Today’s News 18th February 2021

• China Most Active In Spreading Disinformation On COVID-19 Origin: Report
  China Most Active In Spreading Disinformation On COVID-19 Origin: Report

  Authored by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times,

  China was the most active country in propagating disinformation on the origin of the COVID-19, according to a newly-released report by the Associated Press (AP) and the Digital Forensic Research Lab of Washington-based think tank Atlantic Council.

  

  The report was the results of a nine-month joint research project, after analyzing millions of social media posts and articles that were published in the first six months of the COVID-19 outbreak. It examined the false narratives that took hold in four countries: China, Iran, Russia, and the United States.

  China was much to blame for the disinformation on COVID-19 origin, which is caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus.

  “Particularly in the period immediately following COVID-19’s initial spread, factual information about the disease, its origin, and its symptoms was lacking or withheld–most notably by China–providing the ample space for misleading and malicious information to take root,” according to the report.

  The Chinese regime concealed from the public information about the disease and also silenced eight whistleblower doctors, including ophthalmologist Li Wenliang, who were the first to warn about an “unknown pneumonia” outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan on Chinese social media.

  The report pointed out that users on Chinese social media Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, began writing about an unproven conspiracy theory connecting the United States with the outbreak on Dec. 31, 2019. For example, one Weibo user wrote, “Watch out for Americans,” while another wrote about the United States being one of several countries in the world that houses a P4 bio-safety laboratory.

  

  But none of these early speculations on Weibo was “coordinated or particularly far-reaching.”

  Meanwhile, the P4 lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology has long been speculated as the source of the virus in a potential lab leak. A fact sheet released by the U.S. State Department last month stated that it “had reason to believe” several researchers at the institute fell ill with COVID-19-like symptoms in the autumn of 2019, contradicting a claim by a researcher at the institute who said there was “zero infection” among lab staff and students.

  A recent investigation by a team of World Health Organization (WHO) experts in Wuhan did not rule out the possibility that the virus was leaked from the P4 lab, but concluded that the theory was “extremely unlikely.” Last week, WHO Secretary-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus suggested more research was needed to study the different origin theories of the virus.

  China’s state-run media soon began driving China’s narrative of the pandemic after the sporadic chatters on Weibo.

  “China initially preferred to boost international perception in its favor by amplifying stories about its benevolence in assisting other countries to combat the virus,” according to the report.

  In late February last year, China’s state-run media began to publish articles suggesting that the virus may have originated outside of China, according to the report. Some outlets also provided negative coverage of the U.S. response to the outbreak.

  “As the disease persisted, however, China began to push narratives that painted its geopolitical competitors in a negative light, including pushing conspiracies such as the idea that COVID-19 was a U.S. biological weapon,” the report added.

  Twitter

  The report analyzed a series of Twitter posts made by China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijun in March 2020. In a tweet on March 12, Zhao accused the United States army of bringing the virus to Wuhan.

  The report found that Zhao’s tweets targeting the United States on March 12 and 13 last year had “accumulated nearly 47,000 retweets and quote tweets, [was] referenced in at least 54 languages, and favorited more than 82,000 times” as of Feb. 13. These tweets were also “amplified by at least 30 different Chinese diplomats and state-run accounts.”

  

  Zhao’s tweets also had an enormous impact on China’s domestic audience. According to the report, popular hashtags referencing his tweets were viewed by Weibo users more than 300 million times as of Feb. 13.

  The report also analyzed online activities following Zhao’s other tweets in March, which reposted a link to an article by Larry Romanoff published on Global Research Canada, a site known for advancing conspiracy theories on topics such as global warming. The article suggested that the virus might have leaked from Fort Detrick, a prominent military biomedical research lab in Maryland.

  There was a spike in Google searches for “Larry Romanoff” around mid-March, following Zhao’s tweets, according to the report.

  Recently, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying revisited the conspiracy theory by citing Fort Detrick. She said during a Jan. 18 press briefing that the United States should invite WHO experts to “conduct origin tracing” in the country.

  “If the United States truly respects facts, it should open the biological lab at Fort Detrick, give more transparency to issues like its 200-plus overseas bio-labs,” she said.

  Moreover, on Twitter, “the number of Chinese diplomatic accounts more than tripled on the platform between May 2019 and May 2020, from 40 to 135, and the output doubled and became more aggressive and conspiratorial,” the report stated. Due to China’s firewall, Twitter is not accessible by ordinary Chinese citizens.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/18/2021 – 00:05

• Hong Kong Aiming For Legislation To Ban Insulting Public Officials
  Hong Kong Aiming For Legislation To Ban Insulting Public Officials

  If you thought there were free speech issues in the U.S., you haven’t seen anything yet.

  Hong Kong’s government is currently in the process of introducing legislation that would prohibit insulting public officials. We can only imagine the insults that were muttered when local citizens read the news from local media.

  Hong Kong’s Security Bureau is in the midst of leading a study on how the legislation could work and how it would be overseen, according to Bloomberg. Local outlets said, citing Civil Service Secretary Patrick Nip, that the issue was under examination. 

  

  The legislation would be part of a broader agenda by China to “erode basic freedoms” in Hong Kong. The move would be the biggest to censor free speech in Hong Kong since China’s institution of a law that has been used to combat mass protests in Hong Kong. 

  Beijing has also implemented a “patriotism test” to weed out pro-Democracy lawmakers. The test prompted mass resignations from opposition members in the Legislative Council last November, Bloomberg notes. Bloomberg also noted that Hong Kong judges and law enforcement are unlikely to challenge any new legislation from Beijing:

  Earlier this month, Hong Kong’s top court ordered that media tycoon and democracy activist Jimmy Lai remain in jail ahead of his trial on foreign collusion charges, a victory for Beijing that suggested Hong Kong judges were unlikely to challenge the security law. Hong Kong police also separately arrested Lai for assisting in an activist’s attempt to flee to Taiwan, the Oriental Daily reported on Wednesday, without citing anyone.

  Recall, back in June 2020, Hong Kong passed a law banning insults to China’s National Anthem. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/17/2021 – 23:45

• Leaked Video Shows Facebook CEO Questioning "Long-Term Side Effects Of Modifying DNA" In COVID Vaccine
  Leaked Video Shows Facebook CEO Questioning “Long-Term Side Effects Of Modifying DNA” In COVID Vaccine

  Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made comments last year about COVID-19 vaccines that clash with policies that his platform has implemented, leaked video shows.

  

  Zuckerberg said in July 2020:

  “I do just want to make sure that I share some caution on this [vaccine] because we just don’t know the long-term side effects of basically modifying people’s DNA and RNA … basically the ability to produce those antibodies and whether that causes other mutations or other risks downstream. So, there’s work on both paths of vaccine development.”

  The footage was published by Project Veritas, a journalism watchdog.

  It was allegedly from Facebook’s internal weekly question-and-answer session.

  Zuckerberg took a different stance when appearing in a virtual forum in November 2020 with Dr. Anthony Fauci, a leading government scientist.

  “Just to clear up one point, my understanding is that these vaccines do not modify your DNA or RNA. So that’s just an important point to clarify,” Zuckerberg said, prompting Fauci to say: “No, first of all, DNA is inherent in your own nuclear cell. Sticking in anything foreign will ultimately get cleared.”

  Facebook didn’t respond to a request for comment.

  Zuckerberg’s Facebook has imposed harsh guidelines on what people can post about COVID-19, and banned or restricted a number of users for violating the policies.

  Facebook earlier in February said it would take down any posts with claims about vaccines deemed false by health groups or its so-called fact-checkers.

  

  A health care worker prepares a dose of a COVID-19 vaccine at a vaccination center inside the Blackburn Cathedral, United Kingdom, on Jan. 19, 2021. (Molly Darlington/Reuters)

  Facebook stated in a blog post, “Today, following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), we are expanding the list of false claims we will remove to include additional debunked claims about the coronavirus and vaccines.”

  The list includes “claims that the COVID-19 vaccine changes people’s DNA.”

  Administrators for some groups will be required to greenlight all posts if the groups have been labeled problematic in terms of posts that have been made.

  “Claims about COVID-19 or vaccines that do not violate these policies will still be eligible for review by our third-party fact-checkers, and if they are rated false, they will be labeled and demoted,” the company stated.

  Footage showing Zuckerberg commenting privately on various issues has been made public before by Project Veritas. In one clip, he praised President Joe Biden’s early executive orders “on areas that we as a company care quite deeply about and have for some time.”

  “Areas like immigration, preserving DACA, ending restrictions on travel from Muslim-majority countries, as well as other executive orders on climate and advancing racial justice and equity. I think these were all important and positive steps,” he said.

  Facebook banned former President Donald Trump in January while Trump was still in office. Trump remains blocked from the platform.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/17/2021 – 23:25

• America 2021? Cops Block Hungry Portlanders Scrambling For Discarded Food
  America 2021? Cops Block Hungry Portlanders Scrambling For Discarded Food

  A Northeast Portland Fred Meyer hypermarket threw out thousands of perishable items on Tuesday because it suffered power loss due to a winter storm. Images of the food quickly spread on social media as working-poor folks stormed the dumpster. Shortly after, a store manager called the cops, which prevented hungry people from taking free food. 

  The Oregon Live reported workers at the Hollywood West Fred Meyer threw away thousands of items “deemed no longer safe for consumption” on Tuesday following a severe winter storm knocking out power to the store.

  Working-poor Portlander stormed the massive dumpster on Tuesday for hopes of free food. They found a mountain of cheese and meats and juice and all sorts of foods stacked to the brim of a dumpster. 

  

  After a crowd developed, the store manager called Portland police. 

  Morgan Mckniff, a social justice warrior in Portland, said a dozen officers, some without masks, arrived on the scene and guarded the dumpster, ensuring no one in the community took the food. 

  Portland police said the store manager called officers after employees “felt the situation was escalating and feared there may be a physical confrontation,” a police spokesman said. 

  Juniper Simonis, another social justice warrior in Portland, documented the incident.

  Simonis said, “when I arrived on at the Hollywood @Fred_Meyer in Portland this evening, I was greeted by 12 @PortlandPolice officers who were apparently guarding two dumpsters full of food that mutual aid orgs were trying to distribute and hungry folks were trying to eat.”

  

  The amount of food Simonis documented in a series of posts was immense. 

  “And the meat. so. much. meat. think of all of the people hungry in warming shelters that would have LOVED some beef or a shrimp cocktail or a SIDE OF SALMON it is a white legacy to strip the water of salmon and throw it away with no thought for the fish or people,” Simonis said. 

  

  Simonis said it appeared the store cleared out anything that was refrigerated. 

  

  Simonis pictures of working-poor folks gathering food, many of whom are already dealing with food and housing insecurities. 

  

  

  

  Dozens of people found food.

  

  Fred Meyer eventually had to bring in a couple of dumpsters to dispose of the food. 

  

  The company eventually released this statement: 

  “Unfortunately, due to loss of power at this store, some perishable food was no longer safe for donation to local hunger relief agencies. Our store team became concerned that area residents would consume the food and risk food borne illness, and they engaged local law enforcement out of an abundance of caution. We apologize for the confusion.”

  With food banks overwhelmed, millions without jobs, an eviction crisis, soaring food/housing insecurities, and out-of-control inequality produced by the Federal Reserve, who would’ve ever thought Americans would be dumpster diving for food in 2021.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/17/2021 – 23:05

• Biden Slaps Down Move For $50K Student Debt Forgiveness: "I Will Not Make That Happen"
  Biden Slaps Down Move For $50K Student Debt Forgiveness: “I Will Not Make That Happen”

  President Biden has appeared to give his ‘final’ and ‘definitive’ answer on student loan forgiveness at a moment progressives within the Democratic party continue pushing for much more than his planned 10,000 debt write off.

  In comments early this week, he balked at the idea of forgiving $50,000 in student loan debt for some 43 million Americans, which would amount to $1 trillion canceled overnight via executive order:

  “I will not make that happen,” Biden said during a CNN town hall on Tuesday night when asked if he would support cancellation of $50,000, adding that it “depends on whether or not you go to a private or public university” and that he’s opposed to saying that he was going to “forgive the debt, billions of dollars of debt, for people who have gone to Harvard and Yale and Penn.”

  New – Biden completely rejects Schumer/Warren proposal to cancel $50K of student loan debt per borrower:

  “I will not make that happen.”

  Says he doesn’t want to forgive debts of borrowers from elite schools — and money would be better spent on early childhood education. pic.twitter.com/oDwvCJveOm

  — Michael Stratford (@mstratford) February 17, 2021

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  Biden further explained: “I do think in this moment of economic pain and strain that we should be eliminating interest on the debts that are accumulated, No. 1. And No. 2, I’m prepared to write off the $10,000 debt, but not [$50,000],” and underscored that such an ambitious and unfeasible number is likely outside his unilateral power to do.

  Progressives led by Senators Schumer and Warren haven’t let up the pressure after months of being vocal in media interviews and press events, and earlier this month reintroduced their measure which proposed a $50,000 forgiveness per borrower. 

  Meanwhile the usual suspects are seeking to make it primarily a race and class disparity issue, with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeting Wednesday…

  “1. Who cares what school someone went to? Entire generations of working class kids were encouraged to go into more debt under the guise of elitism. This is wrong. 2. Nowhere does it say we must trade-off early childhood education for student loan forgiveness. We can have both.”

  

  The intra-party pressures from top congressional Democrats are likely to continue, with AOC’s tweet getting a lot of media attention later in the day Wednesday. 

  Meanwhile the White House has maintained the line of still looking into and “reviewing legally” whether or not it’s even possible for the president to issue student debt forgiveness without congressional approval, which is another key part of Progressives’ demands. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/17/2021 – 22:45

• Jailed Hong Kong Tycoon Arrested Again, Faces Charges Of Helping Activists Flee
  Jailed Hong Kong Tycoon Arrested Again, Faces Charges Of Helping Activists Flee

  Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai is already facing prosecution under Hong Kong’s new national security laws, and now it looks like authorities are heaping on even more charges against the high-profile pro-democracy figure.

  His Apple Daily tabloid reported that Lai has been arrested again, this time for suspicion of assisting one of 12 fugitives China captured at sea last year. Western media outlets quickly picked up the reports.

  

  Lai, who is being detained while awaiting a bail hearing on Thursday, has been charged with colluding with foreign forces under the new law.

  China’s coast guard captured the 12 fugitives in August as they tried to flee Hong Kong in a boat believed to be bound for Taiwan. All were held in a mainland China prison until a trial in late December. Ten were jailed for terms ranging from seven months to three years for illegally crossing the border, or helping to organize the crossing, while two minors were sent back to Hong Kong. 

  Papers later identified that Andy Li, one of the 12, as the individual Lai was suspected of helping, though it seems police in HK have had no further comment on the issue.

  Beijing imposed the new security law on Hong Kong in June of last year after COVID finally helped end months of pro-democracy protests.

  Lai was already the most high-profile person to be charged under the new security law. His prior charges related to statements he made on July 30 and Aug. 18, in which prosecutors say he requested foreign help for Hong Kong, something the new Beijing-imposed security law no longer allows.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/17/2021 – 22:25

• Los Angeles Slashes School Police Budget, Replaces Officers With "Climate Coaches"
  Los Angeles Slashes School Police Budget, Replaces Officers With “Climate Coaches”

  Authored by GQ Pan via The Epoch Times,

  The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Board of Education on Tuesday approved a plan to cut one-third of its police budget and divert the money to a program that focuses on black students achievement.

  

  The board voted to cut 133 school police positions from the Los Angeles School Police Department, including 70 sworn officers, 62 non-sworn officers, and one support staff member. The staff reductions reduce the annual budget of the district’s police force from $77.5 million to $52.5 million.

  Police officers stationed at all secondary schools will be replaced by new “climate coaches,” who are trained to, according to the plan, implement “positive school culture and climate,” use “de-escalation strategies” to resolve conflict, understand and address “implicit bias,” and eliminate “racial disproportionately” in school discipline practices.

  The new plan doesn’t allow individual schools to apply to keep police officers on their campuses. Instead, officers will remain on call to respond to emergencies, with a goal of a three-to-five minute response time.

  The police force reduction is part of the LAUSD’s $36.5 million Black Student Achievement Plan, which aims to provide supplemental services and support to 53 schools that have a large black student population and “high need indicators,” such as lower than average math and English language arts proficiency rates, higher than average referral and suspension rates, and higher than average chronic absenteeism.

  In addition to the police overhaul, the plan would dedicate $30.1 million for improving “school climate” and reducing “over-identification of black students” in suspensions and discipline actions, $4.4 million to implement academic changes such as adding more black authors into school curricula, and $2 million for community partnership with organizations that serve black youth.

  “We’ve been systematically failing black children as a country. Schools must be part of the solution, because a great education is the most important part of the path out of poverty,” Superintendent Austin Beutner said on Monday during his weekly update to the LAUSD community.

  “While we at L.A. Unified don’t have all the answers, we’re committed to making change.”

  The changes mark the latest move by the nation’s major public school districts in response to the “defund the police” movement. In the wake of death of George Floyd in custody of Minneapolis police, activist and organizations such as Black Lives Matter have called on local and officials to “defund” their law enforcement forces, arguing that redirecting funding from police toward other social service programs could make communities safer.

  Last summer, the Minneapolis Public Schools board of education voted unanimously to terminate its contract with the Minneapolis Police Department, saying it “cannot continue to be in partnership with an organization that has the culture of violence and racism.”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/17/2021 – 22:05

• Myanmar Protesters Denounce China's "Hidden Hand" In Propping Up Junta
  Myanmar Protesters Denounce China’s “Hidden Hand” In Propping Up Junta

  There’s increasing suspicion that China had a “hidden hand” in Myanmar’s coup d’etat which kicked off Feb.1 upon the arrest and detention of the country’s civilian leadership.

  The substantial rumors that Beijing assisted in the military coup that’s plunged its southeast Asian neighbor into unrest – with a near total internet blackout and armored vehicles patrolling the streets – have grown to the point that it prompted a formal denial from China’s ambassador to Myanmar.

  

  Ambassador Chen Hai early this week responded to growing pro-democracy protests that have formed outside the Chinese embassy in the city Yangon. It a written public statement the ambassador claimed to have had no “prior knowledge” of the coup, further saying that allegations of Communist China’s assisting in setting up a telecommunications firewall in cooperation with military coup forces are “laughable”.

  “We have friendly relations with both the NLD and the military. The current situation is absolutely not what China wants to see,” Chen added. 

  As an example of the growing allegations that see Chinese ‘interference’ all over the worsening Myanmar situation, Hong Kong pro-democracy activists are circulating assessments like the following.

  Credible sources revealed that the Myanmar military government is receiving “technical support” from the CCP to build similar internet firewalls to block access to Twitter, NYT, FB etc. The internet cutoff serves this need. Dictators help each other and CCP is leading the way.

  Indeed there should be ways that US-based tech and social media giants can verify this, though companies like Google have long had a suspiciously cozy relationship with Chinese Communist authorities. 

  Anti-China protesters through the region are pointing the finger at Beijing for this month’s rapidly moving Myanmar events…

  We can all ask our friends in telecom industry to verify it. It’s important that we can have information on what’s happening in there and try to act in advance to protect citizens there. It’s a long process to build an internet firewall — the free world should act immediately.

  — Nathan Law 羅冠聰 (@nathanlawkc) February 15, 2021

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  Current widespread internet outages and blockages of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter appear geared toward preempting the growing anti-coup demonstrations, which in the past days have seen tens of thousands hit the streets, and are resulting in increasingly violent clashes with police and military coup forces.

  According the latest reporting in The Guardian, “Since a military coup earlier this month, Myanmar has endured five internet blackouts. There have also been blocks on some social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, which have been used to generate support for anti-coup protests in the country.”

  

  Meanwhile, amid broad clashes with police, there’s increasing “anti-China” sentiment growing among Myanmar protesters, as India’s Economic Times also observes, “Allegations of Chinese hand in Myanmar coup is growing in salience following massive anti-Beijing protests sweeping across the SE Asian state, India’s key neighbor to the East.”

  “Chinese President Xi Jinping has been urged by the protestors not to recognize Myanmar’s military regime and to stand with the people, amid a wave of anti-China sentiment—including boycotts on Chinese products, ET has reliably gathered from sources and activists who did not wish to be identified,” the report underscores further.

  Giant protests today against Myanmar’s military coup and to call for the release of elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Protests have happened daily for nearly two weeks now. #WhatsHappeninglnMyanmar pic.twitter.com/UZxUndy12B

  — Matthew Tostevin (@TostevinM) February 17, 2021

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

  Despite a near total internet and telecommunications outage across the country sporadic social media videos are in some cases still being posted of large-scale troop and armored vehicle deployments to the streets. Chaotic scenes of blasts and flash-bangs show anti-riot tactics deployed on crowds, but also suggest ‘live fire’ could be happening – though there’s still conflicting reports over whether security forces are using live ammo or rubber bullets. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/17/2021 – 21:45

• Greenwashing Turns "Ugly" Into Environmentally Friendly
  Greenwashing Turns “Ugly” Into Environmentally Friendly

  Authored by Bruce Wilds via Advancing Times blog,

  Greenwashing is a term you may not be familiar with but may become used more frequently in the future. The combination of limited public access to information and seemingly unlimited advertising has enabled companies to present themselves as caring environmental stewards, even as they were engaging in environmentally unsustainable practices. This has been going on for years and I expect the effort to portray a company as “caring about the environment” is about to be ramped up to a whole new level.

  

  The idea of greenwashing is not new but has evolved and drastically increased with the news-waves constantly echoing concern over global warming and climate change. Many companies are now working to engage customers in their sustainability efforts, even as their core business model remains environmentally ugly. The many ways companies and people damage the environment are often their “dirty little secrets.” Sometimes environmentally damaging behavior is driven by greed, sometimes ignorance, and sometimes a feeling of entitlement or indifference. It is often difficult for people to discover the truth about a company when it is hidden behind well-contrived lies.

  

  In “Many Cites” Buses Have Few Riders

  In the same way, government diverts our attention from something that highlights its failures, companies often divert our attention from the bigger picture. Marketers create advertisements that appeal to the sensitive hearts of the consumers by making images and films that are adorable. This is also done by making green claims that are vague and ambiguous. By simply changing the color of the company logo from yellow or red to green can invoke the illusion of environmentally friendly products.

  Greenwashing is not reserved for companies, even individuals use it. An example is how John Kerry, President Biden’s recently appointed climate czar and envoy for climate change, tried to wash away his sin for taking a private jet to Iceland in 2019 to receive an award. When asked by a local reporter if this was an eco-conscious way to travel, the former secretary of state replied, “it’s the only choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle.”

  Like many of the global elite, Kerry doesn’t see himself as guilty of abusing his position, to him, he is merely exercising his privilege. We see the same crap flowing from many of the self-absorbed global elite that attend conferences such as the World Economic Forum in Davos. For many of these people, a private jet is not the “only” choice, it is a “preferred choice.” The hypocrisy of John Kerry, and people like him, should give us pause.

  A major issue we now face is that putting a friendly face on ugly presents a real danger. This comes at the same time governments and central banks are rushing to fund a green agenda. Sadly, many of the ideas generated by these so-called environmentalists are akin to putting lipstick on a pig or rooted in the idea a great deal of money can be made by embracing this move. The continuing debate of whether Electric Vehicles are less damaging to the environment and indications they are not underlines the importance of plotting a clear path ahead.

  Years ago the answer was ethanol, a renewable domestically produced alcohol fuel made from plant material, today many see this as an expensive boondoggle to benefit big agriculture. The current political atmosphere is ripe for crony capitalism to flourish and boondoggles to sprout up everywhere, especially when it comes to going “green.” Another troubling development is the possibility of government overreach removing many of the choices we have come to enjoy. This of course would be carried out under the idea it is being done for “the greater good.”

  Falling into this category is an agenda being promoted under the Green New Deal moniker, this name is most likely used to give this vision of America a more credible image. The Green New Deal is modeled in part after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, a large federal program designed to stabilize the economy and recover from the Great Depression. It should be noted many people give credit to World War II for pulling America out of the Great Depression rather than Roosevelt’s economic policies.

  Factcheck.org looked into the Green New Deal to see what it includes and doesn’t as well as to why there is confusion over the content. It calls for a massive change in society and the way we live. It focuses on tackling climate change but isn’t concerned just with reducing emissions. This was all wrapped into a resolution listing goals to be accomplished in a 10-year mobilization effort that does not stipulate how the country will reach them. The resolution is also silent on cost and how all this should be funded. Below is a list of the five goals, which the resolution says should be accomplished in a 10-year mobilization effort:

  • Achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers

  • Create millions of good, high-wage jobs and ensure prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States

  • Invest in the infrastructure and industry of the United States to sustainably meet the challenges of the 21st century

  • Secure for all people of the United States for generations to come: clean air and water; climate and community resiliency; healthy food; access to nature; and a sustainable environment

  • Promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth (“frontline and vulnerable communities”)

  With the hard turn towards creating a more green economy, it should come as no surprise that now Jane Yellen as the face of the Treasury Department’s free money initiative recently addressed the G7 telling them, we “should be focused on what more we can do to provide support at this time.” She went on to “emphasized the commitment of the Biden Administration to multilateralism to solve global issues, stating that the United States “places a high priority on deepening our international engagement and strengthening our alliances.”

  The fact Yellen also “expressed strong support for G7 efforts to tackle climate change, highlights how just a small percentage of votes can cause a 180-degree change in a country’s policies. Yellen even went further expressing her strong belief that G7 countries “must work to address the challenges facing low-income countries who are struggling to respond to the pandemic.” Several Central Banks have already endorsed the green agenda. This all falls into the scenario that it’s time to finally fix the world and together we have the ability to create the money to do it.  In short, we will spend and you should too.

  Enough about the money and the politics behind all this, the reality is, much of the direction the world takes will have less to do with the environment than the image those in charge wish to project. If any of these people really gave a damn about the environment the first word out of their mouth would be “conserve” and then they would be talking about reducing waste. 

  This is the low-hanging fruit that could be quickly reached and picked at little cost. Both would make a great difference. 

  The reason nobody talks about this is that conserving and reducing waste would cause the GDP to fall like a stone.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/17/2021 – 21:25

• Here We Go Again: Zoltan Warns Repo Market On Verge Of Major Shock As Key Funding Rate Turns Negative
  Here We Go Again: Zoltan Warns Repo Market On Verge Of Major Shock As Key Funding Rate Turns Negative

  Two weeks ago, when discussing the imminent avalanche of cash set to be unleashed by the Treasury – as a tsunami of $800BN in extra liquidity hits markets over the next 6 weeks, and a total of $1.1 trillion in the next 10 weeks – we said that “nobody was paying attention” to this coming flood of liquidity.

  Since then, some have started to pay attention, with Bloomberg writing an article yesterday titled “Yellen Shift on Vast Treasury Cash Pile Poses Problem for Powell” in which it described the liquidity “tsunami” as a move which aims to return its cash position at the central bank to more normal levels, and which “will flood the financial system with liquidity and complicate Powell’s effort to keep a tight grip over money market rates.”

  Sounds awfully familiar… as does this:

  “All this cash from the Treasury’s general account will have to go back from the Fed and into the market,” said Manmohan Singh, senior economist at the International Monetary Fund. “It will drive short term rates lower, as far as they can go.”

  Ok, fine – people are finally paying attention.

  So what does this mean for markets? Well, traders are clearly pricing in the impact of this liquidity tsunami with the S&P trading at an all time high just shy of 4,000. That was to be expected: after all every previous liquidity deluge has resulted in sharply higher risk prices and there is no reason why the algos should trade this one any different.

  But while the surge in stocks is in line with expectations, we have also observed several other more concerning developments. The first is the recent surge in 10Y swap spreads…

  

  … which is factoring the coming inflation that will be released courtesy of the Treasury’s soon-to-be unlocked $1.1 trillion.

  

  A more troubling side-effect of this “liquidity supernova” is the ongoing collapse in short-term rates, which – as a reminder – we also warned about saying “the plunge in short-term debt (Bill) issuance (since there will no longer be an urgent need to keep cash balances in the $1+ trillion range) will compress short-term spreads (effective FF through 3M) to zero – or even negative – as there is suddenly a flood of liquidity which could prompt the Fed to engage the fixed-rate borrowing facility or even nudging the IOER higher.”

  This, to be sure, is another point which suddenly has everyone’s attention and as Curvature’s repo export Scott Skyrm writes today in his repo market commentary, “The market is preparing for a deluge of cash. REG markets are progressively trading at lower rates each day and term markets are well bid.”

  Yes, the GSEs already have more cash in the Repo market these days, but now the monthly cash is about to enter the market – typically from the 19th to the 24th of the month. That means even more cash chasing the same amount of collateral. Given where term rates are trading, the market is pricing GC to trade around .03% to .02% early next week.“

  

  And on, and on, until GC repo hits 0%… and then goes negative sparking another mini repo market crisis, similar to the one from September 2019 only in reverse.

  That’s the point made by repo guru Zoltan Pozsar, who in his latest Global Money Dispatch note lays out the problem by comparing it to Sept 2019, similar to what we said two weeks ago when we explained that “what is happening now is just the opposite and many, many times bigger, as almost one trillion reserves are about to be injected into the system as cash is drained from the Treasury’s account at the Fed.”

  Here’s Zoltan:

  During September 2019, we argued that the system was running out of reserves – too much Treasury collateral was entering the system and we needed a fixed-price, full allotment o/n repo facility to absorb all the excess collateral. Banks’ binding constraint was intraday liquidity, which constrained their ability to lend into the o/n repo market. When their lending stopped, repo popped…

  Today, the banking system is running out of balance sheet, and money funds are running out of collateral. Soon there will be too much cash in the system; TGA balances will decline from $1.6 trillion to $500 billion by the end of June.

  As the Credit Suisse plumbing experts writes next, “this roughly $1 trillion decline will occur either through waves of fiscal spending, which will expand deposits and reserves at large banks…

  

  … or, if spending is too slow to meet the $500 billion target, through bill paydowns. Coupon issuance will be $1.4 trillion over the first half, and depending on whether the spending or paydowns scenario dominates, coupons will be bought mostly by banks, or shadow banks.”

  Which brings us to the key part: why we are about to see another burst of fireworks in the repo market where rates are about to go negative:

  Banks don’t have the balance sheet at the bank operating subsidiary level to add $1 trillion of deposits, reserves, and Treasuries: J.P. Morgan can’t grow more due to G-SIB constraints; Citibank flat-lined its balance sheet growth already; Bank of America has the capacity to add only $150 billion of deposits and HQLA; and Wells Fargo’s $500 billion capacity is constrained by its asset growth ban.

  Unless we get SLR relief at the bank opco. level, or Wells Fargo’s ban is lifted, banks will have to turn away wealthy households’ and institutions’ deposits, which will then go to money funds. But money funds will face a constraint too: the marginal asset they will direct inflows into – the o/n RRP facility – is capped; each money fund can place only $30 billion into the facility, which is too little.

  Banks’ balance sheet constraint becomes a collateral constraint for money funds, and collateral constraints may surface in both the spending and paydown scenarios. Collateral supply from coupon issuance will absorb this cash over time, but money markets react to what happens now, and with $1 trillion of new cash, there may be many pockets of collateral scarcity as these flows play out in real time.

  Which means that it will be up to the Fed to intervene once again and allow intermediaries to park the extra trillion in cash somewhere, in this case with the reserve currency’s central bank:

  The Fed can hike the o/n RRP rate to 100 bps, but unless it uncaps the facility, bills and repo can still go negative.

  And besides the repo market, the one place where this particular inversion will unleash shockwaves is the old, familiar FRA-OIS spread which – as everyone remembers from last March – emerged as the financial system’s key funding indicator. Only this time instead of blowing wider as it did last March…

  

  … FRA-OIS, already at the tightest level in at least a decade, is about to go negative. Zoltan has more:

  To have a view on FRA-OIS, we need to have a view on who will warehouse $1 trillion of reserves that will flood the system by June. Large U.S. banks won’t be able to unless they get SLR relief at the bank operating subsidiary level.

  We don’t think that SLR relief is coming, so as the stimulus checks go out, banks will have to turn away institutional non-operating deposits to money funds. The “natural” outlet for these institutional inflows will be at the o/n RRP facility, but the use of this facility is capped at $30 billion per fund. The use of this facility will be tested not only by stimulus-driven inflows but also by bill paydowns: as bills mature, money funds will look to the RRP facility as a substitute for bills.

  Uncapping the o/n RRP facility is more important than adjusting its price; the use of banks’ reserve accounts, the foreign repo pool, or Treasury’s account aren’t capped, so why impose a per-counterparty cap on the o/n RRP facility?

  The RRP cap is a key piece of our warehousing puzzle: the $1 trillion of reserves we’re trying to find a warehouse for are currently warehoused by the Treasury; U.S. banks can’t add another $1 trillion to their warehouses, and money funds can’t warehouse $1 trillion unless the Fed decides to uncap the RRP facility.

  In practical terms, this means that “unless the RRP facility gets uncapped, bill and repo rates can trade negative and money funds may turn away inflows, as they won’t invest at negative rates.”

  And yes, unless the Fed steps in, we may have NIRP among US commercial banks as soon as a few weeks from today:

  J.P. Morgan’s SLR problem points to negative deposit rates, and money funds’ RRP capacity problem points to negative bill and repo rates.

  And yes, somehow everyone missed that JPM’s earnings release itself warned very clearly that negative deposit rates are coming in 2021 should “excess liquidity” and “higher capital” become a fixture – which is about to be the case:

  

  The practical implications for a market trading at all time highs, where there does not appear to be a single cloud in the sky, are alarming:

  The implications for FRA-OIS from here are obvious: if U.S. banks are full and money funds can’t take new money either, foreign banks will warehouse reserves at rates below those of J.P. Morgan but above those available in the bill market – and both are negative. The price of warehousing is a fee, i.e. a negative rate…

  And so, unless the Fed steps in aggressively and either grants banks SLR relief and/or the overnight Reverse Repo Facility is uncapped – so that banks have a place to park the flood of $1.1 trillion in excess cash instead of turning it away – Zoltan expects U.S. dollar Libor-OIS spreads to reach zero by June, with risks to the downside. Needless to say, this would be the first time in US history that the key funding metric has dipped into negative territory. The problem is that just like with oil – which imploded instantly the moment it dipped below $0 on April 20, 2020, nobody knows just how negative FRA-OIS will drop, with the potential to unleash major money-market shockwaves growing by the second.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/17/2021 – 21:11

• An Absurd Look At The Marxist, Ultra-Woke "Education" System In 2021
  An Absurd Look At The Marxist, Ultra-Woke “Education” System In 2021

  Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

  In honor of Black History Month, schools across the Land of the Free are adopting a curriculum that’s being pushed from the organization Black Lives Matter.

  

  Curiously, the “Black Lives Matter at School” curriculum has absolutely nothing to do with history, let alone black history.

  Instead, the organization presents an entirely Marxist, ultra-woke agenda.

  The first clue is that the website literally states “we engage comrades” through the curriculum’s 13 guiding principles.

  One of these guiding principles is “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure” to replace it with “villages that collectively care for one another, and especially our children.”

  Wait, what? OUR children? Now we’re supposed to award untold influence over our kids to self-described “trained Marxists” ?

  But this only scratches the surface of the curriculum.

  Under the organization’s “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” there are lesson plans which endeavor to teach young students about why they should join trade unions when they become an adult.

  And they go on to teach that everyone is “entitled to economic, social and cultural help from your government.”

  One resource in the curriculum advocates printing money to implement a “systemwide social justice shock,” including “free universal health care… and direct subsidies [i.e. universal basic income].”

  Another teaches “that white supremacy is a fundamental component of our founding documents. The Constitution was not a document to promote democracy, but to prevent it… my students engage in an activity where they see this unfold in the classroom.”

  One lesson plan instructs teachers to have their students “Write your own hex poem, cursing… specific people who have been agents of police terror or global brutality” including “small micro aggressions… i.e., people who say ‘all lives matter’. . .”

  And they do this with incredibly young, impressionable children who absorb everything like a sponge.

  For example, the curriculum suggests instructing kindergarten students that ‘Everyone gets to choose if they are a girl or a boy or both or neither or something else’ as part of ‘freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking.’

  This seems totally appropriate for a five year old!

  To be fair, some of the curriculum is grounded in good intentions. They teach kids that everyone has a right to be themselves, and that discrimination is stupid. Those are great lessons.

  But the way they cram it down everyone’s throat is appalling.

  For example, one curriculum resource was written by an individual who self-describes as a “queer disabled autistic nonbinary femme writer and disability/transformative justice worker.”

  You can’t just be a human being anymore. You can’t just be Bob or Maria. You have to provide a laundry list of ways that you self-identify with victim groups.

  This is what passes for credentials these days.

  It almost reminds me of those silly royal titles that monarch’s use. In Game of Thrones, Queen Daenerys self-stylized as “Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Protector of the Seven Kingdoms, the Mother of Dragons . . .”

  Now it’s “Queen of the Bolsheviks, first of her name, rallier of woke mobs, Arch-Tweetress of problematic vocabulary, Lord-Commander of the social justice warriors, vanquisher of the cis-male, and defender of the nonbinary femmes.”

  This curriculum teaches young people that you gain power in our society– not through accomplishments and deeds– but by gathering more titles of victimization. More titles means more power.

  The propaganda and indoctrination starts in kindergarten and continues for 13 years.

  And you might think when you reach university you can finally acquire a real education.

  You pay $70,000 in annual tuition, for example, to attend one of the top schools in the world, Princeton University in New Jersey.

  And what greets these students seeking a higher education?

  First off— Princeton has a “Social Contract” now that students must sign, obliging them to nearly three dozen requirements ranging from obtaining a flu shot, to not leaving Mercer County until the end of the semester, to ratting out fellow students who do not comply.

  But perhaps the most ridiculous development yet was when the school newspaper ran a ‘Dear Abby’ style column last month from a “sexpert” explaining how students should engage in sexual intercouse in the age of COVID.

  The article advises students to abandon physical contact altogether, and instead use remote sex toys that can be controlled through online apps.

  Obviously they haven’t heard the news that such sex toys have been hacked, and users’ private parts were literally being held for ransom by hackers.

  The “sexpert” goes on to advise that, if students absolutely must meet in person for sex, they should wear a mask, avoid kissing, engage in an appropriate position, and use “external/male condoms”.

  Note the language— you have to say ‘external/male’ when referring to condom so that you don’t alienate men with vaginas, or women with penises.

  The sexpert also advises that students wear a “dental dam” for added protection. I had to look this one up— it’s basically a giant rubber barrier around your mouth.

  

  Sexy time!

  And just to prove there’s no limit to their ridiculousness, the sexpert concludes by telling students they should “order from your favorite online Black-, female/femme-, or queer-owned sexuality shop.”

  God forbid you buy a dental dam from someone without regard to the vendor’s gender, race, or sexual orientation.

  There was a time when the purpose of education was to expand minds.

  Now the intent is to close minds… to strip students of any ability to think critically, and replace intellectual independence with woke, Marxist propaganda.

  *  *  *

  On another note… We think gold could DOUBLE and silver could increase by up to 5 TIMES in the next few years. That’s why we published a new, 50-page long Ultimate Guide on Gold & Silver that you can download here.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/17/2021 – 20:45

• As Hearing Looms, Here Is How Gamma Was Weaponized Against GameStop
  As Hearing Looms, Here Is How Gamma Was Weaponized Against GameStop

  Submitted by SpotGamma.com,

  In late January 2021, GameStop experienced a once-in-a-decade squeeze that has captivated the world’s attention. This was a premeditated and programmatic exercise, orchestrated by coordinated stock and option buying across the retail and professional community, that resulted in large institutional entities losing billions of dollars. These investment houses with significant short positions did not expect a stock with GameStop’s fundamental profile to increase +2,500% in price over less than three weeks; therefore, they did not have the controls in place to handle the incredible levels of stock and call option purchases. The frenzy drew comments from the White House, provoked a social media crackdown, caused brokerage units to restrict trading, and has led to a Congressional hearing on GameStop on Thursday, February 18th.   

  At SpotGamma, we offer the following analysis, segmented into three phases:

  Phase One: The Setup

  • This is where retail investors started planning for the event
  • These retail investors started loading up on call options ahead of the coordinated large stock buying activity in phase two 

  Phase Two: The Weaponized Gamma Squeezes

  • In the first squeeze, retail investors relentlessly bought stock and call options 
  • In the second squeeze, the super squeeze, several factors rocketed the stock price upward. They include stock buying, call buying, put selling, celebrity engagement, forced stop-losses, and market makers buying stock to hedge options exposure

  Phase Three: The Unwind

  • This is where stock and options became too expensive for retail investors and declining volatility led to market makers selling stock they owned as hedges
  • Coupled with new trading restrictions imposed by the brokers, the stock price crashed back down more than 80pct from its highs in less than two weeks 

  

  The Setup 

  Phase One: Early in January 2021, Reddit/WSB and other retail traders began to focus on GME as a buying opportunity…. 

  (1) January 11th [Initial Attention]: GameStop recruited a highly-respected industry veteran to their Board (Chewy Founder, Ryan Cohen). This garnered enthusiasm from the retail community and acted as the initial catalyst for these investors to start discussing GME as a potentially exciting stock to own. There was some initial buying in the $15-$20 range, then the stock quickly shifted higher to the $35-$40 range. 

  (2) January 13th-20th [Loading Up]: Members of the Reddit/WSB community started purchasing large amounts of call options. This significant call buying began to form the basis for the first of two dramatic upward stock movements within the “Weaponized Gamma Squeeze” setup.  A “gamma squeeze” can occur when a trader or group of traders purchase call options in bulk, causing market makers who sold them these options to buy the stock as a hedge.  This aggressive forced stock buying adds to the stock price moving steeply upward and pushes the stock price higher as market makers scramble to buy incrementally more stock at rapidly increasing prices.

  This type of trade is not unique to GameStop.  Just last summer, SpotGamma coined the term “Weaponized Gamma” when in August a large fund, namely SoftBank, was reported to have purchased large and concentrated options positions in several top technology stocks. We assigned the term “weaponized” to connote the idea that options were being purchased for the explicit purpose of pushing market makers to purchase stock rather than investing with a belief in the company’s performance or value.

  Here, again, “Weaponized Gamma” applies to the GameStop event because it’s clear that retail traders understood the concept of a “gamma squeeze” and collectively coordinated their options purchases to initiate large market maker stock purchases.  Their action pushed the stock price up – “weaponization”. This snowball effect caused GameStop’s stock to increase as market makers hoped the call buying would stop… while instead the next stage of buying caused even more powerful pressure.

  (3) January 21st [Strength in Numbers]: Citron Research published a sell recommendation research report on GameStop.  This report drew the ire of the Reddit/WSB community, which bonded tightly as one against “Wall Street”. This retail group understood the pain they could inflict through coordinate levered purchases of both call options and stock. So, they organized to exact maximum pain for the institutional complex with full disregard for what they viewed as elitist backlash.  On January 22nd, call option volumes hit their peak, as you can see in the chart below.

  

  GME Call Volume, Put Volume

  Additionally, this activity displayed in the chart below shows the relative cost of an “at the money option” (an option with a strike equal to GME’s current price).  At the start of January, a trader would pay essentially 5pct of the stock’s price for this option, roughly $1.25 per contract.  As the squeeze began, options prices rose dramatically and that same option cost more than 35pct of the stock’s price for this option, upwards of $75.  This means on both a relative and absolute value, the calls became extremely more expensive.

  

  GME Options Costs

  What is equally fascinating, and central to understanding the entirety of the GME trade, is that as these call volumes reached their highs, put options volumes also hit their peak.  As we will explain in Phase 2, we believe this influx of put volumes was key to sustaining the GME stock price and helped fuel the second “super squeeze”.

  The Weaponized Gamma Squeezes

  Phase Two: Reddit/WSB Traders Drove GameStop to Shocking Heights Pressuring Dealers to Buy GameStop Shares

  (4) January 22nd-25th [The First Push, Squeeze #1]: In the days following the Citron research report, retail investors continued to purchase stock and options as a large collective community. They felt more and more emboldened as they made progress in pushing the stock price higher from $50-$60 a share up over $125. Eventually, we saw some large funds that had taken significant losses, including Melvin Capital.  These funds breached their borrowing and leverage capacity and were forced to buy back their short positions on January 25th. Again, at the root of this buying momentum was a squeeze that caused GameStop’s stock price to spike over 200pct higher intraday, which forced options dealers to buy stock at higher prices just to maintain their hedges.  In summary, we saw buying activity driven primarily by call options purchases forcing dealers to buy stock into a short-covering rally during the first gamma squeeze.  

  (5) January 26th-27th [The Super Squeeze, Squeeze #2]: At this point, we hypothesize that the key buyers shifted from the “retail” sector to “institutional.”  We have dubbed the price action associated with this move as the “Super Squeeze”.

  As news broke that Melvin Capital needed a bailout, Reddit/WSB investors felt they were winning.  This became a movement.  Even celebrities began to show their “support” for GameStop which in turn engaged an even larger retail crowd to buy stock.

  The next day, following the dramatic intraday 200pct rise and fall of GME on January 25th, it appeared to many as if the squeeze was over.  On a quantitative basis, the initial gamma squeeze seemed to reset and short covering subsided. However, at SpotGamma we observed that the number of put options traded increased sharply. You can see in the chart below that total call open interest (light blue) did not change materially throughout the entire period, despite the stock price moving much higher. However, put interest (dark grey) surged as the stock gained in price. 

  

  GME Call vs Put Open Interest

  Traditionally when a stock price moves higher traders will often buy puts, and dealers (who are short puts) will short stock as a hedge. However, we believe that that bulk of these put flows were traders SELLING puts. This forced options market makers to accelerate their stock buying hedges.  This activity helped fuel the upward momentum and create the “super squeeze.”  Again, as GME stock price was increasing, the market makers bought hedges and the short sellers bought stock to cover their short positions, thereby creating extraordinary upward pressure.

  As a visual representation of this event, the chart below presents a method of valuing the option market maker risk (exposure) caused by these new trades.  The aggregate delta reflects the directional exposure created by all of the GME options trades. Since this figure is extremely positive, it shows that the independent GME options traders profited from moves higher in GME stock. Conversely, it shows how the market makers (who are on the opposite side of these trades) had a large and growing requirement to buy stock to hedge their positions.  Here, we present this on an aggregate basis to illustrate just how much value in stock had to be purchased the morning of January 27th.

  

  To summarize the reasons for the Super Squeeze, which propelled GameStop shares from $80 per share to over $450, the following events were most impactful:  

  • Gamma-Squeeze: Options market makers bought stock to hedge options risk

  • Stock Purchasing: Retail collaboratively and aggressively purchased stock

  • Short-Covering: 400pct stock price rise forced short investors to buy stock

  The Unwind

  Phase Three:  Expensive Stock and Options Prices, Coupled with Trading Restrictions, Drove GameStop Price Back Down to $60 Per Share

  (6)  January 27th-28th [Expensive and Controlled Dynamics]:  Following this second big push, many traders wondered what would happen next.  Would we see a third leg of this squeeze send GameStop stock price to $700?  The answer we all know now is the trade stalled out, and at SpotGamma, we believe there are three primary reasons:

  Reason one: Stock and options were too expensive. At more than $300 per share, the call prices and stock price cost too much in buying power for the retail crowd to continue pushing the stock higher.  The leverage provided by trading firms such as Robinhood maxed out and the support waned, as retail traders were unable to buy more stock, and in some cases, were forced to sell their existing long positions.

  Reason two: Hedging requirements declined.  As the stock price stalled, the price of options (measured by the implied volatility) meant the market makers who were long stock no longer needed their positions and could sell them, putting downward pressure on GameStop’s share price.

  Reason three:  “Big Brother” clamped down.  On the night of January 27th, social media sites such as Reddit and Facebook blocked message boards discussing GME.

  (7)  January 29th-Feb 4th [Downward Slide]:  With these high prices, new controls, and market interventions, the stock price slide was progressive with a few days of intermittently volatility.  Again, during this period, since options dealers were able to sell the stock they bought as hedges, they eventually pushed the stock steeply lower in a matter of hours.  Eventually, the stock broke back below $100 per share by February 2nd and below $60 per share on February 4th. 

  GameStop was not the first stock to squeeze higher and it will not be the last.  At SpotGamma, we will consistently and reliably analyze these dynamics across more than 3,500 stocks and indices to bring our subscribers relevant actionable information.  We believe with the significant number of new trading accounts opened following the GameStop drama that this is the beginning of more options volume and there will be significant momentum across the derivatives markets in the years to come. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/17/2021 – 20:25

• Despite Putting 77% Of Vax Centers In Hard-Hit Hoods, De Blasio Admits "Profound" Racial Disparities In NYC Jabs
  Despite Putting 77% Of Vax Centers In Hard-Hit Hoods, De Blasio Admits “Profound” Racial Disparities In NYC Jabs

  Despite officials’ virtue-signaling pledges to carry out the ‘most-equitable vaccine rollout’ ever in the history of the world, it appears human people, with minds of their own, have a habit of messing up the best-laid plans of the central-planning overlords.

  

  While most states/cities have been, rightly, prioritizing the elderly and most vulnerable (comorbidities etc.), as well as healthcare workers, the underlying goal of preventing socioeconomic disparities in the vaccination process has been harder to achieve, despite some cities going to great lengths.

  New York City’s Mayor De Blasio said that 77% of the city’s vaccination sites are in 33 hard-hit neighborhoods, but in what he called a “profound” racial disparity, vaccines are disproportionately going to wealthier neighborhoods in Manhattan and Staten Island, according to data the city released Tuesday.

  As Bloomberg reports, white residents composed almost half the people who had gotten at least one dose, despite being only a third of the population.

  “We have a lot of work to do,” de Blasio said.

  “A lot of this is about underlying painful disparities and inequalities to begin with. Folks who have more privilege are best able to navigate this process. Folks who have more confidence in the vaccine are going to go through more effort to get it.”

  Interestingly Axios also reported that early analyses and news reports show that in many cities and states, people of color – particularly Black Americans – are falling behind white Americans in the vaccination effort, with experts claiming that structural barriers and higher rates of vaccine hesitancy would always be a problem.

  “Just as we’ve seen a much smaller portion of vaccines going to Black and brown New Yorkers, we see these geographic disparities bearing out as well,” said Torian Easterling, chief equity officer of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

  “Staten Island and Manhattan have the highest vaccination rates, while the South Bronx, parts of central Queens and central Brooklyn lag behind.”

  De Blasio claims that supply shortages and vaccine hesitancy also play a part.

  “Folks who have been doing very well in this society also have a high level of confidence in the vaccine,” de Blasio said.

  New York City recorded the highest number of vaccine doses administered last week since the inoculation drive began in December, doling out more than 317,000 shots, de Blasio said Tuesday. But, as Bloomberg notes, the city still has a long way to go to cover its more than 8 million residents. New York had administered nearly 1.3 million total vaccine doses as of Sunday, including 870,6000 first doses.

  

  You can lead a horse to water, but a skeptic will not be jabbed! As CBS reported in December, recent data from Pew Research Center shows that only 42% of Black Americans would get the vaccine if it were available to them today.

  This is significantly less than the White (61%), Hispanic (63%) and Asian (83%). 

  

  Source

  Finally, we also noticed to an interesting trend in the COVID-19 death rates. As Axios reports, the giant surge of COVID cases over the fall and winter hit white Americans disproportionately hard, narrowing the racial disparities in COVID deaths.

  

  Source

  And perhaps most worryingly, given the racial bifurcation trend in vaccinations, if these disparities persist, particularly as new variants of the virus become more prevalent in the U.S., the gap between different racial groups’ death rate will likely widen in the coming months.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/17/2021 – 20:25

• Everything They Don't Like Is Now A Public Health Emergency
  Everything They Don’t Like Is Now A Public Health Emergency

  Authored by Kyla Hatcher via The Mises Institute,

  Last summer, infectious disease experts at the University of Washington wrote what they called an “[o]pen letter advocating for an anti-racist public health response to demonstrations against systemic injustice occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

  It is essentially a letter explaining that white supremacy is a public health issue, especially in light of covid-19.

  The letter was signed by 1,288 “public health professionals, infectious diseases professionals, and community stakeholders.”

  

  Here are some passages from the letter (emphases added), followed by my analysis of each:

  White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.

  As public health advocates, we do not condemn [demonstrations that call attention to the pervasive lethal force of white supremacy] as risky for COVID-19 transmission. 

  This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders. Those actions not only oppose public health interventions, but are also rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives.

  Protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported.

  Therefore, we propose the following guidance to support public health: 

  • Do not disband protests under the guise of maintaining public health for COVID-19 restrictions.

  • Advocate that protesters not be arrested or held in confined spaces, including jails or police vans, which are some of the highest-risk areas for COVID-19 transmission.

  • Listen, and prioritize the needs of Black people as expressed by Black voices.

  Dissecting the Letter

  “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue.”

  The language used here is important. White supremacy is lethal. Racism kills people.

  What is not written is, “Sometimes white supremacists, acting out of hatred, kill black people,” or even, “All white supremacists are culpable in the murder of black people.”

  Instead, the agency is assigned to racism itself. It is racism, not racist people, that is the public health issue; it is white nationalism that kills people. This is the same tactic used by antigun lobbies in their slogan “Guns kill people.” If guns kill people, guns need to be illegal. People killing people with guns is already illegal, just as white supremacists killing black men is already illegal. To advance further legal change, you have to change the language. “White supremacy kills people” leads the same people who want guns outlawed to want white supremacy outlawed. While the letter does not draw out these ideas to their logical conclusions, the logic employed is well down the slippery slope of sacrificing free speech.

  “We do not condemn [demonstrations that call attention to the pervasive lethal force of white supremacy] as risky for COVID-19 transmission.”

  That’s weird because every other kind of gathering is condemned by these people as risky. 

  “This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders. Those actions not only oppose public health interventions, but are rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives.” 

  These “experts” have even labeled protests against stay-home orders as demonstrations of white nationalism. How is protesting stay-home orders racist? It is not, of course, but by labeling it that and by labeling white nationalism lethal, we can conclude that protesting stay-at-home orders must also be lethal. By definition, then, these cannot be truly peaceful protests. We’re left with the conclusion that these protests must be regarded as illegal.

  The letter itself doesn’t take things quite this far, but as these ideas are accepted more and more by medical professionals and the public, they are more likely to be adopted by the US Public Health Service, and then how long until we see these kinds of results?

  “Advocate that protesters not be arrested or held in confined spaces, including jails or police vans, which are some of the highest-risk areas for COVID-19 transmission.”

  It’s easy to point out the glaring contradiction here. Protesters should not be arrested because that puts them at a higher risk for covid-19. But earlier in the letter it is argued that protests are not risky for transmitting the virus and that authorities shouldn’t enforce social distancing and masking in public because they’re not risky. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. Health experts are telling the police who they can and cannot arrest not based on innocence or guilt, but on the basis of health. 

  This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

  Thankfully, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has not yet labeled white supremacy a public health emergency, yet leading medical schools have signed on to support the letter and are actively teaching their medical students that things like white supremacy can be dealt with in the realm of health.

  Americans have made health and safety their gods – over freedom, over luxury, over progress and ingenuity, over God. And they have taken the words of their gods’ prophets as scripture.

  During the “age of covid,” we have seen Americans sacrifice everything (jobs, family, religion, social life) to health and safety, and in this letter we witness health experts speaking totally outside the realm of their expertise.

  In any case, Americans have apparently become well trained when it comes to so-called public health emergencies. Because both the public and the “experts” apparently worship health and safety above all else, it is not hard to believe that we can count on widespread obedience during the next declared emergency.

  What will be called a public health issue next? Gun violence (been there), transphobia (done that), religion, private schools and home schools?

  We would not be the first nation to lose its liberties on the installment plan.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/17/2021 – 20:05

• "Citrus Disaster" – Texas Cold Snap Means Crop Losses For Grapefruit Growers
  “Citrus Disaster” – Texas Cold Snap Means Crop Losses For Grapefruit Growers

  Well, here’s some more bad news for consumers who are already experiencing food price inflation – that is – the price of citrus could be ready to skyrocket amid the cold snap in Texas.

  Texas is the nation’s third-largest citrus-producing state behind California and Florida. Dale Murden, president of Texas Citrus Mutual, a trade group that oversees citrus growers in the state, told AccuWeather that growers were “about 50% harvested to date on grapefruit”, just as the polar vortex split dumped Arctic air into the region. He said growers were “just beginning to harvest our late Valencia orange.”

  “Most everyone saw temps of 21 degrees for several hours,” Murden said. He warns, “growers will no doubt lose some of the crop as we see some ice buildup inside the fruit.” 

  Murden said it only takes a few hours of temperatures below 28 degrees to freeze hanging fruit. He provided AccuWeather with pictures of frozen grapefruit trees. 

  

  Temperatures should return to the 40s and 50 for some parts of Texas by the weekend, but after a deep freeze for several days, there are new fears of a sizeable crop loss that could materialize in the state. 

  

  “At this time we have about 15% of our crop hanging on the trees, and that is likely lost,” April Flowers of Lone Star Citrus, a grower based in Mission, Texas. 

  Murden said the temperatures were so cold this week that most measures to warm citrus trees did not work. 

  

   “Some growers use a micro-jet irrigation system to spray their trees with water prior to the freeze because ice is insulative at 32 degrees,” Flowers said, “but this type of system is expensive and not widely used.”

  “As for whether this cold snap will turn into a weather disaster for Texas citrus growers,” Murden warned, adding that “it’s still too early to tell and will likely take a few weeks after the cold snap breaks for growers to assess any damages. ” 

  Flowers repeated Murden’s point: “The next several weeks will give us a clearer picture of the true impact of the storm.” 

  So in the next couple of weeks, more details will likely emerge of crop damage sustained by the latest winter blast to rock the state. This may result in a rise in citrus prices, such as grapefruit. 

  Consumers are learning this year that food prices all around them are erupting. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/17/2021 – 19:45

• Marcuse-Anon: Cult Of The Pseudo-Intellectual
  Marcuse-Anon: Cult Of The Pseudo-Intellectual

  Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

  In my early twenties, I read an expedition was being planned in search of the grave of Genghis Khan. Being young, game, and interested in writing on an adventure, I inquired about tagging along.

  I found a professor at Harvard connected with the mission, whom I quizzed about its likelihood of success. The man laughed and eventually revealed the team had little idea where Khan was buried. Some colleagues merely dug up a few stories of Khan’s death that would be enough to take in a sponsor.

  I was blown away. How, I asked, could the archaeologists justify that?

  “Son,” he laughed. “They’re intellectuals. They can justify anything.”

  People complain about QAnon, but truly lasting, impactful lunacy is always exclusive to intellectuals. Everyone else is constrained. You can’t fish on land for long. Same with using a chainsaw for headache relief. An intellectual may freely mistake bullshit for Lincoln logs and spend a lifetime building palaces. Which brings us to Herbert Marcuse.

  

  Often called the “Father of the New Left,” and the inspiration for a generation of furious thought-policing nitwits of the Robin DiAngelo school, Marcuse was a great intellectual. Most Americans have never heard of him — he died in 1979 — but his ideas today are ubiquitous as Edison’s lightbulbs. He gave us everything from “Silence Equals Violence” to “Too Much Democracy” to the “Crisis of Misinformation” to In Defense of Looting to the 1619 Project and Antiracist Baby, and from the grave has cheered countless recent news stories, from the firing of Mandalorian actress Gina Corano to the erasure of raw footage of the Capitol riot from YouTube.

  Marcuse is so influential that subscribers thought it would be a good idea to review his books, rather than go one-by-one through the seemingly interminable list of homage texts dominating bestseller lists in recent years. When I told a friend, he warned with a chuckle about the author’s “spectacularly bad synthesis,” mimicking the old Reese’s Peanut Butter cup jingle: “You got your Marx in my Freud!” I read One-Dimensional Man, and a painful collection essays that included the famed Bible of post-liberal thinking, Repressive Tolerance. Conclusion number one: a person more hostile to the sensual possibilities of literature would be difficult to imagine. Reading Marcuse is like eating a bowl of thumbtacks. The style is nothing, however, next to the ideas. My God, the ideas!

  Berlin-born Herbert Marcuse was drafted into the German army in 1916, but didn’t see action in World War I. Fortune, obviously concerned with his destiny as the arch-priest of anti-thought in 21st century America, placed him in a rearguard unit. Despite the lack of combat experience, he came out of the war disillusioned, among other things by the experience of watching the German socialist opposition support the war.

  After studying at the University of Freiburg, he worked for years at a bookstore, then went back to school, studying under famed philosopher Martin Heidegger. He hoped to help solve the urgent question animating many young intellectuals of his time: what form of Marxism would eventually triumph across the civilized world?

  Then, just as Weimar Germany degenerated into exactly the social conditions under which Marx predicted proletarian revolution, German communism flopped, Heidegger became a Nazi University Rector, and a stunned Marcuse soon exiled himself to Switzerland and eventually America, where he would spend the rest of his life trying to come up with an explanation for what happened.

  Marcuse’s understandable grief and horror over the rise of Nazism, coupled with a humorously powerful loathing for his adopted American home, led him to write the work that first made him famous, 1964’s One-Dimensional Man.

  The smash #1 bestseller sold 300,000 copies and detailed Marcuse’s long-awaited explanation for a) why the proletariat had not risen in postwar Germany, and b) why there was no sense in waiting for it to do so going forward. He explained: not only was the material condition of the worker in modern capitalism insufficiently brutal to spur him to revolution, but technological advances coupled with expanded freedoms allowed even the lowliest employee to fully integrate into the “one-dimensional society,” a consumerist hell of mostly met material needs, “pleasure,” “fun,” and “socially permissible desirable satisfaction,” all of which “weakens the rationality of protest.”

  In this world where the commonest shlub can “have the fine arts at his fingertips, by just turning a knob on his set,” it would be impossible, Marcuse lamented, to produce the kind of class alienation Marx envisioned. What’s the point of having the right to dissent, if conditions disincline the citizen to revolution?

  Independence of thought, autonomy, and the right to political opposition are being deprived of their basic critical function in a society which seems increasingly capable of satisfying the needs of the individuals through the way in which it is organized. Such a society may justly demand acceptance of its principles and institutions…

  In the later book, An Essay on Liberation, Marcuse anticipated 21st-century liberal attitudes by concluding that the working-class was an actively regressive social force:

  By virtue of its basic position in the production process, by virtue of its numerical weight and the weight of exploitation, the working class is still the historical agent of revolution; by virtue of its sharing the stabilizing needs of the system, it has become a conservative, even counterrevolutionary force.

  After One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse in the 1965 essay Repressive Tolerance set out to argue that the very “stabilizing” rights and freedoms that facilitated this treacherous class integration were the problem that needed conquering. What resulted might be the most impassioned argument against individual rights ever written. It makes the Directorium Inquisitorum read like Dr. Spock on Parenting.

  Repressive Tolerance is a towering monument to the possibilities of nonsense in the academic profession. The essay’s 10,000 words, alternately hilarious and breathtaking, are circular thinking and the absence of self-awareness raised to the level of art. We don’t often encounter an author capable of denouncing “the tyranny of Orwellian syntax” while arguing in the same breath, literally and without irony, that freedom is slavery.

  Marcuse starts down this road by quoting John Stuart Mill, who he notes is “not exactly an enemy of liberal and representative government” (am I hallucinating a Twitter-like tone of haughtiness in such passages?). Even this Enlightenment hero, sneers Marcuse, admitted liberal rights are not absolute. “Liberty, as a principle,” Mill wrote, “has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.”

  But don’t we have something like liberty, in a society that grants us the vote, a free press, the right to assemble, dissent, even plot revolution? No, says Marcuse, because liberty “stipulates the ability to determine one’s own life,” an impossibility in our world. He explains:

  The problem of making possible such a harmony between every individual liberty and the other, is not that of finding a compromise between competitors, or between freedom and law, between general and individual interest, common and private welfare in an established society, but of creating the society in which man is no longer enslaved by institutions which vitiate self-determination from the beginning.

  (One noticeable human tic in the otherwise unrelenting metronome of Marcuse’s prose — the man writes like a car alarm left on — is a weird overuse of the word vitiate).

  In other words, real freedom doesn’t exist in the balance between the many individual liberties doled out to persons and institutions alike in societies like ours, but only in the post-revolutionary “created” society of absolute freedom as imagined by the author, a utopia Marcuse tabs the “pacification of existence.” (The ostensibly antiwar leftist’s use of that term just as America was beginning its “pacification” campaign in Vietnam is another of the essay’s quirks).

  Therefore, Marcuse wrote, any existing rights and freedoms “should not be tolerated,” because “they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery.”

  Settling for anything less than an absolute utopia of painlessness, or admitting any delays on the route there, even in the name of progress, is repression. As he put it, in America, the “exercise of political rights (such as voting, letter-writing to the press, to Senators, etc., protest-demonstrations with a priori renunciation of counterviolence)” only served to “strengthen this administration by testifying to the existence of democratic liberties.” In other words — drumroll — freedom is slavery:

  Freedom (of opinion, of assembly, of speech) becomes an instrument for absolving servitude…

  After completing the first stage of this Orwellian pole-dance, Marcuse marches up and down the runway, flinging paradoxes left and right. Not only is freedom servitude, but tolerance is intolerance! Democracy is totalitarianism! Equality is inequality! For the latter formulation, he used an argument that would be later deployed in reverse by Fox News to explain its infamous “Fair and Balanced” motto: “More representation of the Left would be equalization of the prevailing inequality.”

  He also argues progress is reaction, stability is emergency, and law is lawlessness, because “law and order are always and everywhere the law and order which protect the established hierarchy.” Marcuse doesn’t state it, but the basic premise that all prerevolutionary reform is a trick of the oppressor also explains the current attitude toward racial relations, under which downplaying racial difference is racism and antiracism must conversely mean emphasizing its transcendent importance.

  You’ll recognize the view of violence in Repressive Tolerance. Marcuse had a twofold take. First, violence is obviously violence, when practiced by police, or the wards of prisons and mental institutions. Violence is even violence, he says, as practiced by revolutionaries like Robespierre (“even if the white terror was more bloody than the red terror,” Marcuse hastened to add, not wanting to completely abandon the guillotine to criticism). Whether practiced by the oppressor or the oppressed, he went on, “in terms of ethics, both forms of violence are inhuman and evil.”

  This is no prohibition against violence, however, because:

  Since when is history made in accordance with ethical standards? To start applying [ethics] at the point where the oppressed rebel against the oppressors, the have-nots against the haves, is serving the cause of actual violence by weakening the protest against it.

  Summing up: violence is always violence, as a matter of ethics. However, since ethics are not ethical, not only is violence not violence, but non-violence is violence, when practiced by the oppressed against the oppressor. This is the mentality behind last summer’s firing of analyst David Shor for re-tweeting a study suggesting nonviolent protest is effective, as well as the bizarre mania for calling things that were actually violence not violence (e.g. “mostly peaceful” protests, etc), while things that manifestly are not violence, like grade school teasing or cultural appropriation, are regularly described using the word.

  As for the question of exactly how conditional one’s rights should be, Marcuse insisted that “extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger.” This sounds reasonable until you read on: “I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs.”

  Marcuse remember had just finished a book explaining that revolution was obviated in a society where civil liberties were “too significant to be confined by traditional forms,” and whose “capacity to spread comforts” inspired widespread “voluntary compliance” with its more. Now, that same society was described as presenting such “extreme danger” to the citizen that suspension of all civil rights was necessary.

  To be fair to Marcuse, he was trying to argue that the “one-dimensional” society was “radically evil” because it created a kind of totalitarianism of the consumer instinct, in which the individual becomes one with the state through his worship of product, learning to understand happiness only as something that can be bought. While the supreme beneficiaries of this paradise of buying increase their wealth and political control, the state drops bombs abroad, and at home abuses prisoners, minorities, and the “unemployed and unemployable.” Meanwhile, the tyranny of affluence leads to:

  The systematic moronization of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda, the release of destructiveness in aggressive driving, the recruitment for and training of special forces, the impotent and benevolent tolerance toward outright deception in merchandizing, waste, and planned obsolescence…

  I think most of us can agree that “radical evil” is a term that fits many parts of the American experience, from Tuskeegee to the moonscaped hamlets of North Vietnam and Cambodia to the Covid-racked prisons of today. Surely also we are exhibiting the symptoms of a deeper sickness when we plop our kids in front of screens to make them wanters-of-things, to save time while we adults chase the affluence dragon.

  But Marcuse’s main complaint was that despite technological advances that could have lessened the need for work, the individual of his time was still “compelled to prove himself on the market.” If we could only end the need to struggle through the “pacification of existence,” he insisted, that “might release individual energy into a yet uncharted realm of freedom beyond necessity.” The “extreme danger” was choosing any other path.

  To say this is a warped concept of “danger” is an epic understatement:

  “9-1-1, what is your emergency?”

  “Hi, I live in a society whose citizens choose to struggle in the market rather than enter a workless Eden of pure freedom, in which man’s vital needs will be tended to by a productive apparatus placed under the centralized control of persons like myself…”

  People who do intellectual work should feel a responsibility to make sure the words they use at least roughly correspond to their ostensible meaning, but like a lot of German intellectuals, Marcuse had been mired in dialectical comparisons for so long that his sense of proportion was fucked beyond recognition. The man cited aggressive driving in arguing an emergency so dire that a suspension of all civil liberties was warranted.

  There’s a reason some German scholars are said to prefer reading Clausewitz in English, because it’s clearer. With Marcuse, the translation doesn’t help. He was the real-world embodiment of Orwell’s utopian linguists who were impatient to rid the world of all those annoying words for shades of difference. Once you have a lock on “good,” why bother litigating degrees of its opposite? Bad is bad. He thought in binary pairs, and freely conflated concepts like inadequacy, misgovernment, and indifference with cruelty, repression, persecution, and terror, a habit of mind that’s inspired a generation of catastrophizing neurotics who genuinely don’t know the difference between disagreement and an attempt on their lives.

  We saw it in health officials who went from condemning anti-lockdown protests to, a week or two later, declaring that racism — not on their radar prior to the murder of George Floyd — was a “lethal public health issue” superseding the pandemic. We saw it with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez applying the transitive property of whatever nineteen times over to make Ted Cruz’s decision to refuse certification of the Electoral College mean he was “trying to murder me” and “almost had me murdered.” Same with the New York Times employees who declared their lives were thrust in peril by soon-to-be-fired editor James Bennet’s decision to run an editorial by Senator Tom Cotton:

  just to be crystal clear:

  Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger. pic.twitter.com/2mZfnQegs7

  — rat king (@MikeIsaac) June 4, 2020

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

  The argument-from-emergency ties in with one of Marcuse’s most quoted passages: “Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.” This is another precursor to the Roger Ailes/Fox formulation that leftism is so hegemonic that one needs to pull the steering wheel of society hard to the right just to move in a straight line. (Both arguments are absurd). Marcuse famously believed toleration of competing views repeated the error of Weimar Germany, where “if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.”

  This wasn’t a new idea. It had been expressed by (among others) Plato, in his argument for the rule of philosopher-kings. In book 562(c) of the Republic, he wondered, “Does not the excess (of liberty) bring men to such a state that they badly want a tyranny?” Philosopher Karl Popper addressed this line in The Open Society and Its Enemies, in a passage that hilariously has become one of the most popular memes on Left Twitter. It is impossible to make even a tepid argument in favor of free speech online these days without being swarmed by dingbats posting this image:

  

  Yes, they are referring to a passage that Popper actually wrote: “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

  However, the Popper passage is actually found in the notes to The Open Society and Its Enemies, as an explanation rather than an endorsement of Plato’s argument against tolerance. In fact, the body of The Open Society and Its Enemies contains a passionate common-sense argument against Platonic intolerance and “benevolent dictatorship.” Popper begins with the observation that’s obvious no matter what your level of schooling: “All theories of sovereignty are paradoxical.”

  A society built around individual rights and freedoms does risk allowing illiberal forces to take advantage of those freedoms. But how does anyone outside of a Farrelly brothers movie come up with autocracy as a solution to the threat of autocracy? As Popper wrote, the “Utopian attempt to realize an ideal state… is likely to lead to a dictatorship,” among other things because it contains all the same pitfalls inherent in any government. “Any difference of opinion between Utopian engineers must therefore lead to the use of power instead of reason, i.e. to violence,” wrote Popper.

  Common sense seems to strike Marcuse’s old-world mentality as too gauche, a cheap shortcut, “hitting below the intellect,” as Oscar Wilde once put it, describing the American habit of “brute reason.” Marcuse’s disgust before the crassness, superficiality, and violence of the United States bleeds through in his books. Even when describing, say, America’s unique capacity for generating and distributing material wealth, he used phrases like “the better and more equitable distribution of misery and oppression.”

  Marcuse had no right being blind to the beauty of the American experiment, since his life was graphic proof of it. This was a man who became a wealthy international celebrity selling a book arguing that after fleeing Nazi Germany, he found “democratic totalitarianism” teaching at Brandeis University. In this sense, One-Dimensional Man reads like The Gulag Archipelago, minus the logging. Or confinement. Or political repression of any kind. In fact, Marcuse’s letter from the American gulag reads quite a lot like Monty Python’s “What have the Romans ever done for us?” skit:

  Rather than feel blessed to live in a country where a man can achieve wealth and fame writing one of the stupidest books in history, Marcuse became more embittered. This shines through in Repressive Tolerance, which doubles as an impassioned manifesto against enjoyment of any kind in the here and now, which Marcuse regarded as a kind of sin against the future Utopia. “For the true positive is the society of the future and therefore beyond definition and determination,” he wrote, adding that “the existing positive is that which must be surmounted.”

  Marcuse would have fit with the Puritan settlers, who were ready to hang the first man who laughed at a fart (rather than waiting to do it in the afterlife). The humorlessness and love of the lash that have always been part of America’s DNA, from The Scarlet Letter through the Anti-Saloon League, are part of the reason Marcuse’s ideas still have so much purchase. He was obsessed with determining “correct and incorrect” action and speech, deciding what is art and what is “pseudo-art,” which messages are intolerably regressive, etc. He was happy to tell you how to calculate this. For instance, he declared Dostoyevsky to have a regressive message, but because it was “absorbed, aufgehoben in the artistic form,” the bad thing was “canceled by the oeuvre itself.” So, okay for putting on the shelves of the “pacified” state.

  He was the inspiration for the attitudes of modern America, which is suspicious of all forms of enjoyment divorced from political intent. Forget humor, our popular culture doesn’t even feel safe celebrating sex, unless it’s tragic or transgressive. We’re living out the Woody Allen joke, “I finally had an orgasm, but my doctor said it was the wrong kind.”

  It’s all Puritanism, seething at any delays in building that ladder to heaven, the only difference being that the Puritans, being Christians, at least believed in original sin and forgiveness, i.e. you still got to go to Heaven after the thumbscrews. The new secular incarnation believes forgiveness is the only sin, while due process and the presumption of innocence just delay justice.

  Rehabilitation just can’t be risked, without imperiling society’s victims. “The exercise of civil rights by those who don’t have them presupposes the withdrawal of civil rights from those who prevent their exercise,” Marcuse writes, adding that “liberation of the Damned of the Earth presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters.”

  All the revelry in suppressing rights gets to the real reason Marcuse has come back into vogue. Strip the rhetorical bells and whistles from books like One-Dimensional Man and Repressive Tolerance and what’s left? A white, affluent, upper-class intellectual frustrated by the lack of a popular mandate for his vision of political takeover. The original plan of riding proletarian revolution to power thwarted, Marcuse early on concluded that the working-class needed a push from more knowledgeable political actors. He wrote in 1947:

  Marx assumed that the proletariat is driven to revolutionary action on its own, based on the knowledge of its own interests, as soon as revolutionary conditions are present. . . .  [But subsequent] development has confirmed the correctness of the Leninist conception of the vanguard party as the subject of the revolution. 

  By the mid-sixties, however, he realized that the working-class wouldn’t do the job even if pushed. Therefore, other groups must provide the necessary revolutionary energy:

  Those who form the human base of the social pyramid—the outsiders and the poor, the unemployed and unemployable, the persecuted colored races, the inmates of prisons and mental institutions.

  I’d have more sympathy for this point of view were it not so obvious that Marcuse’s embrace of the “persecuted colored races” was opportunistic afterthought. His real endgame is absolutist rule by our intellectual betters. Explaining that “the democratic argument implies a necessary condition, namely, that the people must be capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge,” he goes on to prove that the broad main of people are not so capable. They lack the discernment to know the “objective truth which can be discovered,” to separate correct from incorrect, among other things because too many incorrect opinions are allowed to circulate.

  Ultimately, he writes, “if the choice were between genuine democracy and dictatorship, democracy would certainly be preferable. But democracy does not prevail.”

  As such, “The radical critics of the existing political process are thus readily denounced as advocating an ‘elitism’, a dictatorship of intellectuals as an alternative.” This sounds bad! But, he insisted in 1965, when one considered that the current business and military elites had such a bad record, “political prerogatives for the intelligentsia may not necessarily be worse for the society as a whole.”

  Summing up, this is a theory of an intellecutal elite forced to seize absolute power on behalf of racial minorities, the disabled, and other oppressed groups, while canceling free speech and civil rights for all others, and especially for the corrupted mass of working-class people, who are no friends of the revolution but actually ignorant conservatives obstructing the road to “pacification and liberation.” Does this sound familiar?

  Marcuse had it wrong. Fifty-plus years later, American society does much worse at satisfying material needs, and the ordinary working person is less and less often invited to share the “stabilizing needs” of the system with its rulers. Even Marx was closer to correctly describing today’s politics. What has been successfully integrated, by the very consumerist oligarchs Marcuse supposedly despised, is would-be dissident literature like Repressive Tolerance.

  Back in the sixties, Marcuse was denounced by Pope Paul VI, while establishment political figures decried his support of groups like the SDS, the Weathermen, and the Black Panthers. He was seen as a thorn in the side of the status quo. Today Marcuse is the status quo. His muddle-headed theories are the cover story for a new theory of corporate vanguardism that places an ennobled political elite in charge of replacing our messy system of freedoms and principles with a more “centralized” control of the “productive apparatus,” the exact thing Marcuse hoped for in One-Dimensional Man.

  The American system, flawed as it was and is, was designed to prevent this kind of concentration of power, through checks and balances and the protection of individual rights. Those protections have been under assault throughout our history by monopolists and other reactionaries, who never had a gift as luscious as Marcuse: a self-styled progressive arguing to the masses that they should cast democracy and ethics aside for their own good.

  For Marcusean ideas to be venerated now by elite millionaire politicians, clad in kente cloth scarves and funded by banks and weapons-makers flying Black Lives Matter banners, is the perfect ending to this slapstick career. Nothing about Marcuse was American, except his most important quality: he was a quack, which made him not just one of us, but a figure of respect and influence in this society. He died too soon for the White House, but he’s well on his way to becoming our own Iron Felix, his statue erected in place of those piddling fake patriots with names like Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt.

  The man who probably wouldn’t have touched a Harley, a blues guitar, a Budweiser, or a baseball without a Haz-Mat suit will spend eternity watching his name become locked in association with the red, white, and blue, with American tanks and rifles spreading his doctrine of unfreedom to every corner of the globe. You could laugh at the irony — capitalism can even absorb this — but this particular character wouldn’t get the joke.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/17/2021 – 19:25

• Watch: Palm Beach Cop Harasses Woman At Her House Over Facebook Remark
  Watch: Palm Beach Cop Harasses Woman At Her House Over Facebook Remark

  A Palm Beach woman who joked on Facebook about dumping ‘thousands of masks’ on the lawn of the county commissioner got a visit from the Sheriff’s office on Feb. 12, after authorities had surveilled the conversation.

  Angelique Contreras, a mother of three, was discussing the county’s new policy to exclude people who refuse to wear masks from public meetings, when a man named Anthony Collins joked about leaving “hundreds of bags of garbage” on the lawn of the county commissioner, to which Contreras added “Thousands of Mask(s).”

  

  Later, an officer with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office who identified himself as Detective Horton showed up at Contreras’ house and warned her against ‘trespassing’ and illegal activity, according to WND.com.

  “The reason why we’re here is, bothering you on a Friday night, is, I guess you and some guy named Anthony were posting on social media that you were gonna go trespass on a county commissioner’s property, dump garbage on her property,” says Horton.

  “I didn’t say that I would dump garbage on her property,” Contreras replied.

  “That’s the discussion you guys were having,” Horton replied.

  “No I wasn’t,” Contreras shot back.

  “I can show you the post,” replied Horton – to which Contreras said “I plead the Fifth.”

  The only crime committed by Contreras was filming the encounter in vertical mode. Watch:

  More via WND:

  “Trespassing is a crime. Dumping garbage on people’s property is a crime. So don’t do it,” Horton explained.

  Contreras asked: “Is that why you all are here?”

  “Yeah,” said Horton. “Today’s day and age, ma’am, you’re talking about trespassing …”

  “Didn’t talk about trespassing,” Contreras noted.

  “Going on someone’s property is trespassing, right?” the detective explained.

  “I didn’t say any of those words,” she responded. “This is just fear-mongering. You know that, right?”

  “Fear-mongering of what?” Horton asked.

  “Of a citizen, for nothing,” Contreras said.

  “OK, sorry you feel that way,” the detective responded.

  “I do, I’m putting my kids to bed, and you’re wasting tax-dollar money to come out here and …”

  “Tell you not commit a crime? Yes,” Horton interrupted.

  “I’m not committing a crime,” Contreras said, adding she wasn’t planning on committing one.

  When Contreras requested to file a trespassing report against an unidentified woman whose identity was known to Horton, they refused to take the report. 

  Contreras, a hairstylist and makeup artist from a family of Cuban refugees, has since posted the incident all over social media.

  “Still looking for answers: Who was the protected and unnamed woman on my property?! Who sent the officers to do their gestapo bidding? Who is watching and reporting my social media post? Why was I targeted?” she posted on Facebook.

  Is this the new way to treat a mother at home in the late hours of the night?! A new low by @PBCountySheriff ~ Using abuse of power, violating my safe haven for What?!!! @TuckerCarlson @dbongino @OANN @newsmax pic.twitter.com/nzraPjzmKo

  — Angelique Contreras (@angels_dream13) February 14, 2021

  “No matter what a person’s political beliefs are, I do not believe anyone deserves to be bullied by our local government officials. We should not be intimidated by law enforcement. What happened at my house was clearly political intimidation,” Contreras told National File.  “I know what Communism is and we have been living in it for the past year.”

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

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/17/2021 – 19:05

• HashMasks, CryptoPunks, & More… Inside The Multi-Billion-Dollar Market For Tokenized Art
  HashMasks, CryptoPunks, & More… Inside The Multi-Billion-Dollar Market For Tokenized Art

  Via The FinTech Blueprint substack,

  We want to talk about Hashmasks. And in particular, the one selling for $650,000. That, in the context of the $3.5MM Beepl art sale, and $1.7MM Rick and Morty NFT sale. More deeply, we want to talk about financial assets, the value of things, and the additive nature of new channels and ecosystems as old ones become commodified.

  

  The reader will be familiar with the traditional asset classes – equities, fixed income, with maybe some cash equivalents and alternative investments. These represent somewhere around $50 to $100 trillion of value. They are core capitalist assets, in the sense that they represent various financial claims and obligations on the abstractions we humans call companies and governments.

  You can’t eat a company.

  But you can eat a piece of bread. Stick with us here.

  

  

  

  

  Bread is wonderful. It is also cheap at $1.50 a pack (give or take). It is made from wheat, a plant that grows from the ground. It takes 4 months from seed to harvest, and then requires a massive industrial value chain to be collected, turned into flour, shipped on diesel-burning-trucks across the country’s highways, and into bakeries, where waged-employees labor in factories to make what you and I buy in the supermarket.

  If you want something with “fundamentals” that is “grounded” and “real”, things can’t really get much better than bread. It mixes the mana from the Earth, with the labor of the human, with the invention of technology, to solve an existential problem. And to most of us, it is essentially *free*.

  

  You eat bread so you don’t starve and die. Very many people have died from starvation. This is a 20 million-people-per-decade problem. You would think that something that is literally a life-saver would be worth a *lot*. But it isn’t on the margin. Bread is not rare — it is a commodity with a massive, undifferentiated supply.

  Put another way, the “market” values your weekly sustenance at less than your Netflix or Spotify subscription. A video game on Steam might cost $50, as does a season of the Sopranos on Amazon, or a Kindle version of Game of Thrones. Aren’t those things “less important”?

  You can see how a central planner of an economy might overindex on the value of bread, and underindex on the value of TikTok.

  Or on the value of collectible digital art. So here we have demonstrated that our intuitions about what is good and valuable for society are totally unhelpful in thinking about innovation and frontier assets.

  Financial Assets as a Flag

  Going back to our point about the $50 trillion of financial asset classes, those tend to be so abstract that the average investor treats them a bit like magic. Yes, the ownership of a share of AAPL stock does grant you certain legal rights, enforceable against a regulated corporation in some particular way under some particular circumstances, tied into a Rube Goldberg machine of exchange, clearing, and settlement, backed by “cash flows” generated by the sales of a kazillion iPhones, summarized in an annual report, and so on and so forth. For most people, this is voodoo. Buying AAPL stock is like buying a Tom Brady jersey. It is popular fashion.

  

  You are not buying the machine. You are buying a flag for your identity. That flag might be AAPL or AMAZON, or GME, or Bitcoin. The Bitcoin flag these days is a bit more fun. Invoking some computational octopus monster that coheres a forever-true ledger of monetary truth is not that different, in our collective consciousness, from summoning Warren Buffet’s “value investing” discounted cash flow approach as a personal virtue for stock selection.

  We are not saying that there aren’t crafts-people, and crafts-robots, who actually do the computational work of assessing these values. We are instead saying that the rest of the market is just a bunch of free riders waving their flag around.

  As another example, options are priced using Black–Scholes, because other market participants are pricing options using Black-Scholes, without understanding what the formula actually does, or its limitations. We can say the same thing for diversification using Modern Portfolio Theory, and its mega-printing of passive ETFs. Such flags can be carried around by an agitated subreddit. Or by an over-conditioned Wharton MBA, that has invested a lot of personal pride in navigating Excel without using the mouse. To go deeper into exploring the distinction between knowing things from first principles (e.g., how a blockchain works, or how a stock is valued) and uniting in a community to champion its reductive slogans, we recommend the collected writings in Less Wrong.

  All this to say, the emotion-driven investor is not “irrational”. Rather, they are a socially-driven animal relying on socially-established consensus around expertise and narrative. They are an investor into “signals”. Thereby we conclude that (1) things that are existentially important to the survival of the species, like bread, are not valuable on the margin, and (2) that things that are abstract and incomprehensible in the extreme to the average person, like a $3,000 share of Amazon, are very valuable and subject to rising exponentially in value.

  Meet me in the Middle

  Not everything is some shared hallucination.

  There are financial assets that have real world instantiations. Or alternately, there are some real world things that have financial attributes.

  

  

  

  There are about $200 trillion worth of residential real estate, and another $30 trillion worth of commercial real estate. These are our homes, sky-scrapers, and cities. We can add to this tangible basket our infrastructure – roads, bridges, and train tracks. Given our obsession with the digital age, we may not remember the very tangible power of owning a rail-road monopoly.

  On the media side, there is about $2 trillion of collected art worldwide, hanging in museums, stacked in galleries, or part of a large family office collection — of this, about $60B is turned into fees per year. In music, the intellectual property of songs accrues to owners and yields $10B in performing rights revenues.

  

  One point that we want to land is that finance is embedded in all these different types of things we love and understand: our homes, our art, our music. Financial constructs are like clothes around their bodies.

  Crypto Collectibles as the Growth Vector

  To the extent that Decentralized Finance is an attempt at re-wiring the financial machine of our abstract asset class markets, NFTs (“non fungible tokens”) and the crypto art movement is an attempt at re-wiring the financial attributes that connect to media and digital objects.

  This is deeply interesting and exciting, especially because we do not really know or understand yet where things are going to go. The current innovations are attempting to re-create analogies in the physical world. That will shift and transform into new frontiers. Just as we flagged DeFi in 2019 as the core engine for growth in 2020 on Ethereum, we flag NFT platform development as a core driver for 2021 and beyond.

  Let’s get our data in order from Cryptoart.io and OpenSea.

  

  

  

  There is about $12MM of digital collectibles trading volume in January of 2021, with projects like Hashmasks and CryptoPunks dominating 7-day volume on OpenSea. There are probably about a hundred thousand existing NFTs, and a few thousands current participants in this market. The business model consists of a few gated platforms (e.g., Nifty Gateway, SuperRare), which act as galleries, editing and filtering a collection. The visual style of the work they select is vaporwave in palette, and delivered as glitchart or 3D renders.

  Some NFTs are individual prints of artwork, similar to a painting made by Picasso, a song dropped by Beyonce, or a video uploaded by a YouTube creator. They are curated, bought and sold in reference to that object only. The value usually derives from *who* made the object, just as it does in traditional media.

  

  Another aside on value. The Mona Lisa is original and valuable. A poster of the Mona Lisa is not valuable, despite being nearly identical in visual information. A reproduction of the Mona Lisa, even if perfect stroke-for-stroke, is similarly not valuable, because it is not the original. Therefore, the art is valuable not for its collection of particular atoms in some particular order, but for its historical and social context. Recreating the object does nothing, because it does not contain the same social history.

  With digital NFTs, the same logic is true. Just because you have an identical JPEG to the one anchored to the blockchain, does not mean you have an original worth anything, nor does your ability to look at it suggest anything from a collectible point of view. Owning the original means you own its particular history and meaning in the community. This is why the original CryptoPunks have sold for a cumulative $43M, as a piece of history of the first generative NFT collection on Ethereum.

  

  That brings us to the second point about NFTs. They do not have to be single, beautiful, genius renders. Instead, they can be large, distributed programs. CryptoPunks printed 10,000 editions of slightly different pixelated avatars. This is done through a software-based art system, and is inherently inclusive. Even if you do not own a “rare” CryptoPunk, you can still have one as a badge of participation in the overall movement. You can allow it to be your *flag*, going back to the point about Apple stock.

  Hashmasks are similarly generative, though they are far more gorgeous, evoking Jean-Michel Basquiat in their procedural algorithms.

  

  

  The print ran to 16,000 objects, with elements of various rarity. The most rare combinations are selling for over ETH 100, with the most common going for a few ETH. That is still several thousand dollars — a price wildly unaffordable for non-crypto denizens. It is far more expensive than our favorite loaf of bread. But what a stunning, bold flag it makes regardless! It answers the question of “who you are” for its digital owner.

  There are, of course, financial features built into these mathematical marvels. First, a lottery. The NFTs were sold without revealing their rarity for several days — a mechanic identical to a lottery ticket, and the lootboxes from video games that countries like Belgium have banned for being too addictive. Second, a bonding curve, which can unfavorably be characterized as algorithmic ponzinomics. We don’t agree with that framing, but it is fair to raise the issue. And last, an “emissions” schedule of tokens from holding the NFT that allow you to change the name of the object, thereby impacting its scarcity and social history.

  There are a few other mechanics worth flagging before we wrap up. Projects like Async Art allow people to buy layers within an artwork, and then change the layer as part of a participatory community effort. Others, like Cometh.io place the NFT collectible into a virtual world with actions that mirror its financial attributes — virtual space ships mine asteroids to receive real world currencies. For comparisons, think about the likes of Eve Online, the World of Warcraft gold farming, Second Life, and the various virtual reality blockchain projects (Decentraland, CryptoVoxels) come to mind as a path towards a Fortnite-like, NFT-based, multiverse.

  Add or Subtract

  All you need to do now is watch this space with curiosity. We will see an evolution beyond the editorial crypto art galleries of today, to TikTok-like neural-network-mediated creative spaces. We will see a deep melding of NFTs with complex DeFi primitives, like tranching for quality, collateralization and staking, as well as lending, borrowing, and exchange. The creative space is barely starting to be explored. Even if the “market” crashes in USD value, the underlying technology trends will persist.

  This will not detract from the past, but it will add to the future. We quote Matthew Ball’s charts of the evolution of the music and gaming markets.

  

  

  New channels and monetization methods are mana for creators. New platforms create gold rushes, excitement, and the conquering of frontiers. Mobile gaming added $40 billion of revenue to its overall market, while digital streaming in music rescued the industry with $5B+ of revenue. On blockchain, NFTs are now generating a profound pull for creative digital objects, and we are excited to see what comes next.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/17/2021 – 18:45

• New COVID Levels Slump To Lowest In Months, 1/3rd Of US Troops Reject Jabs
  New COVID Levels Slump To Lowest In Months, 1/3rd Of US Troops Reject Jabs

  Across the US, Europe and most of the world, new COVID cases and deaths continue to decline as New York State announces more summertime reopening plans for summer camps, indoor family-entertainment centers and amusement parks and the EU strikes a major deal for more COVID jabs.

  Worldwide, total case numbers are nearing 110MM, as total deaths are on the verge of breaking above 2.25MM as of Wednesday. In the US, new daily cases and deaths have plunged to their lowest levels since the fall, as projections show numbers falling even more quickly than academic projections used by the CDC had anticipated.

  

  Globally, new case numbers and deaths are also at their lowest levels in months.

  The first two FEMA mass vaccination centers eopen in California, Joe Biden is promising all Americans who want the shot will be able to get one by July. But even after the latest outbreak aboard a Navy ship, a top US military said Wednesday that more than 1/3rd of servicemembers are declining to get the vaccine.

  During a House hearing on the Armed Forces’ response to COVID-19, Ranking Member of the Armed Services Committee Rep. Mike Rogers asked Maj. Gen Jeff Taliaferro, Vice Director for Operations, what percentage of service members have declined to receive the vaccine. Tallaferro replied that the number was somewhere around 2/3rds acceptance.

  

  Meanwhile, despite the drop in case numbers and deaths, the NYT and its editorial writers warned that COVID isn’t done with the US yet, adding that “some signs” suggest the wave of superbowl parties across the US could spark a wave of new cases in the coming weeks, an assertion that appears entirely speculative. It added that these threats are “compounded” by the fact that new mutant strains could risk taking root despite the vaccination effort.

  Outside the US, Europe finally managed to finalize a deal with Pfizer-BioNTech for 200MM more doses of their vaccines, as well as for another 150MM Moderna jabs.

  Meanwhile, Auckland’s three-day lockdown is coming to an end end after authorities expressed confidence that the latest community outbreak is contained. Auckland will move to Alert Level 2 at midnight on Wednesday, allowing schools and businesses to reopen. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern added that the remainder of New Zealand will move to level 1, meaning people no longer have to observe social distancing or limit the size of gatherings, as cases in the country are essentially back at zero.

  Finally, in France,  officials extended the duration of quarantine to 10 days for those who test positive in the northeastern part of the country where virus circulation and the prevalence of new mutant strains is particularly high.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/17/2021 – 18:25

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