Much ink has been spilled warning of the ramifications should Democrats pass their election “reform” package, HR1 — and for good reason, given how the bill would upend our nation’s electoral system.
Democrats claim HR1 is aimed at maximizing voter participation and ending corruption in our election systems, but the truth is that the legislation would do neither. Instead, it will only serve to open up our states’ elections to fraud and public mistrust at a time when we need to bolster voter confidence.
Let’s look at just a few of the many areas where HR1 would nationalize elections and cancel out state integrity and confidence-building measures.
First, the measure voids dozens of longstanding state voting procedures, many of which are relatively non-controversial and serve to give voters confidence in the accuracy and integrity of our elections process. HR1 would invalidate photo ID requirements — such as those in Indiana — that the Supreme Court have found constitutional and important confidence builders. These laws are popular with large majorities of Americans, and despite critics’ fearmongering they have not negatively impacted voter participation.
HR1 would also force states to allow ballot harvesting, a practice where third parties, usually political operatives, collect and return marked mail ballots. Laws restricting harvesting, which are also popular, deter fraud because they preserve a marked-ballot chain of custody and prevent coercion and undue influence on the elderly and other voters. Yet Democrats want to override these laws and normalize harvesting.
Just last week we saw additional criminal charges against candidates in an all-mail city council election in Paterson, N.J., for vote fraud related to harvesting and tampering with ballots. The fraud was so pervasive that a local judge voided the election and ordered a new one. There was also the infamous congressional race in North Carolina in 2018, when the election had to be thrown out because of fraud initiated through ballot harvesting. The good news is that ballot harvesting bans help prevent and detect these exact types of crimes. But if Congress nationalizes ballot harvesting through HR1, these stories may go from being cautionary tales to the new norm.
To date, the Republican National Committee has been successful in beating the Democrats in court challenges to harvesting bans and has been vocal about the need for bans. And they are not inherently partisan since many states, both blue and red, either prohibit harvesting or severely restrict it. Now, after losing in the courts, Democrats seek to impose the practice from Washington, D.C., with the arrogant belief that they know better than state legislatures about the election integrity measures their states require.
HR1 will also further restrict states from cleaning up their voter rolls. Under current federal law, a state must stop programs that remove ineligible voters from the rolls within 90 days before a federal election. This blackout period already significantly limits a state’s ability to remove voters who may have moved away, died, or are otherwise ineligible to vote because it applies to periods before both primaries and general elections. The Democrats propose expanding that blackout period for many programs to six months before any federal election. Not only will this prevent states from cleaning up their rolls in a federal election year, it will expand that period for many states into the off years.
Voter roll maintenance not only enhances election integrity by ensuring only eligible voters can cast ballots, it also promotes access by ensuring voters are properly registered when they do go to vote, thus preventing lines and provisional ballots that may not count. No wonder both parties have historically agreed on the importance of voter registration list upkeep. HR1’s restrictions make Democrats’ intentions clear: They have abandoned any pretense that they still care about this issue that was once welcomed as reasonable and routine.
Cynics say that Republicans oppose this legislation because we want to restrict people from voting. This could not be further from the truth. The reality is that we want all eligible voters to be able to vote and vote easily — but voters must also have confidence that our elections systems have safeguards to prevent fraud and ensure accuracy. Previous federal election legislation such as the NVRA and HAVA made some attempt to balance the interests of voter integrity and access. But HR1 eliminates any pretense altogether by invaliding states’ reasonable ID requirements, mandating ballot harvesting, and enacting obstacles to critical voter roll maintenance.
The American people do not want a Washington takeover of their elections at the hands of congressional Democrats. They want election transparency and confidence in their future elections restored. These motives are exactly what the RNC will continue to fight for, both in the lead-up to the critical midterms and ahead of all elections to come.
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Justin Riemer is the chief counsel of the Republican National Committee.
DARPA Wants Jetpack Soldiers On Modern Battlefield
Jet suits are commonly associated with science fiction movies or shows, but high-tech miniature turbine engines have quickly advanced this new type of mobility to become a reality.
Now Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is searching for an Iron Man-style jet suit as per its new solicitation on website Sam.Gov (System for Award Management). DARPA is calling on private industry to deliver jet suits or “Portable Personal Air Mobility System.”
DARPA requests, “these platforms could serve a variety of military missions, enabling cost-effective mission utility and agility in areas such as personnel logistics [and] urban augmented combat.” Some requirements include a range of at least 3.1 miles, can take off anywhere, and assembly in under ten minutes. “Systems may be air deployed to allow for [infiltration] to hostile territory, or ground deployed to allow for greater off-road mobility,” DARPA wrote.
Jet suits have already been well-established technology in the last five years.
British jet suit company, Gravity Industries, unveiled its “flying” medic jet suit in October. The company showed how first responders could use the flying suit, powered by multiple kerosene-fuelled micro gas turbines, to respond to emergency incidents in rugged terrain quickly. Here’s a clip of a mock rescue:
WATCH: U.K.-based company, Gravity Industries, has been working with paramedics in the rural Lake District to test their jet suit’s capabilities in emergency situations. pic.twitter.com/AvOHsUgr5C
The Royal Navy has also been testing a real-life version of Marvel’s Tony Stark jet suit. The service may use the jet suits “to rapidly swarm and board ships,” according to the U.S. Naval Institute.
#FunFactFriday – The Royal Navy has been testing Jet Suit assault teams to determine if the Iron Man-like suits could be used to rapidly swarm and board ships. U.S. Special Operations Command is also evaluating a jetpack that can reach speeds of more than 200 mph. pic.twitter.com/mo5FoGWkDu
California-based JetPack Aviation is working on a version of the jet suit that could carry soldiers 200 miles an hour, for up to 10 minutes.
The request also states: “When deployed, the platform will be designed with simplified operations in mind, so that someone unfamiliar with the platform could be educated in its safe and effective use with relatively little training.”
Jet suits are on their way to the modern battlefield and perhaps could be in civilian use before the military.
“Americans deserve the freedom to choose a life without surveillance and the government regulation that would make that possible. While we continue to believe the sentiment, we fear it may soon be obsolete or irrelevant. We deserve that freedom, but the window to achieve it narrows a little more each day. If we don’t act now, with great urgency, it may very well close for good.”
– Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson, New York Times
Databit by databit, we are building our own electronic concentration camps.
With every new smart piece of smart technology we acquire, every new app we download, every new photo or post we share online, we are making it that much easier for the government and its corporate partners to identify, track and eventually round us up.
Saint or sinner, it doesn’t matter because we’re all being swept up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals.
This is what it means to live in a suspect society.
The government’s efforts to round up those who took part in the Capitol riots shows exactly how vulnerable we all are to the menace of a surveillance state that aspires to a God-like awareness of our lives.
Relying on selfies, social media posts, location data, geotagged photos, facial recognition, surveillance cameras and crowdsourcing, government agents are compiling a massive data trove on anyone and everyone who may have been anywhere in the vicinity of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The amount of digital information is staggering: 15,000 hours of surveillance and body-worn camera footage; 1,600 electronic devices; 270,000 digital media tips; at least 140,000 photos and videos; and about 100,000 location pings for thousands of smartphones.
And that’s just what we know.
More than 300 individuals from 40 states have already been charged and another 280 arrested in connection with the events of January 6. As many as 500 others are still being hunted by government agents.
Also included in this data roundup are individuals who may have had nothing to do with the riots but whose cell phone location data identified them as being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Forget about being innocent until proven guilty.
In a suspect society such as ours, the burden of proof has been flipped: now, you start off guilty and have to prove your innocence.
For instance, you didn’t even have to be involved in the Capitol riots to qualify for a visit from the FBI: investigators have reportedly been tracking—and questioning—anyone whose cell phones connected to wi-fi or pinged cell phone towers near the Capitol. One man, who had gone out for a walk with his daughters only to end up stranded near the Capitol crowds, actually had FBI agents show up at his door days later. Using Google Maps, agents were able to pinpoint exactly where they were standing and for how long.
All of the many creepy, calculating, invasive investigative and surveillance tools the government has acquired over the years are on full display right now in the FBI’s ongoing efforts to bring the rioters to “justice.”
FBI agents are matching photos with drivers’ license pictures; tracking movements by way of license plate toll readers; and zooming in on physical identifying marks such as moles, scars and tattoos, as well as brands, logos and symbols on clothing and backpacks. They’re poring over hours of security and body camera footage; scouring social media posts; triangulating data from cellphone towers and WiFi signals; layering facial recognition software on top of that; and then cross-referencing footage with public social media posts.
It’s not just the FBI on the hunt, however.
They’ve enlisted the help of volunteer posses of private citizens, such as Deep State Dogs, to collaborate on the grunt work. As Dinah Voyles Pulver reports, once Deep State Dogs locates a person and confirms their identity, they put a package together with the person’s name, address, phone number and several images and send it to the FBI.
According to USA Today, the FBI is relying on the American public and volunteer cybersleuths to help bolster its cases.
This takes See Something, Say Something snitching programs to a whole new level.
The lesson to be learned: Big Brother, Big Sister and all of their friends are watching you.
They see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.
Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.
Simply liking or sharing this article on Facebook, retweeting it on Twitter, or merely reading it or any other articles related to government wrongdoing, surveillance, police misconduct or civil liberties might be enough to get you categorized as a particular kind of person with particular kinds of interests that reflect a particular kind of mindset that might just lead you to engage in a particular kinds of activities and, therefore, puts you in the crosshairs of a government investigation as a potential troublemaker a.k.a. domestic extremist.
Chances are, as the Washington Post reports, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.
In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.
The government has the know-how.
It took days, if not hours or minutes, for the FBI to begin the process of identifying, tracking and rounding up those suspected of being part of the Capitol riots.
Imagine how quickly government agents could target and round up any segment of society they wanted to based on the digital trails and digital footprints we leave behind.
Of course, the government has been hard at work for years acquiring these totalitarian powers.
Long before the January 6 riots, the FBI was busily amassing the surveillance tools necessary to monitor social media posts, track and identify individuals using cell phone signals and facial recognition technology, and round up “suspects” who may be of interest to the government for one reason or another.
As The Interceptreported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.
When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.
As for the Fourth Amendment and its prohibitions on warrantless searches and invasions of privacy without probable cause, those safeguards have been rendered all but useless by legislative end-runs, judicial justifications, and corporate collusions.
We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers.
Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior.
This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, social media posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.
For example, police have been using Stingray devices mounted on their cruisers to intercept cell phone calls and text messages without court-issued search warrants. Doppler radar devices, which can detect human breathing and movement within a home, are already being employed by the police to deliver arrest warrants.
License plate readers, yet another law enforcement spying device made possible through funding by the Department of Homeland Security, can record up to 1800 license plates per minute. Moreover, these surveillance cameras can also photograph those inside a moving car. Reports indicate that the Drug Enforcement Administration has been using the cameras in conjunction with facial recognition software to build a “vehicle surveillance database” of the nation’s cars, drivers and passengers.
Sidewalk and “public space” cameras, sold to gullible communities as a sure-fire means of fighting crime, is yet another DHS program that is blanketing small and large towns alike with government-funded and monitored surveillance cameras. It’s all part of a public-private partnership that gives government officials access to all manner of surveillance cameras, on sidewalks, on buildings, on buses, even those installed on private property.
Couple these surveillance cameras with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology and you have the makings of “pre-crime” cameras, which scan your mannerisms, compare you to pre-set parameters for “normal” behavior, and alert the police if you trigger any computerized alarms as being “suspicious.”
State and federal law enforcement agencies are pushing to expand their biometric and DNA databases by requiring that anyone accused of a misdemeanor have their DNA collected and catalogued. However, technology is already available that allows the government to collect biometrics such as fingerprints from a distance, without a person’s cooperation or knowledge. One system can actually scan and identify a fingerprint from nearly 20 feet away.
Developers are hard at work on a radar gun that can actually show if you or someone in your car is texting. Another technology being developed, dubbed a “textalyzer” device, would allow police to determine whether someone was driving while distracted. Refusing to submit one’s phone to testing could result in a suspended or revoked driver’s license.
It’s a sure bet that anything the government welcomes (and funds) too enthusiastically is bound to be a Trojan horse full of nasty, invasive surprises.
Case in point: police body cameras. Hailed as the easy fix solution to police abuses, these body cameras—made possible by funding from the Department of Justice—turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras. Of course, if you try to request access to that footage, you’ll find yourself being led a merry and costly chase through miles of red tape, bureaucratic footmen and unhelpful courts.
The “internet of things” refers to the growing number of “smart” appliances and electronic devices now connected to the internet and capable of interacting with each other and being controlled remotely. These range from thermostats and coffee makers to cars and TVs. Of course, there’s a price to pay for such easy control and access. That price amounts to relinquishing ultimate control of and access to your home to the government and its corporate partners. For example, while Samsung’s Smart TVs are capable of “listening” to what you say, thereby allowing users to control the TV using voice commands, it also records everything you say and relays it to a third party, e.g., the government.
Drones, which are taking to the skies en masse, are the converging point for all of the weapons and technology already available to law enforcement agencies. In fact, drones can listen in on your phone calls, see through the walls of your home, scan your biometrics, photograph you and track your movements, and even corral you with sophisticated weaponry.
All of these technologies add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence, especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.
“To think that the information will be used against individuals only if they’ve broken the law is naïve; such data is collected and remains vulnerable to use and abuse whether people gather in support of an insurrection or they justly protest police violence… This collection will only grow more sophisticated… It gets easier by the day… it does not discriminate. It harvests from the phones of MAGA rioters, police officers, lawmakers and passers-by. There is no evidence, from the past or current day, that the power this data collection offers will be used only to good ends. There is no evidence that if we allow it to continue to happen, the country will be safer or fairer.”
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is the creepy, calculating yet diabolical genius of the American police state: the very technology we hailed as revolutionary and liberating has become our prison, jailer, probation officer, Big Brother and Father Knows Best all rolled into one.
NASA Tests “World’s Most Powerful Rocket” Ahead Of 2024 Moon Mission
NASA’s Artemis program to land the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024 has been a widely spoken about topic in recent months. The space agency is collaborating with commercial and international partners to make the lunar mission possible.
On Thursday afternoon, NASA completed the testing firing of deep space rockets made by Boeing/Aerojet. For eight minutes, four main engines remained ignited. This follows a failed test in January.
NASA tweeted a video of the ground-based rocket engine test, saying, “Ready to see the world’s most powerful rocket come alive?”
Ready to see the world’s most powerful rocket come alive?
The four engines will be the core stage of the Space Launch System or SLS rocket, a Space Shuttle-derived super heavy-lift expendable launch vehicle that will propel astronauts to the Moon in the coming years.
“With this critical test finally finished — and assuming everything went well — NASA can now send the rocket segment to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center to prepare it for launch,” said AP.
Officials declined to tell AP if the first SLS launch will occur this year or next, but timelines suggest the rocket could launch an empty Orion capsule to the Moon sometime this year or next. Then by 2022, a crewed test flight is expected, with the crewed lunar mission in 2024.
Credit goes to the Trump administration, who pushed very hard to land astronauts on the Moon by 2024. The Biden administration has yet to fiddle with timelines.
NASA Acting Administrator Steve Jurczyk said it would take a few months to accurately gauge when the crewed mission to the lunar surface occurs.
Boeing is the prime contractor on the SLS project. Aerojet Rocketdyne builds the rocket and engines.
The Syrian Minister of Oil and Mineral Resources, Bassam Tohme, said on Thursday, that the total losses in the direct and indirect oil sector in Syria have exceeded $92 billion (USD).
The Syrian minister said in statements to the state-owned Al-Ikhbariya TV channel (and subsequently translated in Iranian state media), that the areas under the control of the US and their allied forces contain more than 90% of the oil reserves of Syria.
He stated that “the Americans and their followers act as pirates in targeting the Syrian oil wealth and the ships of supplies to it.”
Tohme said that the US was deliberately preventing the Syrian government from benefitting from the oil reserves inside the country.
The oil minister added that the Syrian waters are “qualified in terms of oil reserves, but what distinguishes exploration contracts is that they are expensive and are long term,” pointing out that “there is a promising oil future in those waters, and the matter needs calm and stable logistical conditions.”
The US military and their allies from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) currently control the Al-Umar Oil Fields, the largest oil fields in Syria, which they captured from the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL/IS/Daesh) during the eastern Euphrates campaign.
(In no world of international law is this legal.) #Syria says U.S. oil firm secretly signed deal with Kurdish-led rebels https://t.co/ZfoVCG0iOb
Researchers Believe It’s Possible To Become Immortal
Might future humans resurrect the dead?
Well, Russian researchers Alexey Turchin and Maxim Chernyakov, who belong to the transhumanism movement, wrote a paper explaining the “roadmap to immortality” that involves superintelligent AI systems powered by Dyson spheres as the primary technology might someday make resurrection possible.
Turchin and Chernyakov wrote, “there no evidence of an afterlife. But there’s also no proof that medical death is the end of subjective experience, or that death is irreversible, or immortality impossible.”
The paper, which Popular Mechanics first reported, is titled “Classification of Approaches to Technological Resurrection,” which offers a roadmap to immortality.
“Death seems to be a permanent event, but there is no actual proof of its irreversibility,” the authors write. And “while no method is currently possible, many…may become feasible with future technological development.”
Turchin and Chernyakov examine both conventional and future technologies of making humanity immortal, from cryogenics to uploading brains onto the cloud then transplanted into clone bodies. They said “strong AI” will be the most critical technology to download the brain’s contents, but that technology could years away.
“The development of AI is going rather fast, but we are still far away from being able to ‘download’ a human into a computer,” Turchin told Russia Beyond. “If we want to do it with a good probability of success, then count on [the year] 2600, to be sure.”
The authors said the power supply behind the AI would be so powerful that it would need a “Dyson spheres,” a megastructure of solar panels that encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power output.
The paper describes life as a “continued stream of subjective experiences” and death as an end of that stream. Immortality, to the researchers, is a “life stream without end,” and resurrection is the “continuation of that same stream of experiences after an arbitrarily long gap.”
There has been a big surge in online scammery and con artistry in the past two years. Economic hardship and desperation have been contributing causes, but this kind of activity has been with us since the dawn of time. And con games will always be with us, because they are rooted in the timeless and predictable ingredients of human nature.
My purpose in this article is to provide a rudimentary outline of the basic features that I believe most, if not all, scams and con jobs share. I have worked as a criminal defense lawyer for over twenty years, and have seen a few scenarios that have helped me compile this information. I have also benefitted from observing scam artists in action on Twitter and in other electronic arenas. I have also learned much from watching the “infomercial” hucksters of the 1990s, such as Don Lapre, Kevin Trudeau, and many others. Readers looking for demonstrations of these ideas in action may profit from watching several movies of David Mamet, who seems to have an interest in con games. One of Mr. Mamet’s mainstay actors was the late magician Ricky Jay; and my understanding is that Mr. Jay, as a scholar of the magician’s art, provided a great deal of insight into the psychological bases of con games in the Mamet films House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner.
All con jobs follow a sequence of identifiable stages. The mark (the “pidgeon”) must be led through a series of steps that “soften him up” and make him more pliable to suggestion. We must remember that all con games play on two elements: greed and ignorance. Other emotions can be used, such as pity or guilt, but greed and ignorance are the mainstays. Greed, meaning the mark’s desire to gain easy money; and ignorance, in that the mark will be led into unfamiliar waters, where he can be more easily parted with his money. Young or old, rich or poor, all human beings are vulnerable to cons. Never believe you are exempt. I have seen highly educated people fall victim to them, as well as the humblest laborer. Here are the basic stages of the traditional scam…
The Picture. A successful frame-up has to begin with an image that the scammer is selling. He wants to show you just how successful he is. He wants to overwhelm you with cars, money, hotels, exotic locales, and, of course, women. The reason for this is very simple: he must establish himself as someone who has “made it big.” The message conveyed to the mark is a simple one: “Look how rich and great I am. You can be just like me if you do what I recommend.”
It does not matter whether The Picture is true. It is important to remember this. The scammer may indeed be very rich. Some scammers rent their luxury cars and lifestyles; some scammers lie about their lifestyle completely and without shame. But some scammers actually are rich. Remember: some con artists really do have what they say they have. You may find this a paradox, but it is not. There really are rich people who love to scam others. Their motivations may be darker than the purely financial impulses of lesser scammers. They are not so much interested in squeezing money out of marks; what they are after is power, validation, and an affirmation of their own superiority. We are dealing with psychological factors here, friends: some people are just sadistic, and love to “lord it” over others.
In establishing The Picture, some con artists can get very aggressive. They will demand you acknowledge their “superiority.” They will yell. They will castigate. They will berate. They will try to shame you with bullying tactics. They will try to question your manhood, your character, your intelligence. All of this is part of the well-staged con. The goal is to throw you off balance, to make you question your judgment or value system.
The Secret. This is a critical part of the scam. All successful cons must have an enticing secret involved. What it amounts to is this. The secret involves some “special knowledge.” The scammer will communicate to you, in one way or another, that he has special knowledge of some trade, industry, or whatever. He will play on your desire to make a quick buck. He will play on your desire to cut corners and find shortcuts. “I have a secret, and if you listen to me, you can be just as rich as I am.” This is the essence of The Secret.
In the days of cold-calling stock brokers, there was a certain scam that I was once told about. A crook would send two batches of letters to two groups of people. One batch would say, “You should buy stock X because it’s going up.” Another batch would say, “You should sell stock X because it’s going down.” Of course, one batch would be a correct “prediction.” To the people who received the correct prediction, the scammer would then send another two groups of letters, following the same principle as before: one batch recommending a buy, the other recommending a sell. Over time, and as the sample group narrowed, eventually a very small group of people would have received “correct predictions” multiple times. The marks would get excited, thinking that the broker knew some special secret. The scammer would then say, “I’ve been right in every prediction I’ve made. You should invest with me.” The pitch was often irresistible. Of course, the marks would not know that the scammer was not a wizard; he just used mathematics and probability to his advantage.
The Huddle. This refers to the stage where the scammer draws the “pigeon” deeper into his world. Have you ever seen players on a field huddled together, sharing the details of their next play? That’s what this refers to. The mark will be asked to join a team, a group, an email list, a special clique that will share all the coveted “insider knowledge,” playing back to the “I have a secret” pitch. Isolation is a very effective technique for convincing someone to do something he does not really want to do.
The Directive. Once the psychological groundwork has been laid out as described above, the pigeon will be softened up for the big pitch. Now comes The Directive. The mark is told what to do with his money: what to buy, what to invest in, or what to put his confidence in. The reason why confidence games are called confidence games is because the mark is giving his confidence to the scammer. A frequently used technique here is called the “pigeon drop,” in which the mark is enticed to put up a small amount of money based on the hope that he will receive an even greater payout in the future. This is also the basis for one of the oldest and most effective of cons, the so-called “Spanish Prisoner.” In the Spanish Prisoner con, the mark is enticed by both the prospect of a beautiful woman, and a large sum of money. All he has to do is leave a deposit of money under terms of strict secrecy. Of course, the scammer then vanishes with the money.
Do not underestimate the effectiveness of scams and cons. Good scammers are sociopaths. They can be extremely convincing. You may not even know you have been taken, even after losing your money. Once you underestimate them, you become that much more vulnerable. As I said earlier, extremely intelligent people can fall for them, because they operate at the most basic level of human need: the desire to be secure, wealthy, handsome, or beautiful. The only effective defenses against scams are: (1) a true understanding that nothing in this world is for free, and there is not such thing as easy money; and (2) success takes a long time. Along these lines, I would recommend readers revisit my previous comments on investing.
Scammers are not genial rascals. They are manipulative, depraved people who find satisfaction in preying on others. Understand what is going on around you. If something doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t. There is no such thing as a quick buck. That was true in 5000 B.C., and it is true today.
Quintus Curtius is author of several books, which can be found here.
Turkey In Turmoil Again: Erdogan Fires Second Central Bank Chief In 4 Months, Sparking Foreign Capital Panic
On Thursday, moments after the Central Bank of Turkey unexpectedly hiked rates by a whopping 200bps – double the consensus expectation – to 19% from 17%, the highest rate since the country’s panicked scramble to contain the collapse of the Turkish lira during the economic turmoil of 2018, we said that “unfortunately for Turkey – whose economy will now grind to yet another halt – it had no choice: inflation had accelerated for a fifth month in February as oil rallied and the impact of last year’s lira weakness lingered, while capital outflows soared. The upward trend fueled expectations the central bank would try to rein in prices by raising interest rates… but nobody had expected a 200 bps rate hike.”
Also in our kneejerk response to the rate hike decision, we said that the relatively new CBRT head, Agbal, “was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t: on one hand the lira was plunging angering Erdogan, so he had to stabilize it… on the other the only way to do so was by hiking rates, which would anger Erdogan even more.“
We also quoted from the CBRT’s decision, noting that the bank has decided “to implement a front-loaded and strong additional monetary tightening,” explicitly stating that this “statement is guaranteed to enrage Turkey’s dictator.”
Bottom line: Erdogan would be furious either way.
Finally, we quoted SocGen EM strategist Phoenix Kalen who tried to justify the rate hike with some lofty sleight of logic by saying that “in a challenging context of domestic business and political pressure against further interest rate hikes, the CBRT has stepped up to the plate and delivered a resounding home run to underline its commitment to an inflation-targeting framework.” Kalen then said that the move “will go a long way toward bolstering both retail and foreign investor confidence that the CBRT under Governor Agbal will stay engaged in addressing deterioration in inflation expectations.”
While we were impressed with Kalen’s attempt to make 5-D chess out of what was basically total chaos, our take was far more cynical
Maybe… or maybe it will just force Erdogan to replace yet another CBRT governor.
Two days later, our cynical view proved correct again, because shortly after midnight on Saturday, and just two days after the larger than expected rate hike, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan fired the country’s third central bank governor in less than two years and replaced him with a fan of lowering interest rates.
Naci Agbal, Turkey’s former finance minister who was appointed central bank chief last November, was fired by Erdogan and was replaced with Sahap Kavcioglu, according to a decree published after midnight on Saturday in the Official Gazette. Agbal’s abrupt termination is a clear retaliation by Erodgan for last week’s unexpectedly big rate hike, one which does not fit within the absurd confines of “Erdoganomics” whereby lower rates are somehow needed to fight inflation.
And while Erdoganomics appeared to have ended some time in late 2020 when shortly after Agbal’s appointment, Erdogan’s son-in-law Berat Albayrak – then finance minister – also unexpectedly quit in a move that encouraged battered foreign investors to redeploy capital into the capital-starved Turkey as monetary orthodoxy appeared to be making a comeback, it is now clear that this was just one giant fakeout, and that Erdogan was merely biding his time before he pulled the rug from under a new cohort of offshore investors who are about to suffer devastating losses on their Turkish exposure.
Agbal took the job as Turkey’s top banker last November after weeks of declines in the lira and raised the benchmark one-week repo rate by a cumulative 875 basis points since, boosting the central bank’s damaged credibility among investors.
Meanwhile, Erdogan, the man behind the eponymous bizarro monetary policy which posits that high interest rates cause inflation, was oddly silent during the latest rate hike episode even though he had for years frequently chastised the central bank when he thought it was keeping borrowing costs too high.
Well, we now know that the Turkish despot was – like a dormant volcano – merely building up his anger and frustrations, and finally exploded early on Saturday morning in a move that will decimate any leftover trust in Turkey.
Erdogan’s latest pick for central bank head is Sahap Kavcioglu, a professor of banking at Marmara University in Istanbul and a columnist at the pro-government Yeni Safak newspaper. The paper attacked Agbal’s latest interest-rate increase on its front page on Friday…
Erdogan assigns Şahap Kavcioglu, an academic and a columnist for conservative pro-gov’t Yeni Şafak, as replacement to the Turkish Central Bank
Yeni Şafak on Friday attacked Agbal from the front page, accusing him of conducting an operation against the Turkish economy by hikes pic.twitter.com/5MV3NP9X7U
… saying the decision “turned a deaf ear” to Turkey’s 83 million people, would hurt economic growth and primarily benefits “London-based owners of hot money.”
As Turkey’s correspondent for the Middle East Eye, Ragip Soylu, further notes, last month Kavcioglu said that:
CBRT shouldn’t insist on its high interest rate policy
Many countries with domestic/foreign problems have negative real interest rates so could Turkey
Rate hikes indirectly creates inflation
Turkey’s new governor of Central Bank in February:
• CBRT shouldn’t insist on its high interest rate policy
• Many countries with domestic/foreign problems have negative real interest rates so could Turkey
• Rate hikes indirectly creates inflation https://t.co/sY518SKSiI
As Bloomberg further notes, in a column on Feb. 9, Kavcioglu said it was “saddening” to see Turkish columnists, bankers and business organizations seeking stability in high interest rates at a time when other countries had negative interest rates.
“The central bank shouldn’t insist on high interest rates,” he wrote. “When interest rates in the world are close to zero, raising interest rates here won’t solve our economic problems. To the contrary, it’ll deepen them in the period ahead.”
He also seconded Erdogan’s unorthodox theory on the relationship between interest rates and inflation, saying that raising interest rates would “indirectly open the way to increasing inflation.” And while most central bankers are idiots, one thing that is relatively accurate is that raising interest rates does generally control excessive inflation.
But wait, it gets worse: Kavcioglu, who’s also a former lawmaker for the ruling Ak Party, defended reserve policies executed from 2018 to 2020, when Turkey began spending its foreign-currency reserves to try and prop up the lira in times of volatility. The use of the central bank’s foreign-exchange coffers then helped to rein in inflation, interest rates and the exchange rate, he said.
In other words, the new head of the CBRT is not only an ideological carbon copy of Erdogan (which explains his ascent to the monetary throne), but is a firm believer in Erdoganomics. Which means that last week’s rate hike will be prompted reversed, perhaps as soon as Sunday, leading to yet another episode of “Turkey in Turmoil”, and all out current account panic as foreigners pull all their money from Turkey now that the country has lost any last trace of credibility and collapses into an Erdogan singularity, a process which will most likely culminate with economic collapse, domestic conflict and/or civil war.
People Are Snapping Up Virtual Land Like Hotcakes — And Now There’s A Fund
Whether you’re shaking your fist like an old man with kids on his lawn, or a true believer in Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) looking to make millions, there’s a booming ‘virtual reality’ real-estate market where people are buying and selling parcels of ‘land’ across several online “metaverses” – where people are building virtual hotels, stores, and other properties in the hopes of increasing their value.
And if you’re an accredited investor willing to drop at least $25,000 – and you’re invited – there’s a fund for those who want to get in on the NFT real estate market.
Republic Real Estate – which buys distressed condos in the real world, is launching the virtual land fund next week. Founder Janine Yorio, head of Republic, says “Real-world real estate is very uncertain now,” adding “Housing prices are at an all-time high. Meanwhile, offices are empty, hotels are empty. This feels insulated from a lot of those real-world risks.”
Bloomberg unpacks:
Plots sell daily in online worlds such as Decentraland, a virtual place with its own economy, currency and social events calendar, accessible to anyone with a web browser. And values for such assets are multiplying.
This year through March 15, the average price paid per parcel in Decentraland was $2,703 — more than triple what it was in 2020, according to NonFungible.com, which tracks the sales. Land prices quadrupled in the metaverse called Cryptovoxels, from $821 a parcel last year to $3,895 in the first two and half months of 2021.
Republic, meanwhile, has purchased over 30 parcels across four metaverses, and is in talks with a real-world hospitality brand to co-develop a hotel and bar on one of those sites. We assume you have to mix your own drinks. According to Yorio, the lodging firm would collaborate on the virtual hotel design – paying Republic to develop it. The goal is to become a well-regarded watering hole, which then draws other retailers and developers to snap up nearby parcels.
We assure you, this is real. This week, contemporary artist Krista Kim recently sold an NFT-minted digital house, called “Mars House,” for 288 ether – valued at more than $500,000 based on Friday’s trading price.
“Right now, a lot of the [NFT] art that’s currently available on platforms, it’s a very limited parameter of how you can present the art,” said Kim in a Wednesday CNBC interview. “It’s presented, basically, as a digital file, a beautiful drawing or video on your screen, but my intention was to look beyond that.”
“For me, I actually foresee that we will be living in an augmented reality lifestyle within a very short period,” Kim added, saying it could happen in “a couple years.”
A view of Mars House, a 3D NFT creation from Krista Kim Studios that was recently sold.
The new owner of Mars House will be able to upload the property to various metaverses.
In February, meanwhile, eight lots of virtual real estate sold for a combined $1.5 million on gaming platform Axie Infinity, according to NonFungible.
“There is obviously some fear-of-missing-out phenomenon behind this,” says NonFungible COO, Gauther Zuppinger, in an email to Bloomberg. “The best, rarest places are almost all purchased. The secondary market shows that the first buyers sell their assets for way more than the initial price.”
Each land parcel is a non-fungible token, or NFT — a unique asset that can’t be forged or replicated, just like physical land in the real world.
The value of online real estate rises as more people buy digital art or other collectibles and need a place to showcase them, according to Zuppinger. Many artists and designers also are turning to the virtual world to host what they create, as consumers spend more time there, Yorio said.
And now, there’s a functional market in which prices have more than quadrupled in a matter of months for well-trafficked space.
“Buying land today in virtual worlds may end up feeling a lot like buying land in Manhattan in the 1750s,” says Yorio. “There is massive growth ahead, and now is the time to get in on the ground floor.“
Now might be a great time to read Neuromancer, Ghost in the Shell or watch Lawnmower Man if you’re uninitiated, as it seems we may be headed in that direction.
The danger posed by the Deep State is that it wields immense power but is unelected and unaccountable…
As a former intelligence officer, I find it amusing to read articles in the mainstream media that blithely report how the latest international outrages are undoubtedly the work of CIA and the rest of the U.S. government’s national security alphabet soup. The recurring claim that the CIA is somehow running the world by virtue of a vast conspiracy that includes the secret intelligence agencies of a number of countries, using blackmail and other inducements to corrupt vulnerable politicians and opinion makers, has entered into the DNA of journalists worldwide, frequently without any evidence that the current crop of spies is capable to doing anything more complicated than getting out of bed in the morning.
One problem with the theory about total global dominance through espionage is the sheer logistics of it all. Directing political and economic developments in two hundred nations simultaneously must require a lot of space and a large staff. Is there a huge office hidden in Langley? Or the Pentagon? Or in the White House West Wing itself? Or is it in one of the secure facilities that have been popping up like mushrooms just off of the Dulles Toll Road in Herndon Virginia?
To provide evidence that intelligence agencies extend their tentacles just about everywhere, the other claim that is nearly always made is that all former spooks are part of the conspiracy, as once you learn the secret handshake to join CIA, NSA or the FBI you never stop being “one of them.” Well, that might be true in some cases but the majority of former spooks are quite happy to be “former,” and one might also observe that many voices in the anti-war movement, such as it is, come from intelligence, law enforcement or military backgrounds. Of course, the conspiracy theorists will explain that away by claiming that it is a conspiracy within a conspiracy, making the dissidents little better than double agents or gatekeepers who are put in place to make sure that the opposition doesn’t become too effective.
Given the fact that how the so-called American “Deep State” actually gets together and plots is unknown, one would have to concede that it is an organization without much structure, unlike the original Turkish Deep State (Derin Devlet), which coined the phrase, that actually met and had centralized planning. I would suggest that the problem is one of definitions and it also helps to know how the national security state is structured and what its legitimate mission is. The CIA, for example, employs about 20,000 people, nearly all of whom work in various divisions that collect information (spying), analysis, technology and also are divided into staffs that work transnationally on issues like terrorism, narcotics, and nuclear proliferation. The overwhelming majority of those employees have political views and vote but there is a consensus that what their work entails is apolitical. The actual politics of how policy comes out the other end is confined to a very small group at the top, some of whom are themselves political appointees.
To be sure, one can and probably should oppose the policies of regime change that the Agency is engaged in worldwide but there is one important consideration that has to be understood. Those policies are set by the country’s civilian leadership (president, secretary of state and national security council) and they are imposed on CIA by its own political leadership. The Agency does not hold referenda among its employees to determine which foreign policy option is preferable any more than soldiers in the 101st Airborne are consulted when they receive orders to deploy.
Nearly all current and former intelligence officers that I know are, in fact, opposed to the politics of U.S. global dominance that have been pretty much in place since 9/11, most particularly as evidenced by the continued conflict with Russia, the ramping up of aggression with China, and the regime change policies relating to Syria, Iran and Venezuela. Those officers often consider the invasions and exercise of “maximum pressure” to have been failures. Those policies were supported by truculent language, sanctions and displays of military readiness by the Trump Administration but it now appears clear that they will all be continued in one form or another under President Joe Biden, likely to include even more aggression against Russia through proxies in Ukraine and Georgia.
The officers engaged in such operations also observe that regime change has basically come out of the closet since 2001. George W. Bush announced that there was a “new sheriff in town” and the gloves would be coming off. Things that the intelligence agencies used to do are now done right out in the open, using military resources against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria while the biggest change of all, in Ukraine in 2014, was largely engineered by Victoria Nuland at the State Department. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was also active in Russia supporting opposition parties until the Kremlin forced them to leave the country.
So, it is fair to say that the Deep State is not a function of either the CIA or the FBI, but at the same time the involvement of John Brennan, James Clapper and James Comey in the plot to destroy Donald Trump is disturbing, as the three men headed the Agency, the Office of National Intelligence and Bureau. They appear to have played critical leadership roles in carrying out this conspiracy and they may not have operated on their own. Almost certainly what they may have done would have been either explicitly or implicitly authorized by the former President of the United States, Barack Obama, and others in his national security team.
It is now known that President Barack Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan created a secret interagency Trump Task Force in early 2016. Rather than working against genuine foreign threats, this Task Force played a critical role in creating and feeding the meme that Donald Trump was a tool of the Russians and a puppet of President Vladimir Putin, a claim that still surfaces regularly to this day. Working with Clapper, Brennan fabricated the narrative that “Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.” Brennan and Clapper promoted that tale even though they knew very well that Russia and the United States have carried out a broad array of covert actions against each other, including information operations, for the past seventy years, but they pretended that what happened in 2016 was qualitatively and substantively different even though the “evidence” produced to support that claim is weak to nonexistent.
I would, nevertheless, argue that their behavior, though it exploited intelligence resources, was not intrinsic to the organizations that they led, that the three of them were part and parcel of the real Deep State, which consists of a consensus view on running the country that is held by nearly all of the elements that together make up the American Establishment, with its political power focused in Washington and its financial center in New York City. It should come as no surprise that those government officials who are complicit in the process are often personally rewarded with highly paid sinecure jobs in financial services, which they know nothing about, when they “retire.”
The danger posed by the Deep State, or, if you choose, the Establishment, is that it wields immense power but is unelected and unaccountable. Even though it does not actually meet in secret, it does operate through relationships that are not transparent and as the media is part of it, there is little chance that its activity will be exposed. One notes that while the Deep State is mentioned frequently in the national media there has been little effort to identify its components and how it operates.
Viewed in that fashion, the argument that there exists a cohesive group of power brokers who really run the country and are even able to coopt those who are ostensibly dedicated to keeping the country safe becomes much more plausible without denigrating the many honest people who are employed by the national security agencies.
The Deep State conspirators don’t have to meet to plot as they all understand very well what has to be done to maintain their supremacy.
That is the real danger.
The Biden Administration will surely demonstrate over the next several months that the Deep State is still with us and more powerful than ever as it operates both inside and outside the government itself.
And the real danger comes from the Democrats now in charge, who are if anything more given to playing with consensus politics that involve phony threats than were the Republicans.
SecDef Austin Warns North Korea: US “Ready To Fight Tonight”
In an unusually blunt threat and warning even for the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said that US forces are ready to “fight tonight” in comments aimed at North Korea after an angry Pyongyang denounced the resumption of joint military exercises between the US and South Korea.
“Our force remains ready to fight tonight, and we continue to make progress toward the eventual transition of wartime Operational Control to a [Republic of Korea]-commanded, future Combined Forces Command,” Austin said on Thursday.
Via ABC News
He issued the words from Seoul at the tail end of his Asia trip this week alongside Secretary of State Antony Blinken and South Korean leaders. Secretary Blinken had continued his denuclearization of the peninsula message, saying, “We are committed to the denuclearization of North Korea, reducing the broader threat the DPRK poses to the United States and our allies, and improving the lives of all Koreans, including the people of North Korea who continue to suffer widespread and systematic abuses at the hands of their repressive government.”
Pyongyang on Thursday slammed what DPRK first vice foreign minister Choe Son Hui called a “lunatic” and “hostile” policy. The senior North Korean diplomat said of the question of denuclearization talks that there will be no contact with Washington “unless the US rolls back its hostile policy towards the DPRK.”
“Therefore, we will disregard such an attempt of the US in the future, too.” The “new regime” in the US, she added, had only put forward a “lunatic theory of ‘threat from north Korea’ and groundless rhetoric about ‘complete denuclearisation'”.
The Biden administration has reportedly been attempting to reach out to the North via various diplomatic channels since mid-February, but to no avail.
Via AP
Meanwhile the resumption of joint military exercises with the South, which had been on pause for a year with the ostensible reason given being the coronavirus pandemic, certainly won’t help thaw the ongoing tensions anytime soon.
Currently, transnational globalists are pushing for a “Great Reset.” It helps to understand what’s coming at us if you remember that the globalist’s mindset is akin to a zookeeper’s. Currently, the zookeepers have their animals safely confined, but there remains a modicum of hope that the animals can liberate themselves.
First some context. History is replete with ideologies that seek to save people either from themselves or a foreign contagion. Until recently, this impulse, as the 20th century shows, has taken the form of political ideologies.
For those espousing Marxism, the ideology sought to cleanse a people from the errors and machinations of the past. When the new ideas prevailed, even if only briefly, the alleged salvation from historical, social, and economic maladies required a reset of just about everything. More often than not, the reset was accompanied by a sea of blood and violence. The objects of salvation (the people) often died or ended up in the same circumstances or were worse off.
I’m referring to communism, fascism, and National Socialism.
Some will say, what about capitalism? Whatever the ills of capitalism, it behooves one to consider the alternatives offered during the 20th century. Some have said history is just one damn thing after another. Others say history is the same damn thing after another.
In any case, the intellectuals of modernity (see Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society) decided that people left to their own devices will get in the way of humanity’s salvation. Their solution is global governance that will closely manage all human activity. Saving humanity is yesterday’s solution. Saving Planet Earth from humanity is the ticket. Enter the zookeeper.
In a zoo, the animals are confined. Their diet, reproduction, interaction with other species, consumption of resources, etc. are carefully managed, depending on the zookeeper’s management goals.
When the kept animals’ illness, infirmity, or age becomes a liability, they are eliminated.
In the 21st century, COVID has given the intellectuals and their political and media lackeys the ability to turn modern life into a giant zoo. Whatever the coronavirus’s root cause, the ruling elite have passionately embraced its usefulness as a tool to reorder societies and economies across the globe.
I may be wrong, but I do not recall a time when the world’s governments acted in such remarkable uniformity. The virus-instigated collapse of the extant infrastructure (i.e., jobs, income, mobility, access, distribution, manufacturing, agriculture, etc.) has been blindingly swift. The obvious question — “When will things return to normal?” — is regularly answered by the authorities: they won’t.
The ruling class intends to give the “new normal,” AKA “the reset,” its best shot.
The future the ruling class contemplates is one in which “rights” and privileges will be granted only to those people who comply. Global mobility has plummeted, enforced confinement is mandated, jobs have vanished, goods are becoming scarcer, surveillance is omnipresent, and noncompliance is punished. We will be told that this is all for the greater good. The elite have turned the world into a zoo, with themselves as keepers and the rest of us as the animals that must be trained or destroyed.
The power to command and control human activity is off the charts. The impulse toward totalitarian rule is as old as dirt. Those with the power to attempt it have always done whatever it takes. The good news is that the animals in this new zoo are the most innovative, creative, adaptive, and resilient creatures on the planet. There’s still a chance they can bust out of the joint.
BofA: The Uber-Dovish Fed Backfired And Vigilantes Are Now Bullying Powell Into YCC – Three Ways To Trade This
Anyone expecting a major bank to discuss a deflationary scenario will have to wait for at least a year; they certainly won’t get it here.
In his latest Flow Show report, BofA CIO Michael Hartnett first looks at the biggest driver behind the ongoing reflationary wave, and writes that globally delivered covid vaccines (400 million) are already far outpacing covid cases (122 million)…
… which is why clients are even talking about a vaccine “glut” by the autumn offsetting the spring shortage in Europe and Emerging Markets, and the resulting disorderly bond yield rise is negative for Q2 economic growth.
Then there is the elephant in the room: the unprecedented fiscal excess unleashed by most DM countries and the US in particular. Having earlier touched on the Fed’s “Catch 21”, namely the soaring US budget & current account deficits, which will surpass $4TN in ’21, and $2TN in ’22 (with forecasts excluding a potential $1.5-2tn in additional infrastructure spend)…
… Hartnett notes that issuance YTD is Treasuries $861bn, IG/HY bonds $514bn, stocks $178bn (incl SPACs), all on pace for record highs, so bond & equity supply is annualizing a record $7.6TN. Also note that US Treasury issuance ($4.45tn) this year will easily exceed the GDP of Germany, so it’s “little wonder 30-year UST off to 2nd worst start in past 100 years.”
The combination of the “end of covid” as noted in the latest BofA Fund Manager Survey, now that runaway inflation and taper tantrums are both bigger risks than the vaccine rollout…
… with the relentless flood of fiscal stimulus leads Hartnett to make the stunning conclusion that “we are in midst of strongest macro data of our lives” as the boom phase currently is set to dominate the upcoming bust for a long time:
Philly Fed survey manufacturing highest since Mar’73; Philly & NY price surveys show inflation pressures early March; US small businesses reporting ‘jobs hard to fill’ highest in 50 years; US house prices +19%, China exports up +60% Y/Y; Baltic shipping rates +95% YTD;
And yet despite this record economic overheating, one where inflation is already out of control as supply chains are broken and shortages of most goods are prevalent…
… the Fed is convinced that this inferno of soaring prices will be transitory, and has remained uber-dovish, promising on Wednesday not to hike rates though 2023. However, according to Hartnett, this “uber-dovish Fed posture has backfired”, with the bond vigilantes “moving quickly to bully US central bank into Yield Curve Control” which the BofA CIO says is likely once the yield on the 5Y surpasses 1¼%.
Meanwhile EM’s are already tightening to curb runaway inflation (Brazil & Turkey just hiked this week) resulting in 8 global rate hikes YTD (vs 5 cuts); And not just EMs – Norway was the 1st DM central bank to signal hike, and no matter how deep in the sand the Fed, ECB and BOE stick their heads, global financial conditions are starting to tighten – just look at spreads, vol and so on…
Which brings us to three views from Hartnett: a short-term, a medium-term and a longer term:
1) Short-term:Cyclicals have soared in anticipation of boom & “Goldilocks” plays e.g. tech, credit & EM on back foot; immediate risk is disorderly yield jump hurts cyclicals. Indeed, the oil price plunge may have been the first sign of potential regime shift to higher yields – lower growth. Here Hartnett says to watch HYG <$84…
… BKX <115, SOX <2800, and notes that the basket of rate sensitive assets (LQD, HYG, EEM, IAI, KRE, VBK, XHB, SOXX ) has started to roll. BofA's advice: utilities & staples are good defensive hedges.
2. Medium-term: Ominously, the BofA CIO predicts low/volatile asset returns in ’21 driven by 3P’s of peak Positioning, Profits, Policy in H1, and 3R’s of rising Rates, Regulation, Redistribution in H2. His advice how to trade the medium-term: own volatility.
3. Longer-term: 2020 marked the secular low point for inflation and interest rates; 40-year bull market in bonds is officially over…
… with the following long-term asset allocation implications: bullish real assets, commodities, volatility, small cap, value & EAFE/EM stocks, bearish bonds, US dollar, large cap growth.
To Hartnett’s reco we would just throw in bitcoin. Why? Because in the “longer-term” central banks will launch digital currencies to reflate at any cost even if it means the loss of the reserve currency to terminally debase fiat, and force billions into the parallel monetary system that is crypto. Incidentally, it was Hartnett who earlier today explained why bitcoin is 2021’s safe haven (read “The Fed’s “Catch 21”: BofA Explains Why Bitcoin Is 2021’s Safe Haven“). And yes, those who were long bitcoin heading into this year. are blowing out all other asset classes as Hartnett himself shows with his latest “Scores of the Doors: bitcoin 99.9%, oil 23.3%, global stocks 4.0%, US$ 2.1%, cash 0.0%, HY bonds -0.2%, IG bonds -4.8%, government bonds -5.2%, gold -8.9% YTD.”
“It’s Pretty Windy Outside” – White House Blames ‘Climate’ For Biden’s Biff On Air Force One Steps
Update (1245ET): Phew! A White House official has confirmed that President Biden, after stumbling aboard Air Force One on his way to Georgia, “is fine.”
Additionally, Steven Nelson reports that White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre seems to blame the wind for President Biden’s fall. She told reporters aboard Air Force One:
“It’s pretty windy outside. It’s very windy. I almost fell coming up the steps myself. He is doing 100 percent.”
“The saddest part about Biden overall is that it isn’t actually funny watching him physically deteriorate on TV, It’s sad for him/his family,detrimental to our country, & makes us a laughing stock to the world, We are seen as weak because under a Biden administration we are“
But in the interest of balance, can we please stop being mean to the president.
Guys stop being so mean to Joe Biden saying he’s old, senile and unfit. He just sometimes breaks his foot in the shower because he pulls his dog’s tail, falls 3x times walking up stairs, calls Kamala the President and forgets the name of his defense secretary. No big deal. pic.twitter.com/7oimYMn5IL
It’s not exactly a vote of confidence, coming just hours after he mistakenly referred to his Veep as “President” Harris. Fortunately, an aide to the president confirmed that he was “doing fine” after the spill.
Oh and just one more thing. Remember when Biden mocked Trump’s ramp walk at West Point…
FLASHBACK -> Biden mocks Trump’s ramp walk at West Point and claims he’s stronger: “Look at how he steps and look at how I step. Watch how I run up ramps and he stumbles down ramps. Come on.” pic.twitter.com/U7CL0dBSQA
We’ll give the final word to Don Jr who, as usual, sums up the farce perfectly: “I remember the press bashing Trump for touching the rail once. Biden falls repeatedly but I’m sure he’s the picture of health. No wonder all our enemies are pouncing simultaneously and mocking him publicly. “
The attack was horrific leaving eight people dead (six of whom were of Asian descent) because our society doesn’t value human life.
Rather unsurprisingly, this was immediately turned into a race issue.
The man pulling the trigger was white, and therefore, this must be a race-related hate crime committed by a white supremacist.
(If this were race-related, one would expect all eight victims to be of the same race? Or was that part of his cunning plan to throw off investigators to his real racist motives?)
The problem is, as much as the left wants it to be, it wasn’t ‘race’ that caused the man to commit these crimes.
Specifically, as we previously noted, the man arrested for the murders reportedly said he committed the crime spree because “it’s a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.”
He admitted that he has a “sex addiction” and frequently used these “massage parlors” to feed his sex habit. Six of the eight victims were of Asian descent.
Of course, that wasn’t good enough and “investigations” into his motives continued…
“So obviously, it’s a heartbreaking incident, and it hits particularly close to home for me since I consider Atlanta home…
The FBI is supporting state and local law enforcement, specifically APD, the Atlanta Police Department, and the [Cherokee County] Sheriff’s Office. So we’re actively involved but in a support role.”
Director Wray continued saying:
“And while the motive remains still under investigation at the moment, it does not appear that the motive was racially motivated.”
Listen to the full interview here:
Now, perhaps, the Biden administration will step up support for disadvantaged women? Or attempt to clamp down on the sex-trafficking epidemic (cough, border control, cough) that forces so many women into these desperate situations… instead of amplifying the “white supremacy” card, which the left and their compliant media are always so quick to use, exacerbating societal divides.
‘That Stinks!’: Brooklyn Art Director Sells Audio Of A Fart As An NFT For $85
We’re not exactly sure if the non-fungible token craze has peaked, but this has got to be a surefire sign that we’re close.
“NYC man sells fart for $85, cashing in on NFT craze,” was the exact headline the NY Post ran with on Thursday of this week whilst reporting on a Brooklyn-based art director in the midst of selling “a year’s worth of fart audio clips” as non-fungible tokens.
The artist, Alex Ramirez-Mallis, asked the Post: “If people are selling digital art and GIFs, why not sell farts?”
In fact, he is selling a whole year of them. He has launched an NFT called “One Calendar Year of Recorded Farts,” which he started at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020. He got the idea when him and his friends were sharing audio of farts via WhatsApp, the report notes.
And on the one year anniversary of his quarantine, he compiled the respective recordings into what the Post called a 52 minute “master collection” audio file. He is selling individual fart recordings for 0.05 Ether, or about $85 each. So far, one has sold.
He also seems to acknowledge the absurdity of the NFT craze. “If the value increases, they could have an extremely valuable fart on their hands,” Ramirez-Mallis commented. “The NFT craze is absurd — this idea of putting a value on something inherently intangible. These NFTs aren’t even farts, they’re just digital alphanumeric strings that represent ownership.”
“I’m hoping these NFT farts can at once critique [the absurdity], make people laugh and make me rich,” he said. Ah, yes, the American dream. Getting rich selling audio of your farts for a currency that wasn’t even around 10 years ago.
He continued: “In many ways, this is a bubble, but it’s also been around forever. Buying and selling art purely as a commodity to store value in has been around for centuries, and NFTs are just a digital way of representing that transactional nature of art.”
“The art is just an avatar for value. There’s that old saying, ‘Why don’t they just frame the money?’, and this is really the embodiment of that.”
The “artist’s” friend Grayson Earle commented: “By purchasing an NFT, you become part of the in-crowd of a technological novelty that masquerades as revolutionary but operates in the same tired old way of the existing art market.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has released a much-hyped, much-cited new report on “Foreign Threats to the 2020 Elections.” The key conclusion:
We assess that Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, [and] undermining public confidence in the electoral process…
The report added Ukrainian legislator Andrey Derkach, described as having “ties” to “Russia’s intelligence services,” and Konstantin Kilimnik, a “Russian influence agent” (whatever that means), used “prominent U.S. persons” and “media conduits” to “launder their narratives” to American audiences. The “narratives” included “misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden” (note they didn’t use the word “false”). They added a small caveat at the end: “Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.”
As Glenn Greenwald already pointed out, the “launder their narratives” passage was wolfed down by our intelligence services’ own “media conduits” here at home, and regurgitated as proof that the “Hunter Biden laptop story came from the Kremlin,” even though the report didn’t mention the laptop story at all. Exactly one prominent reporter, Chris Hayes, had the decency to admit this after advancing the claim initially.
With regard to the broader assessment: how many times are we going to do this? We’ve spent the last five years watching as anonymous officials make major Russia-related claims, only to have those evidence-free claims fizzle.
From the much-ballyhooed “changed RNC platform” story (Robert Mueller found no evidence the changed Republican platform was “undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia”), to the notion that Julian Assange was engaged in a conspiracy with the Russians (Mueller found no evidence for this either), to Michael Cohen’s alleged secret meetings in Prague with Russian conspirators (“not true,” the FBI flatly concluded) to the story that Trump directed Cohen to lie to Congress (“not accurate,” said Mueller), to wild stories about Paul Manafort meeting Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy, to a “bombshell” tale about Trump foreknowledge of Wikileaks releases that blew up in CNN’s face in spectacular fashion, reporters for years chased unsubstantiated claims instead of waiting to see what they were based upon.
The latest report’s chief conclusions are assessments about Derkach and Kilimnik, information that the whole world knew before this report was released. Hell, even Rudy Giuliani, whose meeting with Derkach is supposedly the big scandal here, admitted there was a “50/50 chance” the guy was a Russian spy. Kilimnik meanwhile has now been characterized as having “ties” to Russian intelligence (Mueller), as a “Russian intelligence officer” (Senate Intelligence Committee), and is now back to being a mere “influence agent.” If he is Russian intelligence, then John McCain’s International Republican Institute (where Kilimnik worked), as well as embassies in Kiev and Moscow (where Kilimnik regularly gave information, according to the New York Times), have a lot of explaining to do.
No matter what, the clear aim of this report is to cast certain stories about Joe or Hunter Biden as misinformation, when the evidence more likely shows that material like the Hunter Biden emails is real, just delivered from a disreputable source. That makes such stories just like, say, the Joe Biden-Petro Poroshenko tapes, which were also pushed by Derkach and reported on uncontroversially by major media outlets like the Washington Post, before it became fashionable to denounce outlets reporting such leaks as Russian “proxies” and “conduits.”
I never thought the Hunter Biden laptop story was anywhere near as big of a deal as the efforts by platforms like Facebook and Twitter to block access to it, which seemed a historic and dangerous precedent. This new effort to cast the reporting of “allegations against President Biden” as participation in a foreign intelligence campaign is nearly as ominous. Even worse is the degree to which press figures are devouring the message. Will any bother to point out the huge quantity of recent official takes on the Russia story that went pear-shaped? A very, very brief sample:
All 17 U.S. intelligence agencies backed an assessment that cyberattacks in 2016 came from the “highest levels of the Kremlin.” That was later corrected in congressional testimony to four (it was actually three):
A “senior U.S. government official” characterized the ex-spy who claimed Russia had been cultivating Donald Trump for at least five years, and could “blackmail him,” was “a credible source with a proven record of providing reliable, sensitive, and important information to the US government.” But Christopher Steele was subsequently dismissed as an FBI source for his “completely untrustworthy” decision to talk to the media, and Horowitz not only discovered that both the FBI and the CIA (who dismissed his reports as “internet rumor”) had many reservations about his credibility, but that his famed “blackmail” claims about pee and prostitutes had been made in “jest,” over “beers.”
But Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe testified that as early as August of 2016, Page became the focus of secret surveillance because Papadopoulos had been deemed a dead end. This scarcely reported detail only rendered the entire predicate for the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation absurd:
“Senior FBI and national intelligence officials” told the White House and major news outlets that releasing the name of an “informant” in the Trump-Russia investigation could “risk lives,” one of many such stories (we heard similar warnings before the release of the name of Christopher Steele, his source Igor Danchenko, the “exfiltrated spy” Oleg Smolenkov, the “anonymous” New York Times editorialist, the Ukraine “whistleblower,” and others). The “informant” Haspel warned about, Stefan Halper, turned out to have been a professor outed by name as an intelligence source in the New York Times all the wayback in 1983:
“Current and former intelligence officers” told the New York Times that CIA director Gina Haspel showed Donald Trump pictures of British children sickened, as well as ducks killed, by a Russian assassination in England using the deadly nerve agent Novichok. It turns out there were no such sick children or dead ducks, and Haspel didn’t show such pictures, an error the Times chalked up to lack of research time:
According to “officials briefed on the matter,” New York Times reported, and the Washington Post “confirmed,” that “a Russian military spy unit offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants to attack coalition forces in Afghanistan.” Two months later, an on-the-record military official was less certain:
One could go on and on with this list, from the bogus claims about Maria Butina that ended up as Times headlines (“Suspected Secret Agent Used Sex in Covert Plan”), to overhype of the Cambridge Analytica story (which turned out to have nothing to do with Brexit), to the bass-ackwards denunciations of the so-called “Nunes memo” (validated almost entirely by Horowitz), and on, and on.
Does this mean the Russians don’t meddle? Of course not. But we have to learn to separate real stories about foreign intelligence operations with posturing used to target domestic actors while suppressing criticism of domestic politicians. It’s only happened about a hundred times in the last five years — maybe it’s time to start asking for proof in these episodes?
‘Nothing Can Help Them’ – Trials Begin For Canadians Accused Of Spying In China
A long-awaited show trial for one of two Canadians accused of espionage in China started Friday, as family members of the men say they are prepared for the worst, according to media reports. According to Bloomberg, a hearing was held at a local court in Dandong city (situated in the northeastern province of Liaoning) in the trial of Michael Spavor on allegations of spying. Spavor ran a business organizing tours of North Korea for mostly western clients before he was picked up by Chinese law enforcement back in late 2018.
Trials for both men are set to begin Friday (for Spavor) and Monday (for Michael Kovrig, a former Canadian diplomat who has also been accused of spying). The two Canadians have been detained since December 2018 and were charged in June last year with spying. In a Thursday statement, Marc Garneau, Canada’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, said the country’s embassy in Beijing “has been notified that court hearings for Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig are scheduled to take place on March 19 and March 22, respectively.”
Kovrig, a former Canadian diplomat who worked for the International Crisis Group at the time of his arrest, has been accused of “stealing sensitive information and intelligence through contacts in China since 2017.” Spavor has been accused of providing intelligence to Kovrig. It’s not clear whether the two men knew each other prior to their arrests.
Chinese officials haven’t shared any of the “evidence” they have gathered against the two men, or information detailing their alleged crimes, though they insist that “the facts are clear and evidence is solid.”
Both men were arrested shortly after Canadian authorities arrested Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou after she stepped off a plane in Vancouver. Wanzhou, the daughter of Huawei’s founder, a high-profile figure in China, was arrested at the behest of US authorities, who sought her extradition to the US to face charges that she violated US sanctions against Iran.
The arrests were widely seen as political retribution against Ottawa for cooperating with the US. However, while Meng has been allowed out on bail (she’s currently under house arrest in her opulent home) while she awaits the results of her extradition proceedings – which are still ongoing – both men have been detained in Chinese prisons, will little contact with their families or the outside world.
Family members and contacts of the two Canadian men have described them being held in poor conditions, and denied outside contact. Almost all in-person consular visits to foreign prisoners in China have been paused since last year due to the coronavirus pandemic. Since then, diplomats have only been allowed to speak to the men via phone.
Teng Biao, a lawyer who practiced human rights law in China for 10 years, and now lives in exile in New Jersey, told Canada’s the Toronto Star that the two men have almost no chance of being found innocent. They will face a “show trial” driven by political considerations, before being handed potentially lengthy prison sentences, to be served in China.
“In this kind of politically sensitive case the judges, the court, are not able to make the final decision,” Teng said. “We can say in these kinds of cases the court is only a political tool of the Chinese Communist Party.”
Criminal trials in China are generally very short, often lasting only a day or two, said Teng, and won’t be open to the public.
After Kovrig and Spavor were charged with espionage last year, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau denounced the “political” nature of their case, saying their detention was a “decision made by the Chinese government and we deplore it.” However, Beijing has held strong, continuing to insist that the charges against the men are legitimate, while denying Trudeau’s claims that the CCP is persecuting Canadian nationals for political purposes.
Asked bluntly by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos if he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin is “a killer,” Joe Biden answered, “Uh, I do.”
Biden added that he once told Putin to his face that he had “no soul.”
Biden also indicated that new sanctions would be imposed on Russia for the poisoning of dissident Alexei Navalny and for meddling in the 2020 U.S. election to allegedly help Donald Trump. Russia also faces U.S. sanctions for building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline under the Baltic to deliver natural gas to Germany.
With its president being called a “killer” by the U.S. president, Russia called Ambassador Anatoly Antonov home “for consultations.” In other times, such an exchange would bring the two nations to the brink of war.
What is Biden doing? Do we not have enough enemies? Does he not have enough problems on his plate?
The May 1 deadline for full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, negotiated a year ago with the Taliban, is just six weeks off. Do we stay and soldier on or depart? No decision has been announced.
If we stay, our forces in Afghanistan could, again, come under fire. If we leave, the Kabul regime could be shaken to its foundation and fall.
Leaving would be an admission that the U.S. failed, and the war is lost.
After the recent U.S.-South Korea military exercises, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s sister issued this threat to the Biden administration:
“We take this opportunity to warn the new U.S. administration trying hard to give off powdered smell in our land (that) if it wants to sleep in peace for the coming four years, it had better refrain from causing a stink at its first step.”
There is talk of new North Korean tests of missiles and nuclear weapons.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in Tokyo this week that the U.S. goal remains “the complete denuclearization of North Korea” But Presidents Bush II, Obama and Trump all failed to achieve that goal.
With national elections in June, the clock is also running on the Tehran regime that negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal. Does Biden intend to sign on again, as he indicated in the campaign he would, or walk away?
Biden also faces a new crisis of his own making. His “compassionate” policy on illegal immigration has been rewarded with scores of thousands of children, teenagers and families crossing our Southern border to be granted temporary residence while their cases await hearings.
With the border disintegrating, one would think the Biden administration would not be looking around for other crises.
Yet, in Tokyo, on the eve of his meeting with the Chinese in Anchorage, Blinken was playing the hawk:
“China uses coercion and aggression to systematically erode autonomy in Hong Kong, undercut democracy in Taiwan, abuse human rights in Xinjiang and Tibet, and assert maritime claims in the South China Sea that violate international law. … We will push back if necessary when China uses coercion or aggression to get its way.”
China has enacted a new law that authorizes its coast guard to use force to defend Chinese sovereignty. And among China’s claims to sovereign control are the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, claimed and controlled by Japan.
Blinken has warned the U.S. will fight to keep the Senkakus Japanese.
While in Tokyo, Blinken also denounced the generals’ coup in Myanmar, accusing Myanmar’s army of “attempting to overturn the results of a democratic election and … brutally repressing peaceful protesters.”
Former national security adviser to President Trump John Bolton has listed other areas where China is engaged in “unacceptable behavior.”
“A by-no-means-comprehensive list of Beijing’s transgressions that require U.S. attention would include: meddling, blatant and subtle, with U.S. public opinion; building military bases in the disputed South China Sea; menacing Taiwan, Vietnam and India; increasing strategic nuclear forces and egregious global cyberwarfare; empowering North Korea’s nuclear weapons program; concealing the origins of covid-19; stealing intellectual property and forcing technology transfers; and genocide against Uyghurs and the repression of Hong Kong.”
Perhaps the Anchorage talks can be extended to get all the items on Bolton’s agenda fully addressed.
Again, does not America have enough on her plate already?
Our national debt is now larger than our national economy. COVID-19 has killed half a million of us and is killing 1,000 a day more. We have a broken and bleeding Southern border being overrun with no end in sight.
Politically, our nation is divided as deeply as it was on the eve of the Civil War. We are caught up in a culture war, at the root of which is an irreconcilable conflict over whether America is a good and great country, perhaps the greatest — or a nation of whose history and founding we ought to be eternally ashamed.
If time is on America’s side in our cold wars with Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, is not the wiser policy to maneuver to avoid any new hot wars?
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