Oct 18

Today’s News 18th October 2020

  • The American Revolution – The Sequel
    The American Revolution – The Sequel

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 10/17/2020 – 23:30

    Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

    The US is the most observed country in the world. Since it’s the world’s current empire (and since it is beginning its death throes as an empire), it’s fascinating to watch.

    Those of us outside of the US watch it like Americans watch TV. It’s like a slow-motion car wreck that we observe almost daily, eager to see what’s going to happen next. We criticise the madness of it all, yet we can’t take our eyes off the unfolding drama. It has all the excitement of a blockbuster movie.

    • The national debt is, by far, the highest of any country in history.

    • The economic system is a house of cards, getting shakier every day.

    • The government has become mired in progress-numbing fascism and increasing collectivism.

    • The government is aggressively creating the world’s most organized police state.

    • The majority of the population have become wasteful, spendthrift consumers who apathetically hope that their government will somehow solve their problems.

    • The media consistently misrepresents international events, prodding the citizenry into accepting that the ongoing invasion of multiple other countries is essential.

    • The most popular candidates for president (both parties) are the candidates that are the most egotistical, out-of-control blowhards who preach provocative rhetoric rather than real solutions.

    Still, most Americans retain the hope that, somehow, it will all work out.

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    Hope Is a Desire, Not a Plan

    There are growing numbers of Americans who have accepted that the US is unravelling rapidly and is headed for a social, economic, and political collapse of one form or another.

    Some talk of a new revolution (but hopefully a peaceful one, of the Tea Party sort). Some imagine that, if they can store enough guns and ammunition in their homes, they might be able to make a stand against government authorities. Others mull over the idea of organised secession by some of the states. A small, but growing, number are quietly leaving for more promising destinations.

    Except for the last of these, most of the “hopes” are understandable, but any attempt at a “Second American Revolution” is unlikely to succeed.

    Why? Well, just for a start,

    • The power of the US state is far greater than that of King George III in the late eighteenth century.

    • The present US state would be fighting on its own ground, not some continent thousands of miles across the ocean.

    • The US state is committed to the concept that it dealt definitively (and forever) with the concept of secession between 1861 and 1865.

    But, for the sake of argument, let’s say that a breakup of the union, or complete removal and replacement of the government were possible in the US. What then?

    Well, unfortunately, here comes the really bad news for those who hope that the US could start over as the free nation it was in its infancy:

    • In the late eighteenth century, America was a largely agrarian collection of colonies. Colonists had to work hard just to survive, so the work ethic and self-reliance were paramount in the colonists’ makeup. They were a brave people who were accustomed to providing for themselves and physically fighting off those who would challenge them.

    • Colonists received no significant largesse from the British or local governments. No welfare, no social security, no Medicare or Medicaid, no benefits of any kind.

    • Colonists made their own daily decisions. They had no government schools or media telling them what to think or what choices to make. They relied on common sense and self-determination to guide their decisions and actions.

    Today, of course, the opposite is true. Less than 2% of Americans are involved in agriculture. A mere 9% are actually employed in the production of goods. They are rarely directly involved in their own physical protection (Most, if not all, combat is overseas and fought by defence contractors or those who voluntarily serve the military).

    Most Americans receive benefits of one type or another from their government. Most recipients regard these benefits as “essential” and could not get by without them.

    Most Americans receive their opinions from the media. Although this is not apparent to many Americans, it’s glaringly clear to those outside the US who can only shake their heads at the misinformation proffered by the US media and the wholesale acceptance of this “alternate reality” by so many Americans.

    But what bearing does this have on what the future would be for Americans if they were to become determined enough to either remove their entire government or, alternatively, for some states to secede?

    There have been many revolutions in the history of the world, both peaceful and otherwise. In the case of the American Revolution of 1776, the colonists themselves were largely self-contained as a people and possessed the ideal ethos to succeed as a productive country.

    But this has rarely been true in history. Whenever a people have been heavily dependent on the State in one way or another, they had become accustomed to receiving largesse at the expense of others. This is a major, major factor. Such a group is unlikely in the extreme to either produce or elect a Washington or a Jefferson. They almost always choose, instead, to fall in behind someone who promises largesse from the State. In choosing such leaders, the people are more likely to receive a Robespierre or a Lenin. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

    The pervasive difficulty here lies in the erroneous concept that there can be a return to freedom whilst maintaining the dependency upon largesse from the State. The two are mutually exclusive. Those who seek a return to greater freedom must also accept that “freedom for all” means an end to the State being empowered to steal from one person in order to give to another.

    Or, as stated by Frédéric Bastiat in the mid-nineteenth century, “Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavours to live at the expense of everybody else.”

    Whether the US continues on its present downward progression, or if it breaks free in a bid for greater freedom, the eventual outcome is likely to have more to do with the collectivist mindset of the majority than with the libertarian vision of a few.

    *  *  *

    Right now, the US is the most polarized it has been since the Civil War. If you’re wondering what comes next, then you’re not alone. The political, economic, and social implications of the 2020 vote will impact all of us. That’s exactly why bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released this urgent new video about how to prepare for what comes next. Click here to watch it now.

  • Watch Next-Gen Sikorsky-Boeing Helicopter Conduct "Rigorous Flight Test At High Speeds"
    Watch Next-Gen Sikorsky-Boeing Helicopter Conduct "Rigorous Flight Test At High Speeds"

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 10/17/2020 – 23:00

    A little more than a year ago, we brought the Sikorsky-Boeing SB-1 Defiant to the attention of our readers, outlining how this “advanced aircraft” was on track to become the US Army’s next helicopter.

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    The Defiant is set to replace the iconic UH-60 Black Hawk and Apache attack helicopters in the coming years. Here is the development timeline and potential dates of the new aircraft entering operating capability with the service. 

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    In 2019, readers saw the first round of flight tests of the new helicopter. While it only hovered several dozen feet above the ground, the test did not show the aircraft conducting high speeds and impressive flight maneuverability, until now: 

    The Sikorsky-Boeing team continues to make significant progress as we advance DEFIANT’s rigorous flight test program. With every flight, as we continue to increase DEFIANT’s speed, angle of bank, and climb rate, we are gathering important data, expanding our speed and maneuverability envelope, and validating our modeling and simulation tools.

    On Oct. 12, with only about two-thirds prop torque and engine power, DEFIANT achieved 211 knots straight and level and 232 knots in a descent. We are excited about the results we are seeing and what the future holds to bring this capability to the warfighter. – read a description of SB1 Defiant’s YouTube channel. 

    Here’s the newly released video of the next-generation helicopter traveling at 266 mph. 

    Here’s the first test flight (2019) of Defiant. 

    Flush with cash, the Pentagon has been on a spending spree to modernize its services. President Trump has repeatedly bragged about spending more than $2.5 trillion on the military. 

    As for the other weapon upgrades, the Pentagon has spent billions of dollars on, well, we’ll list a few below:

  • Before The Bidens "Did" Ukraine, There Was Iraq… And Serbia
    Before The Bidens "Did" Ukraine, There Was Iraq… And Serbia

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 10/17/2020 – 22:30

    Authored by James George Jatras via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    The United States approaches the November 2020 election with growing apprehension, even dread.

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    Among the possibilities:

    For those who have followed events outside the United States during the past few decades, much of this sounds familiar. We’ve seen it before – inflicted on other countries.

    Now It’s Coming Home to the U.S.

    As explained by Revolver News, what happens in America next to a great extent may be a form of blowback from a specific event: the U.S.-supported 2014 regime change operation in Ukraine:

    ‘A “Color Revolution” in this context refers to a specific type of coordinated attack that the United States government has been known to deploy against foreign regimes, particularly in Eastern Europe deemed to be “authoritarian” and hostile to American interests. Rather than using a direct military intervention to effect regime change as in Iraq, Color Revolutions attack a foreign regime by contesting its electoral legitimacy, organizing mass protests and acts of civil disobedience, and leveraging media contacts to ensure favorable coverage to their agenda in the Western press.

    ‘It would be disturbing enough to note a coordinated effort to use these exact same strategies and tactics domestically to undermine or overthrow President Trump. The ominous nature of what we see unfolding before us only truly hits home when one realizes that the people who specialize in these Color Revolution regime change operations overseas are, literally, the very same people attempting to overthrow Trump by using the very same playbook. Given that the most famous Color Revolution was the [2004] “Orange Revolution” in the Ukraine, and that Black Lives Matter is being used as a key component of the domestic Color Revolution against Trump, we can encapsulate our thesis at Revolver with the simple remark that “Black is the New Orange.”’

    This hardly should come as a surprise. The same government agencies and their corporate, NGO, and think tank cronies that are now weaponizing Black Lives Matter, Antifa, other Wokesters, and military putsch plotters here at home to remove Trump have turned regime change abroad into an art form. Ukraine was one of their signal successes, featuring a cast of characters later key to the failed “Ukrainegate” impeachment.

    Another consequence of regime change: corruption. As the old saying goes, any idiot can turn an aquarium into fish soup, but no one has yet figured out how to reverse the process. Once a country gets broken it tends to stay broken, whether the “breaking” is accomplished by military means (Serbia 1999, Iraq 2003, Libya 2011) or by a color revolution from the streets (Serbia 2000, Georgia 2003, Ukraine 2004-2005 and again in 2014, Kyrgyzstan 2005, Lebanon 2005, Armenia 2018, plus many others of varying degrees of success, and failures in Iran, Russia, Venezuela, China (Hong Kong), and Belarus). With the target nation’s institutions in shambles, the dregs take over – in Libya, for example, even to the point of reintroducing trade in sub-Saharan African slaves, whose black lives evidently don’t matter to anyone at all.

    Iraq: Crush, Corrupt, Cash In

    Finally, once regime change occurs and corruption is rampant, another shoe drops: foreign vultures descend on the carcass, profiteers who in many cases are the very same people that helped to create the chaos on which they are cashing in. Invariably, these carpetbaggers are well-connected individuals in the aggressor states and organizations positioned on the inside track both for the carve-up of the target country’s resources and (the word “hypocrisy” doesn’t begin to describe it) for funds to implement “reform” and “reconstruction” of the devastated target.

    The showcase of this scam, pursuant to Colin Powell’s reported “Pottery Barn Rule” (You break it, you own it) was the money ostensibly spent on rebuilding Iraq, despite assurances from the war’s advocates that it would pay for itself. With the formal costs conservatively set at over $60 billion to $138 billion out of a tab for the war of over two trillion dollars, the lion’s share of it went to U.S. and other vendors, including the notorious $1.4 billion no-bid contract to Halliburton subsidiary KBR, of which then-Vice President Dick Cheney, a major proponent of the war, had been a top executive. (“Rand Paul Says Dick Cheney Pushed for the Iraq War So Halliburton Would Profit.”)

    In Ukraine, Biden’s Son Also Rises

    The predatory cronyism vignette most pertinent to the Black/Orange regime change op now unfolding before us with the intent of installing Joe Biden in the Oval Office is that of his son, Hunter, and a Ukrainian energy company with a sketchy reputation, Burisma Holdings. (Right at the outset, even some of Hunter’s associates though the gig with Burisma was too “toxic” and broke off ties with him.) Though ignored or dismissed as fake news and a conspiracy theory by Democrats and legacy media (or do I repeat myself?), the facts are well enough known and fit the Iraq pattern to a T: then-Vice President Joe Biden pushed for regime change in Ukraine, which succeeded in February 2014 with the ouster of the constitutionally elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. In April 2014, Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, was brought onto Burisma’s board (along with a fellow named Devon Archer, later convicted of unrelated fraud) at an exorbitant level of compensation that made little sense in light of Hunter’s nonexistent expertise in the energy business – but which made plenty of sense given that his dad was not only Veep but the Obama administration’s point man on policy toward Ukraine, including foreign assistance money. [NOTE: It now has come out that in 2015 Hunter put his dad, the U.S. Vice President, in direct contact with Burisma, news the giant tech firms sought to suppress on social media.]

    When a troublesome Ukrainian prosecutor named Viktor Shokin seemed to be taking too much interest in Burisma, Papa Joe came to the rescue, openly threatening the western-dependent politicians installed after Ukraine’s 2014 color revolution with withholding of a billion dollars in U.S. aid until Shokin, whom Joe unironically alleged to be “corrupt,” got the heave-ho. As Tucker Carlson nails it, Shokin’s ouster followed a direct request from Burisma’s Clinton-connected PR firm, Blue Star Strategies, to Hunter to lobby his dad to get Shokin off their back. Joe did just what was asked. He later bragged: “I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here [i.e., Kiev] in, I think it was about six hours.’ I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”

    But First There Was Serbia

    Today many people remember Iraq, some have a clue about Ukraine. But Serbia, which preceded them, is off the radar screen of most Americans. To recap:

    As a Senator in the 1990s, Joe Biden was one of the most militant advocates of U.S. military action against Serbs during the breakup of the Yugoslav federation, first in Croatia (1991-95), then in Bosnia (1992-95), and then in Serbia’s province of Kosovo (1998- 1999). (As has been said about others like Hillary Clinton and the late John McCain, Biden evidently has never met a war he didn’t like. Along with Hillary, in 2003 Biden helped to whip Senate Democrat votes for the Bush-Cheney Iraq war.) Channeling his inner John McCain, Biden continually called for the U.S. to bomb, bomb, bomb bomb the Serbs while (in a foreshadowing of the Obama-Biden administration’s support for jihad terrorists in Libya and Syria, which ultimately resulted in the appearance of ISIS) pushed successfully for sending weapons to the Islamist regime in Bosnia and then for the U.S. to arm the Islamo-narco-terrorist group known as the “Kosovo Liberation Army” (KLA).

    Joe Biden was the primary sponsor of the March 1999 Kosovo war authorization for military action against Serbia and Montenegro, S. Con. Res. 21. (As a little remembered historical note, Biden’s resolution might be seen as the last nail in the coffin of Congress’s constitutional war power. While S. Con. Res 21 passed the Senate, it failed in the House on a 213-213 tie vote, with Republicans overwhelmingly voting Nay. It didn’t matter. Bill Clinton, reeling from the Lewinsky scandal, went ahead with the bombing campaign anyway.) The ensuing 78-day NATO air operation had little impact on Serbia’s military but devastated the country’s infrastructure and took hundreds of civilian lives. (Even now, more than 20 years later, Serbia suffers from elevated cancer levels attributed to depleted uranium munitions.) But for Jihad Joe even that wasn’t punishment enough for people he collectively demonized as “illiterate degenerates, baby killers, butchers, and rapists.” In May 1999, at the height of the NATO air assault, he called for the introduction of U.S. ground troops (“we should announce there’s going to be American casualties”) followed by “a Japanese-German style occupation.”

    Eventually the bombing stopped in June 1999 when then-Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević acceded to temporary international occupation of Kosovo on the condition that the province would remain part of Serbia, as codified in United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244. It was a promise the U.S. and NATO, not to mention their European Union (EU) concubine, had no intention of keeping. Under the nose of the NATO occupation, ostensibly demobilized KLA thugs were given virtually free rein to terrorize the Serbian population, two-thirds of whom were driven out along with Jews and Roma, the rest sheltering in enclaves where they remain to this day. Orthodox Christian churches and monasteries, many of them centuries old, were particular targets for destruction and desecration. KLA commanders – who were also kingpins in the Kosovo Albanian mafia dealing in sex slaves, drugs, weapons, and even human organs – were handed local administration.

    In 2007 Senator Biden praised the new order as a “victory for Muslim democracy” and “a much-needed example of a successful U.S.-Muslim partnership.” A year later, the Bush administration sought to complete the job by ramming through Kosovo’s independence in barefaced violation of UNSCR 1244 and despite strong Russian objections. But instead of resolving anything the result was a frozen conflict that persists today, with about half of the United Nations’ member states recognizing Kosovo and half not. Touting itself as the most pro-American “country” [sic] in the world, the Kosovo pseudo-state became a prime recruiting ground for ISIS.

    But hey, business was good! Just as in Iraq, the politically well-connected, including former officials instrumental in the attack on Serbia and occupying Kosovo, flocked to the province fueled by lavish aid subsidies from the U.S. and the EU, which for a while made Kosovo one of the biggest per capita foreign assistance recipient “countries” in the world. One such vulture – sorry, entrepreneur – was former Secretary of State Madeleine we-think-a-half-million-dead-Iraqi-children-is-worth-it Albright, a prominent driver of the Clinton administration’s hostile policy on top of her personal Serb-hatred. Albright sought to cash in to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars on sale of the mobile telephone company PTK, originally a Yugoslav state-owned firm that was “privatized” (i.e., stolen) in 2005 as a joint stock company, but who later dropped her bid when it attracted unwanted publicity. Also in the hunt for Kosovo riches was former NATO Supreme Commander and operational chief of the Kosovo war General Wesley Clark, who reportedly cornered a major share of the occupied province’s coal resources under a sweetheart deal that seems to have vanished from public scrutiny since first reported in 2016.

    At the moment there seems to be no smoking gun of a direct Biden family payout, à la Ukraine, but there is a possible trail via Hunter’s Burisma-buddy Devon Archer and Archer’s fellow-defendant John “Yanni” Galanis, who in turn is connected to top Kosovo Albanian politicians. In any case, the Biden clan seems to have paid a lot of attention to Kosovo for not having skin in the game. Joe’s late son and Delaware Attorney General, Beau, worked in Kosovo following the war to train local prosecutors as part of an OSCE (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe) “rule of law” mission (admittedly a big task in a mafia-run pseudo-state), for which a road was named after him near the massive U.S. base Camp Bondsteel. With Hunter on hand for the naming ceremony, Joe Biden took the opportunity to express his “condolences” to Serbian families who lost loved ones in the NATO air assault – of which he was a primary advocate.

    A ‘Shokin’ Demand  

    Perhaps the best parallel between Biden’s handiwork in Ukraine and his interest in Kosovo also relates to getting rid of an inconvenient individual. But in this case, the person in question wasn’t a state official like Burisma prosecutor Viktor Shokin but a hierarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

    In May 2009 Vice President Biden insisted on visiting one of Kosovo’s most venerable Serbian Orthodox Christian sites, the Visoki Dečani monastery. Ruling Bishop Artemije of the Eparchy of Raška and Prizren, which includes Kosovo and Metohija, refused to give his blessing for the visit, in effect telling Biden he was not welcome. Bishop Artemije long had been a bane of Biden and others advocating detachment of Kosovo from Serbia, starting with his first mission to Washington in 1997 as war clouds gathered. In 2004 Bishop Artemije sued the NATO powers in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg following their inaction to protect his flock during an anti-Serbian rampage by Muslim Albanian militants in March of that year. Then, in March 2006, as preparations were underway for a “final solution” to the Kosovo issue, Bishop Artemije launched an intensive multinational lobbying and public relations effort (in which Yours Truly was the lead professional) to try to derail the U.S. policy to which Biden had devoted so much attention. While the Bishop’s campaign was unsuccessful in reversing U.S. policy it was instrumental in delaying it for over a year – to howls of outrage from Biden’s associates in Washington. Thus, for Biden, the monastery visit snub by Bishop Artemije was adding insult to injury.

    The end for Bishop Artemije came a few months later, at the beginning of 2010 at the time of two visits to Kosovo by U.S. Admiral Mark P. Fitzgerald, then Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe and Africa, and Commander, Allied Joint Force Command (JFC) Naples, (who retired later that year, becoming, unsurprisingly, a consultant “with numerous defense and commercial maritime and aviation contractors”). At that time, an unconfirmed report indicated that a high NATO officer (whether Admiral Fitzgerald or someone else is not specified) stated in the course of one of his local meetings (this is verbatim or a close paraphrase): “What we need here is a more cooperative bishop.” (More details are available here. Since that posting last year the NATO command in Naples seems to have scrubbed the items about Fitzgerald’s 2010 visits from their site.)

    Shortly afterwards, Biden’s troublesome priest was forcibly removed by police and exiled from his see, without ecclesiastical trial, by Church authorities in Belgrade under pressure from compliant Serbian politicians installed after the October 2000 color revolution, in turn pressured by NATO. The pretext? Transparently baseless charges of financial wrongdoing. In other words, bogus accusations of “corruption” – like against Ukraine’s Shokin.

    One could almost hear Joe Biden chortle: “Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”

    But Look at the Bright Side…

    Back to the incipient coup facing the United States, there should be no illusion that what’s at stake in the unfolding scenario for the removal of Donald Trump is not just his presidency but the survival of the historic American ethnos of which he is seen as an avatar by both his supporters and detractors. Remember, we’re dealing with predators and scavengers who are happy to burn the old, evil America down as long as they can achieve total power and continue to feather their cushy nests. Short of a blowout Trump victory by a margin too big to hijack, we’re headed for a dystopian state of affairs.

    If they do manage to remove Trump, “by any means necessary,” and Joe Biden takes the helm, we can anticipate a bevy of globalist warmonger appointees that make Trump’s team look like disciples of Mahatma Gandhi. Among the names floated like Nicholas Burns, Antony Blinken, Michele Flournoy, Evelyn Farkas, and Anne-Marie Slaughter, all were on board with Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, Syria … [NOTE: The Atlantic Council, known as NATO’s semi-official think tank in Washington and which will be instrumental in staffing a future Joe Biden administration, also has been the beneficiary of generous donations from Hunter Biden’s paymaster, Burisma.]

    It’s a recipe for wars, regime changes, and color revolutions galore.

    But to finish on a positive note, the potential future business opportunities will be endless!

  • Visualizing The World's Gold & Silver Coin Production Vs. Money Creation
    Visualizing The World's Gold & Silver Coin Production Vs. Money Creation

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 10/17/2020 – 22:00

    Both precious metals and cash serve as safe haven assets, intended to limit losses during market turmoil. However, as Visual Capitalist’s Jenna Ross notes, while modern currencies can be printed by central governments, precious metals derive value from their scarcity.

    In this infographic from Texas Precious Metals, we compare the value of the world’s gold and silver coin production to global money creation.

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    Total Production Per Person, 2019

    We calculated the value of global currency issuance in 2019 as well as precious metal coins minted, and divided by the global population to get total production per person.

    Throughout, global money supply is a proxy based on the 5 largest reserve currencies: the U.S. dollar, Euro, Japanese Yen, Sterling Pound, and Chinese Renminbi.

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    The value of new global money supply was 600 times higher than the value of gold coins minted, and 3,700 times higher than silver coins minted.

    Put another way, for each ounce of minted gold coin, the global money supply increased by more than $908,000.

    Change in Annual Production, 2019 vs. 2010

    Compared to the start of the decade, here’s how annual production levels have changed:

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    Annual increases to global money supply have increased by one-third, far outpacing the change in the world’s gold and silver coin production.

    Even more recently, how has production changed during the COVID-19 pandemic?

    The COVID-19 Effect

    In response to the global pandemic, central banks have enacted numerous measures to help support economies—including issuing new currency.

    The global money supply increased by more than $11.8 trillion in the first half of 2020. In fact, the value of printed currency was 1,600 times higher than the value of minted gold coins over the same timeframe.

    Investors may want to consider which asset is more vulnerable to inflation as they look to protect their portfolios.

    Want to learn more? See the U.S. version of this graphic.

  • The World's Most Bearish Hedge Fund Just Did Something It Hasn't Done In 8 Years
    The World's Most Bearish Hedge Fund Just Did Something It Hasn't Done In 8 Years

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 10/17/2020 – 21:33

    At the start of 2012 Horseman Global did something which virtually none of its peers dared or would dare to do: it took its formerly 100% equity net long exposure to deep net short, launching an 8 year period in which the fund would be bearish month after month on stocks, yet as the monthly P&L table below shows, it also manged to generate impressive annual returns over this same period (with the exceptions of 2016 and 2019) despite constant central bank intervention pushing stocks relentlessly higher, largely thanks to the Fund’s significant bond long position.

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    Yet after a dismal 2019, in which fund CIO Russell Clark finally met his match in Powell as it full-on fought the Fed and the Fed won, resulting in a 35% drop last year, things changed dramatically at Horseman, which has since rebranded itself as Russell Clark Investment Management.

    First, as we reported back in April, the fund suddenly ditched its long-running bet on deflation, with Clark saying he used the opportunity offered by the Covid-19 crisis “to exit deflationary positions. We have sold all our government bonds, and I am now trying to short assets that have benefited from very low interest rates, wages and commodity prices, namely commercial property, restaurants and utilities (and potentially private equity).”

    And yet, the fund was still net bearish on stocks, because as Clarke explained, “if inflation appears, then US markets are in big trouble. For me, the 1970s and stagflation beckons. Short bonds and long commodities look right, with a bias to shorting US equities. I see inflationary assets outperforming deflationary assets.”

    Fast forward six months later, when things aren’t working out quite as expected because in a year that had seen wild swing in the fund’s P&L, September proved to be the worst month of 2020 for Clark, with the fund losing 9.25%, and cutting its return for the year by more than half to 8.75%. Worse, it also meant that the AUM for the Russell Clark Investment Management strategy had dropped to just $100 million, from $150MM at the start of the year. 

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    … and was less than 20% of what it was at the start of 2019, which with a -34.9% return, would end up the worst year on record for Clark (in May of 2019, Bloomberg profiled Clark saying he is “betting it all on a market crash“, which did in fact materialize… unfortunately several months too late to help the hedge fund CIO).

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    But what we find most notable is that sometime in the past few months, Horseman, pardon Russell Clark, underwent a historic position and sentiment shift and after 8 years of being net short, the fund is now back on the bullish bandwagon with a 23.2% net long position (with no exposure to bonds).

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    So what happened?

    Well, as is customary, Russell first gives a big picture view of what is going on in the hedge fund world, where it is hardly a secret, nothing works any more as central banks flipped the market on its head in their nuclear bomb response to the covid pandemic, and handed it to 16-year-old Robinhood daytraders on a silver platter. Needless to say, that made chasing momentum and consensus positioning critical, and crushed any contrarians who shied away from the herd. Sadly for Clark, he was among them, and the result has been a rollercoaster for both the fund, and Clark’s investment positioning, with the fund manager claiming that Covid-19 not only “allowed central banks to short circuit the natural de-leveraging process”, but also “literally turned the world upside down” making it extremely difficult for Clarke to “develop new ideas.”

    Your fund lost 9.25% this month, from the long book and the currency book.

    My big thing, for what it is worth, is finding something that no one else knows about and then building a fund around that. Ideas like Ireland was not going to default on its bonds, or iron ore prices were going to fall, shale oil drillers will never make any money or mall REITS are shorts. Simple ideas, which you can then build structures around, that both make money and fill an investment need for clients. For that reason, I have tended to shy away from consensus ideas and momentum, unless it explicitly fits in with that big idea.

    In the last couple of years, the big idea was that clearinghouses were mispricing risk, market products that sold volatility would cause volatility to spike, and that this should result in a lot of financial bankruptcies and a significantly lower stock market. Covid-19 caused this to come to fore, but also allowed central banks to short circuit the natural de-leveraging process that would have occurred as a result. Usually I have a few ideas on the go, so that I can naturally move from one idea to another, but Covid-19 literally turned the world upside down, and so I have had to push myself harder than usual this year to develop new ideas.

    So what is the one unifying idea behind Clark’s latest trades? As he says, “now the simple idea is that inflation is coming. All the inflation indicators that I look at; things like the Australian dollar, the Nikkei, Japanese Government Bond yields, the Transport index, Chinese Yuan and the CRB Raw Industrial Index, all say inflation but the loss in the fund this month says otherwise.”

    In terms of specific trades, Clark had focused on the nat gas market whose rebalancing he thought was “signalling inflation.”

    And certainly, there are signs of change there – but I can’t help noticing that it is Asian bond yields that are rising, not US bond yields, which is where you would think a rebalancing natural gas market would affect first.”

    Perhaps there is a better place to bet on rising prices: Food.

    Towards the end of the month, I revisited my presentations and noticed that Chinese pork prices have been very strong and are at 6 times that of the US. Can Chinese food prices really cause inflation in the rest of Asia? The answer is probably yes, but whether that will be bad inflation or good inflation is hard to tell. Naturally, high food prices are negative for consumption, but Asia has more farmers than anywhere else in the world, and high crop prices have tended to create consumption booms in places like India, Indonesia, and the rest of ASEAN. If China starts to increase imports of food from Asia, it could be very economically beneficial.

    Still, as Asian bond yields have made it clear, “higher food price will cause bond yields to rise” according to Clark who adds that “food and food prices have been at the heart of every major Chinese revolution and crisis for the last 150 years. For that reason, I expect Chinese rates to stay high, and for the Chinese Yuan to keep appreciating.”

    In short, Clark “started the month thinking that oil and gas prices were going to drive inflation, and ended the month thinking it will be food inflation.” He is hardly alone, because as he noted, food exporting currencies are performing “surprisingly well, and food related stocks trading much better than oil and gas names.”

    One key anchor to the fund’s new food inflation obsession comes from none other than Warren Buffett according to Clark, who explains as follows:

    To answer one final question, how do I know that no one knows about food inflation? Well I just read a long article in The Economist, trying to understand why Warren Buffett bought the Japanese trading houses. The Economist had no idea of course. Japanese trading houses are the number one companies to benefit from food inflation in Asia. That is, I believe, why. If you don’t believe me, start googling about businesses that export pork, bananas or any other major food. We are moving to a portfolio that is long food, short bonds.

    One small caveat: last week we wrote “Food Shortage Simulation Predicts 400% Increase In Food Prices By 2030“, so to say that “no one knows about food inflation” may be a bit of a stretch.

    Finally, Clark’s latest dramatic portfolio reassessment means that “starting late September, and continuing in October”, Clark is “moving our commodity longs to food related names.” This is likely good news for the fund’s remaining LPs as it also means is that Clark “can focus the fund down to fewer names on both the long side and short side, as I now have a better idea of what is going on, which should reduce volatility going forward.”

    Two final observations: while the fund is net long some of the most inflation-sensitive sectors such as financials, basic materials, industrials and energy, it remains short the covid-impacted industries such as restaurants and transports; and while we assume the tech short is just a bet on mean reversion, the substantial short in utilities is just another way for the fund to go short Treasuries.

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    Finally, in terms of geographic positioning, one can summarize Clark’s latest view simply as “long Asia, short the US.”

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  • Beijing Views US Consulates As "Hostile Forces", Orders Monitoring Of Diplomats: Leaked Documents
    Beijing Views US Consulates As "Hostile Forces", Orders Monitoring Of Diplomats: Leaked Documents

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 10/17/2020 – 21:30

    Authored by Eva Fu via The Epoch Times,

    Chinese authorities see U.S. consulates as “hostile forces” that conduct “infiltration and sabotage” activities on Chinese soil and have ordered officials to monitor key U.S. diplomats, according to a leaked document obtained by The Epoch Times.

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    In a four-page “work plan” dated April 2018, the Leizhou Foreign and Overseas Chinese Affairs Bureau described the “U.S. and other Western consulates in China” as key targets that could threaten the region’s political and social stability.

    At a time when bilateral relations hit a historical low, the document from Leizhou city of China’s southeastern Guangdong Province offers a rare glimpse into how the Chinese regime deals with American diplomats.

    All departments and units within the bureau must work to counter such influences, by effectively “blocking [the consulates] from establishing connections with key [Chinese] political figures, prominent lawyers, ‘public intellectuals,’ ‘rights defenders,’ and special interest groups,” the bureau told its staff.

    The bureau’s goal is to “break all threats and nets” and leave no room for such attempts, the document stated.

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    A policeman stands guard in front of the U.S. consulate in Chengdu, southwestern China’s Sichuan province, on July 26, 2020. (Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images)

    Methods

    To address the perceived threats, the bureau outlined a four-step plan, with measures such as watching for “infiltration activities” organized by foreign consulates in Guangzhou city, the capital of Guangdong, and “use all efforts”—including “reminders, warnings, and a mild degree of force”—to discourage the aforementioned individuals from attending events held by consulates.

    The bureau staff were to monitor organizations and individuals that have “close ties” with the foreign consulates, and gather any relevant information, such as their background and any changes in their “asset accounts,” to cut off any “financial enticements” from U.S. consulates.

    The office also planned to establish a database on “key” foreign diplomats in China and use big data to track down their whereabouts. “It’s a countermeasure against ongoing infiltration and subversion,” the document stated.

    The bureau cautioned the staff to be “strategic” in balancing between “prevention and control” and “collaboration and taking advantage.”

    Given that Guangdong borders Hong Kong, the bureau also detailed in a separate section how staff should guard against any “contamination” from “opposition forces.” The “pro-independence elements” may attempt to “sneak in” through participating in cultural exchange programs and inviting Chinese scholars to Hong Kong and convert them into “domestic agents,” it warned.

    A former British colony, Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule in 1997 and was promised a high degree of autonomy, which the regime stripped away this July with a sweeping national security law. The Chinese Communist Party routinely characterizes Hong Kong pro-democracy activists who are vocal about Beijing’s encroachment on the city’s affairs as separatists, and accuse them of supporting the territory’s independence from the mainland.

    It stressed that in the event such opposition forces “really need to enter” Guangdong, they must be strictly monitored and prosecuted if they exhibit any problematic behaviors. The document also stated plans to collaborate with relevant higher government departments in Hong Kong, such as by supplying intelligence, to eliminate any of Hong Kong’s “negative influences” on Guangdong.

    The document ended by stating the “counter-infiltration” work would be on the daily agenda. The bureau formed a “leadership team” comprising top officials, including the bureau director, to take up this task.

    The U.S. State Department did not immediately return an inquiry regarding the leaked document.

    Interrupted Academic Exchanges

    While the document focused primarily on Guangdong, it is unclear whether other Chinese cities have issued similar orders.

    A separate internal document from 2016 suggested that Chinese authorities have oversight over how local academic institutions can interact with U.S. diplomats.

    In an August 2016 meeting with top officials in northeastern Jilin province, then-U.S. ambassador to China Max Baucus raised concerns about consular access to multiple Chinese universities, citing abrupt cancelations of scheduled conferences with U.S. consular officials in the nearby city of Shenyang, according to a government meeting minutes provided to The Epoch Times.

    Wang Zhiwei, then-director of the Jilin foreign affairs office, blamed the timing of the conference, saying that students were all on summer vacation and thus, wouldn’t be able to attend; then-Jilin governor Jiang Chaoliang, in turn, replied that any activities that “don’t endanger China’s national security” and “spread positive energy should be fine.”

    “I want to clarify that there shouldn’t be any issue with our university visits. There are no subversion activities,” Baucus had told Jiang during the meeting. ” He then asked Jiang to “urge the institutions not to reject interacting with us.”

    Calls for Reciprocity

    The United States has decried a lack of reciprocity when it comes to diplomatic interactions with the Chinese regime.

    On Sept. 10, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called out Beijing’s “hypocrisy” after Chinese state media People’s Daily rejected an op-ed drafted by then-U.S. Ambassador to China Terry Branstad. Pompeo cast the state newspaper’s reasoning as “a litany of grievances.”

    “The People’s Daily’s response once again exposes the Chinese Communist Party’s fear of free speech and serious intellectual debate–as well as Beijing’s hypocrisy when it complains about lack of fair and reciprocal treatment in other countries,” he said in a statement.

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    A worker attempts to remove the wall insignia of the US Consulate in Chengdu, southwestern China’s Sichuan province, on July 26, 2020. (Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images)

    The two countries have imposed restrictions on each other’s diplomatic missions since July, after the State Department moved to shut down the Chinese consulate in Houston over espionage concerns. In retaliation, Beijing closed the U.S. consulate in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province.

    On Sept. 2, Pompeo announced that senior Chinese diplomats in the United States will have to ask permission to visit U.S. college campuses and meet with local officials.

    “We’re simply demanding reciprocity. Access for our diplomats in China should be reflective of the access that Chinese diplomats in the United States have,” he told a news briefing on Sept. 2.

    The Chinese foreign ministry responded by applying restrictions on the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and consulates across China, including the one in Hong Kong.

  • California Is Blaming Its Crippled Economy On Climate Change
    California Is Blaming Its Crippled Economy On Climate Change

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 10/17/2020 – 21:05

    With mass exodus occurring from California and the state on the verge of going broke, Democrats aren’t blaming their decades old misunderstanding of economics – but rather are using climate change as the scapegoat. 

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    California is now turning to wildfires that have made their way through 4.1 million acres in the state to lay blame as to the state’s worsening financial state. The fires have cost just $1.1 billion to battle over the last three years, a relatively small sum for such a large state, according to Bloomberg.

    But, with the pandemic throwing a true wrench into the gears of the state’s economy – and the state’s residents leaving at an alarming clip – the state needs to blame its $54 billion hole in its budget on something. 

    Scott Anderson, Bank of the West’s chief economist, said: “Policy action in the next one to five years would be optimal, and probably sooner rather than later to move the economy in the right direction. Otherwise we’re going to be facing a pretty bleak economic future here in California.”

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    Anderson says the reversal of fortune for the state’s finances should be a “wake up call” about the impacts of climate change. We wonder if he’s ever heard of less government spending. 

    He also predicts the fires, coupled with Covid, will push the state’s unemployment rate to 10.4% this year and 8.8% in 2021. Those numbers are higher than the current forecasts of 8.4% and 6.9%. He said the trend of people leaving the state could be “more prolonged” than in the last recession.

    Patricia Healy, senior vice president of research at Cumberland Advisors, said that the wildfires: “may have inhabitants, insurers, and government questioning the viability of living there and continually rebuilding.” She also thinks the rise in “work from home” as a result of Covid will drive people out of the state.

    The time to up and leave may never get better. The state has somehow managed to maintain its credit rating and sellers are able to get massive sums for their homes if they decide to pick up and leave: median home prices in August hit $706,900, a record. 

    Gavin Newsom, who is overseeing the exodus, said last week: “This state six, seven months ago was dominating in so many different sectors. Those core tenets of this state remain still as alive and enlivened as they ever have been despite some of these situational challenges that we face.”

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    The state is spending about $205 million in fire prevention and management programs this year, which is down from $354 million in the prior year. Ironically, the big government Democrats in the state seem to want massive government spending on everything but the “climate change caused” problem of wildfires. 

    The fire trends in the state are “only expected to intensify,” according to Bloomberg. About 69% of the state’s economic output was exposed to fire risk in 2018 and that number is estimated to rise to 71%. 

    Sean McCarthy, head of municipal credit research at PIMCO, said: “It’s impossible to deny that these risks are not here now. We’re going to see the collision of climate change with the recession.”

    Meanwhile, Newsom’s administration has been focused on nothing but climate change since he has been in office. While the state has been “going to hell”, as President Trump put it in a recent Tweet, Newsom has been busy making sure gasoline powered cars aren’t available by 2035 and respecting the rights of transgendered prison inmates.

    With efficiency like that, we’re sure the state will turn right around…

  • In "Blunt Message" China Warns It Might Detain Americans If US Prosecutes PLA-Linked Academics
    In "Blunt Message" China Warns It Might Detain Americans If US Prosecutes PLA-Linked Academics

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 10/17/2020 – 20:55

    After federal agents this summer moved to detain and charge multiple visiting Chinese academics for their undisclosed links to the People’s Liberation Army while at US research universities or laboratories (often involving outright deception to federal agencies), Beijing has escalated things with its own unprecedented warning. 

    A WSJ exclusive published Saturday cites several sources to say Chinese government officials are threatening to arrest American nationals working or residing in China in response to the DOJ prosecutions of Chinese military-linked researchers. The report cites a series of warnings communicated via “multiple channels” since the summer, including directly to the US Embassy in Beijing.

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    Via Yahoo News

    Recall too that after a developing tit-for-tat, last month the Trump administration announced that it is “blocking” many students from China from obtaining visas to America, specifically graduate students focusing on research in scientific and medical fields over fears they could steal sensitive research, especially related to coronavirus data or the search for a vaccine. 

    And there was also the mid-July diplomatic fiasco involving Chinese national Tang Juan, a University of California-Davis researcher previously admitted on a J-1 visa, who was alleged to have hid out in the Chinese consulate in San Francisco after being sought by the FBI for lying about her PLA affiliation. She was taken into custody and charged later that month, along with a handful of others, including a visiting scholar at a Texas research institution.

    And three weeks ago a Chinese scientist accused of stealing trade secrets from a leading American researcher at the University of Virginia had all charges dropped against him after a court concluded he had authorization to access the information in question. But there’s now been monthly instances of the DOJ rounding up Chinese academics under such suspicions. 

    It now appears Beijing too is ready to go ‘gloves off’ as the WSJ details:

    The Chinese message, the people said, has been blunt: The U.S. should drop prosecutions of the Chinese scholars in American courts, or Americans in China might find themselves in violation of Chinese law.

    Though the threats up until now have not been detailed to the public, the warnings via diplomatic backchannels began this summer, according to the report, which characterized the communications as a “blunt message”.

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    File image via The New York Times

    “China started issuing the warning this summer after the U.S. began arresting a series of Chinese scientists… the people said,” the report adds.

    Though both sides, including the US State Department, are keeping mum over the potential retaliatory move Beijing is said to be mulling, the US last month did issue a travel advisory telling Americans that given deteriorating Sino-US relations on multiple fronts, especially the Hong Kong national security law issue and a growing blacklist related to Chinese tech firms, they must remain hyper aware when traveling of the possibility for the Chinese government to detain other countries’ citizens “to gain bargaining leverage over foreign governments.”

    However, Beijing has claimed that this is precisely what the United States and Western governments are doing in the first place, offering as a foremost example the case of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, which has marred Canada’s diplomatic ties with China. Beijing has said the US was clearly an “accomplice” in her continued detention. 

  • Has Our Luck Finally Run Out?
    Has Our Luck Finally Run Out?

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 10/17/2020 – 20:40

    Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via The Daily Reckoning,

    Long-term cycles escape our notice because they play out over many years or even decades; few noticed the decreasing rainfall in the Mediterranean region in 150 A.D.

    But, this gradual decline in rainfall slowly but surely reduced the grain harvests of the Roman Empire, which, coupled with rising populations, resulted in reduced caloric intake for many people.

    This weakened their immune systems in subtle ways, leaving them more vulnerable to the great Antonine Plague of 165 AD.

    The decline of temperatures in Northern Europe in the early 1300s led to “years without summer” and failed grain harvests, which reduced the caloric intake of most people and left them weakened and more vulnerable to the Black Plague, which swept Europe in 1347.

    I’ve mentioned the book The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire a number of times as a source for understanding the impact of natural cycles on human civilization.

    It’s important to note that the natural cycles and pandemics of 200 AD didn’t just cripple the Roman Empire; this same era saw the collapse of the mighty Parthian Empire of Persia, the kingdoms of India and the Han Dynasty in China.

    In addition to natural cycles, there are human socio-economic cycles of the debt and decay of civic values and the social contract: a proliferation of parasitic elites, a weakening of state finances and a decline in the purchasing power of wages/labor.

    Debt and Its Eventual Collapse

    The rising dependence on debt and its eventual collapse is a cycle noted by Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratieff and others. In fact, Peter Turchin listed these three dynamics as the key drivers of decisive discord of the kind that brings down empires and nations.

    All three are playing out globally in the present.

    In this context, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a political expression of long-brewing discontent with precisely these issues:

    The rise of self-serving parasitic elites, the decay/corruption of the social contract and state finances, and the decades-long decline in the purchasing power of wages/labor.

    Which brings us to karma, a topic of some confusion in Western cultures more familiar with Divine Retribution than with actions having consequences even without Divine Intervention, which is the essence of karma.

    Squandered Chances

    Broadly speaking, the U.S. squandered the opportunities presented by the end of the Cold War 30 years ago on hubristic Exceptionalism, wars of choice, parasitic elites and an unprecedented waste of resources on unproductive consumption.

    Now the plan — for lack of any real plan — is to borrow trillions of dollars to fund an even more spectacular orgy of unproductive consumption, on the bizarre belief that “money” can be conjured out of thin air in essentially infinite quantities and squandered, and there will magically be no consequences of this trickery in the real world.

    Actions have consequences, and after 30 years of waste, fraud and corruption being normalized by the parasitic elites while the purchasing power of labor decayed, the karmic consequences can no longer be delayed by doing more of what’s hollowed out the economy and society.

    Which brings us to luck…

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    Luck: The Overlooked Factor

    As a general rule, historians seek explanations, which leaves luck out of the equation. This gives us a false confidence in the predictability and power of human will and actions and cycles. Yes, cycles and human actions influence outcomes, but we do a great disservice by shunting luck into the shadows as a non-factor.

    If Emperor Pius had chosen someone other than Marcus Aurelius as his successor, someone weak, vain and self-absorbed — like so many of Rome’s late-stage emperors– then Rome would have fallen by 170 AD as the Antonine Plague crippled finances and the army, and the invading hordes would have swept the empire into the dustbin of history.

    It can be argued that only Marcus Aurelius had the experience and character to sell off the Imperial treasure in order to raise the money needed to pay the soldiers and spend virtually his entire term in power on the front lines of battle, preserving Rome from complete collapse.

    That was a good judgment by Pius but also good luck.

    As we ponder luck, consider the estimate that had the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago struck the Earth 30 minutes earlier or later, it would not have generated the Nuclear Winter that destroyed the dinosaurs.

    (A direct hit in deep water would have spawned a monstrous tsunami, but no dust cloud. A direct hit on land would have raised a dust cloud, but without the water vapor/steam generated by the vaporization of millions of gallons of seawater, the cloud wouldn’t have risen high enough to encircle the planet.)

    That was bad luck for the dinosaurs and good luck for the mammals who replaced them.

    A Great 75-Year Run

    The global economy has been extraordinarily lucky for 75 years. Food and energy have been cheap and abundant. (If you think food and energy are expensive now, think about prices doubling or tripling, and then doubling again.)

    In our complacency and hubris, we attribute this to our wonderful technologies, which we assume guarantee us permanent surpluses of energy and food. The idea that technology has reached hard limits or that it could fail doesn’t occur to us.

    We’ve taken good luck to be our birthright because it’s all we’ve known. We attribute this good fortune to things within our control — technology, wise investments and policies, etc.

    The possibility that all these powers that we consider so godlike are insignificant doesn’t occur to us because we’ve enjoyed the favorable winds of luck without even being aware of it.

    When times are good, modest reforms are all that’s needed to maintain the ship’s course. By “good times” I mean eras of rising prosperity, which generate bigger budgets, profits, tax revenues, paychecks, etc. — eras characterized by high levels of stability and predictability.

    Since stability has been the norm for 75 years, institutions and conventional thinking have both been optimized for incremental change. But we’re facing much more than incremental change.

    We are woefully unprepared for a long run of bad luck. My sense is the cycles have turned, and the good luck has drained from the hour-glass. Energy and food will no longer be cheap and abundant, our luck in leadership will vanish, and our vaunted technologies will fail to maintain an abundance so vast that we can squander the finite wealth of soil, water, resources and energy on mindless consumption.

    I’m reminded of a line from an Albert King song, “Born Under a Bad Sign” (composed by Booker T. Jones and William Bell): “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.”

    The next five years might have us singing this line, with feeling.

  • Twitter Refuses To Unlock NYPost Account Unless Paper Deletes Tweets About Hunter Biden
    Twitter Refuses To Unlock NYPost Account Unless Paper Deletes Tweets About Hunter Biden

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 10/17/2020 – 20:15

    By immediately condemning the Hunter Biden emails and photos published by the New York Post as the work of Russian hackers colluding with Rudy Giuliani, the MSM destroyed any credibility it might have had. As we pointed out earlier, more evidence has emerged to support Giuliani’s version of events – namely, that he was given a copy of the laptop’s hard drive and all of its contents by the owner of a Delaware computer-repair shop.

    But despite apologizing and acknowledging  “straight up blocking of URLs was wrong”, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has apparently not finished punishing the New York Post, because three days after the account was initially frozen, the New York Post hasn’t been able to tweet, and according to a NY Post report, Twitter has frozen the New York Post’s account until the paper’s social media managers agree to delete six tweets about Hunter Biden.

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    “Anyone who looks at The Post’s Twitter feed can’t even see the tweets about the Biden stories, which have been replaced by messages saying, ‘This Tweet is no longer available,'” the Post wrote on Friday.

    Twitter previously said the Post’s Hunter Biden stories violated the website’s Hacked Media Policy which prohibits the display of “hacked” information, an allegation that the Post called “baseless.” However, on Friday, Twitter updated that policy, saying it will start labeling content that violates its rules rather than remove it altogether “unless it is directly shared by hackers or those acting in concert with them.”

    Confusingly, though, the company said that these changes wouldn’t apply retroactively, meaning that the NYP still must delete the tweets if it wants to use its account again, even though readers can’t even see them.

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    Twitter confirmed in an interview with Fox Business that the NY Post “has been informed what is necessary to unlock their account.”

    Facebook, meanwhile, is temporarily restricting circulation of the story until an independent team of fact checkers has had time to investigate the claims, and certify they are real.

    While social media has been rife with speculation, in the days since the first NYP story was published, nobody has offered anything in the way of evidence – however circumstantial or unconvincing – that the materials were stolen by hackers. Beyond James Clapper’s ‘professional opinion’, the MSM has nothing to support these claims.

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  • Chinese Ambassador Makes Outrageous Veiled Threat To Canadians In Hong Kong
    Chinese Ambassador Makes Outrageous Veiled Threat To Canadians In Hong Kong

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 10/17/2020 – 19:50

    Canada and China are once again in a diplomatic battle over a range of issues — this time with Beijing threatening retaliation over Canada’s acceptance of activists from Hong Kong who are seeking political asylum.

    China’s ambassador to Canada Cong Peiwu issued a somewhat unprecedented threat to Ottawa late this week, saying that accepting anti-China activists could jeopardize the “health and safety” of 300,000 Canadians who live in Hong Kong.

    “We strongly urge the Canadian side not to grant so-called political asylum to those violent criminals in Hong Kong, because it is interference in China’s domestic affairs, and certainly it will embolden those violent criminals,” Cong said.

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    Ambassador Cong Peiwu

    “If the Canadian side really cares about the stability and prosperity in Hong Kong, and really cares about the good health and safety of those 300,000 Canadian passport holders in Hong Kong, and a large number of Canadian companies operating in Hong Kong, you should support those efforts to fight violent crimes.” This was widely taken as an ominous threat of retaliatory action against Canadian citizens and companies in the region.

    Ironically the ultra-provocative remarks came during an event marking the 50th anniversary of Canadian and Chinese diplomatic relations. When pressed over whether the statements were a threat, the ambassador left if open, replying: “That is your interpretation.”

    Cong was also responding to the move among dozens of Canadian MPs and senators recently calling for their country to accept more Hong Kong activists in the wake of the over 3-month old Chinese national security law. A number of prominent pro-independence activists fled in the wake of the harsh law, given it’s rumored to apply retroactively, and can carry stiff jail sentences for mere political speech, should that speech be dubbed by authorities incitement or “terroristic”. 

    According to Canadian national media reports:

    “Canada has accepted at least two Hong Kong activists as refugees, granting them protection in early September. More than 45 other dissidents are awaiting approval for asylum, sources have told The Globe.”

    Cong had defended the national security law as ensuring “stability” after months of protests, riots, and clashes with police which turned violent and often led to massive destruction of property and temporary shutdowns to things like public transit. 

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    “I want to make clear that a stable and prosperous Hong Kong … is not only in the interest of the vast majority of Hong Kong residents, but it is also conducive to the majority of those … law-abiding foreigners and enterprises in Hong Kong,” Cong emphasized.

    Canada’s Affairs Minister François-Philippe Champagne immediately protested the deeply “inappropriate” comments. “The reported comments by the Chinese ambassador are totally unacceptable and disturbing,” he said in a statement. “I have instructed Global Affairs to call the Ambassador in to make clear in no uncertain terms that Canada will always stand up for human rights and the rights of Canadians around the world.”

    Cong had also taken Trudeau’s prior statements to task alleging the mainland’s “coercive diplomacy” in its crackdown in Hong Kong. Trudeau had also mentioned arbitrary detention of Uyghurs in government-run camps.

    “There is no coercive diplomacy on the Chinese side,” Cong responded Thursday. “The Hong Kong issue and the Xinjiang-related issue are not about the issue of human rights. They are purely about internal affairs of China, which brooks no interference from the outside.”

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    He also hit Ottawa over the still contested Huawei affair, charging that Canada is ultimately an “accomplice” to Washington in detaining Huawei executive, Meng Wanzhou.

    There’s been a rapidly downward spiral in diplomatic relations between China and Canada springing from the Huawei controversy, but especially following the mainland’s crackdown on protests in Hong Kong. Last month China walked away from free trade talks with China, which had been in process for a year.

  • The Illusion Is Failing
    The Illusion Is Failing

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 10/17/2020 – 19:30

    Authored by Chris Martenson via PeakProsperity.com,

    Sometimes the magic fails.

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    The secret to the trick is accidentally revealed. The woman was always in the box.  The eye is no longer deceived. And there’s no getting the audience’s sense of awe back.

    Just like a bungled illusion, once trust is broken, it’s gone.

    For many during 2020, the loss of their jobs and businesses — in many cases due to incompetent government management of the pandemic — has been both a blessing and a curse.

    Of course nobody likes being laid off or losing a business they’d carefully built up over the years.

    But for a significant number of those people, however, they’ve now been given time (against their will, admittedly) to reflect and realize how much they hated their work in the first place.  For them, the illusion has been broken.

    They won’t go back to pretending their former lives were acceptable or tolerable, and they’re actively looking for employment that better fits their values.  Time for something new.

    Others have realized how much they really disliked what air travel had devolved into. With its demeaning theater of faux displays of ‘safety’– being groped by TSA agents and having to perform a striptease to get personal items through the security scanners.

    I’m one of these folks.  I’ll be traveling a lot less in the future, no matter what happens with the SARS-2 virus. I’ll be content to stay local and conduct my business via Zoom calls as much as can possibly be done.  I won’t miss the pat-downs, delays, crowded seats, and cancelled flights.

    Similarly, social media has now been revealed to be run by petulant sociopaths whose goal is for you to see exactly what content they want you to see, because that fits their profit incentive.  But they do so under the guise of “protecting” us from uninteresting or inappropriate material.

    Their contradictions couldn’t be any more gaping.  They’re pushing a “diversity” that requires uniformity of thought.

    Living on the internet this year while researching and publishing over 100 updates about covid, I’ve seen innumerable examples of this on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — such as their promotion of the W.H.O.’s inconsistent and blatantly Big Pharma-conflicted messages while suppressing front-line doctors armed with positive real-world results.

    The list goes on and on.

    None of it makes any sense.  At least, not once you lift your head up and shake off the consumer lifestyle blinders.

    The world is literally and figuratively on fire.

    We are now seeing the most profound ice loss ever in the arctic.

    We’re seeing more destructive wildfires in the US than ever before.

    And so many storms in the Atlantic basin that they’ve run blown through “Z” and are now working their way through the Greek alphabet.

    Protests.  Riots.  Political and social divisions so volatile that suddenly you can read credible opinion pieces on how civil war could be ‘a thing’ in our future.

    But none of this has to be this way.

    There’s another path.  One that begins by taking stock of the fact that the ways in which we’ve been living and running our society no longer work.  The more we continue to pursue the status quo in the hopes that somehow this will all magically turns itself around, the more we waste valuable time and resources.

    To change, we must first start by declaring “Not this!”

    That’s what millions of people are currently doing on some level.  Somewhere deep inside, they’re realizing that their old lives aren’t coming back. And good riddance too!

    The illusion is broken. There’s no more fun in the show.  Time to wander out of the theater and find something actually worth our time.

    The illusion is broken.  Our top health authorities have shown that they care more about creating the next massively profitable drug than they do about actually saving lives.  Once you’ve see that, you can’t ‘unsee’ it.

    Both major political parties reacted to covid by hastily shoveling trillions of dollars to Wall Street and mega corporations while only giving poorly-delivered scraps to ordinary people. Which is why the current candidates’ campaign promises aren’t believed.

    “None of the above” would win in a landslide here in the USA in 2020.  The illusion is broken.

    If the first necessary step is to withdraw our consent, what’s the second step?

    Become as resilient as you can.  Control what you can and let the rest unfold as it will.

    Many of our largest systems are in the process of breaking down.  Not only is there nothing you can do to stop that, but nothing should be done here.  Those unsustainable and deeply unfair systems are failing for a reason. They’re not worth preserving. Any efforts spent trying to prop them up simply delay our opportunity to replace them with better new models.

    Sometimes it’s just best to admit that a building has lived out its full useful lifespan, tear it down, and build anew.  Honor it for how it’s served us, nod once, and tear it down.

    So what’s next for you?  Where do you go from here?

    Well, our upcoming Peak Prosperity digital seminar (Oct 24-25th) will lay out much of our best thinking — and that of our incredible faculty of guest experts — on the best steps to take now to protect and nurture your money, health, home and community.

    If you haven’t registered yet do so now by clicking here (fyi: our ‘last chance to save’ discounted price of $199 expires Saturday night, after which the price rises to $249)

    And for myself and my fiancée Evie, we’re up to our eyeballs in creating community, planting, raising animals, and building infrastructure.  Besides giving us a much-needed sense of control during an otherwise out-of-control year, these actions align with our inner sense of integrity.

    Intelligent regenerative action is what the world needs now. And even if they prove to be insufficient, they are inarguably necessary.  Some of these efforts, such as planting pear trees, are being planted for whomever comes after us.  We do this because it’s the right thing to do.

    In a world that has gone mad, and lacks a coherent story, the need to make sense and become the author of our own story grows exponentially.

    So what does a better story look like?

    In Part 2: Building A Better Plan we parse through the wisdom of generations and cultures that have come before us, to rediscover some of the secrets of living a sustainable, fulfilling and integrity-rich life that modern society lost as it traded meaning for convenience.

    If we don’t heed the lessons of the past, and attempt to build on and improve them as best we can, our remaining prosperity will vanish as quickly as the unfortunate illusionist’s act.

    Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access).

  • Trump Says He Won't Force Americans To Take COVID-19 Vaccine
    Trump Says He Won't Force Americans To Take COVID-19 Vaccine

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 10/17/2020 – 19:00

    It’s not every day that President Trump outflanks his progressive critics on the issue of ‘consent’.

    But according to some recent comments from the president, skeptics worried about the prospect of mandatory vaccination orders in the US and in the UK have rallied to voice their opposition.

    But if President Trump is reelected, Americans who are concerned about what some ‘experts’ have characterized as a ‘rushed’ approval process for the COVID-19 vaccine won’t need to worry about being forced to accept the vaccine and vaccinate their children. Because President Trump says he will not issue a mandate requiring that individuals receive the coronavirus vaccine once one becomes widely available.

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    While Trump claimed that “essential workers” and “older people” would take priority, the president made a brief detour detour during the interview with Fox’s Stuart Varney that he won’t require vaccinations because “some people feel very strongly” about the issue, Trump said.

    Bill Gates, who insists that everyone – all 7+ billion humans on the planet – must be vaccinated to completely stamp out the virus and reduce its incidence to “zero”.

    “I don’t believe I’d ever do a mandated vaccine,” the president told Fox’s Stuart Varney. “I just don’t think I would do that, where you have to have it, because there are some people who feel very strong about that whole situation,” Trump said.

    Polls suggest roughly 50% of Americans would decline to take a COVID-19 vaccine, regardless of the developer, due to concerns about the approval process, which Bill Gates himself once denounced as potentially corrupt, blaming President Trump’s insistence on approving a vaccine before election day.

  • The Media Is Now Openly Pushing Secession As The Election Nears
    The Media Is Now Openly Pushing Secession As The Election Nears

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 10/17/2020 – 18:35

    Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

    It’s becoming increasingly clear to even mainstream media outlets that things are unlikely to return to “normal” after the 2020 election.

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    No matter who wins, it is likely the losing side will regard the winning side as having obtained its win using dirty tricks, foreign meddling, or through relentless propaganda offered up by a heavily biased and one-sided news media.

    And if about half the country regards the winning president as illegitimate, where does one go from there?

    The survey data isn’t exactly calming on this issue. As reported by Politico last week, the percentage of Americans who believe it is justified to use violence to “advance political goals” has quadrupled since 2017, for both Republicans and Democrats.

    After all, political invective has reached a fever pitch since Hillary Clinton declared that a sizable portion of the United States population constituted a “basket of deplorables.” Perhaps not since the 1870s and 1880s—when Catholics, Southerners, and Irish (all core constituents of the Democratic Party) were denounced by Republicans as spies, traitors, and drunks—has half the country so despised the other half. As early as 2017, when asked of the chances of another civil war in the United States,  about one-third of foreign policy scholars polled said it was likely.

    Perhaps, then, it is not shocking that we are now seeing articles even in mainstream publications suggesting that maybe, just maybe, the United States can’t continue in its present form. Moreover, the view is now increasingly being promoted by writers and ideologues outside the usual conservative and libertarian groups that have long advocated in favor of decentralization and local control.

    On September 18, for example, Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune asked: “Can the United States survive this election?” For the past century, the answer given by most any mainstream journalist would have been a decisive yes. The usual narrative has long been this: “Of course America will endure for centuries to come! We Americans are masters of compromise. We’ll all soon realize we are all in this together and come together in unity!”

    But now Chapman writes:

    The concept of splitting off is as American as the Fourth of July. The high point of separation sentiment came after Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, resulting in the Civil War. But New England states contemplated leaving over the War of 1812….The bonds that hold Americans together have frayed, and what happens on Nov. 3 may do additional damage. No nation lasts forever, and ours won’t be the first. This election won’t be the end of the United States. But it could be the beginning of the end.

    Moreover, Chapman notes that while many no doubt will continue to see the United States as strong and likely to endure indefinitely, such assumptions may be unwise given the reality of experience elsewhere:

    In 1970, the Russian dissident Andrei Amalrik wrote a book titled, “Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?” At the time, the idea of a giant superpower disintegrating sounded like a fantasy. But it eventually came true. … Countries like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia also have broken apart. Britain is leaving the European Union, and Scotland could push to leave Britain. It would be folly to think the United States is immune to these forces.

    Chapman is not alone.

    Last month in the Philadelphia Inquirer Chuck Bonfig suspected that maybe the end is near:

    The country has gone through many periods of strife in my time here: assassinations, recessions, desegregation, inflation, gas crisis, Watergate, hanging chads, the AIDS crisis, 9/11. Maybe it’s the 24-hour news cycle or the immediacy of social media that makes the landscape seem so bleak, but I don’t recall us ever being so divided.

    No one in our country seems happy today. The right is angry. The left is despondent. Our nation reminds me of those married couples who try to stay together for “the children” but end up making everyone around them miserable.

    Maybe it’s time for a breakup….Just think about it, America. I know breaking up is hard to do. We used to be good together. But what is the point of having the “greatest country in the world” if none of us actually like it?

    The debate over separation and secession has been additionally pushed into the national debate by Richard Kreitner and his book Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union. Kreitner, who writes for the leftist magazine The Nation, suggests that the United States has never been as unified as many suggest and also concludes that secession and division may be a necessary tactic in bringing about the left-wing reforms he’d like to see. In an interview with The Nation, Kreitner discussed how he began to think about secession as a serious solution:

    What if the United States broke apart? Would that be such a bad thing? Is it possible that the progressive policies and programs that I wanted to see put into place might be easier to enact in a smaller entity than the United States, with its 330 million people and the need to always convince people with very different attitudes and interests? So with that question, I was curious if anybody else in American history had favored secession for noble or progressive reasons—not to perpetuate slavery but even to oppose it.

    The answer, I quickly found, is yes: There were disunion abolitionists who were fiercely against slavery and who wanted the northern states to secede from the union in the 1840s and 1850s as a way not only to protest slavery but to undermine it. Taking in their arguments and their rhetoric was really, really interesting.

    Kreitner goes on to note that secession has long been at the forefront of American political ideology. This, of course, goes back to the secession of the American Revolution and can also be found in the secession movement favored by abolitionists and in New England’s efforts to secede during the War of 1812.

    Kreitner is right.

    Secession has long been entertained by many Americans, and not just defenders of the old Confederacy. In the early days of Southern secession, many Americans—including those who didn’t like the South or slavery—were fine with the Confederacy’s departure. New Yorker George Templeton Strong, for instance, declared in 1861, “the self-amputated members [the Southern states] were diseased beyond immediate cure, and their virus will infect our system no longer.” That same year, other New Yorkers seriously discussed leaving the Union and becoming a city-state devoted to free trade. In 1876, the battle over who won the presidential election very nearly produced a national split, with the pro-Democrat governor of New York “promising state resistance” to the Republican usurpers.

    Nor were the nation’s founders necessarily opposed to division. Thomas Jefferson expressed prosecessionist views, even when he was a sitting president. In an 1803 letter to John Breckinridge, Jefferson explained that if the future states of the Louisiana Territory sought to secede that was fine with him:

    [If] it should become the great interest of those nations to separate from this, if their happiness should depend on it so strongly as to induce them to go through that convulsion, why should the Atlantic states dread it? But especially why should we, their present inhabitants, take a side in such a question?

    And in 1804, Jefferson wrote to Joseph Priestly stating:

    Whether we remain in one confederacy, or form into Atlantic and Mississippi confederacies, I believe it not very important to the happiness of either part.

    Only Decentralization Can Save the Union

    At this point, there is only one strategy that can prevent a continued slide toward conflict, disunion, and (possibly) violence: decentralization of political power.

    Thanks to decades of growing centralization of power in Washington, DC, American policy is increasingly made by the national government and not by state and local authorities. This means American life is more and more governed by one-size-fits-all policies hatched by faraway politicians in DC. Thus, with each passing election, the stakes become higher as gun policy, healthcare, poverty relief, abortion, the drug war, education, and much more will be decided by the party that wins in DC, and not in the state capitol or in the city council. In other words, the laws that govern Arizona will be primarily made by politicians and judges from other places entirely. These faraway politicians will be more concerned with the needs and ideology of a national party, rather than with the specific needs of people who live in Arizona. 

    It is only natural that as the national government becomes supercharged in this way many Americans might start considering ways to get beyond the central government’s reach.

    It doesn’t have to be this way. The United States could follow another path in which domestic policy is created and enforced in a decentralized manner, in which laws for Texans are made in Texas and laws for Californians are made in California. This, of course, is what Thomas Jefferson imagined when he wrote that the states should be self-governing and unified only on matters of foreign policy:

    The true theory of our constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the states are independent as to everything within themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign nations. Let the general government be reduced to foreign concerns only.

    In a decentralized political scheme such as this, the stakes in a national election are much lower. It doesn’t matter as much for Ohioans which party is in power in Washington when relatively few laws affecting Ohioans are made at the federal level. 

    To adopt this way of doing things, however, would require a sizable departure from the current ideology that reigns in Washington. On the left especially, it seems few can imagine a world where people in Iowa or Indiana are allowed to run their own schools and healthcare systems without meddling from Washington. While conservatives’ efforts to force marijuana prohibition on states like Colorado show that the Right is not immune from this impulse, it is abundantly clear that the Left is quite enthusiastic about the idea of sending federal enforcers to ensure the states enact abortion on demand, adopt Obamacare, and enforce drug prohibitions as dictated by Washington.

    But unless Americans have a change of heart and begin to decentralize the political system, expect a growing unwillingness to accept the outcomes of national elections and growing resistance to the federal government in general. What follows is unlikely to be pleasant.

  • Russian Trade Minister Celebrates Collapsing Ruble As "Awesome"
    Russian Trade Minister Celebrates Collapsing Ruble As "Awesome"

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 10/17/2020 – 18:10

    Over the past decade, western central banks have generated countless hours of derision, mocking and scorn because while it has become painfully obvious that their two primary objectives – pushing stocks higher and hammering the currency – have nothing to do with their stated objectives of full employment at stable prices, central bankers have been steadfastly stubborn in their baseless claims that what they do is for the greater good. So much so, that the very same Fed whose catastrophic monetary policies of the past decade have spawned the greatest wealth and class inequality in US history in their pursuit of weaker currencies and higher asset prices, are now actively pretending they are pursuing an end to racial inequality, which is nothing but pure propaganda to justify printing even more money until maybe one day, inequality somehow magically ends.

    But there is one place where officials are not hypocritical about their true motives and desired outcomes: Russia, where the government minister in charge of getting companies to keep production at home thinks the ruble’s recent 20% plunge against the dollar is simply “awesome.”

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    Russian Industry and Trade Minister Denis Manturov

    In an interview with Bloomberg on Wednesday, the Russian Industry and Trade Minister Denis Manturov said that companies that don’t rely heavily on imports “are in a sweet spot right now.” He was referring to the plunge in the Russian currency: the ruble is one of the worst-performing currencies this year due to a slump in global oil prices and concern the U.S. and European Union may introduce new sanctions.

    And while economy Minister Maxim Reshetnikov said in parliament Thursday that the currency is undervalued, while the central bank has warned the devaluation may push inflation above a 4% target, Manturov disagrees.

    Anticipating the weakness of its currency, the Kremlin introduced measures to get companies to be less reliant on imports since US and European sanctions curbed Russia’s access to international markets in 2014. Manturov said three years ago that a ruble rate of 62 per dollar would be an optimal level for the policy to blossom.

    And with the currency was trading near 78 per dollar…

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    … this has meant an even faster recovery for Russia’s export-oriented business. In fact, after a deep slump in the second quarter, the Russian economy bounced back over the summer after many lockdown restrictions were lifted. Industrial production will probably only shrink 4.5% for the full year, while manufacturing will contract 2%, Manturov said.

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    Of course, there is the possibility that the drop will only accelerate further as Russian virus infections have surged in recent weeks with daily tallies surpassing levels reached in the spring, although unlike in the West there is little discussion of a new round of shutdowns. Furthermore, unlike many western nations, Manturov said the government isn’t discussing any plans to prolong support measures for businesses. “We hope that the peak is over,” Manturov said. “The recovery was very quick in many industries.”

    But what is more important to Russia is that its goods and services are now about 20% cheaper to its foreign trading partners than they were at the start of the year, resulting in a foreign-led demand boom.

    The bottom line is that while every developed nation is now engaged in massive QE precisely in hopes of devaluing their own currencies to even a modest degree of what Russia has achieved, they will never admit to it (the BOJ for example has constantly stated that a weaker yen is not one of its policy intentions, just a boost to inflation… as if yen weakness isn’t a key driver of that). Which is why in a world of endless lies and constant hypocrisy, hearing at least one financial official admit the truth that it is “awesome” to see one’s currency collapse, is delightfully refreshing.

  • Brown University Researcher Says Trump Signs, American Flags "Scare" & "Traumatize" Black People
    Brown University Researcher Says Trump Signs, American Flags "Scare" & "Traumatize" Black People

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 10/17/2020 – 17:45

    Authored by Ben Zeisloft via Campus Reform,

    A postdoctoral researcher at Brown University took to social media to explain that Black AirBnB guests may be traumatized by Trump signs.

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    Carycruz Bueno, a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute, tweeted that vacation rental company Airbnb “doesn’t understand the trauma” of Trump signs for a Black person.

    Airbnb rentals are privately owned properties listed for short-term and long-term rental on Airbnb. Airbnb, unlike hotels, does not own the properties. It is the platform that connects private owners with renters and facilitates payments.

    Bueno recalled that she and her husband rented a property in Maine. When they arrived, she said they saw “Trump signs and other white nationalist symbols” in the yard. Bueno was “immediately scared” for her life and the safety of her family.

    According to Bueno, AirBnB stated that it could not do anything, which Bueno described as a “prime example [of] how White companies make a BLM statement,” yet “do nothing” when a Black person says that she doesn’t “feel safe.”

    Bueno alleged that Airbnb is “only words no action,” and should “do better” than making Black people “retell a traumatizing experience.”

    She also called for a “greenbook version of AirBnB” so that BIPOC (black indigenous people of color) would not have “to pay to feel uncomfortable and scared.”

    Bueno mentioned that the American flag could also be a symbol “used in many places to scare Black people,” in addition to KKK and Confederate iconography.

    Cruz Caridad Bueno, an “anti-racist feminist economist,” chimed in as well: “Disgusted, not using Airbnb anymore.”

    Brown University Students for Trump President Emma Rae Phillips told Campus Reform that she is “disappointed by Bueno’s comments.”

    Phillips, who majors in economics, said that Bueno’s “tweets do not seem to show much understanding of how free markets work” since AirBnB’s customers have the choice to take their business elsewhere. 

    Additionally, she says that “American flags and Trump signs are not racist in any way, shape, or form.”

    Campus Reform reached out to Bueno for comment but did not receive a response. 

  • Franklin's Rule: How The Barrett Hearing Left The Democrats Holding An Empty Sack
    Franklin's Rule: How The Barrett Hearing Left The Democrats Holding An Empty Sack

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 10/17/2020 – 16:55

    Authored by Jonathan Turley,

    Below is my column in the Hill on the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett and the oddly disconnected questions during her confirmation hearing.  While I have written about the revealing moments of the hearing, the Democrats clearly elected not to focus on the nominee but the election. When they did attack the nominee, they fired wildly and missed completely in three areas.

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    Here is the column:

    Benjamin Franklin once said, “it is hard for an empty sack to stand upright.” It took almost 300 years, but Franklin’s observation finally has been proven demonstrably true. The three-day Senate Judiciary Committee hearing for federal appellate judge and Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett can best be described as an empty-sack confirmation that simply would not stand upright.

    From the outset, committee Democrats were dealing with a highly qualified nominee who has the intellect, the temperament and the background to be an exceptional justice. And that was the problem.

    Democrats decided to use the hearing as a springboard for the coming election. They never intended to put anything in the sack against Barrett. Yet, to frame this effort, they advanced a number of false premises that collapsed on their own weight:

    The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is about to be killed

    Barrett was surrounded in the hearing room by photos of ill individuals who could perish without national health care. It made Barrett look like some judicial serial-killer.  However, these were not her victims. Indeed, the entire premise was false.

    Senate Democrats were suggesting that the pending case of California v. Texas was just one vote shy of striking down the ACA. It left many of us watching in disbelief. While a district court struck down the whole act, an appellate court wanted to send it back to consider the elements of “severability.” The vast majority of experts believe that the striking down of one provision — the individual mandate provision — should not result in the loss of the entire act. More importantly, a clear majority of the Supreme Court appears to believe that. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh both are expected to vote to uphold the rest of the act. Indeed, a Justice Barrett could well vote with them.

    What is clear is that it is extremely unlikely that the ACA is teetering on destruction. Numerically, the current head-counting means that it is as likely that a unanimous court would support severability as a five justice majority would strike down the whole act.

    None of that mattered, however, as Democratic committee members spun a conspiracy theory that Barrett’s nomination was all about supplying that needed fifth vote just before a Nov. 10 court hearing on the case. It was an empty sack that just laid there as Barrett explained this was a narrow question of severability and she has never ruled on the issue of severability.

    Abortions are about to become illegal in America

    Barrett is undeniably pro-life. She’s said so over and over. She also said she does not consider Roe v. Wade to be a “super precedent.” As such, the case is not inviolate and can be revisited.

    However, even if Barrett were to supply the fifth vote on the court to overturn Roe — which remains unlikely — it would not make abortion illegal. Indeed, former Vice President Joe Biden himself has explained why. He said recently that if Barrett helped overturn Roe, his “only response [would be] … [to] pass legislation making Roe the law of the land. That’s what I would do.”

    Put aside for the moment that forcing states to accept abortion, if it is no longer a constitutional right, could be challenging under the 10th Amendment. The broader point is still valid: Such a decision would simply return the question to the states. And the majority of states likely would continue to guarantee the right to abortion as a legislative matter. In other words, Roe might end — but it would not end the right to choose, as a matter of state law.

    Ironically, Barrett is a huge defender of states’ rights and would likely defend pro-choice states in asserting such federalism powers.

    Barrett is unethical because she will not recuse herself

    One of the weakest arguments is that Barrett cannot be confirmed unless she agrees to recuse herself from the ACA case or future election controversies. The reason is that Democrats say there is an appearance that President Trump really wants her on the court to vote on such issues. However, that logic would seem to require not just the recusal of the other two Trump-nominated justices — Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — but a host of other justices who were confirmed a year before elections in prior administrations.

    There is no reason for Barrett to recuse herself under the court’s governing standards. She has no personal or financial interests in these challenges and did not work on any of the underlying litigation, including election litigation that has not occurred yet. Nonetheless, Barrett pledged to consider recusal if anyone raises the appearance of a conflict and to apply the governing standard of 28 U.S. Code § 455. That was not enough for Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), who responded to her pledge by saying “the fact that you wouldn’t even bring forth the recusal process says to me that voters may decide there is an appearance of conflict.” That was as confusing legally as it was grammatically for most of us.

    We ended this hearing where we began it, with nothing from Senate Democrats relevant to the actual nomination. Instead, they gave us probing questions about Barrett’s views on global warning and how she felt about putting immigrant children in cages. No serious answers were expected by the Democrats, and no answers given.

    Indeed, for much of the hearing, Barrett seemed as relevant to senators as the ficus plant in the corner of the hearing room. Speeches were made. Pictures were paraded. Voters were beckoned. Even the Houston Astros were maligned. But nobody could get that empty sack to sit upright.

  • Senate Homeland Committee Demands Answers From FBI Over Hunter Biden Laptop
    Senate Homeland Committee Demands Answers From FBI Over Hunter Biden Laptop

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 10/17/2020 – 16:02

    Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-WI) has fired off a Saturday letter to FBI Director Chris Wray demanding answers over the agency’s handling of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

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    According to the letter, after Johnson released his a report on Hunter Biden’s activities abroad which raised “counterintelligence and extortion concerns,” Johnson’s committee was contacted by a whistleblower – ostensibly Delaware computer shop owner John Paul Mac Issac – who “informed my staff that he had possession of a laptop left in his business by Hunter Biden.”

    Issac told Johnson that “he provided its contents to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in response to a December 9, 2019 grand jury subpoena,” to which the FBI responded that they “would not confirm or deny any information identified by the committee.” In other words, Wray’s FBI stonewalled when confronted with direct questions by the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

    To review the timeline – according to an associate of Issac, Hunter Biden left three laptops at the repair shop on April 12, 2019. In September of 2019, after Hunter failed to respond to come pick them up, Issac walked into the FBI office in Albuquerque, New Mexico and spoke with an agent.

    Two months later, while Democrats were holding Trump-Ukraine impeachment hearings, two FBI agents from the Wilmington, DE office, Joshua Williams and Mike Dzielak, paid Issac a visit. He offered them one of Biden’s hard drives, which they declined to take with them. Two weeks later, they came back with a subpoena for the drive.

    After months of silence from the FBI, Issac contacted Rudy Giuliani and offered him a copy of the drives.

    The FBI, of course, is laughably investigating the Hunter Biden emails as a potential Russian influence operation despite the above timeline.

    Johnson, meanwhile, asks the FBI the following questions:

    1. Does the FBI possess material from Hunter Biden’s laptop(s)? If yes. how and when did the FBI obtain this information?

    2. Is it accurate that FBI officials obtained contents from Hunter Biden’s laptop from a business located in Delaware? If so:

    • When did the FBI first examine these records?
    • Has the FBI concluded its examination of these records?
    • Has the FBI found any evidence of criminal activity based on its examination of these records?
    • Has the FBI determined whether the records on the computer was generated on that computer. Is genuine, or has been altered in any way?
    • Has the FBI determined whether these records were generated or authored by Hunter Biden?
    • Has the FBI determined whether these records are a result from someone hacking Hunter Biden’s computer?

    3. Is it accurate that the FBI issued a grand jury subpoena from the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware to obtain this information? If so, when and why was this subpoena issued? Was this information ever offered to the FBI voluntarily?

    4. When and how were you made aware that the Delaware computer repair shop owner possessed a computer and its electronic contents that he claimed originally belonged to Hunter Biden?

    5. In addition to these records allegedly provided in response to a subpoena, has the FBI ever been in possession of any other of Hunter Biden’s laptops) or material from Hunter Biden’s laptop?

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  • "I Got Rich Off Of EDD:" Feds Bust LA Rapper For $1.2M Unemployment Scam Detailed In Music Video
    "I Got Rich Off Of EDD:" Feds Bust LA Rapper For $1.2M Unemployment Scam Detailed In Music Video

    Tyler Durden

    Sat, 10/17/2020 – 15:40

    A tidal wave of first-time jobless claims during the virus pandemic overwhelmed California’s computer systems, as it was a perfect opportunity for scammers to use stolen identities and file false claims. 

    This is precisely what happened in Los Angeles when a get-rich-quick unemployment benefits scheme netted one rapper more than $1.2 million, reported CBS Los Angeles. 

    The rapper, Fontrell Antonio Baines, 31, who goes by “Nuke Bizzle,” was arrested Friday on federal charges for fraudulently receiving $1.2 million in unemployment insurance benefits under the CARES act. 

    “According to an affidavit filed with the complaint, Baines possessed and used debit cards preloaded with unemployment benefits administered by the California Employment Development Department,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

    “The debit cards were issued in the names of third-parties, including identity theft victims. The applications for these debit cards listed addresses to which Baines had access in Beverly Hills and Koreatown,” federal prosecutors said in a news release. 

    Court documents pointed out Baines uploaded a music video titled “EDD” [Employment Development Department] on YouTube, which included the lyrics, “I got rich off of EDD” and “getting rich by [going] to the bank with a stack of these.” 

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    A second rapper in the video sings: “You gotta sell cocaine, I just file a claim.”

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    Baines was also heard giving a “shoutout” to President Trump for the CARES Act. 

    Court documented showed Baines used at least 92 preloaded EDD debit cards, worth more than $1.2 million, with many of the withdraws in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. 

    EDD fraud in California has been an ongoing, widespread issue this year. Between mid-August and the first week of September, Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) claims in California soared, which forced California’s EDD to halt new unemployment claims mid-September for two weeks.  

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    No matter what – or who – is to blame, California’s fraud issue underscores the widespread unemployment data challenges – including clerical errors and double counting – that state employment departments have faced since the pandemic began. 

    “Aggressive efforts to fight fraud are yielding results in curbing the recent uptick in suspicious Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) claims in California,” the state’s employment department said.

    And to refresh readers’ minds about pandemic fraud, a Florida man recently used loans granted under the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to purchase a 2020 Lamborghini Huracan. 

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