writers present at the conference agreed to the utmost secrecy and it was not until 1935 that the activities of the War Propaganda Bureau became known to the general public. It was agreed that pamphlets and books would be written to promote the government’s view of the situation.
Other than writing books for the Ministry of Propaganda, Wells also did some dabbling as a journalist under the supervision of Lord Northcliffe, the owner of The Times and the Daily Mail (the largest circulating newspaper in the early 20th century), among other newspapers.
Northcliffe’s newspapers propagandized for creating a Minister of Munitions, which was held first by David Lloyd George (1915), and played an instrumental role in getting him appointed as Prime Minister of Britain in 1916. Lloyd George then appointed Lord Northcliffe as Director of Propaganda.
Thus, H.G. Wells not only participated in the British War Propaganda Bureau but worked directly under the Director of Propaganda. And thus, much of his writing from 1914 on, should be regarded in service (and certainly not counter) to the interests of the British Empire.
Among the plethora of books Wells wrote, was “The New World Order,” (1940). It appears that Wells was indeed the first to pioneer the now-infamous term.
Wells’ Vision for a New Republic vs the People of the Abyss
In Wells’ “Anticipations” published in 1901, he writes the “vicious, helpless and pauper masses” have appeared, spreading as the railway systems have spread, and representing an integral part of the process of industrialization, like the waste product of a healthy organism. For these “great useless masses of people” he adopts the term “People of the Abyss” and he predicts that the “nation that most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes, exports or poisons its People of the Abyss” will be in the ascendant.
The ethical system laid out in Wells’ New Republic forbids the further growth of the “People of the Abyss”. In the past, Nature killed these off, and in some cases killing will still be necessary. And we should not be appalled by this task, as per Mr. Wells. Death for such people will mean merely “the end of the bitterness of failure, the merciful obliteration of weak and silly and pointless things.” Clearly the effecting of this will be morally justifiable according to Wells:
“The new ethics will hold life to be a privilege and a responsibility, not a sort of night refuge for base spirits out of the void; and the alternative in right conduct between living fully, beautifully and efficiently will be to die. For a multitude of contemptible and silly creatures, fear-driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hateful happy in the midst of squalid dishonour, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying through sheer incontinence and stupidity, the men of the New Republic will have little pity and less benevolence.” (5) [emphasis added]
If “the whole tenor of a man’s actions” shows him to be unfit to live, the New Republicans will exterminate him. They will not be squeamish about inflicting death because they will have a fuller sense of the possibilities of life.
“They will have an ideal that will make killing worth the while.” The killing, Wells explains, will not be needlessly brutal. “All such killing will be done with an opiate.”
Whether this will be administered forcibly or whether the victim will be persuaded to swallow it, he does not reveal. Selected criminals will be destroyed by the same means. The death penalty will also be used to prevent the transmission of genetic disorders. People suffering from genetically transmissible diseases will be forbidden to propagate, and will be killed if they do.
As for the “swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people”, who do not meet the new needs of efficiency, will, he insists “have to go”. It is “their portion to die out and disappear”.
In 1938, Wells’ “War of the Worlds” was broadcasted as a radio drama and narrated by Orson Welles. Apparently, during the broadcast it had not made itself clear to its audience that it was in fact a radio drama and not the actual news. Suffice to say the reporting of a man-eating alien invasion caused quite the panic in its London boroughs, and I am sure the British Propaganda Bureau got quite the chuckle out of it. It was great news for them, for it showed how easy it would be to control the narrative even if it were to be carried out to an absurd degree. It confirmed to them that the public will believe anything.
Wells wrote of the panic caused by the radio drama in the London boroughs:
“If one could have hung that June morning in a balloon in the blazing blue above London, every northward and eastward road running out of the infinite tangle of streets would have seemed stippled black with the streaming fugitives, each dot a human agony of terror and physical distress…Never before in the history of the world had such a mass of human beings moved and suffered together…without order and with a goal, six million people, unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of civilization, of the massacre of mankind.” [emphasis added]
I think it no coincidence that our entertainment industry today, so heavily saturated with the influence of Wells’ propaganda, is obsessed with the theme of a post-apocalyptic world, the ever-revolving death game where its avatars are tested on their ability to survive at all cost. Through these adventures, we the audience are brought along and are taught how to feel the thrill of the hunt, the catharsis of the bludgeoning, the release that comes from mayhem. For we are the children of the ultimate revolution… the dawn of the great Purge.
Modern Religion: A Collective Orwellian Mind
In H.G. Wells’ “Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution”, he makes no qualms in declaring his trilogy: “The Outline of History” (1919), “The Science of Life” (1929), and “The Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind” (1932) as the new Bible:
“I have told already how I have schemed out a group of writings to embody the necessary ideas of the new time in a form adapted to the current reading public; I have made a sort of provisional “Bible,” so to speak, for some factors at least in the Open Conspiracy.”
The reader should be aware that Julius Huxley was a co-author of “The Science of Life”. Julian was also a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society, serving as its Vice-President from 1937-1944 and its President from 1959-1962. Interesting life choices from the authors of the new Bible.
Of Wells’ vision for a “Modern Religion” he wrote:
‘…if religion is to develop unifying and directive power in the present confusion of human affairs it must adapt itself to this forward-looking, individuality-analyzing turn of mind; it must divest itself of its sacred histories…The desire for service, for subordination, for permanent effect, for an escape from the distressful pettiness and mortality of the individual life, is the undying element in every religious system.
The time has come to strip religion right down to that [service and subordination is all Wells wants to keep of the old relic of religion]…The explanation of why things are is an unnecessary effort…The essential fact…is the desire for religion and not how it came about…The first sentence in the modern creed must be, not “I believe,” but “I give myself.” ‘ [emphasis added]
And to what are we to “give ourselves” to without any questions asked, but with a blind faith to worship what we are told is the good?
Wells explains it to us thus:
“The character of the Open Conspiracy will now be plainly displayed. It will have become a great world movement as wide-spread and evident as socialism or communism. It will have taken the place of these movements very largely. It will be more than they were, it will be frankly a world religion. This large, loose assimilatory mass of movements, groups, and societies will be definitely and obviously attempting to swallow up the entire population of the world and become the new human community.”
Conclusion
In Alfred Hitchcock’s film “The Rope” (1948), two Harvard students murder one of their friends as an experiment in committing the “perfect murder” and a display of their intellectual superiority. They stuff the body in a large chest in the middle of the dining room and hold a party, the idea being that all of their guests will be too daft as to figure out that they are dinning in a room with a fresh corpse, that is, everyone except Rupert Cadell (played by James Stewart), a former teacher of theirs. Rupert, they recognise will be their real challenge and their greatest proof of intellectual superiority if they succeed in pulling the wool over his eyes.
In fact, it was Rupert who taught the two men this manner of thinking that “murder is a crime for most men, but a privilege for the few.” This is reasoned by the belief that “moral concepts of good and evil do not pertain to the superior being.”
This subject is discussed at the dinner party, the guests think at first Rupert is kidding, but he assures them that the world would be a better place if the superior were permitted to commit murder, and that such a murder would be an “art form.” He states “think of what this would mean for unemployment, poverty, waiting in long lines.” He thinks open season for murder would be too much, and suggests shorter durations such as “cut a throat week” or “strangulation day.”
As the evening progresses, Rupert, the astute man that he is, observes a series of odd behaviour from the two men. David (the murdered young man) was in fact invited to the party, his father and his fiancé are amongst the guests and there is a growing concern for why David has not shown up.
Long story short – after all the guests had left, only Rupert and the two young killers remain in the apartment. Rupert discovers that they have murdered David (who was also a student of Rupert’s), and he opens the chest to find the body. Horrified and disgusted, he asks “why did you do it?” They of course responded, “we simply acted out what you always talked about.”
Confronted with the reality of his words, Rupert is ashamed at being partially responsible for this macabre scene. However, Rupert states, “there was always something deep within me that prevented me from ever acting out my words,” in other words, he never thought it possible that anyone would actually have it in them to act them out.
It is in this moment that Rupert realises that it is not in fact the superior being who is capable of committing murder, but the criminally insane. That the idea of purging the world of its “inferiors,” would in fact rid the world of its most loving and moral beings, their traits regarded as intolerably foolish and weak.
In the end, we would be left with the worst of humankind, a human race that had cannibalised itself.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/16/2021 – 22:00 - "Tough Months Ahead" – NYC's Lackluster Recovery Continues To Decimate Businesses And Livelihoods
“Tough Months Ahead” – NYC’s Lackluster Recovery Continues To Decimate Businesses And Livelihoods
Indoor dining is banned; offices are empty; city dwellers are fleeing the metro area.
The virus pandemic has deeply scarred New York City’s economy that will have long-lasting effects. Many small and medium-sized firms, entire industries, and livelihoods continue to unravel as the economic toll continues to rise nearly one year after the pandemic began.
Bloomberg reports the Bronx’s unemployment rate stands around 16%, which is much higher than the national average of 6.7%. The virus-induced downturn could result in at least 33% of the city’s businesses going under as the vaccine rollout has been incredibly slow.
“It is really going to be tough still in the coming months,” said Tim Tompkins, former head of the Times Square Alliance, which hosted its annual New Year’s Eve celebration without the public for the first time in more than a century.
Jobless rates across all five of the city’s boroughs remain stubbornly high but off the highs seen in June.
Source: Bloomberg New Yorkers shouldn’t be shocked if a multi-year economic downturn unfolds.
“This is an event that struck right at the heart of New York’s comparative advantages,” Mark Zandi, the chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, recently said. “Being globally oriented, being stacked up in skyscrapers and packed together in stadiums: the very thing that made New York the pandemic undermined New York, was upended by it.”
Zandi said while the US economy “will be a long slog” from here, with estimates of a downturn lasting until 2023 – New York might not experience a recovery until 2025.
Zandi said NYC’s recovery could take two years longer than the rest of the country as the virus-induced downturn has severely damaged five key industries – restaurants, hotels, the arts, transportation, and building services – most of which heavily rely on travel and tourism.
Airbnb Chief Executive Officer Brian Chesky explained that a significant problem is developing for large cities. He said this summer people would vacation not in big cities like New York but in small towns and rural communities. The shift in domestic travel trends will continue to pressure New York City’s key industries, resulting in stubbornly high unemployment.
A recovery in the city is unlikely this year. As explained by the World Bank Chief Economist Carmen Reinhart on Wednesday, don’t confuse the latest economic rebound with a “recovery.”
Making matters worse, New Yorkers are leaving en masse – reports already indicate 300,000 people have fled the metro area because of the virus pandemic, social unrest, and increasing violent crime.
With the services industries decimated and a rapidly shrinking city, remaining businesses may add back fewer than 30% of the 662,000 jobs lost in 2020.
What does this mean?
Some New Yorkers’ livelihoods will be permanently destroyed as hundreds of thousands will be financially devastated as the labor market shrinks. Many have resorted to food banks and government assistance programs to survive. The situation is even becoming even direr for the working-poor as they owe a whopping $2 billion in back rent.
New York financial district gets it. They are also leaving as they understand the city is descending into years of socio-economic chaos.
Wall Street firms are packing up their bags and moving elsewhere. Other firms are shrinking their corporate footprint as work-at-home dominates.
The latest high-frequency data shows foot traffic inside the financial district is rolling over as Manhattan transforms into a ghost town once more. Check out some of the data showing recovery is nowhere in sight to begin the new year:
Source: Bloomberg Apple mobility data for New York City is rolling over.
Source: Apple All of this has crushed the residential and commercial real estate markets.
Manhattan apartment rents have dived to decade lows as inventory swells to record highs. As for Manhattan’s office space supply, well, inventory has hit highs not seen since the 2000s.
There are concerns that some CMBS tranches heavily exposed to New York City hotels and shopping malls could experience defaults as there is no significant improvement in the metro area’s economic recovery.
To sum up, Paul Joseph Watson said, “New York City is dead, and it’s not coming back.”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/16/2021 – 21:30 - What Will WHO Experts Find During Their Wuhan Trip?
What Will WHO Experts Find During Their Wuhan Trip?
Authored by Wang Youqun, op-ed via The Epoch Times,
On Jan. 14, a team of experts from the World Health Organization was finally allowed to travel to Wuhan and investigate the origin of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. The announcement issued by the National Health Commission on Jan. 11 contained only a short sentence. It did not mention the length of the trip, nor specified a detailed itinerary. This trip takes place more than a year after the virus first emerged. It has since spread to 191 countries and regions.
Can WHO experts find the source of the CCP virus in Wuhan?
I think it is unlikely.
The reasons are as follows:
First, tracing the virus origin and tracing who’s responsible for its global spread are closely linked.
If Wuhan is found to be the source of the global pandemic, but the CCP allowed virus carriers to fly from Wuhan to other parts of the world—causing at least 93 million infections and over 2 million deaths to date—the CCP will be held accountable. This is something the CCP is absolutely unwilling to face.
On May 19, 2020, under strong pressure from the international community, the World Health Assembly passed a resolution to investigate the source of the virus. However, for the WHO experts to go to Wuhan, the CCP dragged its feet again and again for more than 7 months. Why did it take so long? Some experts believe that it is to clean up all the evidence at the scene of the virus outbreak.
Since the outbreak in 2020, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department repeatedly offered to send experts to China, but was rejected time and time again. In the end, China only agreed that the U.S. experts would go to China with the WHO expert team. In February 2020, after a 9-day trip, Canadian Bruce Aylward, the team leader of the WHO China Joint Mission, was asked by reporters in Geneva why he did not go through quarantine after visiting Wuhan. His answer accidentally revealed the fact that he had not been to any “dirty areas” of the Wuhan hospital. In other words, the expert group only went where the CCP allowed and anything they saw and heard was carefully arranged.
Also, the CCP will silence all relevant personnel. Yan Limeng, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong School of Public Health fled to the United States to reveal the truths about the CCP virus. Officials from the Ministry of National Security went to her hometown of Qingdao to harass her family. She said that since mid-May, the CCP began to attack her on the internet, spread rumors, and destroy her reputation. The CCP set up a fake Facebook account with her name and resume, she alleged. The CCP lied about her being kidnapped in the United States, and claimed that she was lying and mentally ill. Yan’s mother was subsequently arrested.
The CCP has brutally clamped down on those Chinese citizens who requested to investigate the source of the virus and hold leaders accountable. For example, Ren Zhiqiang, former business tycoon and “red princeling,” was sentenced to 18 years for his outspoken criticism of the CCP; Zhang Zhan, a citizen journalist who went to Wuhan to investigate the epidemic, was sentenced to four years in prison; and citizen journalist Fang Bin has disappeared, with many suspecting that he has been detained by authorities.
The CCP has repeatedly retaliated against Australia, which proposed an independent investigation into the source of the virus. The Chinese regime has banned imports of Australian barley, imposed tariffs of 107.1 to 212.1 percent on Australian wine, blacklisted six Australian beef suppliers, and placed other restrictions on imports of Australian coal, cotton, and lobster.
The CCP continues to blame other countries on the source of the virus. On March 12, 2020, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian posted a tweet claiming, without evidence, that the virus was brought into Wuhan by the U.S. army. After that, the “blaming” wars commenced. Chinese state media have claimed, on different occasions, that the virus originated in Italy, Spain, Germany, France, India, Bangladesh, Australia, Italy, Russia, Greece, and Czech Republic.
Since the Australian government proposed in April last year that a global independent investigation into the source of the virus must be conducted, the international community has begun the research.
In early July last year, the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response was set up with the former Prime Minister of New Zealand Helen Clark and the former President of Liberia Ellen Johnson Sirleaf serving as co-chairs.
And some experts and officials outside of China have raised the possibility that the CCP virus leaked out of a virology lab in Wuhan.
Wuhan Virus: CCP covered it up. CCP disappeared the doctors who knew. CCP still refuses to let the world in to see what it wrought. CCP lied about where the virus came from. pic.twitter.com/jVCETwUokO
— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) January 16, 2021
The CCP will definitely do everything possible to conceal the truth about the source of the virus – deceit is in its nature. But nothing can be kept hidden forever. The truth will eventually come to light.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/16/2021 – 21:00 - Goldman Sounds The Alarm On Stocks: When Euphoria Is This High, "It's A Good Time To Reduce Risk"
Goldman Sounds The Alarm On Stocks: When Euphoria Is This High, “It’s A Good Time To Reduce Risk”
The past few months can best be characterized as a period of unprecedented market optimism and sheer euphoria, and we have done just that with several recent articles…
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Dec 1: Market Euphoria Surpasses Dot Com Levels: What’s An Investor To Do?
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Dec 2: Citi Warns Most “Euphoric” Market Since Dot Com Bubble
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Dec 6: JPMorgan Warns Crowded Trades And Euphoric Consensus Are The Biggest Threats For Markets
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Dec 15: Record Wall Street Euphoria Triggers First BofA “Sell Signal” Since February 2020
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Dec 17: Euphoria Goes To 11: Futures, Global Markets, Bitcoin Soar As Dollar Collapse Continues
… and so on. But whereas in the recent past, the euphoria was always bounded by the upper limit reached during the insatiable buying spree of the dot com bubble, the first week of 2021 is when we went off the chart. Literally. As we showed last week, Citi’s latest Panic/Euphoria model hit a record reading of 1.83 versus an upwardly revised 1.69 in the prior week.
What does this mean? It’s simple: as Citi chief economist Tobias Levkovich wrote last Friday when looking at market returns following previous euphoria extremes, there is now a “100% historical probability of down markets in the next 12 months at current levels.”
Judging by the market action in the subsequent week which saw the S&P slide 1.5%, the Citi economist may be right, and the selloff is only just starting. Then again, the market has a tendency to do the opposite of what consensus expects it to do – and right now consensus among even the most bullish banks is that the next move in stocks will be lower – which is why the fact that Citi’s call for a selloff becoming consensus, make us wonder if the next move in stocks won’t be much higher instead.
Case in point, in the latest Goldman Portfolio Research Strategy report, Christian Mueller-Glissman writes that Goldman’s Risk Appetite Indicator (RAI) reached a reading of 1 this week – the highest in 4 years and just shy of an all time high – after a large increase in risk appetite since Q4 last year.
How did we get to such a high reading?
As Goldman explains, this was largely on the back of growth optimism in 2021, and while the bank expects monetary policy to remain supportive, “we see less potential for much more positive impulses from here. Following the news of a successful COVID-19 vaccine in November, growth optimism has broken out and shifted further into positive territory since Q4 as markets have become more optimistic on the prospects for reflation.” These various dynamics are shown below:
The Goldman strategist then notes that he has “seen a similar bullish shift in other sentiment and positioning indicators” and explains that while “sentiment and positioning alone are seldom a catalyst for a reversal, at extremes they increase that risk in the event of shocks.” Furthermore, “they are often a better contrarian signal on the way down as markets tend to overshoot faster during ‘risk off’ episodes – on the flipside risk appetite tends to build up slowly and can remain positive for a long time with a supportive macro backdrop.”
At this point, Goldman basically repeats what Citi said last week, warning that “from RAI levels close to 1 the asymmetry to add risk is worse: subsequent equity returns, especially in the near term, tend to be more negatively skewed and there is increased risk of drawdowns.”
Furthermore, at current RAI levels the market is more vulnerable to negative growth nor rate shocks in the near term, such as monetary and fiscal policy disappointments or more negative COVID-19 news. The key driver of risk appetite in the coming months is likely to be growth and reflation sentiment –we don’t expect more positive impulses from monetary policy.
That said, Goldman isn’t telling its clients to sell just yet because as Glissman writes, “risk appetite can stay at elevated levels for prolonged periods as long as the macro backdrop remains supportive” and explains further:
the RAI only tends to be at extremes for short periods of time: for example, the RAI has spent just 1.1% of the time below -2 and 1.7% of the time above 1. Still, adjusting equity allocations tactically based on RAI signals has enhanced returns: Exhibit 17 and Exhibit 18 show strategies that only invest 80% in the S&P 500 (the rest in T-Bills) if the RAI is high and 120% (with leverage) if it is very low. But the improved performance was captured only on a few days – for example, the RAI on average time spent only 6 consecutive days above 0.9.
On the other hand, “periods when the RAI declined back to zero from elevated levels have on average delivered positive, albeit slower, returns for risky assets.”
This is Goldman’s base case for the rest of 2021, and is why the bank remains pro-risk in its asset allocation, and expects the S&P to rise to 4,100 by the end of the year, and 4,400 in two years.
Which is odd, because Glissman also warns that a backtest of extreme RAI readings, shows that it is a good contrarian signal.
The problem is that while the right move here may well be to sell, the question is when: as Goldman explains, market timing with the RAI alone is difficult as it tends to spend little time at extremes. Still, not even Glissman can deny that what is coming won’t be pleasant – contrary to the recos from Goldman’s chief equity strategist David Kostin – and concludes that “when the RAI is above 0.9 and until it normalizes below 0.75, it has been a good time reduce risk tactically.”
So… time to buy?
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/16/2021 – 20:30 -
- Tech Supremacy: Silicon Valley Can No Longer Conceal Its Power
Tech Supremacy: Silicon Valley Can No Longer Conceal Its Power
Authored by Niall Ferguson via The Spectator,
‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,’ George Orwell famously observed. He was talking not about everyday life but about politics, where it is ‘quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously’.
The examples he gave in his 1946 essay included the paradox that ‘for years before the war, nearly all enlightened people were in favour of standing up to Germany: the majority of them were also against having enough armaments to make such a stand effective’.
Last week provided a near-perfect analogy. For years before the 2020 election, nearly all American conservatives were in favour of standing up to big tech: the majority of them were also against changing the laws and regulations enough to make such a stand effective. The difference is that, unlike the German threat, which was geographically remote, the threat from Silicon Valley was literally in front of our noses, day and night: on our mobile phones, our tablets and our laptops.
Writing in this magazine more than three years ago, I warned of a coming collision between Donald Trump and Silicon Valley. ‘Social media helped Donald Trump take the White House,’ I wrote. ‘Silicon Valley won’t let it happen again.’ The conclusion of my book The Square and the Tower was that the new online network platforms represented a new kind of power that posed a fundamental challenge to the traditional hierarchical power of the state.
By the network platforms, I mean Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Google and Apple, or FATGA for short — companies that have established a dominance over the public sphere not seen since the heyday of the pre-Reformation Catholic Church. FATGA had humble enough origins in garages and dorm rooms. As recently as 2008, not one of them could be found among the world’s largest companies by market capitalisation. Today, they occupy first, third, fourth and fifth places in the market cap league table, just above their Chinese counterparts, Tencent and Alibaba.
What happened was that the network platforms turned the originally decentralised worldwide web into an oligarchically organised and hierarchical public sphere from which they made money and to which they controlled access. That the original, superficially libertarian inclinations of these companies’ founders would rapidly crumble under political pressure from the left was also perfectly obvious, if one bothered to look a little beyond one’s proboscis.
Following the violent far-right rally at Charlottesville in August 2017, Matthew Prince, chief executive of the internet service provider Cloudflare, described how he had responded: ‘Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the internet.’ On the basis that ‘the people behind the [white supremacist magazine] Daily Stormer are assholes’, he denied their website access to the internet. ‘No one should have that power,’ he admitted. ‘We need to have a discussion around this with clear rules and clear frameworks. My whims and those of Jeff [Bezos] and Larry [Page] and … Mark [Zuckerberg] shouldn’t be what determines what should be online.’
But that discussion had barely begun in 2017. Indeed, many Republicans at that time still believed the notion that FATGA were champions of the free market that required only the lightest regulation. They know better now. After last year’s election Twitter attached health warnings to Trump’s tweets when he claimed that he had in fact beaten Joe Biden. Then, in the wake of the storming of the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters, Twitter and Facebook began shutting down multiple accounts — including that of the President himself, now ‘permanently suspended’ from tweeting. When Trump loyalists declared their intention to move their conversations from Twitter to rival Parler — in effect, Twitter with minimal content moderation — Google and Apple deleted Parler from their app stores. Then Amazon kicked Parler off its ‘cloud’ service, effectively deleting it from the internet altogether. It was a stunning demonstration of power.
It is only a slight overstatement to say that, while the mob’s coup against Congress ignominiously failed, big tech’s coup against Trump triumphantly succeeded. It is not merely that Trump has been abruptly denied access to the channels he has used throughout his presidency to communicate with voters. It is the fact that he is being excluded from a domain the courts have for some time recognised as a public forum.
Various lawsuits over the years have conferred on big tech an unusual status: a public good, held in private hands. In 2018 the Southern District of New York ruled that the right to reply to Trump’s tweets is protected ‘under the “public forum” doctrines set forth by the Supreme Court’. So it was wrong for the President to ‘block’ people — i.e. stop them reading his tweets — because they were critical of him. Censoring Twitter users ‘because of their expressed political views’ represents ‘viewpoint discrimination [that] violates the First Amendment’.
In Packingham vs North Carolina (2017), Justice Anthony Kennedy likened internet platforms to ‘the modern public square’, arguing that it was therefore unconstitutional to prevent sex offenders from accessing, and expressing opinions on, social network platforms. ‘While in the past there may have been difficulty in identifying the most important places (in a spatial sense) for the exchange of views,’ Justice Kennedy wrote, ‘today the answer is clear. It is cyberspace —the “vast democratic forums of the internet” in general … and social media in particular.’
In other words, as President of the United States, Trump could not block Twitter users from seeing his tweets, but Twitter is apparently within its rights to delete the President’s account altogether. Sex offenders have a right of access to online social networks; but the President does not.
This is not to condone Trump’s increasingly deranged attempts to overturn November’s election result. Before last week’s riots, he egged on the mob; he later said he ‘loved’ them, despite what they had done. Nor is there any denying that a number of Trump’s most fervent supporters pose a threat of further violence. Considering the bombs and firearms some of them brought to Washington, the marvel is how few people lost their lives during the occupation of the Capitol.
Yet the correct response to that threat is not to delegate to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and their peers the power to remove from the public square anyone they deem to be sympathetic to insurrection or otherwise suspect. The correct response is for the FBI and the relevant police departments to pursue any would-be Trumpist terrorists, just as they have quite successfully pursued would-be Islamist terrorists over the past two decades.
The key to understanding what has happened lies in an obscure piece of legislation, almost a quarter of a century old, enacted after a New York court held online service provider Prodigy liable for a user’s defamatory posts. Congress then stepped in with the 1996 Telecommunications Act and in particular Section 230, which was written to encourage nascent firms to protect users and prevent illegal activity without incurring massive content management costs. It states:
1. No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
2. No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of … any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.
In essence, Section 230 gives websites immunity from liability for what their users post if it is in any way harmful, but also entitles websites to take down with equal impunity any content that they don’t like the look of. The surely unintended result of this legislation, drafted for a fledgling internet, is that some of the biggest companies in the world enjoy a protection reminiscent of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Try to hold them responsible as publishers, and they will say they are platforms. Demand access to their platforms and they will insist that they are publishers.
This might have been a tolerable state of affairs if America’s network platforms had been subject to something like the old Fairness Doctrine, which required the big three terrestrial TV networks to give airtime to opposing views. But that was something the Republican party killed off in the 1980s, seeing the potential of allowing more slanted coverage on cable news. What goes around comes around. The network platforms long ago abandoned any pretence of being neutral. Even before Charlottesville, their senior executives and many of their employees had made it clear that they were appalled by Trump’s election victory (especially as both Facebook and Twitter had facilitated it). Increasingly, they interpreted the words ‘otherwise objectionable’ in Section 230 to mean ‘objectionable to liberals’.
Throughout the summer of last year, numerous supporters of Black Lives Matter used social media, as well as mainstream liberal media, to express their support for protests that in many places escalated into violence and destruction considerably worse than occurred in the Capitol last week. One looked in vain for health warnings, much less account suspensions, though Facebook says it has removed accounts that promote violence.
Compare, for example, the language Trump used in his 6 January speech and the language Kamala Harris used in support of BLM on Stephen Colbert’s show on 18 June. Neither explicitly condoned violence. Trump exhorted the crowd to march to the Capitol, but he told them to ‘peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard’. Harris condemned ‘looting and… acts of violence’, but said of the BLM protestors: ‘They’re not going to stop. They’re not. This is a movement. I’m telling you. They’re not going to stop, and everyone, beware. Because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before election day in November, and they are not going to stop after election day. And everyone should take note of that on both levels.’ What exactly was the significance of that ‘beware’?
Earlier, on 1 June, Harris had used Twitter to solicit donations to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which posted bail for people charged with rioting in Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd. It would be easy to cite other examples. ‘Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence,’ Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times told CBS in early June, at a time when multiple cities were being swept by arson and vandalism. Her Twitter account is still going strong.
The double standard was equally apparent when the New York Post broke the story of Biden’s son Hunter’s dubious business dealings in China. Both Twitter and Facebook immediately prevented users from posting links to the article — something they had never done with stories damaging to Trump.
You don’t need to be a Trump supporter to find all this alarming. Conservatives of many different stripes — and indeed some bemused liberals — have experienced the new censorship for themselves, especially as the Covid-19 pandemic has emboldened tech companies to police content more overtly. In the UK, TalkRadio briefly vanished from YouTube for airing anti–lockdown views that violated the company’s ‘community guidelines’. A recording of Lionel Shriver reading one of her Spectator columns on the pandemic was taken down for similar reasons. Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson, two Oxford academics, fell foul of Facebook’s censors when they wrote for this magazine about a briefly controversial paper on the efficacy of masks in Denmark.
You might think that FATGA have finally gone too far with their fatwa against a sitting president of the United States. You might think a red line really has been crossed when both Alexei Navalny and Angela Merkel express disquiet at big tech’s overreach. But no. To an extent that is remarkable, American liberals have mostly welcomed (and in some cases encouraged) this surge of censorship — with the honourable exception of the American Civil Liberties Union.
True, during last year’s campaign the Biden team occasionally talked tough, especially about Facebook. However, it is increasingly clear that the most big tech has to fear from the Biden-Harris administration is protracted antitrust actions focused on their alleged undermining of competition which, if history is any guide, will likely end with whimpers rather than bangs. Either way, the issue of censorship will not be addressed by antitrust lawsuits.
It is tempting to complain that Democrats are hypocrites — that they would be screaming blue murder if the boot were on the other foot and it was Kamala Harris whose Twitter account had been cancelled. But if that were the case, how many Republicans would now be complaining? Not many. No, the correct conclusion to be drawn is that the Republicans had their chance to address the problem of over-mighty big tech and completely flunked it.
Only too late did they realise that Section 230 was Silicon Valley’s Achilles heel. Only too late did they begin drafting legislation to repeal or modify it. Only too late did Section 230 start to feature in Trump’s speeches. Even now it seems to me that very few Republicans really understand that, by itself, repealing 230 would not have sufficed. Without some kind of First Amendment for the internet, repeal would probably just have restricted free speech further.
As Orwell rightly observed, ‘we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality.’
Those words sum up quite a lot that has gone on inside the Republican party over the past four years. There it was, right in front of their noses: Trump would lead the party to defeat. And he would behave in the most discreditable way when beaten. Those things were predictable. But what was also foreseeable was that FATGA — the ‘new governors’, as a 2018 Harvard Law Review article called them — would be the true victors of the 2020 election.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/16/2021 – 20:00 - UFO In Cape Hatteras? Viral Video Sparks Debate Of Mysterious Flying Object
UFO In Cape Hatteras? Viral Video Sparks Debate Of Mysterious Flying Object
Days before the CIA released a large cache of files involving unidentified flying objects (UFOs), following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by podcaster John Greenwald Jr., social media was a buzz about a UFO last week over North Carolina’s Outer Banks area.
According to the regional newspaper The News & Observer, photographer Wes Snyder captures what appears to be a mysterious object in the night sky.
“The object was visible for just under 3 minutes total, so I doubt it’s a meteor, (or) shooting star as those typically only last a few seconds,” Snyder posted on YouTube.
Judging by the video, the object appears to have corners. Here’s the video in full.
“I spent a night at the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse shooting time-lapse photos to create an upcoming video. While I was looking through my footage, I realized there was something in the video that I could not explain,” he wrote on Facebook. “It’s much larger than your typical plane appears, and it’s moving way faster than clouds.”
Snyder said the best explanation is that it may be “space junk or a satellite burning up in the atmosphere.”
Comments on Snyder’s Facebook post agreed that it certainly wasn’t a meteor.
“It’s not a meteor,unless somebody reported one crashing somewhere within the surrounding towns or counties, cuz it was way to close. Anybody with common sense knows that it cannot a shooting star. WavyTv 10 did a special a while back about the pilots at Norfolk Air Force Base and the unidentifiable things they have witnessed over the years. So I’m gonna say it’s Extraterrestrial. I bet that the airport on Hatteras Island would have some sort of record of it. So would NASA and the Air Force Base,” wrote Regan Wynne.
Someone else wrote, “I’d say the best bet would be a stage of the space x rocket.”
Another said, “Space station or a satellite fly by.”
Authorities have yet to identify what exactly flew by the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.
But with the recent CIA dump of UFO files, it certainly makes you wonder if life beyond Earth actually does exist.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/16/2021 – 19:30 - Iran Releases Rare Footage Of Prior IRGC Ballistic Missile Attack On US Forces
Iran Releases Rare Footage Of Prior IRGC Ballistic Missile Attack On US Forces
Iran’s military has published on social media a new video clip of the Iranian missile strike on the Ain Al-Assad base in western Iraq, where US forces are stationed.
This attack, which took place on January 8th, 2020, was carried out by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on the US forces at the Ain Al-Assad base, targeted one of the largest installations in the country.
The video shows an Iranian operations room and the moment of pressing the launch button for the missiles that fell on the base where many US personnel were stationed in the Al-Anbar Governorate of western Iraq, causing huge explosions at the site, where the flames escalated to tens of meters.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps carried out this powerful attack on the US forces in response to the assassinations of Major General Qassem Soleimani of the IRGC’s Quds Force and Abu Mahdi Al-Mohandis of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units.
Later in the year, the US military deployed Patriot missiles to the country, amid the increase in attacks on the Green Zone in Baghdad, which have been blamed on the Iraqi forces allied with Iran.
Via NPR/Planet: A satellite photo from the commercial company Planet shows damage to at least five structures at the Ain al-Assad air base in Iraq.
While Iran had previously published footage of the missiles soaring through the air from Iranian airspace (see below), the new video published Friday is the first to provocatively show the command center and under-surface rocket silos from where they were launched.
IRGC Launches Attack on US Ein Al-Assad Air Base in Iraq in Retaliation for Assassination of Top Iranian Commander pic.twitter.com/34fwNvsoMf
— Fars News Agency (@EnglishFars) January 8, 2020
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Tensions have remained high between the US and Iran, as several reports surfaced last month about the American President Donald Trump’s interest in possibly striking the nuclear facilities of the Islamic Republic.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/16/2021 – 19:00 - LA County First In US To Top 1MM Cases: Live Updates
LA County First In US To Top 1MM Cases: Live Updates
Summary:
- LA County tops 1MM cases
- Global deaths top 2M
- Norway sees cases of vaccine-related health complications rise to 80
- 29 people over 75 have died after receiving the first vaccine dose
- India vaccinates 165K+ as vaccine rollout begins
- US hospitalizations, cases continue to slow
- Ireland blames Christmas for latest outbreak
- Russia lifts some travel bans
- Israel rolls out COVID “breathalyzer”
* * *
Update (1830ET): As the COVID-19 picture has improved across the US, LA County has just crossed the 1MM case mark, becoming the first county in the country to cross that benchmark. Public health officials have also confirmed that there’s at least one case confirmed case of the new mutant first discovered in the UK. The man who first had the strain is now quarantining in Oregon. .
“The presence of the U.K. variant in Los Angeles County is troubling, as our healthcare system is already severely strained with more than 7,500 people currently hospitalized,” said Dr. Barbara Ferrer, LA county’s public health director, in a statement. “Our community is bearing the brunt of the winter surge, experiencing huge numbers of cases, hospitalizations and deaths, five-times what we experienced over the summer.”
On Saturday, Los Angeles reported 1,003,923 confirmed Covid-19 infections and 13,741 deaths.
California has reported more than 2.9MM confirmed cases, according to NBC News counts. Texas, with 2MM cases, and Florida, with 1.5MM, are the next two states with the most infections. New York, which was one of the country’s first and biggest hot spots, has recorded 1.2MM.
* * *
Global coronavirus deaths have passed 2MM as of Saturday morning, while the US has topped 23.5MM. As daily case totals slowed in the US, Norway revealed that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine contributed to the deaths of more than 2 dozen people. But the biggest news overnight comes from Norway, where the government says 29 elderly people have died, and 80 have seen their health seriously impacted, due to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
Of course, readers of Zero Hedge won’t find this at all surprising. And deaths haven’t been confined to Norway, either. Another 55 have been reported in the US as well.
But in the US and most of Europe, the vaccine story hasn’t registered like fears of the mutated COVID-19 strains. B117, the strain first discovered in the UK, is believed to have contributed to the higher death rate in the UK.
India, meanwhile, is embarking on the largest vaccination campaign in the world, according to Bloomberg (at this point, it’s pretty clear that China has vaccinated millions more than the official numbers from Bloomberg and other US media outlets have published). On Friday, hospitals and vaccination centers across all of India’s major cities vaccinated 165,714 Indian patients who fit the priority category.
While PM Narendra Modi has insisted that Indians must ignore anti-vaccine propaganda, questions about the vaccine’s safety have swirled since India’s drug regulator gave the green light to Bharat Biotech International’s indigenously produced Covaxin shot this month even though it has yet to clear final-stage trials.
Global cases have topped 93.4MM people, and a growing number appears to be caused by the newer mutated strain, since the virus is “evolving”‘ much more quickly than the scientific community had expected. In Vienna, 17% of new cases are believed to be caused by the British variant. The number was derived from a survey of a random sample of COVID patients (closely examining a sample’s genetic makeup is more time-consuming and costly than simply running a test).
Circling back to the US, while deaths have moved higher over the past couple of weeks, new cases and hospitalizations are falling.
The chart below reflects the rate in average hospitalizations across the US.
Some more encouraging data: cases are falling in all four US regions (the northeast, southeast, midwest and the west).
Here are some more stories from overnight and Saturday morning:
Ireland is blaming Christmas and related gatherings for the fact that the country is now seeing the highest rate of new cases in the world. Rampant infections since Christmas forced Micheál Martin’s government into a series of drastic lockdown measures that have closed schools, construction, hospitality and retail, leaving tens of thousands jobless again (Source: FT).
Russia decided to restart flights to Vietnam, India, Finland, Qatar on Jan. 27 after reviewing its stance on the pandemic. But Russia’s ban on flights to and from the UK will remain in place until Feb. 1 (Source: Bloomberg).
Portugal on Saturday reported the biggest daily increase in confirmed coronavirus cases since the start of the outbreak. There were 10,947 new cases in a day, more than the previous record of 10,698 announced on Thursday, taking the total to 539,416. The total number of deaths rose by 166 to 8,709, also a record daily increase (Source: Bloomberg).
Scentech Medical has developed a test that works like a blood-alcohol breathalyser that detects Covid-19 with 98% accuracy in preliminary testing, the Jerusalem Post reported on Saturday (Source: Bloomberg).
* * *
Looking ahead, the there’s no question that the news out of Norway has rocked the world’s hope that the vaccine will end the COVID pandemic. The WHO and others have repeatedly warned that even people who have already vaccinated are still vulnerable, particularly if they have only had one dose.The question is, will that stop the world from adopting “immunity passports”?
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/16/2021 – 18:48 - 89 Year Old Donald Tober, Who Popularized Sweet N' Low, Jumps To His Death From Park Ave. Apartment
89 Year Old Donald Tober, Who Popularized Sweet N’ Low, Jumps To His Death From Park Ave. Apartment
An 89 year old business magnate who was “struggling with Parkinson’s disease” leapt to his death from the top of his Park Ave. apartment building last week,
Donald Tober, who was CEO and co-owner of Sugar Foods – the company best known for Sweet n’ Low – jumped from his building just after 5AM on Friday, according to the NY Post.
He was found “in the courtyard of the luxury Upper East Side building between 65th and 66th streets”, the report notes.
Tober was responsible for taking the Sweet n’ Low brand and making it into a restaurant and home mainstay. His company also produced “Sugar in the Raw” and “N’Joy” coffee creamer. 80% of all foodservice establishments used Sweet n’ Low by the mid 1990’s, the Post said.
He had described his company in 1995 by saying: “Basically, we’re concerned with everything that surrounds the coffee cup. We’re tightly focused.”
“Donald IS Sweet’N Low,” the company’s President, Steve Odell, had said at the time. “Don’s had as much to do with building Sweet’N Low into a household name as anyone ever has with a product. Every packet of Sweet’N Low sold today can be traced back to a single sales call that he probably made or at least had a part in.”
Odell continued: “He was bigger than life. He made everybody feel special — everybody. He’s an icon and he’ll always be.”
“I talked to him yesterday and certainly, no. There was no indication whatsoever,” he said, when asked about the suicide.
Odell concluded: “He was much more than just one product. A thousand people a second use our products. Donald left us with eight words, and we live them every day. The first two words are ‘Be prepared.’ The second are ‘Show up.’ The third two words are ‘On time.’ And the last two are ‘Follow through.’”
“He did that every day, all day, through his career.”
Rest easy, Donald.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/16/2021 – 18:30 - 55 Americans Have Died Following COVID Vaccination, Norway Deaths Rise To 29
55 Americans Have Died Following COVID Vaccination, Norway Deaths Rise To 29
Amid increasing calls for suspension of the use of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines produced by companies such as Pfizer, especially among elderly people, the situation in Norway has escalated significantly as the Scandi nation has now registered a total of 29 deaths among people over the age of 75 who’ve had their first COVID-19 vaccination shot.
As Bloomberg reports, this adds six to the number of known fatalities in Norway, and also lowers the age group thought to be affected from 80.
Until Friday, Pfizer/BioNTech was the only vaccine available in Norway, and “all deaths are thus linked to this vaccine,” the Norwegian Medicines Agency said in a written response to Bloomberg on Saturday.
“There are 13 deaths that have been assessed, and we are aware of another 16 deaths that are currently being assessed,” the agency said.
All the reported deaths related to “elderly people with serious basic disorders,” it said.
“Most people have experienced the expected side effects of the vaccine, such as nausea and vomiting, fever, local reactions at the injection site, and worsening of their underlying condition.”
Norway’s experience has prompted the country to suggest that Covid-19 vaccines may be too risky for the very old and terminally ill… the exact group that ‘the science’ shows are actually at risk from this virus.
Pfizer and BioNTech are working with the Norwegian regulator to investigate the deaths in Norway, Pfizer said in an e-mailed statement. The agency found that “the number of incidents so far is not alarming, and in line with expectations,” Pfizer said.
However, it’s not just Norway as The Epoch Times’ Zachary Stieber reports that fifty-five people in the United States have died after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, according to reports submitted to a federal system.
Deaths have occurred among people receiving both the Moderna and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, according to the reports.
In some cases, patients died within days of receiving a COVID-19 vaccine.
One man, a 66-year-old senior home resident in Colorado, was sleepy and stayed in bed a day after getting Moderna’s vaccine. Early the next morning, on Christmas Day, the resident “was observed in bed lying still, pale, eyes half open and foam coming from mouth and unresponsive,” the VAERS report states. “He was not breathing and with no pulse.”
In another case, a 93-year-old South Dakota man was injected with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on Jan. 4 around 11 a.m. About two hours later, he said he was tired and couldn’t continue with the physical therapy he was doing any longer. He was taken back to his room, where he said his legs felt heavy. Soon after, he stopped breathing. A nurse declared a do-not-resuscitate order.
In addition to the deaths, people have reported 96 life-threatening events following COVID-19 vaccinations, as well as 24 permanent disabilities, 225 hospitalizations, and 1,388 emergency room visits.
It’s not just the old and frail, in Israel, which proudly lays claim to the greatest vaccination effort in the world (largest percentage of the population inoculated),
As RT reports, at least 13 Israelis have experienced facial paralysis after being administered the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine, a month after the US Food and Drug Administration reported similar issues but said they weren’t linked to the jab.
Israeli outlet Ynet reported, citing the Health Ministry, that officials believe the number of such cases could be higher.
“For at least 28 hours I walked around with it [facial paralysis],” one person who had the side effect told Ynet.
“I can’t say it was completely gone afterwards, but other than that I had no other pains, except a minor pain where the injection was, but there was nothing beyond that.”
Ynet quoted Prof. Galia Rahav, director of the Infectious Diseases Unit at Sheba Medical Center, who said she did not feel “comfortable” with administering the second dose to someone who had received the first jab and subsequently suffered from paralysis.
“No one knows if this is connected to the vaccine or not. That’s why I would refrain from giving a second dose to someone who suffered from paralysis after the first dose,” she told the outlet.
Finally, as we noted yesterday following the news of rising post-vaccination deaths in Noway, health experts from Wuhan, China, called on Norway and other countries to suspend the use of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines produced by companies such as Pfizer, especially among elderly people.
China’s Global Times reports Chinese experts said the death incident should be assessed cautiously to understand whether the death was caused by vaccines or other preexisting conditions of these individuals.
Yang Zhanqiu, a virologist from Wuhan University, told the Global Times on Friday that the death incident, if proven to be caused by the vaccines, showed that the effect of the Pfizer vaccine and other mRNA vaccines is not as good as expected, as the main purpose of mRNA vaccines is to heal patients.
…
A Beijing-based immunologist, who requested anonymity, told the Global Times on Friday that the world should suspend the use of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine represented by Pfizer, as this new technology has not proven safety in large-scale use or in preventing any infectious diseases.
Older people, especially those over 80, should not be recommended to receive any COVID-19 vaccine, he said.
All of which is a problem since it is the elderly who are at most risk (quite frankly at any real risk at all) and thus who need the protection the most.
The Chinese health experts instead say that the most elderly and frail should be recommended to take medicines to improve their immune system.
Of course, one cannot help but note the irony of scientists from the source of the plague that has killed millions around the world and destroyed lives/economies almost everywhere, is now calling for the cessation of the process to protect against the plague.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/16/2021 – 18:01 - Designed To Fail, Failure Guaranteed
Designed To Fail, Failure Guaranteed
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
Yet it still comes as a great surprise to everyone when ‘doing more of what’s failed spectacularly’ ends up collapsing the whole rotten structure.
Systems and nations are designed to fail without anyone even noticing: nobody set out to design the current broken system to fail at critical points, but now failure can’t be avoided because the incentive structure has locked in embedded processes that enrich self-serving cartels and insiders at the expense of the nation and its populace.
Nobody chose America’s insanely perverse healthcare system–it arose from a set of initial conditions that generated perverse incentives to do more of what’s failing and protect the processes that benefit cartels and insiders at the expense of everyone else.
In other words, the system that was intended to benefit all ends up benefiting the few at the expense of the many.
The same question can be asked of America’s broken higher education system: would any sane person choose a system that enriches insiders by indenturing students via massive student loans (i.e. forcing them to become debt serfs)?
Students and their parents certainly wouldn’t choose the current broken system, but the lenders reaping billions of dollars in profits would choose to keep it, and so would the under-assistant deans earning a cool $200K+ for “administering” some embedded process that has effectively nothing to do with actual learning.
The academic ronin a.k.a. adjuncts earning $35,000 a year (with little in the way of benefits or security) for doing much of the actual teaching wouldn’t choose the current broken system, either.
Now that the embedded processes are generating profits and wages, everyone benefiting from these processes will fight to the death to retain and expand them, even if they threaten the system with financial collapse and harm the people who the system was intended to serve.
How many student loan lenders and assistant deans resign in disgust at the parasitic system that higher education has become? The number of insiders who refuse to participate any longer is signal noise, while the number who plod along, either denying their complicity in a parasitic system of debt servitude and largely worthless diplomas (i.e. the system is failing the students it is supposedly educating at enormous expense) or rationalizing it is legion.
If I was raking in $200,000 annually from a system I knew was parasitic and counter-productive, I would find reasons to keep my head down and just “do my job,” too.
At some point, the embedded processes become so odious and burdensome that those actually providing the services start bailing out of the broken system. We’re seeing this in the number of doctors and nurses who retire early or simply quit to do something less stressful and more rewarding.
These embedded processes strip away autonomy, equating compliance with effectiveness even as the processes become increasingly counter-productive and wasteful. The typical mortgage documents package is now a half-inch thick, a stack of legal disclaimers and stipulations that no home buyer actually understands (unless they happen to be a real estate attorney).
How much value is actually added by these ever-expanding embedded processes?
By the time the teacher, professor or doctor complies with the curriculum / “standards of care”, there’s little room left for actually doing their job. But behind the scenes, armies of well-paid administrators will fight to the death to keep the processes as they are, no matter how destructive to the system as a whole.
This is how systems and the nations that depend on them fail. Meds skyrocket in price, student loans top $1 trillion, F-35 fighter aircraft are double the initial cost estimates and so on, and the insider solutions are always the same: just borrow another trillion to keep the broken system afloat for another quarter.
Yet it still comes as a great surprise to everyone when doing more of what’s failed spectacularly ends up collapsing the whole rotten structure.
Consider a spacecraft as a metaphor for a system which is designed not to fail but that can fail anyway. There are two basic ways the spacecraft can fail: a single essential component can fail, or a single failure can trigger a domino-like cascade which leads to the entire craft failing.
If the craft’s single oxygen tank ruptures, the crew dies. 99% of the spacecraft is still working perfectly, but the system failed in its primary purpose: keeping the crew alive.
If an electrical failure causes a cascade of subsystem failures, you end up with the same result: a powerless craft and a dead crew.
But 99% of the system is working just fine is little solace to the expired crew.
* * *
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Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/16/2021 – 18:00 - Billionaire Benjamin de Rothschild Dies At 57
Billionaire Benjamin de Rothschild Dies At 57
Billionaire Baron Benjamin de Rothschild, chairman of the iconic Edmond de Rothschild Holding and the 22nd richest man in France with a net worth of €4.3 billion, has died at 57.
Baron Benjamin de Rothschild, his wife Ariane and daughter Noemie attend the dinner hosted by Chateau Mouton Rothschild on June 16, 2013 in Pauillac. “Ariane de Rothschild and her daughters are deeply saddened to announce the death of husband and father, Benjamin de Rothschild, following a heart attack in the family home in Pregny (Switzerland) in the afternoon of January 15, 2021” the family said in a press release on Saturday.
⚫️🇫🇷DISPARITION – 22ème fortune de France, le Baron Benjamin de Rothschild a succombé hier à une crise cardiaque à l’âge de 57 ans (famille à l’AFP). pic.twitter.com/4xzP3xwyXS
— 🌐Le Globe (@LeGlobe_info) January 16, 2021
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The namesake company confirmed his death on Saturday, offering condolences to his wife, children and family. In a statement on its website it said that the entrepreneur developed the entity “in an exceptional way during all these years” and was “passionate about finance, speed, sailing and automobiles, wine enthusiast, Benjamin de Rothschild was also an active philanthropist.”
Visionary entrepreneur, passionate about finance, speed, sailing and automobiles, wine enthusiast, Benjamin de Rothschild was also an active philanthropist, namely involved in developing innovation within the Adolphe de Rothschild Foundation Hospital. With his unique character, Benjamin de Rothschild never ceased to transform and modernise his legacy, in line with the family’s values.
Born on July 30 1963, Benjamin de Rothschild was the son of Edmond – scion of the Rothschild banking family of France – and Nadine de Rothschild. He headed the group created by his father since 1997. Benjamin de Rothschild was chairman of the board of directors at Edmond de Rothschild Holding SA, the umbrella entity of the Edmond de Rothschild Group, specializing in private banking and asset management.
Benjamin de Rothschild most recently made the news in early 2019 when he took the Swiss Bank Edmond de Rothschild (Suisse) S.A. private. The Swiss branch of the sprawling Rothschild banking dynasty – once one of the world’s richest families, and according to some, still the richest – was created by Baron Edmond de Rothschild, whose parents fled to Switzerland during World War II. He created the group in 1953, later buying a Swiss private bank and branching out into asset management.
The banking dynasty has spawned countless labyrinthine and convoluted financial entities which have helped obfuscate its financial exposure. The Edmond de Rothschild Group has financial assets distributed around the globe and in the form of investments in hedge funds via a fund of funds operation with over 173 billion francs in AUM.
The Chateau de Pregny – also known as the Rothschild Castle – where the banker died, is located near Lake Geneva.
The estate has belonged to the family since it was built in 1858 by the Swiss banker, Adolphe Carl de Rothschild. He bequeathed to a cousin, Maurice de Rothschild of the Rothschild banking family of France, who in turn left it to his son, Edmond Adolphe de Rothschild. The property remains in the family and as at 2013 is the principal residence of Edmond’s widow, Nadine.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/16/2021 – 17:54 - TSA To Reveal Security Plan For Air Cargo Industry
TSA To Reveal Security Plan For Air Cargo Industry
By Eric Kulisch, of American Shipper,
Companies that purchase and provide transport on all-cargo aircraft will be closely watching whether the Transportation Security Administration on Wednesday offers an alternative security arrangement many believe is designed to help one company — Amazon — avoid screening every outbound shipment for explosives.
How to comply with pending international airfreight security standards is reopening a long-running policy debate over whether supply chains are best protected through a risk-based approach or comprehensive physical checks. Freight forwarders, pilots and some security experts say everyone should adhere to the same screening standards, but major cargo airlines argue the system should be flexible to prevent airport backlogs and contain costs.
Carriers such as Atlas Air, FedEx and UPS view a trusted trader approach as a way to spread the security burden and benefit of manufacturers, e-commerce retailers and other shippers — not just Amazon.
“Anytime you can push the screening responsibility upstream it’s a good thing for the carrier because it’s an on-time business. If you don’t get cargo on the plane when it departs the customer isn’t happy and Atlas isn’t happy because we’re losing revenue,” Gary Wade, Atlas Air’s vice president of global security, said in an interview. “Secure throughput is key for us.”
The International Civil Aviation Organization is requiring member states by June 30 to screen 100% of all export cargo before loading on commercial freighters, creating an equivalency with the passenger environment in which for a decade all cargo, domestic or international, has been screened prior to loading. Until now, the primary focus of security measures for freighters has been preventing the “jack-in-the-box” threat — someone stowing away in a crate and accessing the cockpit from the main deck.
National authorities, however, can also allow regulated companies — airlines and logistics providers — that apply approved security controls throughout the supply chain to have their shipments cleared to fly. A third option would allow manufacturers, retailers or other entities outside the TSA’s normal regulatory reach to prove they have highly secure facilities that provide an equivalent level of security as a substitute for X-ray scanning, explosive trace detection or sniffer dogs.
That appears the direction TSA officials are headed.
The agency has six months to develop and implement a rulemaking that addresses how freighter operators should screen cargo and other options. It likely will expand the Certified Cargo Screening Program (CCSP) that allows logistics providers, ground handlers, shippers or independent security companies that follow TSA-approved criteria to inspect the cargo themselves and tender it to the airlines following strict chain-of-custody requirements.
The CCSP program was established to prevent airlines, many of which have constrained airport warehouses, from getting crushed with inspection responsibilities and being unable to load planes on time. Three years ago, the TSA also created a popular third-party canine screening program that allows airlines and forwarding agents to use certified companies with bomb-sniffing dogs in lieu of physical screening.
And during a virtual meeting with industry representatives Wednesday, TSA officials are scheduled to unveil a proposal for secure packing facilities whereby manufacturers, fulfillment centers and other entities with strict security protocols can have shipments deemed secure that are exempt from 100% screening. Security criteria are expected to cover building access, personnel security, in-transit security, employee training and information technology. The facilities would also be subject to periodic TSA audits and inspections.
Amazon loophole?
Some stakeholders believe the alternative security framework is being pushed by Amazon and that the online retail giant will be the only one to qualify as a secure package facility.
The Airforwarders Association and others say the TSA should expand the CCSP to allow greater participation by manufacturers, suppliers, e-commerce fulfillment centers and others. Going beyond that would create an uneven playing field and possible security gaps, they claim.
But several airlines, in comments submitted last year to the TSA, also expressed strong support for self-policing by shippers as a way to ease their burden as the ultimate party responsible for ensuring security.
They recommended against a one-size-fits-all approach because of the large variety of cargo, airlines and shippers in the system.
“We firmly believe that an alternative framework is necessary in part because … requiring 100% screening of export cargo moving on all-cargo aircraft would not be justified under any cost/benefit review,” Atlas Air wrote. “If the risk is relatively small, the benefits gained from applying a draconian measure like 100% screening of all U.S. outbound air cargo transported on all-cargo carriers will not be great and cannot be justified when compared with the anticipated costs. Given the fact that available data indicate that there have been no attempts by terrorists to introduce explosives into cargo outbound from the United States, the finding that there is relatively low risk mandates the conclusion that TSA should move forward with its program to provide an alternative to a 100% screening regime.”
The Air Line Pilots Association countered that improvised explosive devices in 2010 got onto two planes — one flown by FedEx and one by UPS — in the Middle East and reached the U.S., showing there is a terrorist threat to all-cargo aircraft even if the bombs were discovered and malfunctioned. The union complained that the options for third-party screening and security packing facilities both “allow the commercial entities who benefit from the rapid and efficient movement of cargo, to police their own operations with limited oversight, which has previously proven to be a significant vulnerability.”
Purchase, New York-based Atlas, which operates 117 freighter aircraft — including 44 747 jumbo jets — recommended the alternative approach mirror the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism, a government program under which ocean shippers with approved supply chain security plans and vetted transportation partners, can avoid port inspections of their containers and other trade facilitation benefits.
Carriers noted that flexibility is the only way to meet the mandate because many types of cargo — pharmaceuticals, hazardous materials, perishable foods, live animals or items shipped in steel drums — are too big to pass through existing X-ray machines or can’t be recognized by them or canines. And packages below a certain size or weight are incapable of containing dangerous explosives.
Atlas is one of Amazon Air’s key flying partners, with about 25 aircraft under lease-operating agreements. Amazon also owns 5% of Atlas and has warrants allowing it to increase its share. Wade said the companies cooperated on developing an alternative screening proposal, but that Amazon has not asked for help pitching the idea.
UPS Airlines also strongly supports an alternative approach, saying companies with adequate security controls should be able to inject cargo into the air transport system without the need for additional screening.
“If the entity applies the required security protocols established by TSA, including chain of custody from the warehouse or fulfillment center to the air carrier, the consignment should be deemed secure,” it said. But most companies will rely on certified cargo screening facilities and airlines to secure their export cargo because of the substantial capital and human resources needed to meet TSA standards for security controls, the express carrier predicted.
One well-connected industry source, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to upset professional ties with multiple parties, suggested FedEx and UPS could easily accommodate outbound screening of international shipments, but worry a scan-all mandate will become a slippery slope leading to calls for similar rules on the domestic side, where much greater volumes, aircraft and flights are involved.
Opponents also raise concern that other countries may not allow shipments from the alternative program to enter. While ICAO gives countries the option to use an enhanced trusted shipper approach, the European Union and other states are requiring 100% screening and could expect the same treatment in return.
Wade dismissed that notion, saying, “I don’t know that they’re going to refuse commerce based on someone not dotting the ‘i’ the way they did.”
With so much still unknown about what the regulatory requirements will be, cargo airlines are trying to figure out how much they will have to screen and how much volume will be handled by the freight forwarding community and the alternative program.
Atlas Air plans to use outsourced canine teams, “but we’re just not sure how much we’re going to have to do,” Wade said. “At least it won’t be all on us.”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/16/2021 – 17:10 - Tesla Tells Employees To "Liquidate" Model S, X Inventory Hours After NHTSA Recall
Tesla Tells Employees To “Liquidate” Model S, X Inventory Hours After NHTSA Recall
On January 14, we wrote an article explaining that the NHTSA had asked Tesla to recall about 158,000 Model S and Model X units that could potentially suffer from failing display consoles. When a display console in a Tesla fails, drivers can experience “loss of audible and visual touchscreen features, such as infotainment, navigation, and web browsing and loss of rear camera image display when in reverse gear,” the regulator said at the time.
Then, something interesting happened. About 24 hours later, on January 15, pro-Tesla blog electrek put out an article noting that Tesla was telling its employees to “liquidate” their Model S and Model X inventory by the end of the month – which is about 2 weeks away.
The blog had “learned from sources familiar with the matter” that the company was telling employees “to sell all Model S and Model X inventory in stores across all markets.”
The goal, the report said, is for Tesla to have “absolutely no Model S or Model X in inventory by the end of the month.” The blog speculates that the inventory liquidation could be due to an upcoming refresh. Meanwhile, the Semi and the Roadster we were promised years ago have still not hit the road.
“The move is unusual at the beginning of a new quarter and it intensifies rumors of a design refresh,” the blog says. More unusual than the move was its timing, we first thought.
Recall, we wrote about the forced recall last week, when the NHTSA told Tesla that: “The lack of a functioning windshield defogging and defrosting system may decrease the driver’s visibility in inclement weather, increasing the risk of a crash. If Tesla decides not to conduct the requested recall, it must provide ODI with a full explanation of its decision, including any additional analysis of the problem beyond Tesla’s past presentations.”
The agency also said Tesla’s over-the-air fixes for the problem weren’t enough. “[T]hese updates are procedurally and substantively insufficient,” the NHTSA concluded.
Tesla had reportedly “balked” at moving forward with the recall, according to NBC, who said: “Experts say the letter means that Tesla has resisted doing a recall that NHTSA feels is necessary.”
And so now, the game plan goes from balking at the recall, to getting all of the affected models out of showrooms and into the hands of customers? Sounds like par for the course for Tesla.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/16/2021 – 16:45
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