Feb 23

Today’s News 23rd February 2021

  • Turkey's Eternal Crusade On PKK Continues
    Turkey’s Eternal Crusade On PKK Continues

    Via SouthFront.org,

    Turkey is unrelenting in its crusade against the Kurdistan Worker’s Party and the People’s Protection Units, as two parts of a whole.

    Ankara’s forces carry out frequent operations within and without the country, targeting both the Kurdistan Worker’s Party’s (PKK) and the People’s Protection Units (YPG)’s interests and members. The Turkish government dubs both groups as terrorists, and does not shy away from invading the sovereign territory of other countries to pursue and “eliminate” their members and positions.

    As a result, Turkey frequently encroaches on Syrian and Iraqi territory, and even has observation posts set up to target its Kurdish enemy.

    It strongly opposes the Syrian Democratic Forces, a group whose core is comprised of the YPG, and receives heavy US support.

    Most recently, between February 10th and the 14th, Turkey began its most recent operation in northern Iraq. In particular, it took place on the Gara Mountain in the Duhok Governorate of the Kurdistan Region. The result was such that both the PKK and the Turkish Armed Forces claimed victory, following the operation. The accounts of what transpired vary.

    Turkey said it killed 53 PKK members, and captured 2. It admitted to losing 3 soldiers, while 4 of its troops were wounded in battle. According to the PKK, Turkey lost at least 30 soldiers, and dozens more were injured. A sort of collateral damage involved 13 Turkish hostages whose corpses were discovered in a cave network in the mountain area. Turkey and the US claimed that these were largely civilians, and some intelligence officers. The PKK claimed these were 13 Turkish military hostages. Turkey’s Defense Minister claimed many weapons and ammunition, as well as other equipment were seized.

    In the aftermath, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to expand military operations which showed progress to other regions where threats are still significant.

    Ankara’s aggressive and assertive actions are making many of the involved parties dissatisfied. Regardless it keeps carrying them out and shows no intention of stopping.

    In Iraq, the Al-Nujaba Islamic Resistance Movement issued a warning to the Turkish Army against invading the country any longer. It said that it would suffer the same fate as the American Army whose convoys and positions continue to be targeted. Iraq maintains the posture that Turkey must withdraw fully from its sovereign territory. It should simply pack up its bases in the north of the country and vacate the premises.

    In response, Turkey maintains that the West, and Iraq’s government aren’t doing enough to counter the alleged terrorist threat. Ankara claims it has its right of self-defense, even if it requires invading other countries.

    Operation Claw Eagle 2 was of questionable success, if the numbers by the PKK are to be considered, against those provided by Turkey. These operations, however, are unlikely to stop, both in Iraq and Syria.

    Erdogan seems hell-bent on solving all “security issues” and expanding Turkish activities in regions that are deemed threatening to Ankara’s interests.

    *  *  *

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 02/23/2021 – 02:00

  • WeWork's Neumann Nears Deal To Settle With Softbank For $500MM, Retain 'Major' Ownership Stake
    WeWork’s Neumann Nears Deal To Settle With Softbank For $500MM, Retain ‘Major’ Ownership Stake

    The former CEO and co-founder of WeWork, the tech/real-estate private company which saw its IPO implode back in 2019 (before talk of a possible second bite at the apple resurfaced in recent weeks) is reportedly nearing a settlement with Softbank in a closely-followed case.

    Per WSJ, Neumann could be nearing a settlement with Softbank, the Japanese telecom giant/VC behemoth, which takes out long-term leases and then divvies it up on shorter terms after completing hip renovations, cut thousands of jobs and withdrew from dozens of buildings around the world. The settlement would allow SoftBank to avoid paying some of the money it agreed to pay to Neumann back in the fall of 2019, while still allowing Neumann to walk away with $500MM, and retain his status as a major shareholder in WeWork.

    For those who haven’t been closely following this legal saga, Softbank rescued WeWork when it came to the company’s rescue after WeWork’s IPO fell apartment in 2019. But one of the strategies it used to recapitalize the company involved buying back, or rather, promising to buy back, shares owned by insiders, including Neumann, which left the firm with a majority stake, and the freedom to make sweeping management changes.

    Originally, the deal struck between Softbank and WeWork back in late 2019 involved a commitment to spend $3B to buy shares from Neumann and other WeWork insiders.

    But, according to terms being discussed currently, Softbank would spend roughly $1.5B to buy the shares of early WeWork investors and employees, including nearly $500MM to purchase shares from Neumann. Neumann – who was widely panned for the $185MM golden parachute consulting agreement he pocketed during the chaos of 2019 – would only walk away with half of what Softbank initially promised him, meaning his hopes for regaining billionaire status have  potentially been snuffed out – at least, unless the WeWork SPAC becomes a reality and a success.

    That’s right: Instead of $1B, Neumann would only walk away with $500MM, according to WSJ’s sources. Bloomberg points out that the price of the shares that Neumann has agreed to sell hasn’t changed since 2019. However, SoftBank will only walk away with half the original number.

    Under the terms of the potential settlement, SoftBank would purchase half of the WeWork shares it originally agreed to buy in 2019, said one the people, who asked not to be identified because the talks are still private. That means Neumann would be able to sell close to $500 million in stock, and that SoftBank would pay about $1.5 billion overall. The shares are being sold at the same price agreed upon in 2019, the person said.

    The deal would mean Neumann sells about a quarter of his position in WeWork and remains a major shareholder in the company, the person said, while noting the agreement isn’t finalized and could still change. The agreement could also pave the way for a second attempt at a WeWork public listing, the person added. A spokesman for Neumann and a spokeswoman for SoftBank declined to comment. The Wall Street Journal reported on the talks earlier.

    Despite the comity once shared between Softbank and WeWork, negotiations have reportedly been tense, and the relationship between Neumann and his former patron, billionaire Softbank Chairman Masayoshi Son, has reportedly soured.

    As the SPAC boom rolls on, WeWork has been in talks with a SPAC called BowX Acquisition and the two sides could reach a deal in the coming weeks, the people said.

    WeWork is infamous for seeing its private-market valuation implode over the span of a few weeks during the summer of 2019 as WSJ, Bloomberg, Reuters and others reported on a stream of leaks purportedly emanating from the investment bankers working on the deal and their clients, who were seriously dissatisfied with the price that the bankers were purportedly demanding for the shares.

    There is no guarantee WeWork will reach a deal with BowX, and other financing and SPAC options are still on the table, the people cautioned. But with the SPAC boom rolling on seemingly with no end in sight, few would be surprised, at this point, if WeWork does eventually trade in the public markets.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 02/23/2021 – 01:00

  • Escobar: The Art Of Being A Spectacularly Misguided Oracle
    Escobar: The Art Of Being A Spectacularly Misguided Oracle

    Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

    The late Dr. Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski for some time dispensed wisdom as an oracle of US foreign policy, side by side with the perennial Henry Kissinger – who, in vast swathes of the Global South, is regarded as nothing but a war criminal.

    Brzezinski never achieved the same notoriety. At best he claimed bragging rights for giving the USSR its own Vietnam in Afghanistan – by facilitating the internationalization of Jihad Inc., with all its dire, subsequent consequences.

    Over the years, it was always amusing to follow the heights Dr. Zbig would reach with his Russophobia. But then, slowly but surely, he was forced to revise his great expectations. And finally he must have been truly horrified that his perennial Mackinder-style geopolitical fears came to pass – beyond the wildest nightmares.

    Not only Washington had prevented the emergence of a “peer competitor” in Eurasia, but the competitor is now configured as a strategic partnership between Russia and China.

    Dr. Zbig was not exactly versed in Chinese matters. His misreading of China may be found in his classic A Geostrategy for Eurasia published in – where else – Foreign Affairs in 1997:

    Although China is emerging as a regionally dominant power, it is not likely to become a global one for a long time. The conventional wisdom that China will be the next global power is breeding paranoia outside China while fostering megalomania in China. It is far from certain that China’s explosive growth rates can be maintained for the next two decades. In fact, continued long-term growth at the current rates would require an unusually felicitous mix of national leadership, political tranquility, social discipline, high savings, massive inflows of foreign investment, and regional stability. A prolonged combination of all of these factors is unlikely.

    Dr. Zbig added,

    Even if China avoids serious political disruptions and sustains its economic growth for a quarter of a century — both rather big ifs — China would still be a relatively poor country. A tripling of GDP would leave China below most nations in per capita income, and a significant portion of its people would remain poor. Its standing in access to telephones, cars, computers, let alone consumer goods, would be very low.

    Oh dear. Not only Beijing hit all the targets Dr. Zbig proclaimed were off limits, but the central government also eliminated poverty by the end of 2020.

    The Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping once observed, “at present, we are still a relatively poor nation. It is impossible for us to undertake many international proletarian obligations, so our contributions remain small. However, once we have accomplished the four modernizations and the national economy has expanded, our contributions to mankind, and especially to the Third World, will be greater. As a socialist country, China will always belong to the Third World and shall never seek hegemony.”

    What Deng described then as the Third World – a Cold War-era derogatory terminology – is now the Global South. And the Global South is essentially the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) on steroids, as in the Spirit of Bandung in 1955 remixed to the Eurasian Century.

    Cold Warrior Dr. Zbig was obviously not a Daoist monk – so he could never abandon the self to enter the Dao, the most secret of all mysteries.

    Had he been alive to witness the dawn of the Year of the Metal Ox, he might have noticed how China, expanding on Deng’s insights, is de facto applying practical lessons derived from Daoist correlative cosmology: life as a system of interacting opposites, engaging with each other in constant change and evolution, moving in cycles and feedback loops, always mathematically hard to predict with exactitude.

    A practical example of simultaneously opening and closing is the dialectical approach of Beijing’s new “dual circulation” development strategy. It’s quite dynamic, relying on checks and balances between increase of domestic consumption and external trade/investments (the New Silk Roads).

    Peace is Forever War

    Now let’s move to another oracle, a self-described expert of what in the Beltway is known as the “Greater Middle East”: Robert Kagan, co-founder of PNAC, certified warmongering neo-con, and one-half of the famous Kaganate of Nulands – as the joke went across Eurasia – side by side with his wife, notorious Maidan cookie distributor Victoria “F**k the EU” Nuland, who’s about to re-enter government as part of the Biden-Harris administration.

    Kagan is back pontificating in – where else – Foreign Affairs, which published his latest superpower manifesto. That’s where we find this absolute pearl:

    That Americans refer to the relatively low-cost military involvements in Afghanistan and Iraq as “forever wars” is just the latest example of their intolerance for the messy and unending business of preserving a general peace and acting to forestall threats. In both cases, Americans had one foot out the door the moment they entered, which hampered their ability to gain control of difficult situations.

    So let’s get this straight. The multi-trillion dollar Forever Wars are “relatively low-cost”; tell that to the multitudes suffering the Via Crucis of US crumbling infrastructure and appalling standards in health and education. If you don’t support the Forever Wars – absolutely necessary to preserve the “liberal world order” – you are “intolerant”.

    “Preserving a general peace” does not even qualify as a joke, coming from someone absolutely clueless about realities on the ground. As for what the Beltway defines as “vibrant civil society” in Afghanistan, that in reality revolves around millennia-old tribal custom codes: it has nothing to do with some neocon/woke crossover. Moreover, Afghanistan’s GDP – after so much American “help” – remains even lower than Saudi-bombed Yemen’s.

    Exceptionalistan will not leave Afghanistan. A deadline of May 1st was negotiated in Doha last year for the US/NATO to remove all troops. That’s not gonna happen.

    The spin is already turbocharged: the Deep State handlers of Joe “Crash Test Dummy” Biden will not respect the deadline. Everyone familiar with the New Great Game on steroids across Eurasia knows why: a strategic lily pad must be maintained at the intersection of Central and South Asia to help closely monitor – what else – Brzezinski’s worst nightmare: the Russia-China strategic partnership.

    As it stands we have 2,500 Pentagon + 7,000 NATO troops + a whole lot of “contractors” in Afghanistan. The spin is that they can’t leave because the Taliban – which de facto control from 52% to as much as 70% of the whole tribal territory – will take over.

    To see, in detail, how this whole sorry saga started, non-oracle skeptics could do worse than check Volume 3 of my Asia Times archives: Forever Wars: Afghanistan-Iraq, part 1 (2001-2004) . Part 2 will be out soon. Here they will find how the multi-trillion dollar Forever Wars – so essential to “preserve the peace” – actually developed on the ground, in total contrast to the official imperial narrative influenced, and defended, by Kagan.

    With oracles like these, the US definitely does not need enemies.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 02/23/2021 – 00:00

  • Supposedly Retired, F-117 Nighthawk Stealth Jets Spotted Over Los Angeles
    Supposedly Retired, F-117 Nighthawk Stealth Jets Spotted Over Los Angeles

    Defense Blog reports a pair of Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk stealth attack aircraft were spotted above Los Angeles last Friday. The F-117s are supposedly retired but were spotted flying with a Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker. 

    AP Freelance photographer Matt Hartman tweeted a picture of the stealth aircraft on Sunday. He said:

    “So one day at ⁦ @flyLAXairport ⁩ I get a tip about something special… I look up ……. USAF KC-135R in-flight w/ 2 F-117 Stealth Fighter’s! Well I guess their NOT retired after all?? 02-19-21 2.”

    Two F-117 Nighthawks

    After 25 years in service, the Air Force retired the F-117 fleet in April 2008, but in September 2017, the service received special permission to keep 51 in Type 1000 storage, meaning the planes could swiftly return to active service. 

    In October, we reported two F-117s were spotted at the Miramar Naval Base in San Diego.

    It appears the Pentagon is bringing some of these legacy stealth aircraft back to active duty. 

    Four decommissioned F-117s were secretly deployed to the Middle East in 2017 to launch surgical strikes. The reason for the deployment was simple; Russia and Syria had shut down Syrian airspace by mid-2016. The U.S.-led coalition was unwilling to lose a fifth-generation aircraft to Russia’s S-400 missile systems in Syria. 

    With a great power competition unfolding between the US and China – may be the Pentagon is prepping these planes for future Pacific warfare. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/22/2021 – 23:40

  • Flight Audio Captures Pilot's Frantic Reaction To "Fast-Moving Cylindrical Object" Over New Mexico
    Flight Audio Captures Pilot’s Frantic Reaction To “Fast-Moving Cylindrical Object” Over New Mexico

    Multiple news sources including The Drive and The Daily Mail are detailing a mysterious encounter between an American Airlines flight and what the pilot has described as a mysterious, “long cylindical object” which was fast-moving over New Mexico on Sunday.

    AA Flight 2292 had been en route between Cincinnati and Phoenix when the crew was startled by the strange object which “almost looked like a cruise missile” – according to the audio – flying over their aircraft which was at an estimated 36,000 feet at the time of the sighting, according to details in The Drive. 

    Getty Images

    Amazingly the pilot’s reaction to the strange encounter was actually recorded, with the radio transmission subsequently published to the space and aviation analysis blog, Deep Black Horizon.

    A startled pilot can be heard radioing to Albuquerque Air Traffic Control: “Do you have any targets up here? We just had something go right over the top of us!” 

    The pilot is then heard saying: 

    “I hate to say this but it looked like a long cylindrical object that almost looked like a cruise missile type of thing – moving really fast right over the top of us.”

    Here’s a recording of the event via Daily Mail: 

    At the moment of the ‘cruise missile-like’ object’s sighting, the airliner was doing about 460 miles per hour. There’s yet to be official comment from either the FAA, American Airlines, or the US military.

    Below are the flight details and transcript of the audio snippet as picked up by Deep Black Horizon:

    At approximately 1:19 CST on the Albuquerque Center frequency of 127.850 MHz or 134.750 MHz (recording wasn’t frequency stamped) the pilot reported: “Do you have any targets up here?  We just had something go right over the top of us – I hate to say this but it looked like a long cylindrical object that almost looked like a cruise missile type of thing – moving really fast right over the top of us.”

    According to Flight 24 and Flight Aware AAL 2292 was over the northeast corner of New Mexico west of Clayton, New Mexico. No reply was monitored by Albuquerque Center because local (Amarillo) air traffic walked on top of it. AAL 2292 was near flight level 370 (37k) at the time of the report. 

    No significant military aircraft presence was noted on ADS-B logs. 

    The AA flight later landed in Phoenix, Arizona without incident and according to schedule. 

    The Drive speculates on what the pilot might have seen, while saying it’s unlikely to have been a simple case of a military flight that civilian aviation authorities weren’t warned about or notified of: “As to what the pilots aboard American Airlines Flight 2292 could have actually seen, we really cannot say at this time. Many will point out that New Mexico is home to the sprawling White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) along with a bevy of other military facilities, installations, and restricted areas,” the report notes.

    “Still, the chances that a missile could have ‘gone off the reservation’ during a test or some other standard military explanation seems unlikely,” according to The Drive’s analysis. “There are procedures in place for this sort of thing and pilots would have been alerted to the safety hazard.”

    White Sands Missile Base, file image via Pinterest 

    As is also detailed in The Drive report, this is certainly far from the first time such an bizarre, close encounter took place between an airliner an unidentified flying object. Indeed New Mexico and the southwest US in general seems to have recorded more such strange flights and sightings than other parts of the country both in recent years and historically in the 20th century.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/22/2021 – 23:20

  • Bill Gates Bashes Twitter Over Trump Lifetime Ban
    Bill Gates Bashes Twitter Over Trump Lifetime Ban

    Even Bill Gates, a longtime proponent of big tech taking steps to unilaterally eliminate “disinformation” on its platforms, believes Twitter’s lifetime ban for former President Donald Trump isn’t appropriate, and might actually be making things worse.

    After unloading his argument about what might happen if the world doesn’t achieve net-zero carbon emissions within the next 30 years, Gates warned that the blowback could be many multiples worse than it was during COVID-19.

    But toward the end of the interview, Fox News’ Chris Wallace asked Gates about Trump and ‘Big Tech’.

    Gates replied that while Trump said many things “about the illegitimacy of the 2020 election that were corrosive,” the US doesn’t want to divide social networks along political lines.

    “We don’t want to partition and have one social network for one party, then another social network…” Gates said. “There’s got to be some way between the government and the well-meaning actors where we draw a line, and we keep the debate…without the corrosive parts.”

    “But the idea that you end up with a lifetime ban – that, it seems like we should discuss.”

    This follows remarks from Gates late last week where he said in an interview that it would be “a shame” if Facebook followed through with plans to ban President Trump. Facebook is still waiting for its advisory committee to decide Trump’s future on the platform.

    Twitter permanently suspended the @realDonaldTrump account last month, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence,” after Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in a bid to disrupt the Senate’s certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election.

    Watch Live:

    https://video.foxnews.com/v/embed.js?id=6234101150001&w=466&h=263Watch the latest video at foxnews.com

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/22/2021 – 23:00

  • America's Plot For World Domination
    America’s Plot For World Domination

    Authored by Robert Merry via TheAmericanConservative.com,

    Probably the most profound geopolitical development of the Twentieth Century was the rise of America as the world’s preeminent power during and after World War II. We’re still living in what Henry Luce called the American Century some eighty years after the publisher proclaimed its inception. Historians have put forth various interpretations for how and why this happened: that America was always an irrepressible nation whose expansionist impulses presaged its hegemonic ambitions; that with all of its resources and power, the country had no choice but to embrace the challenge of global stability.

    Now Stephen Wertheim, of the Quincy Institute and Columbia University, propounds a provocative new thesis: that the hegemonic temptation was the product of a coterie of strategic planners from the American foreign policy elite who crafted the notion and sold it to the country by distorting America’s distinct and “foundational” philosophy of internationalism.

    Tomorrow the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy, by Stephen Wertheim, (Belknap Press: October 2020), 272 pages.

     

    There’s some excellent history here as Wertheim traces the perceptions and recommendations of prominent thinkers struggling to keep up with a world in flux. No sooner would they craft a grand strategy for the future they foresaw than the perceived future would be washed away by powerful new developments. Ultimately they concluded that their options narrowed to a single vision: world primacy.

    “Six years after global supremacy was all but inconceivable,” writes Wertheim, “it was now indisputable.”

    Wertheim goes awry a bit, though, in tracing the broad sweep of U.S. international relations from George Washington to Franklin Roosevelt. His interpretation elides significant elements of that rich story while interpreting others in questionable ways.

    In Werthheim’s view, America was born as an internationalist nation, “promising and incarnating a world governed by reason and rules, not force and whim.” George Washington’s famous farewell call for America to avoid “entangling alliances” was actually a broader admonition against engaging in any form of power politics in the world. That concept, “premised on the ability of peaceful interaction to replace clashing politics,” became a central element of the American ethos.

    Ultimately it found expression in the Wilsonian enthusiasm that emerged most powerfully during World War I, when intellectuals and politicians (led by Wilson himself) formulated the concept of eliminating war through disarmament, marshalled of antiwar public opinion, and created global organizations such as Wilson’s cherished League of Nations. Peaceful discourse and adjudication of transnational disputes would replace nationalist impulses and balance-of-power maneuvering, and the world would bathe in comity and peace.

    As Wertheim tells it, this was America’s fundamental foreign policy outlook throughout its first century and a half, right up to Wilson’s decision to take America into World War I alongside the Allies.

    But wasn’t that decision a violation of Washington’s farewell warning? No, writes Wertheim, because Wilson’s League was designed to “transform the balance of power into a ‘community of power’ in which ‘all unite to act in the same sense and with the same purpose.”’ Wertheim explains that, under the Wilson plan, the United States would  “Americanize Europe” by creating a universal alliance with American participation. This would be a “disentangling alliance” that would “forever end the capacity of European alliances to ensnare the United States.”

    The key here is that the increasingly powerful U.S. would not seek “to counterbalance or dominate any rival but instead to render counterbalancing and domination obsolete.” America would be the progenitor of endless peace.

    Of course America declined to join Wilson’s League and rejected his broader vision, whether entangling or disentangling. The country entered what most historians have considered an “isolationist” phase (a term that Wertheim abhors, as we will see).

    Then came World War II in Europe, which set American planners to the task of developing a grand strategy for what seemed like a new global order. When Hitler conquered France and unleashed his bold effort to destroy Britain’s defensive air power so he could invade, the planners promptly grappled with the American response to a Europe fully dominated by Nazi Germany. Perhaps America could confine its sphere of influence and central trading zone to the Western Hemisphere, including Greenland and Canada and encompassing all or most of South America. It didn’t take long to see, however, that such a zone would hardly sustain the U.S. economy.

    Even adding a vast section of Asia, perhaps including a powerful and aggressive Japan (a daunting diplomatic challenge), wouldn’t solve the economic problem while also posing new geopolitical difficulties. The planners seemed stymied.

    After Hitler failed to gain dominance over British skies, thus ending any immediate prospect of an invasion and seemingly preserving the British Empire, a new concept emerged: combine the Western Hemisphere with the Pacific basin and the British Empire into a vast area encompassing nearly all of the non-German world. As Wertheim puts it, “Finally, after months of study, the planners had discovered that if German domination of Europe endured, the United States had to dominate almost everywhere else.”  This “everywhere else” became known as the Grand Area, and it was based on the imperative that Germany must be confined to continental Europe and that only American leadership could ensure the success of that enterprise.

    This dealt a fearsome blow to what Wertheim considered America’s foundational internationalism, the Wilsonian concept of peaceful dispute adjudication. He writes: “Out of the death of internationalism as contemporaries had known it, and the faltering of British hegemony, U.S. global supremacy was born.” But it still had to be sold to the American people, and that led to two new developments. First, partisans of hegemony demonized opposition thinkers as “isolationists,” a new term of opprobrium designed to put naysayers on their heels. “By developing the pejorative concept of isolationism,” writes Werthheim, “and applying it to all advocates of limits on military intervention, American officials and intellectuals found a way to make global supremacy sound unimpeachable.”

    They also conceived the idea of a United Nations to gather other states into the fold and thus “convince the American public that U.S. leadership would be inclusive, rule bound, and worthy of support.” In other words, it was a ruse to help the elites supplant the old notion of placid internationalism with armed supremacy.

    Thus do we see, in Wertheim’s telling, how a small group of wayward intellectuals, back in the chaos years of World War II, hijacked the country’s intrinsic internationalist philosophy and reshaped it into something else entirely, inconsistent with traditional Americanism, namely a credo of power politics and global supremacy.

    No doubt many opponents of the foreign policy aggressiveness of today’s Republican neocons and Democratic humanitarian interventionists will embrace Wertheim as a sturdy ally in their cause. But they should note that he builds his thesis upon a foundation of dubious history.

    George Washington was not a forerunner to Woodrow Wilson, and warning against entangling alliances circa 1797 can’t be logically equated to advocating world government in 1919. Neither can one draw an accurate picture of American foreign policy thinking without noting the force of American nationalism, which played a major role (though of course not the only role) in the formulation of U.S. international relations throughout American history. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago calls it “the most powerful ideology in the modern world.” Wertheim hardly mentions it.

    He argues that we shouldn’t consider America’s expansionist zeal under James Polk in the 1840s as representing power politics because, after all, the United States was simply consolidating its position on its own continent while eschewing the acquisition of Cuba or all of Mexico (as opposed to gobbling up merely half of Mexico in an aggressive war). But when in history did a major power, after consolidating its position in its own neighborhood, stop there? Did Rome? Did the Ottomans? Did the British? Neither did America.

    Similarly, Wertheim disputes any link to power politics on the part of the United States at the turn of the last century by noting that America “continued to stay politically and militarily apart from the European alliance system while intensifying efforts to transform power politics globally.”

    The latter part here is false. America built up its navy just in time to destroy Spain’s Pacific and Atlantic fleets, kick that waning empire out of the Caribbean, free Cuba from Spanish dominion, and take the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. If that wasn’t power politics, the term has no meaning. For that matter, why did the United States annex the globally strategic islands of Hawaii, from which America could project power far into Asia? And why did it build the Panama Canal, which allowed it to concentrate more naval firepower more quickly in more places?

    No, America wasn’t born as a benign instrumentality of peace destined to calm the waters of international conflict through means never before seen in any successful guise in the annals of human history. America was born like every other nation, into a world of conflict and danger, buffeted by swirls of power, ambition, and potentially hostile forces. The country proved remarkably adept, like its mother nation, in the arts of self-reliance, self-defense, popular government—and expansionism.

    It was therefore natural that when the world turned upside down and power interrelationships got tossed into the air like confetti, those U.S. planners would perceive American power as the greatest hope for stability in the world as well as the greatest hope for U.S. security. For the first 45 years of the new era, the Cold War, America played its role largely with aplomb. Then it went awry when the world changed and the country’s elites could neither see the transformation nor adjust to it.

    Wertheim is correct in positing that America’s current foreign policy follies are a product of its leaders’ insistence on clinging to the same ideas that emerged from the minds of those strategic planners back in the 1940s. But in his effort to tell the story of how we got here, he gets it only partially right.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/22/2021 – 22:40

  • Defense Firms Unveil New Weapons At IDEX 2021 
    Defense Firms Unveil New Weapons At IDEX 2021 

    The International Defence Exhibition and Conference (IDEX 2021) kicked off on Sunday and runs through the 25th of the month at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre. All sorts of new weapons are being featured at the first COVID-era defense show. 

    According to Breaking Defense, IDEX 2021 features more than 900 exhibitors from 59 nations with 35 national pavilions. 

    “84% of companies exhibiting will be internationally based, while 16% will be UAE based entities which demonstrate the vast international interest in IDEX and NAVDEX,” said Humaid Matar Al Dhaheri, managing director and group CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Exhibitions Company (ADNEC), the shows’ organizers.

    Staff Brig. Gen. Mohammed Al Hassani, an official spokesman for IDEX, said the first day, about $1.37 billion worth of deals were signed with seven international firms while 78% went to 12 local companies.

    Here are some of the weapons being featured at IDEX 2021:

    UAE’s HALCON unveiled its first anti-ship cruise missile. 

    The Kalashnikov Group revealed the AK-19 assault rifle. 

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    Chinese defense companies featured drones, a fighter jet, a shoulder-fired missile, and a tiny spy drone. 

    South African Paramount Group signed deal with Bharat Forge to produce Kalyani M4 MRAP armor vehicles in India. 

    UAE’s Milanion Group unveiled an unmanned ground vehicle with a machine gun turret on top. Their exhibit also featured a drone battery capable of launching three unmanned aerial vehicles.

    France’s Arquus (previously Renault Trucks Defense) featured a new remote control turret for ground vehicles. 

    China Defense unveiled the “Chinese King Dragon 680 mm and Fire Dragon 750 mm” rockets, said one Twitter user.

    UAE’s CARACAL featured the CSA338 Semi-Automatic rifle. 

    Turkish company Otokar showed off its ground-based vehicles and a tank. 

    Armenian defense firm Pride Systems unveiled their new drone that can be armed with high-explosive or high-explosive antitank warheads at IDEX 2021.

    More scenes from the defense conference that will last all week. 

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    This UAE-made tank appears to be very futuristic in design. 

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    Many of these weapons will be used on the modern battlefield as a great power competition between the US and China deepens. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/22/2021 – 22:20

  • Ayatollah Khamenei Says Iran Might Pull Trigger On 60% Uranium Enrichment
    Ayatollah Khamenei Says Iran Might Pull Trigger On 60% Uranium Enrichment

    With all eyes on the big question of whether Iran and the United States will actually sit down at the same table in EU-sponsored talks to restore the terms of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal (JCPOA), Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has just upped the ante with statements that surely also raised the alarm in Tel Aviv. 

    Khamenei declared on Monday that Tehran might continue enriching uranium up to 60% – which would blow far past the current 20% and put the country on the cusp of being able to produce a nuclear weapon. He further vowed the Islamic Republic will “never” yield to US pressure over what Iran has long claimed is actually a peaceful nuclear energy program. 

    Via Reuters

    “Iran’s uranium enrichment level will not be limited to 20%. We will increase it to whatever level the country needs… We may increase it to 60%,” state media quoted Ayatollah Khamenei as saying. He added that if Iran “wanted to” pursue a nuke, then “no one could stop Tehran from acquiring it.”

    He still stressed his longtime position that Iran is not in fact pursuing nukes, which he’s previously said violates “Islamic principles”, but that neither the US nor “Zionist clown” – a reference to Israel – to do anything about it if Tehran wanted to.

    If indeed Iran does eventually pull the trigger on 60% enrichment, this would likely provoke Israel into mounting some kind of preemptive attack.

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    Over the past year Israel was believed behind multiple ‘mysterious’ and unexplained explosions and fires and Iranian nuclear facilities. 

    In the recent past Israeli military leaders have threated to take action militarily if intelligence believed Iran was close to obtaining a nuke. Likely the Biden administration would intervene to warn against such action, however, especially given Washington now appears ready to engage in EU-brokered talks toward restoring the nuclear deal. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/22/2021 – 22:00

  • US Arrests Beauty Queen Wife Of El Chapo On Drug Charges, Accused Of Plotting Two Prison Escapes
    US Arrests Beauty Queen Wife Of El Chapo On Drug Charges, Accused Of Plotting Two Prison Escapes

    Emma Coronel Aispuro, a former US beauty queen and wife of the world’s most notorious living drug kingpin – Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, the former leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel who is currently serving a life sentence – was arrested on Monday in the US over her alleged involvement in international drug trafficking, the US Justice Department reported on Monday.

    Coronel, 31, a dual US-Mexican citizen and a regular attendee at her husband’s trial two years ago, was arrested at Dulles International Airport in northern Virginia “on charges related to her alleged involvement in international drug trafficking” is expected to appear in a federal court in Washington on Tuesday. It was unclear why Coronel was in the Washington area.

    Her arrest came two years after a trial in Brooklyn where Guzman, now 63, was convicted of trafficking tons of drugs into the United States as Sinaloa’s leader. Prosecutors at the trial said Guzman amassed power through murders and wars with rival cartels. He was sentenced in July 2019 to life in prison plus 30 years, which the sentencing judge said reflected Guzman’s “overwhelmingly evil” actions. Guzman was sent to ADX Florence in Colorado, the nation’s most secure “Supermax” prison.

    Coronel and Guzman have been married since 2007, when they wed in an ostentatious ceremony in a village in Durango state. At the time, Coronel was an 18-year-old beauty queen.

    Coronel was charged on Monday in a one-count complaint with conspiring to distribute one kilogram or more of heroin, five kilograms or more of cocaine, 500 grams of more of meth and a whopping 1,000 kilograms or more of cannabis for unlawful importation into the United States. The DOJ also accused Coronel of conspiring to aid her husband in his July 2015 escape from the Altiplano prison in Mexico, when he dug a mile-long tunnel from his cell.

    She was also allegedly among those behind another of Guzman’s escape attempts from the same jail after his recapture by Mexican authorities in January 2016. The plot failed to materialize after prison officials uncovered an entrance to yet another would-be underground tunnel outside of the facility. Then, with his hopes for reaching freedom dashed, the Sinaloa Cartel co-founder asked the authorities to fastrack his extraction to the States, complaining of dire conditions in the Mexican prison.

    El Chapo was eventually handed over to the US in January 2017, where he is currently serving a life sentence plus 30 years, after being convicted on 10 charges related to large-scale drug trafficking and conspiracy to commit murder.

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    Before her arrest, Coronel capitalized on Guzman’s notoriety, launching a clothing line named after her husband, ‘El Chapo Guzman,’ and became a reality star after she was featured on Season 2 on VH1’s ‘Cartel Crew’ series.

    U.S. and Mexican efforts to fight drug trafficking became strained in October when the DOJ brought drug charges against former Mexican Defense Minister Salvador Cienfuegos.  However one month later the Justice Department unexpectedly dropped that case the following month and let Cienfuegos return to Mexico, a move Mexico said would restore trust in the countries’ strained security ties.  Cienfuegos was exonerated two months later when Mexico dropped its own case.

    Tomas Guevara, an investigator in security issues at the Autonomous University of Sinaloa, said Coronel’s arrest might be part of a “pressure strategy” to prompt cooperation from Guzman.

    According to Reuters, a Mexican official familiar with Coronel’s case, who asked not to be identified, said her arrest appeared to be solely a U.S. initiative, and that Coronel was not wanted in Mexico. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/22/2021 – 21:55

  • Coca Cola Confirms Training Employees To "Try To Be Less White"
    Coca Cola Confirms Training Employees To “Try To Be Less White”

    Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,

    Is Coca Cola sponsoring racism? That’s the claim. You be the judge.

    ‘Try To Be Less White’

    When I first saw this story I was highly skeptical. 

    However, the training course is available online and Coca Cola is doing its best to try to back down from the course.

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    Here’s the course Confronting Racism, with Robin DiAngelo

    In this course, Robin DiAngelo, the best-selling author of White Fragility, gives you the vocabulary and practices you need to start confronting racism and unconscious bias at the individual level and throughout your organization. There’s no magic recipe for building an inclusive workplace. It’s a process that needs to involve people of color, and that needs to go on for as long as your company’s in business.

    The free into above does not show the ending slide “Try to be less white” but what you can see is galling enough.

    The video Tweet by @DrKarlynB shows more of the damning slides.

    Coca-Cola Whitewash

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    Backlash

    Late Sunday evening NewsWeek reported Coca-Cola, Facing Backlash, Says ‘Be Less White’ Learning Plan Was About Workplace Inclusion

    Coca-Cola, facing mounting backlash from conservatives online, has responded to allegations of anti-white rhetoric after an internal whistleblower leaked screenshots of diversity training materials that encourages staff to “try to be less white.”

    A Coca-Cola spokesperson confirmed that the course is “part of a learning plan to help build an inclusive workplace,” but also noted that “the video circulating on social media is from a publicly available LinkedIn Learning series and is not a focus of our company’s curriculum.”

    Coca-Cola Logo

    The Coca-Cola logo is on training snapshots in the video Tweet.

    If Coca-Cola did not authorize and pay for the the training, the slides would not have their logo, Karlyn would be in deep legal trouble, and Twitter would have removed the Tweet.

    Who in the hell is reviewing their training materials? 

    Candance Owens

    Best selling author Candance Owens had this to say. 

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    Owens is Founder of the @BLEXIT  organization. “Black people don’t have to be Democrats— still.”

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    Coke Is Racist

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    The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Salon, and Washington Post have no coverage of this. 

    All the top sites plus Coca-Cola all want to sweep this under the rug.

    Why Trump Nearly Won

    Please recall Politically Correct Educators Vote to Rename 44 SF Schools Including Washington and Lincoln

    Also note The Dumbing Down of America is Poised to Accelerate. 

    If you are looking for a reason why millions of people voted for Trump, look no further.

    I intended to do a post on why Trump nearly won but this post will suffice. 

    Every bit of this is a complete outrage. It is why Trump won in 2016. Had he toned things down a bit in 2020 he probably would have been reelected.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/22/2021 – 21:45

  • Russia Says Jihadists Are Planning "Simulated" Chemical Attack In Idlib To Get Biden's Attention
    Russia Says Jihadists Are Planning “Simulated” Chemical Attack In Idlib To Get Biden’s Attention

    In what feels like a throwback scenario to 2017 which marked the first time Trump bombed Syria over al-Qaeda’s unverified claims of a government chemical attack on a “rebel”-held town in Idlib province, Russia’s military is now warning that anti-Assad jihadists are planning a new “false-flag operation against civilians” involving chemical weapons in Idlib.

    The allegation of a major ‘provocation’ in the works originated in official comments days ago from the deputy chief of the Russian de-escalation mission in Syria, Rear Admiral Vyacheslav Sytnik. The statements are being featured predominantly in Russian and Iranian state media sources, which say the incident will be blamed on Damascus, ultimately in order to gain the attention of the newly in office Biden administration. 

    Via Reuters

    “According to our information, militants of illegal armed groups are plotting a provocation to blame Syria’s government forces for delivering strikes at settlements in thee Idlib de-escalation zone,” Admiral Sytnik said.

    At a moment it’s widely believed the Biden White House is internally divided over Syria and Mideast policy in general, with little future strategy having been announced publicly, any level of ‘mass casualty incident’ is sure to gain Washington’s attention. 

    Here are the details of Adm. Sytnik’s statement via Russian media sources and their translation:

    Citing intelligence reports, Rear Admiral Vyacheslav Sytnik, deputy chief of the Russian de-escalation mission in Syria, claimed that militants belonging to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) have transported containers with toxic agents to the settlement of Tarmanin. The Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists plan to use the chemicals, believed to be chlorine, to “simulate” an attack resulting in casualties among local residents, Sytnik said. He added that the militants hope to then blame the incident on Syrian government forces. 

    HTS is formally designated as a terrorist organization by the US government as well as internationally. Yet despite this, the US and Western allies have frequently condemned any attempts of Syrian or Russian military forces to take back the northwestern province of Idlib.

    Idlib has been held by HTS and other al-Qaeda factions since its takeover in 2015, reportedly with CIA help via an operations room in Turkey.

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    Assad with Russia’s help has been the clear victor over most of Syria, with a northeast oil-and-gas concentrated chunk of the country occupied by the US and its Kurdish allies (SDF), and the northwest (Idlib) occupied by al-Qaeda (HTS), and northern towns now under Turkish control.

    The Russians have been getting increasingly vocal over the past month that some level of ‘provocation’ is coming soon, despite Syria having long been out of international headlines. 

    “The warning comes several weeks after the reconciliation center revealed that it had been tipped off that HTS militants and members of the ‘White Helmets,’ a self-styled civil defense group, were planning to stage a chemical attack in a town 11 kilometers (seven miles) northwest of Aleppo,” RT summarizes of recent allegations.

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    Meanwhile, despite the Syrian government under Assad being the ‘victor’ over the conflict, loyalist areas are now being smashed by US-led sanctions that are meant to choke the economy. Thus the economic war was greatly ramped up the moment that Western-led regime change efforts were acknowledged as having ultimately failed. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/22/2021 – 21:40

  • Thousands Of Unaccompanied Minors Face 'Cages' As HHS Shelters Hit 93% Capacity
    Thousands Of Unaccompanied Minors Face ‘Cages’ As HHS Shelters Hit 93% Capacity

    Thousands of migrant children face ‘the cages’ built by the Obama-Biden administration, after the child-shelter network run by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) reduced its capacity by 40%, leaving them 93% full.

    Children sleeping in cages built by the Obama-Biden administration (2014)

    Once the HHS shelters reach capacity, migrants will be housed in facilities run by the Border Patrol – a.k.a. ‘the cages,’ described by the Wall Street Journal as “stark cells – with just a bench and a toilet – that are designed to hold single adults for a few hours rather than children for days.”

    Over 700 children were in Border Patrol custody as of Friday, up from 150 on Tuesday, according to the report, which cites “a person familiar with the numbers.”

    “A jail cell is no place for a child, even for the shortest possible duration,” said former US Customs and Border Protection spokesman, Andrew Meehan, who served during 2019.

    “They’ve seen very large growth in a very short period of time,” said Mark Greenberg, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank, who was in charge of the HHS shelter network during the Obama administration. “The closer you get to 100% capacity, the harder the system is to manage.”

    On Monday, the government plans to reopen an emergency shelter in Carrizo Springs, Texas—a converted encampment that once hosted oil-field workers—to house 700 additional children. That facility, which opened in 2019 to manage the surge of children, and other emergency shelters had come under criticism from Democrats, in part because they didn’t follow standards governing care at permanent government shelters.

    Unaccompanied children enjoy unique protections under immigration law that forbid the government from quickly deporting them. They are required to be sent to HHS shelters, where the government cares for them until they can find a suitable sponsor, typically a family member or family friend living in the U.S. –Wall Street Journal

    According to the report, the flood of migrants is likely because of “sagging economies and gang violence in Central America, exacerbated by the pandemic and a pair of hurricanes last year which hit the region.”

    It could also be the brand new US president that’s promised a ‘pathway to citizenship’ and just started letting migrants enter the United States while they await their immigration hearings they’re sure to attend.

    “If we were not in the middle of a pandemic, we wouldn’t be facing the situation that we are in right now,” said one HHS official.

    In November, government shelters began filling up with migrants after a federal court ordered the Trump administration to halt the practice of sending children back to their home countries without an adult – while the Biden administration has opted to continue housing them while they apply for asylum, despite an appellate decision overturning the lower court’s November decision.

    Biden has also halted the practice of sending children back to their country of origin if they were traveling with an adult who isn’t their parent – a policy which sends more children to HHS shelters.

    “It’s certainly not ideal,” said Jennifer Podkul, vice president for policy and advocacy at Kids in Need of Defense, an immigrant advocacy organization. “But for now, it’s better than having kids remain in [border patrol] custody.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/22/2021 – 21:20

  • Trump Offered North Korea's Kim A "Ride Home" On Air Force One, Adviser Reveals
    Trump Offered North Korea’s Kim A “Ride Home” On Air Force One, Adviser Reveals

    A newly released BBC documentary entitled “Trump Takes on the World” has revealed the former president offered Kim Jong Un a ride back to North Korea on Air Force One after the Hanoi summit two years ago, which came at the height of the temporary breakthrough in relations between Washington and Pyongyang. 

    Former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger, who had an unusually long stint under Trump helping to formulate Asia policy for the administration, told the BBC: 

    “President Trump offered Kim a lift home on Air Force One. The president knew that Kim had arrived on a multi-day train ride through China into Hanoi and the president said: ‘I can get you home in two hours if you want.’ Kim declined.” 

    Getty Imags

    The BBC documentary narrated that the US president “stunned even the most seasoned diplomats” by making the offer.

    Presumably both sides were indeed shocked by the gesture given that if it had actually happened, serious “security concerns” would be raised by the spectacle of Kim and his entourage riding on an official US government aircraft (which features ‘Top Secret’ technology, layout and protocol) while entering North Korean airspace. 

    Both the US and North Korean sides have formal laws against such “enemy” aircraft and officials violating airspace.

    As BBC recounts further of the unlikely “bromance” of that period:

    During the Singapore summit, Trump gave Kim a glimpse inside his presidential state car — a $1.5 million Cadillac also known as “The Beast” — in a show of their newly friendly rapport.

    At the Hanoi summit in Feb.2019, via AFP.

    Ultimately the historic thawing of tensions and relaxation of ‘war-footing’ didn’t outlast the Trump administration, given Pyongyang and Washington are now essentially right back where they started.

    Currently it remains unclear what Biden’s North Korea policy will be – only that as US state-funded VOA News describes Biden is “likely to reverse the Trump administration’s North Korea policies”. But ultimately there won’t be a denuclearization of the peninsula anytime soon.

    “As the new Biden administration gears up to formulate policies toward North Korea, experts think the administration will probably return to the incremental approach to denuclearization that was the norm before former President Donald Trump’s term in office,” VOA concludes.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/22/2021 – 21:00

  • Deconstructing "WokeThink"
    Deconstructing “WokeThink”

    Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

    It Bears a Striking Resemblance to Cognitive Distortions

    This post was originally going to be another one about dangers of techno-utopian thinking, which is supposed to be the subject matter of my next book . That one is going slowly for the time being, but I described it a bit in a previous piece on transhumanism-as-religion here.

    It was originally inspired by Tristan Greene’s “Why developing AI to defeat us may be humanity’s only hope” because at first glance I thought that was going to be another “AI will fix everything” piece along the lines of Fully Automated Luxury Communism (which is TL,DR: a full blown Marxist version of The Singularity is Near)

    But as I read it I found myself unable to even parse out the rationale behind what the author was proposing.  The suggestion was that because “[t]he rational end game for humanity is self-wrought extinction” we should intentionally create an existentially threatening AI and then turn it loose against ourselves, in order to unite humanity…

    “with concentrated redirection, maybe our passion for adversity could become a strength for our species.

    Maybe we need an AI adversary to be our “Huckleberry” when it comes to the urge for competition. If we can’t make most humans non-violent, then perhaps we could direct that violence toward a tangible, non-human opponent we can all feel good about defeating.”

    The singular premise upon which he scaffolded his logic is that “the entire history of humanity is evidence against [world peace] ever happening. We are violent and competitive”

    That had been “proved” citing a single study out of which he had plucked flawed statistic:

    Since World War II, homicide rates have actually increased rather than decreased in a number of industrialized countries, most notably the United States.

    The US homicide rate did increase after the end of WWII until it peaked in 1980, it has been coming down ever since and has dipped below the end of WWII rates at 4.5 per 100,000. In fact it may surprise many that the US is toward the lower end of the spectrum at 0.7% when it comes to the national homicide rate. But when you listen to some people talk about this, you would think it’s murder and mayhem everywhere, perhaps at the level of their southern neighbour Mexico, where the homicide rate is a staggering 6.07%

    It was understanding these statistics that interjected some reality over Greene’s underlying premise that apparently justified his over-the-top idea. It was so devoid of intellectual rigour as to be a non-sequitur (not to mention that even if humanity accepted and went ahead with this idea, there’s no recognition of the possibility that it might not work and we end up being exterminated by an AI we invented to unite us.  Unintended consequences abound.)

    What the piece did do was make me think of one of the cue cards I carry around with me in my pocket journal at all times.

    This is a list of the Big Ten Cognitive Distortions.

    Cognitive distortions are biased perspectives we take on ourselves and the world around us. They are irrational thoughts and beliefs that we unknowingly reinforce over time. 

    When somebody is depressed or suffering from a full blown depressive episode, their thinking can be distilled down to these cognitive distortions.

    Depression is a characteristic of being human that probably everybody struggles with at one time or another. When it intensifies or persists, it can cross into the realm of mental illness and it can be devastating. Like its close cousin, alcoholism, of which I’m personally all too familiar with, depression is pernicious in that it’s a type of mental illness that tells you you’re not sick.

    The mind folds in on itself and spins out a hall of mirrors to convince you that reality is objectively hopeless and foreboding.

    What struck me was that the author was succumbing to more than one of the Big Ten Cognitive Distortions in putting forward a pretty extreme policy (intentionally creating an adversarial AI and unleashing it against humanity) because of a conclusion he had arrived at that probably seems perfectly objective and beyond refute to him (that the human race was irredeemably violent and regressive).

    But when you run down the list of these cognitive distortions you realize not only this particular idea, but on examination, what I call The Four Horsemen of the Woke-pocalypse (systemic racism, climate alarmism, anti-capitalism and cancel culture) – in other words Wokethink in its totality, actually relies on and is defined by these cognitive distortions.

    The other thing I realized about all this was that in normal depressive or anxiety episodes, the sufferer is in effect irrationally brainwashing themselves that they are flawed, unworthy, alone or overwhelmed. In some way they feel inferior or incomplete. In the extreme woke, the überwoke, these same 10 cognitive distortions are oddly inverted in order to convince themselves that it is the world outside that is irredeemable, unworthy and doomed. Meanwhile they The Woke, are attempting to save it.

    The Woke are not flawed. They are not even suffering from normal human uncertainty or healthy doses of self-doubt and skepticism. They have no need for introspection because they have their hands full taking everybody else’s inventory and Literally Saving The World™.

    Here are the 10 cognitive distortions that comprise #wokethink,

    We can riff off a quick example or two for each one, but as we step through them, we’ll realize the current MSM driven zeitgeist is saturated with it.  It actually gets pretty creepy when you look at it.

    #1 All or Nothing Thinking

    My personal view of left vs right thinking comes from a book about the human brain by Ian McGilchrest called The Master and the Emissary. He examines the two different hemispheres of the brain as “two whole, coherent, but incompatible ways of experiencing the world.”

    But despite those ways of experiencing the world being incompatible, most people are able to integrate them in order to unify both sides of their brain into our subjective experience of “I”. (In McGilchrist’s analogy one side will act as an “emissary” for the dominant side, the “master”).

    I am probably guilty of  mangling this book to make a tortured analogy about the political spectrum. Right and left thinking may very well be whole and incompatible strains of political thought. But a healthy society needs both sides of the political spectrum, functioning coherently. Both. At different times throughout history they may trade the roles of master and emissary, one may be dominant, the other may be ahead of the curve and setting the overall agenda or identifying the imperatives. But the important point is that they co-exist and cannot function without each other. To the degree that one side, left or right, is marginalized or persecuted,  society becomes unhealthy.

    In today’s environment I will accuse the Woke Left of dominating the narrative and operating on the basis that anything right of center is not only wrong, but morally and ethically impermissible to exist. Any conservative thought or libertarian leanings will in due course become negatively branded by being hitched to narratives of white supremacy or climate denialism and genuine dissent is in danger of being criminalized.

    Under Wokethink, everything society has accomplished until now (if you’re reading this it means “you’re soaking in it”), is not an accomplishment at all but an affront and a crime against humanity. Everything has to be dismantled, deconstructed and decolonized.

    It all has to be burned down.

    #2 Overgeneralization

    The famed “Critical race theory in one image”. Which I thought was satire, but apparently not.

    Moving right along…

    #3 Mental Filter – Dwelling on the Negative

    Without this cognitive bias the whole “capitalism has failed us” thing would be a bust. We usually hear a lot of this either via hipsters tweeting about it from iPhones in the back of an Uber on their way to art gallery openings, or otherwise – from super rich celebrities, industrialists or monarchs hectoring us about our carbon footprints.

    It seems as though it’s the people ensconced within the very cushiest enclaves of our erstwhile free enterprise, liberal democratic system who are ruminating the loudest about how much better things would be under socialism and the only way that can be done with a straight face is to very deliberately ignore the myriad benefits that capitalism has delivered for nearly everybody in the modern era.

    #4 Disqualifying the Positive

    While it’s true that capitalism and classical liberal democracy hasn’t yet solved everything, and there has been a lot of shitshows and injustice along the way, that doesn’t mean we should completely reject the foundational basis of civilization entirely.

    Despite the central banks best efforts to undermine capitalism via central larcenous Cantillon Effect interventions, capitalism has delivered in a few hundred years what the monarchs, emperors and feudal lords of the previous millennia couldn’t: a world wherein everyone was free to select their goals and work toward finding their own station in life atop a rising tide of technological advancement and productivity gains resulting in previously undreamt of living standards.

    Sites like HumanProgress would be very educational (possibly jarringly so) to those who think we wallow under the jackboots of an irredeemably oppressive system.

    In the year before she died I gave my mom (an incorrigible pessimist) a copy of Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist and she asked me if I really believed what he said in it. I told her that even with my own misgivings about the current policy tracks we’re on, and the unavoidable disastrous consequences they will cause, they will in the overall scheme of things be temporary chapters in time and humanity will most likely forge ahead and keep on iterating and improving.

    On a similar note when my daughter was in grade 6 she came home one day asking me if it was true that the world was going to end in 12 years because of climate change (thanks Greta). I gave her a copy of  Hans and Ann Rosling’s Factfulness and it made such an impression on her she made it her speech topic that year.

    #5 Jumping to Conclusions

    Two words: Kavanaugh Hearings. Two episodes during those are forever etched in the public mind. The first was when Zina Bash, sitting behind Kavanaugh in frame of the TV cameras, scratched her forearm, and the entire population of Never-Trumpers went batshit crazy for days.

    Bash, a Hispanic Jew whose parents were Holocaust survivors, was accused of flashing a symbol of white supremacy, in the “OK” sign. Amy Siskind, tweeted that it should have been grounds for disqualifying Kavanaugh from the SCOTUS post. The idea that an innocuous hand gesture was a symbol of white supremacy originated as a troll from the bowels of 4chan and has been refuted as such by the Anti-Defamation League. It is precisely because of this cognitive distortion that Wokethink can propel trolls to such spectacular success.

    The other was the #BelieveAllWomen reaction to what remain unsubstantiated, and in later iterations, provably manufactured claims of sexual misconduct  that were motivated entirely by political calculus. #BelieveAllWomen became mantra. A rule. One that violates fundamental legal principles and codifies a cognitive bias. (At least until arguably more credible claims of actual sexual assault were made against Joe Biden. Then #BelieveAllWomen suddenly became less of a thing in the Western media).

    #6 Magnification and Catastrophizing

    If I had to pick just one cognitive thinking bias and limit my comparison of Wokethink to it, I would choose this. It’s the one where everything from a tweet, or a smirk, to a standard-issue inconvenience or inevitable negative outcome in the world is made out to be either something steeped in cosmic injustice or a civilization-ending existential threat.

    This happens via judicious mis-application of CNN panels, bluecheck tweetstorms, “think pieces” in the left media and all amplified via Big Tech platforms run by woke social media barons.

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    #7 Emotional Reasoning (Feelings == Reality)

    I have to mentally restrain myself from at least figuratively slapping anybody who makes the argument whenever somebody is being deplatformed or canceled that it’s because “they make others feel unsafe”. Speech is not violence, silence is not complicity.

    One time I saw a clip of a reporter trying to interview Kanye West asking him to remove his MAGA hat because “it made him feel unsafe”. West basically told the guy to fuck off.

    Statistically you have a higher probability of being killed by your own furniture than an act of terrorism, let alone being attacked by anybody in a MAGA hat.

    The reality is that you face more physical danger from Teslas than you do from people with opposing political views.

    #8 Should Statements

    This one captures that outer-directed inversion of the cognitive bias that makes Wokethink so aggravating.

    When normal self-examining individuals struggle with these cognitive distortions, we think of them in terms of “should” statements : we should be better people. In those moments our perceptions of our own failings can become exaggerated and threaten to overwhelms us.

    There have been periods in my life when I was convinced that I was lousy husband, shitty father, incompetent CEO, clueless investor, mediocre guitar player, inconsiderate to my pet (and a windbag of a writer).

    When I feel any of these coming on, especially more than one at the same time, that’s when I realize I’m being overrun by these cognitive distortions and I have trained myself to break out the cognitive biases cue card and walk through all the ones I am falling prey to in that moment. Journaling them out can be therapeutic.

    But because of the “othering” of the cognitive distortion around Wokethink, none of it ends up being about  “I should try to be a better person” and the existential angst we all struggle with around measuring ourselves to our own ideals and aspirations. Most of us are our own harshest critics. That is, until some überwoke comes along.

    Under Wokethink it’s you! YOU should be a better person! You are the problem! The collective you, the specific you, it’s always about you.

    You shouldn’t be this, you shouldn’t say that, you shouldn’t like that,

    YOU SHOULD NOT THINK THAT

    It’s all should, it’s all outer directed and there is a complete lack of self-awareness around any of it.

    In the course of getting sober one of things other sober people taught me was to always ask “what was my part in this?”

    The überwoke don’t do that. They may instruct the rest of us to examine our part in whatever it is they’re droning on about this time. But it will never occur to them to examine themselves or their premises. They are operating from a perch of higher morality and advanced evolution, handing down pronouncements from an exalted state.

    We should listen to them, apparently.

    #9 Labeling and mislabeling

    Where would Wokethink be without labels and mislabeling?

    As you can see in the cue card, my struggle with these biases is that ever since my hellish existence as an awkward nerdy pipsqueak in middle school, I’ve never been able to fully shake that voice in my head that tells me, incessantly “I am a loser”.

    Your voice may tell you something different, but as is our theme today, these are internal struggles many of us face with our own ghosts and demons. In the normal course of the human condition are lives are largely about facing and overcoming these internal voices.

    But under Wokethink, once again it’s outward directed: You are problematic in some way that violates some self-referential norm that for these people, that may not even have existed yesterday. But somehow you are offside of something they find offensive and they expect you to accept their labeling of you and to do something about it that suits them.

    #10 Personalization

    Again, in our own personal struggles we may succumb to the temptation to ascribe responsibility to ourselves for negative externalities that we objectively could not have foreseen, let alone have impacted in any meaningful way.

    Sometimes I suffer from this one and my therapist reassures me that this is simply a form of grandiosity and that I need to get over myself.

    For the woke, the pattern by now is clear: You personally and you collectively are responsible for crimes that occurred before any of us here today were even born, and you will also be held responsible for things that didn’t go their way in the present…

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

    …and you are definitely on the hook for whatever imagined catastrophes their own neuroses have projected into the future.

    That’s on you.

    And that’s #WokeThink.

    *  *  *

    To receive future posts in your mailbox join the Bombthrower mailing list. In this post I talked a bit about alcoholism. If you have concerns around your drinking and want somebody to talk to, my Twitter DM’s are open. Or use a throwaway email account to email me at markjr@myprivacy.ca. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/22/2021 – 20:40

  • "Extremely Dramatic Increase" – Ghost Gun Seizures Up 400% In Baltimore City
    “Extremely Dramatic Increase” – Ghost Gun Seizures Up 400% In Baltimore City

    A homemade or improvised firearm that lacks commercial serial numbers is becoming a significant problem across Baltimore City. These weapons are commonly referred to as “Ghost Guns,” are untraceable and can either be made from 80 percent lower kits or 3D-printers.

    The Baltimore Sun reports Baltimore City Police said a sharp increase in ghost guns in the metro area had been seen. 

    Baltimore Police Lt. Col. John Herzog told lawmakers this week that city police seized 126 ghost guns in 2020, up from 29 in 2019. The number of untraceable firearms seized in the city last year was more than all ghost guns seized statewide in 2019.

    “That’s an extremely dramatic increase,” Herzog said. “We know they are becoming more popular for criminals and gun traffickers.”

    Maryland lawmakers introduced a bill earlier this month to regulate the ability to purchase or manufacture untraceable firearms. 

    “Untraceable firearms are not just guns with serial numbers crossed off,” said Sen. Susan Lee (D-Montgomery), “they also include guns that have been designed to get around state laws and the federal definition of ‘firearm.'”

    Herzog said 21 of the ghost guns sized last year were linked to violent crime, including 15 tied to homicides or shootings. 

    Baltimore City has face five years of homicides over the three hundred mark, ever since the 2015 riots after Freddie Gray, a young black man, died in police custody; since then, mistrust of police among people in the community has resulted in a city that continues to descend into chaos. 

    Years ago, more specifically in 2014, we noted, “3D-printing, like decentralized cryptocurrencies, have the potential to change the world in which we live in extraordinary ways.” 

    Over the years, US lawmakers have called ghost guns a threat to communities. 

    Now entering the Biden administration era, who has repeatedly warned they will “defeat” the National Rifle Association (NRA). In response, the NRA filed for bankruptcy last month by dumping New York to incorporate in Texas. 

    More specifically, Biden’s website makes it clear that he will “stop ghost guns.” Here’s what his website says:

    One way people who cannot legally obtain a gun may gain access to a weapon is by assembling a one on their own, either by buying a kit of disassembled gun parts or 3D printing a working firearm. Biden will stop the proliferation of these so-called “ghost guns” by passing legislation requiring that purchasers of gun kits or 3D printing code pass a federal background check. Additionally, Biden will ensure that the authority for firearms exports stays with the State Department, and if needed, reverse a proposed rule by President Trump. This will ensure the State Department continues to block the code used to 3D print firearms from being made available on the Internet.

    Meanwhile, in anticipation of a crackdown on guns and ghost guns, Americans, for months, have been panic searching and or buying ghost gun kits before new regulations are passed. 

      Tyler Durden
      Mon, 02/22/2021 – 20:20

    • Justice Clarence Thomas Dissents From Supreme Court On Election Case: 'We Need to Make It Clear'
      Justice Clarence Thomas Dissents From Supreme Court On Election Case: ‘We Need to Make It Clear’

      Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

      Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas issued a dissenting opinion regarding the high court’s decision not to take up a case challenging the Pennsylvania Nov. 3 election results.

      The court on Monday announced it won’t take up lawsuits challenging a Pennsylvania state court decision that relaxed ballot-integrity measures, including a move to extend the ballot-receipt deadline during the November election by three days due to the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. Former President Donald Trump and Pennsylvania’s GOP urged the court to take up a review of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling.

      “This is not a prescription for confidence,” Thomas wrote on Monday, adding that “changing the rules in the middle of the game is bad enough.” Thomas, considered by many to be the most conservative justice, said the court should have granted a review.

      “That decision to rewrite the rules seems to have affected too few ballots to change the outcome of any federal election. But that may not be the case in the future,” Thomas wrote (pdf). “These cases provide us with an ideal opportunity to address just what authority nonlegislative officials have to set election rules, and to do so well before the next election cycle. The refusal to do so is inexplicable.”

      Other than Thomas, Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch also dissented.

      “If state officials have the authority they have claimed, we need to make it clear. If not, we need to put an end to this practice now before the consequences become catastrophic,” Thomas, an appointee of former President George H.W. Bush, also wrote.

      Thomas also appeared to make a reference to allegations of fraud and irregularities during the Nov. 3 election.

      “We are fortunate that many of the cases we have seen alleged only improper rule changes, not fraud,” Thomas wrote. “But that observation provides only small comfort. An election free from strong evidence of systemic fraud is not alone sufficient for election confidence. Also important is the assurance that fraud will not go undetected.”

      The Supreme Court on Monday also declined to review a bid by Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) and others who asked the court to strike down a policy that expanded mail-in ballots.

      A lawyer for Kelly, Greg Teufel, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last week that “it’s important the court should take an interest in whether Pennsylvania’s election laws are administered constitutionally or not, and in accordance with the Pennsylvania constitution and with the federal constitution.” Teufel noted that before the court’s decision on Monday, there was a slim chance of the justices taking it up.

      Trump still has a request on the Supreme Court docket regarding his challenge to changes that the Wisconsin Election Commission ordered last year.

      Tyler Durden
      Mon, 02/22/2021 – 20:00

    • World's Largest Hedge Fund Manager Warns Emerging Tech Stocks In "Extreme Bubble"
      World’s Largest Hedge Fund Manager Warns Emerging Tech Stocks In “Extreme Bubble”

      Authored by Ray Dalio via Bridgewater.com,

      I’ve seen a lot of bubbles in my time and I have studied even more in history, so I know what I mean by a bubble and I systemized it into a “bubble indicator” that I monitor to help give me perspective on each market. We now use it to look at most markets we are in. I want to show you how it works and what it is now showing for US stocks.

      What I mean by a bubble is an unsustainably high price, and how I measure it is with the following six measures.

      1. How high are prices relative to traditional measures?

      2. Are prices discounting unsustainable conditions?

      3. How many new buyers (i.e., those who weren’t previously in the market) have entered the market?

      4. How broadly bullish is sentiment?

      5. Are purchases being financed by high leverage?

      6. Have buyers made exceptionally extended forward purchases (e.g., built inventory, contracted forward purchases, etc.) to speculate or protect themselves against future price gains?

      Each of these six influences is measured using a number of stats that are combined into gauges. In the stock market we do it for each stock that we are looking at. These gauges are combined into aggregate indices by security and then for the market as a whole. The table below shows the current readings of each of these gauges for the US equity market as a whole, and the chart below it shows the aggregate reading derived by combining these gauges into one reading for the stock market going back to 1910. It shows how the conditions stack up today for US equities in relation to past times.

      In brief, the aggregate bubble gauge is around the 77th percentile today for the US stock market overall. In the bubble of 2000 and the bubble of 1929 this aggregate gauge had a 100th percentile read.

      There is a very big divergence in the readings across stocks. Some stocks are, by these measures, in extreme bubbles (particularly emerging technology companies), while some stocks are not in bubbles. The charts below show the share of US companies that these measures indicate being in a bubble. It is about 5% of the top 1,000 companies in the US, which is about half of what we saw at the peak of the tech bubble. The number is smaller for the S&P 500 as several of the most bubbly companies are not part of that index.

      We took the stocks that are in bubbles and created a basket of the “bubble stocks” to keep a close eye on them. The chart below shows their performance and the performance of our basket of the top 500 companies. This market action is reminiscent of the “Nifty Fifty” in the early 1970s and the dot-com bubble stocks in the late 1990s, both of which I remember well. It scores similarly to the bubble stocks of the late 1920s, which I can’t remember because I wasn’t alive then.

      While I won’t show you exactly how this indicator is constructed because that is proprietary, I will show you some of the sub-aggregate readings and some indicators.

      1. How High Are Prices Relative to Traditional Measures?

      The current read on this price gauge for US equities is around the 82nd percentile, shy of what we saw in the 1929 and 2000 bubbles.

      2. Are Prices Discounting Unsustainable Conditions?

      This measure calculates the earnings growth rate that is required to produce equity returns in excess of bond returns. This is derived by looking at individual securities and adding up their readings. Currently this indicator is around the 77th percentile for the aggregate market. This indicator shows that while stock prices in aggregate are high in relation to the absolute returns they are to provide, they are not extremely high in relation to their bond market competitors. In both 1929 and 2000 this measure was at the 100 percentile.

      3. How Many New Buyers (i.e., Those Who Weren’t Previously in the Market) Have Entered the Market?

      A rush of new entrants attracted by rising prices is often indicative of a bubble. That is because they are typically entering the market because it is hot and because they are unsophisticated. This was the case in both the 1929 and 2000 equity bubbles. This gauge has reached the 95th percentile recently due to the flood of new retail investors into the most popular stocks, which by other measures also appear to be in a bubble.

      4. How Broadly Bullish Is Sentiment?

      The more bullish the sentiment, the more people have already invested, so the less likely they will invest more and the more likely that they will sell. Our aggregate market sentiment gauge is now around the 85th percentile. Once again, it is heavily concentrated in the “bubble stocks” rather than most stocks.

      As shown below, IPOs have been exceptionally hot—the hottest since the 2000 bubble.

      The current IPO pace has been brought about by the sentiment previously mentioned, as well as the SPAC boom, as these blank-check acquisition companies have lower regulatory hurdles and greater flexibility to bring more speculative companies into the public markets. The main reason the overall read on both sentiment and aggregate frothiness for the entire market is shy of what we saw in past bubbles is that not all players are showing the same degree of exuberance. For example, sentiment from professional equity managers has moderated recently to more average levels, and corporate financial engineering (in the form of buybacks and M&A) remains mediocre as they are still working through the hit from the pandemic.

      5. Are Purchases Being Financed by High Leverage?

      Leveraged purchases make the underpinnings of the buying weaker and more vulnerable to forced selling in a downturn. Our leverage gauge, which looks at the leverage dynamics across all the key players and treats option positions as a form of leverage, is now showing a read just shy of the 80th percentile. Like some of our other bubble measures, there is high leverage being deployed by the retail segment (using options) in “bubble stocks,” while there is much less leveraging by other investors and in non-bubble stocks.

      As shown below, volume in single-stock call options is at record highs. Retail purchases of options have been the big contributor to this surge. Outside the retail sector we aren’t seeing excessive leveraged buying.

      6. To What Extent Have Buyers Made Exceptionally Extended Forward Purchases?

      One perspective on whether expectations have become overly optimistic comes from looking at forward purchases. We apply this gauge to all markets and find it particularly helpful in commodity and real estate markets where forward purchases are most clear. In the equity markets we look at indicators like capital expenditure—whether businesses (and, to a lesser extent, the government) are investing a lot or a little in infrastructure, factories, etc. It reflects whether businesses are extrapolating current demand into strong demand growth going forward. This gauge is the weakest across all our bubble gauges, pulling down the aggregate read. Corporations are the most important entity in terms of driving this piece via capex and M&A. Today aggregate corporate capex has fallen in line with the virus-driven hit to demand, while certain digital economy players have managed to maintain their levels of investment. Similarly levels of M&A activity remain subdued so far.

      What one chooses to do with this is a tactical decision. Even if this gauge is perfectly accurate (which it is not) timing tops and bottoms based on it is precarious because while it shows what neighborhood these stocks are in, there is nothing precise about it. So it is tough to pick the levels and timing of tops and bottoms based on it. Having said that, we have found that it is a pretty good predictor of relative performance of stocks over the subsequent three to five years. As a result, while it contributes to our increasingly favoring non-bubble stocks, we need to combine it with timing indicators. I just wanted to pass this along to you because I found it helpful and thought you might too in light of what’s now going on in the markets.

      Tyler Durden
      Mon, 02/22/2021 – 19:55

    • Dollars Are Flooding Into China At A Record Pace
      Dollars Are Flooding Into China At A Record Pace

      The capital outflows from China that prompted the country to engage in a shock devaluation are a distant memory, at least according to Goldman’s preferred gauge of FX flows.

      Looking at the latest round of SAFE data, Goldman’s Chinese economists find net inflows of around US$35BN in January, vs US$93BN in December last year, cumulatively the highest on record. Goods trade related FX inflows remained strong, while foreign buying of onshore bonds rose further in January (even though there were modest outflows through the stock connect program).

      Key highlights:

      In January, there was $24BN in net inflows via onshore outright spot transactions, and another $16BN in net inflow via freshly entered and canceled forward transactions. Another SAFE dataset on “cross-border RMB flows” shows that domestic banks saw net RMB payment of $4BN from offshore to onshore. This means that according to Goldman’s “preferred FX flow measure” there was a total of $35BN in January inflows, somewhat slower than the record high level of US$93bn in December 2020, but still the second highest month since early 2014!

      So what did all this dollar flow go to? Looking at the components, foreign buying of Chinese bonds accelerated: Foreigners’ holding of bonds rose $34BN in January vs. a $25BN increase in December, which was offset by the net FX outflows related to the stock connect program. The stock connect program saw US$34bn outflows in January.

      Meanwhile, China’s goods-trade surplus related inflows remained strong at $42BN in January, vs $61BN in December last year. While the January goods trade data is not yet available, seasonality around the Chinese New Year holiday suggests trade surplus could be smaller in January as importers tend to front-load purchases ahead of the holiday. Services trade related FX outflow in January was $7BN, vs $9BN in December. Note that January trade data will be released as January-February combined in March, but Goldman’s analysis suggests exporter FX conversion ratio is likely to stay high in Q1.

      As an aside, last Friday, news reports said SAFE mentioned policymakers would “explore ways to allow individuals to utilize the annual 50K USD FX conversion quota to invest in offshore equities and insurance products”. This signals policymakers are leaning towards further liberalizing outflows in light of CNY appreciation and continued inflow pressures, but the mention of “exploration” suggests the actual implementation of this policy is probably still far away.

      As for China’s official FX reserves (released earlier in the month in a separate PBOC dataset), these stood at US$3,211bn in January, $6BN lower than December. However, according to Goldman all of the decline and then some was due to FX valuation effects which reduced FX reserves by $8BN in January so after adjusting for FX valuation effect, FX reserves rose by another $2Nn in January.

      Yet for all the FX inflows, perhaps the real story is what that “other” currency is doing. As Bloomberg Ye Xie notes, the latest yuan settlement data showed that China’s efforts to push for more use of yuan in cross-border trade and services — and reduce its reliance on the dollar –has set another milestone: “The percentage of the payments and receipts denominated in yuan in total FX transactions by banks for their clients surged to a record 44% in January, from 16% four years ago.” Meanwhile, in a mirror image, the usage of the dollar declined to 51% from 74%.

      On the other hand, global usage of the yuan still remains stubbornly low: while yuan payments have jumped, they accounted for 2.4% of the global market share, compared with the dollar’s 38%, according to an analysis from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications.

      Still, even if it still has a long way to go, the pandemic has accelerated China’s move to further internationalize the yuan, part of its ambition to challenge the U.S.’s economic dominance. As Xie concludes, “Beijing, which has been complaining about the U.S. abusing its privilege as the issuer of the reserve currency with unconventional policies, would be pleased to see what it has achieved so far.”

      Tyler Durden
      Mon, 02/22/2021 – 19:39

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