Oct 23

Today’s News 23rd October 2020

  • Turkey Vows National Troops To Help Azerbaijan If Requested 
    Turkey Vows National Troops To Help Azerbaijan If Requested 

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 10/23/2020 – 02:45

    Among the big fears of major regional powers neighboring the Caucasus like Russia or Iran is that the ongoing war between Azerbaijan and Armenia in the Karabakh region might spill over into a broader regional conflict that becomes internationalized. In Iran’s case, for example, errant missiles and mortar fire from the fighting are now somewhat routinely crossing the border and land on Iranian soil, sometimes on civilian homes.

    In Russia’s case, the Kremlin has a mutual defense pact with Armenia in the case of national war, yet few direct national security interests which would be reason enough to get involved militarily. 

    And yet what’s most alarming is Turkey’s continued bellicose and jingoistic stance when it comes to aggressive verbal and political support for its tiny ally Azerbaijan through the past weeks of fighting over the self-declared autonomous border region. 

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    Via Azerbaijan Defense Ministry/AP

    On Wednesday Turkish Vice President Fuad Oktay gave a forceful statement and promise, which surely raised eyebrows from Tehran to Moscow to Washington, saying that if requested Turkey is willing to send ground troops to the Karabakh region in support of Azerbaijan.

    The Turkish vice president said this in an interview with CNN Turk: “Turkey will not hesitate to send soldiers and provide military support for Azerbaijan if such a request is made by Baku,” according to a Reuters translation and paraphrase.

    Reuters described further of the ultra-provocative comments:

    Speaking in an interview with broadcaster CNN Turk, Oktay also criticized the OSCE’s Minsk group – formed to mediate the conflict and led by France, Russia and the United States – of trying to keep the issue unresolved and supporting Armenia, both politically and militarily.

    He did underscore, however, that no such request has yet to be made. No doubt Baku also has an interest in not seeing a broader war with Armenia expand beyond the contested border zone, given it could trigger both Russian and Iranian intervention if Turkey’s army formally enters. 

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    Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with Vice President Fuat Oktay, via AFP

    Already, Turkey’s Erdogan has stood accused of facilitating the transfer of Syrian Islamist mercenaries from northern Syria into the Nagorno-Karabakh theater.

    Meanwhile Armenian President Armen Sarkisian on the same day complained to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg in a meeting that Turkey remains the biggest obstacle to a lasting ceasefire, accusing it of “supporting” Azerbaijan both “militarily and diplomatically”. 

    President Sarkisian said, “This conflict is not only between the Armenian side and Azerbaijan, there is a third country that supports Azerbaijan both militarily and diplomatically. This country is Turkey, which also brings terrorists to the region.”

    The Armenian president added, “Unfortunately, this country is a member of NATO. If Turkey stops being a party to the conflict, I think we will reach a ceasefire and we will be able to sit at the negotiating table and find a peaceful solution.”

  • Facebook Takes Aim At Nextdoor With New "Neighborhoods" Feature
    Facebook Takes Aim At Nextdoor With New “Neighborhoods” Feature

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 10/23/2020 – 02:00

    When your company gets big enough and an idea infringes upon your customer base, you always have the option to just rip it off and claim it as your own. After all, Microsoft started its journey to becoming a trillion dollar company with Windows 95 after ripping off Apple, who ripped off their operating system from Xerox.

    And that trend in technology is still apparent today with Facebook, who is now testing a “Nextdoor” style feature called Neighborhoods, that allows users to join community based groups. 

    When you enter a profile and address it allows you to join a local neighborhood so you can display posts and content just among neighbors, including people who may not be friends. 

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    “Won’t you be my neighbor?”

    Facebook told Bloomberg about the feature: “More than ever, people are using Facebook to participate in their local communities. To help make it easier to do this, we are rolling out a limited test of Neighborhoods, a dedicated space within Facebook for people to connect with their neighbors.”

    The feature could have a major impact on NextDoor, which works with 25% of U.S. neighborhoods, per engadget. Nextdoor helps people inform neighbors about events, the sale of items and report crimes. 

    “We’re going to make communities as central to the FB experience as friends and family,” Mark Zuckerberg was heard saying both last year and this year. 

    Facebook’s feature could also allow the platform to hone in aggressively with their advertising and gather more data on its users – two big positives for the social network. Meanwhile, the project is already being beta tested in Canada:

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

     

  • Blockbuster Report Reveals How Biden Family Was Compromised By China
    Blockbuster Report Reveals How Biden Family Was Compromised By China

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 10/23/2020 – 01:36

    In a day when half the US population remained transfixed by the ongoing revelations about the contents of Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” and the other half was doing everything in its power to ignore the news which the socials have conveniently been desperate to censor, a far less noticed but perhaps just as important investigative report authored by the unknown Typhoon Investigations, was released by Christopher Balding, Associate Professor at Peking University HSBC School of Business Shenzhen, China and also Bloomberg contributor  (which is odd considering the clear anti-Trump bias of the Bloomberg media empire) exposing Biden activities in China which “the press has simply refused to cover”, and which reveals “how Biden was compromised by the Communist Party of China.”

    In a series of tweets around noon on Thursday, Balding said that he had really “not wanted to do this but roughly 2 months ago I was handed a report about Biden activities in China the press has simply refused to cover. I want to strongly emphasize I did not write the report but I know who did.”

    Some more background on the origins of the report from Balding’s website:

    For two months I have worked on behalf of my colleague to ensure that this report helped others report on the documented evidence of Biden activities with regards to China. I want to emphasize a couple of things about my own involvement.

    • First, I did not write the report and I am not responsible for the report. I have gone over the report with a fine tooth comb and can find nothing factually wrong with the report. Everything is cited and documented. Arguably the only weakness is that we do not have internal emails between Chinese players or the Chinese and Bidens that would make explicit what the links clearly imply.
    • Second, I will not be disclosing the individual who did write this report. They have very valid reasons to fear for both their personal safety and professional risks. Throughout the years that I have known this individual we never discussed politics. I have never heard them criticize any political party other than the CCP. They are not a Republican.
    • Third, it was my very real wish that the press would have reported on the documented evidence in this report and left me and the author entirely out of this situation. I did not vote for Trump in 2016 and will not vote for him in 2020. This information however is entirely valid public interest information that the press has simply refused to cover due to their own partisan wishes. I have serious policy differences with President Trump. I am pro-immigration. I would like to see more free trade efforts to shift trade away from China and into partner countries from Mexico to Vietnam and India. I believe that institution building in Asia is vital and America needs to take that lead. However, I cannot in good conscience allow documented evidence of the variety presented here go unreported by partisans who are simply choosing to hide information.
    • Finally, I will not be answering any questions about the report. I had no wish to be involved in Presidential politics. I do not want to be on the news. I will not be answer any questions about who wrote the report. We need to return the focus to the known documented facts.

    Upon review, this is how Balding summarized the report’s contents in his series of tweets:

    Hunter Biden is partnered with the Chinese state. Entire investment partnership is Chinese state money from social security fund to China Development Bank. It is actually a subsidiary of the Bank of China. This is not remotely anything less than a Chinese state funded play.

    Though the entire size of the fund cannot be reconstructed, the Taiwanese cofounder who is now detained in China, reports it to be NOT $1-1.5 billion but $6.5 billion. This would make Hunters stake worth at a minimum at least $50 million if he was to sell it.

    Disturbingly, everyone on the Chinese side are clearly linked with influence and intelligence organizations. China uses very innocuous sounding organization names to hide PLA, United Front, or Ministry of Foreign Affairs influence/intelligence operations. This report cannot say Hunter was the target of such an operation or that China even targeted him. However, based upon the clear pattern of individuals and organizations surrounding him it is an entirely reasonable conclusion.

    Finally, the believed Godfather in arranging everything is a gentleman named Yang Jiechi. He is currently the CCP Director of Foreign Affairs leading strategist for America, Politburo member one of the most powerful men in China, and Xi confidant. Why does this matter?

    He met regularly with Joe Biden during his stint as Chinese ambassador the US when Biden chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  Later he was Minister of Foreign Affairs when the investment partnership was made official in 2013. Importantly, the Taiwanese national listed MOFA institutions as the key clients in helping to arrange everything. Yang would clearly have known the importance of Hunter Biden and undoubtedly would have been informed of any dealings. Given that he is now the point person in China for dealing with the US this raises major concerns about a Biden administration dealing impartially with an individual in this capacity. These are documented facts from Chinese corporate records like IPO prospectuses and media. They raise very valid concerns about Biden linkages to China.

    Turning to the report itself, here is the 10-point summary of its findings:

    Joe Biden’s compromising partnership with the Communist Party of China runs via Yang Jiechi (CPC’s Central Foreign Affairs Commission). YANG met frequently with BIDEN during his tenure at the Chinese embassy in Washington.

    Hunter Biden’s 2013 Bohai Harvest Rosemont investment partnership was set-up by Ministry of Foreign Affairs institutions who are tasked with garnering influence with foreign leaders during YANG’s tenure as Foreign Minister.

    HUNTER has a direct line to the Politburo, according to SOURCE A, a senior finance professional in China.

    Michael Lin, a Taiwanese national now detained in China, brokered the BHR partnership and partners with MOFA foreign influence organizations.

    LIN is a POI for his work on behalf of China, as confirmed by SOURCE B and SOURCE C (at two separate national intelligence agencies).

    BHR is a state managed operation. Leading shareholder in BHR is a Bank of China which lists BHR as a subsidiary and BHR’s partners are SOEs that funnel revenue/assets to BHR.

    HUNTER continues to hold 10% in BHR. He visited China in 2010 and met with major Chinese government financial companies that would later back BHR.

    HUNTER’s BHR stake (purchased for $400,000) is now likely be worth approx. $50 million (fees and capital appreciation based on BHR’s $6.5 billion AUM as stated by Michael Lin).

    HUNTER also did business with Chinese tycoons linked with the Chinese military and against the interests of US national security.

    BIDEN’s foreign policy stance towards China (formerly hawkish), turned positive despite China’s country’s rising geopolitical assertiveness.

    To simply the various opaque Chinese intermediaries, the report shows the transfer of Chinese state money to Hunter, via major Chinese financial SOEs.

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    The next chart shows how the Communist Party of China cultivated Hunter via Lian and multiple Chinese foreign influence organizations:

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    The third and final chart shows the relationships connecting US leaders with communist leaders in China and North Korea. While there is official state-to-state dialogue and relationships between US and Chinese leaders, just one or two levels below are connected business arrangements with their relatives and associates, who are always the personal recipients of Chinese state money.

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    The key section of the report begins on page 19, in which the anonymous author details how the Biden family was compromised by China:

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    The report also quotes from a 2019 National Review article detailing Hunter Biden’s financial links to China:

    Late Summer 2006: Hunter Biden and his uncle, James Biden, purchase the hedge fund Paradigm Global Advisors. According to an unnamed executive quoted in Politico in August, James Biden declared to employees on his first day, “Don’t worry about investors. We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.” At this time, Joe Biden is months away from becoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and launching his second bid for president.

    The unnamed executive who spoke to Politico charged that the purchase of the fund was designed to work around campaign-finance laws: “According to the executive, James Biden made it clear that he viewed the fund as a way to take money from rich foreigners who could not legally give money to his older brother or his campaign account. “We’ve got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash ready to invest in this company,” the executive remembers James Biden saying.”

    Incidentally, this same article also points out the following:

    An outside audit of Paradigm by the firm of Briggs, Bunting & Dougherty finds a “failure to reconcile Investment Advisors reimbursement of fund expenses, failure to reconcile and review cash account on a timely basis, and failure to reconcile and review various other accounts on a timely basis.”

    And while the National Review article does an exhaustive look into both Biden, Paradigm’s and Seneca Global Advisors, the real focus is on China, which concludes that its “research indicates the Biden family and associates went on to execute a string of business deals with China and the CPC for nearly a decade.”

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    Fast-forwarding through the report, we learn about a curious entity called Thornton consulting:

    Shortly after BIDEN was named as Obama’s running mate in August, HUNTER founded Seneca Global Advisors and the Beijing government approved the incorporation of Thornton Beijing – Solebury Thornton（Beijing）Consulting Co Ltd.

    On October 21, 2007 LIN, LAKIS and ARCHER visited HNA Group in Beijing, this time with ARCHER, acting as COO of Rosemont Solebury Capital, and had dinner with Chen. On the same day, the Thornton delegation also met with officials from PKU.

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    HNA, which was originally an airline carrier, is of course best known for becoming a major Chinese conglomerate which in 2015-2016 was the most acquisitive Chinese company involved in a flurry of multi-billion global M&A, including US electronics distributor Ingram Micro, CIT Group’s aircraft leasing business, a 25% stake in Hilton, a 5% stake in Deutsche Bank, and is widely regarded as backed by or ultimately owned by Wang Qishan, then former vice premier (2008 – 2013).

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    Wang is currently China’s Vice-President and a close aide of Xi. According to the report:

    “HNA has allegedly used various methods to bribe targets in the past, including hosting parties and supplying targets with young women. It is unknown if Thornton representatives were targeted in this manner at Chen’s dinner, but if any nighttime entertainment was provided, it was probably recorded by HNA/Chinese intelligence (as is commonplace in China).“

    The following day a Thornton/Rosemont Solebury/SLLF delegation, including LIN, ARCHER, and LAKIS, met with Peng Fang, Director General of the NPC’s Foreign Affairs Committee , which is responsible for communicating with foreign affairs committees from other countries.74 The meeting was held in the Great Hall of the People, China’s most prestigious state building used to host legislative and ceremonial activities. In other words, the Thornton delegation met with a senior Chinese foreign affairs official at China’s most famous state building, in a meeting which would have been approved by or informed to China’s top leaders. This was clearly not a business meeting, but (at least in the eyes of the Chinese contingent), rather a nation to nation, state to state meeting.

    Fast-forwarding to 2010 (the report has all the interim details), we read that between April 7-9, 2010, “HUNTER was introduced by LIN to China’s most powerful government controlled financial institutions.” Here the report notes that “while the English news item is no longer accessible on Thornton’s website, but the Chinese version remains.”

    Only that’s no longer the case, because since the publication of this report, it appears that someone had a keen interest in quickly removing that particular URL as can be seen here. However, courtesy of the wayback machine, we can see what the Thornton consulting website, which was summarily taken down in the past 3-4 weeks, had to say as of this Sept 26 (after which the website just disappears) snapshot:

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    The report continues that according to Thornton’s news item, HUNTER was introduced as the chairman of Rosemont Seneca and the second son of the US Vice-President, and the purpose of his visit was to “deepen mutual understanding and explore the possibility of commercial cooperation”. LIN had delivered HUNTER to the Chinese for discussions on his pay-off.

    Three days later, BIDEN met with then Chinese President Hu Jintao in Washington as part of the Nuclear Security Summit. At the time Hunter was just barely 40 years old.

    The Secret Service protects, by statute, the president and vice president and their families.84 As the son of a sitting Vice-President, HUNTER will have had secret service protection during his business trip to China. Freedom of Information Act request records show that HUNTER visited China from April 6 to April 9, 2010. Unusually, for such a high-profile visit, there were no media reports in English or Chinese media. Therefore, his father BIDEN (even if unaware personally, which is unlikely given how close to each other they live and work), will have been aware of his son’s business trip to Beijing through official channels. Given the sensitive nature of US-China relations, HUNTER would have been closely watched by various Chinese securities agencies during the trip.

    The report then pivots to dad Joe, who August 18, 2011 held talks with Xi, then Chinese Vice-President, during a five-day trip. At the meeting Biden said the US “fully understands that Taiwan and Tibet issues are China’s core interests, the U.S. will continue to resolutely pursue the one China policy, the U.S. does not support ‘Taiwan’s independence’, and the U.S. fully recognizes that Tibet is an inalienable part of the People’s Republic of China.”  Biden’s words are verbatim from China’s official standpoint on Taiwan and Tibet. Additionally, Biden said he “has spent more time in private meetings with Xi than any other world leader, including 25 hours of private dinners with Xi and one interpreter.“

    A few days later BIDEN delivered a speech at Sichuan University, where he said:

    “China’s development and prosperity are in line with the interest of the U.S”, in comments on the university’s website. The Obama Whitehouse records published a transcript of the speech during which BIDEN said “Let me be clear — let me be clear: I believed in 1979 and said so and I believe now that a rising China is a positive development, not only for the people of China but for the United States and the world as a whole…In order to cement this robust partnership, we have to go beyond close ties between Washington and Beijing, which we’re working on every day, go beyond it to include all levels of government, go beyond it to include classrooms and laboratories, athletic fields and boardrooms.”

    A few months after Biden’s Sichuan trip, Archer and Lin worked with a Sichuan Chemical, a large Sichuan state-owned company to set-up a major potash deal (that never materialized) for Prospect Global, a listed US company at the time, that soon delisted and no longer appears to be in business. According to the report, “it is unclear if the purpose of the deal was to just deliver Archer millions of dollars in compensation, to talk up the Prospect Global stock, or if it resulted in Sichuan Chemical transferring millions of US dollars to the US (either for capital flight purposes or to be directed to US politicians such as BIDEN and KERRY).”

    The story only gets more interesting from here, and focuses on the arrival on the scene in 2013 of none other than John Kerry, who is intimately tied to Hunter (and thus Joe Biden) via Rosemont Seneca’s predecessor Rosemont Capital, established in 2005 by Chris Heinz and Devon Archer who were roommates at Yale University. The firm was named after a Heinz family farm, and the capital was from Heinz, heir to the Heinz food processing empire, and step-son of John Kerry, a former Yale graduate who at the time was the senator for Massachusetts. On June 25 2009, Hunter Biden co-founded Rosemont Seneca with Archer and Heinz; the company’s offices in Georgetown were located two miles from both Biden’s office in the White House and his residence at the Naval Observatory, and one mile from Kerry’s Georgetown mansion.

    We will let readers do their own digging but we will highlight one section from the report, detailing how the Hunter Biden received Chinese state money…

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    … and it involved the creation of BHR, which served as the entity facilitating the bulk of Chinese fund flows into the Bidens, as Hunter’s initial BHR stake, purchased for just $400,000, is now likely be worth approximately $50 million. From the report:

    On December 4, 2013 HUNTER accompanies BIDEN on his official trip to China.

    HUNTER told the New Yorker that he met Li during the December 2013 trip but described it as social encounter. “How do I go to Beijing, halfway around the world, and not see them (Li) for a cup of coffee?” he said. HUNTER arranged a quick meeting in the lobby of the American delegation’s hotel in Beijing between BIDEN and Li, the BHR CEO. This was followed by a “social meeting” between HUNTER and Li, according to reports by the New Yorker.

    The trip by HUNTER coincided with an official trip by the Ukranian President Viktor Yanukovych. Many business deals promoting trade and investment between China and Ukraine were signed during this trip. Some deals between Chinese and Ukranian firms have ties to firms HUNTER is known to be involved with such as the Bohai Commodity Exchange, owned by the same local governments that own a part of Bohai Industrial Investment.

    On 16 December 2013, a week after the BIDEN and HUNTER visit to Beijing, BHR was incorporated in Shanghai, with its registered address in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone, according to State Market Regulatory Administration records.

    HUNTER’s profile no longer appears on the BHR website. One archived version lists him as a director on November 16, 2015. BIDEN is referred to in the profile as a managing partner of Rosement Seneca Partners and a consultant at Boies Schiller Flexner LPP . According to a statement by BIDEN’s lawyer George Mesires on October 13, 2019, BIDEN was of counsel with Boies Schiller and advising Ukraine-linked Burisma Holdings Limited on its corporate reform initiatives. He is also listed on Chinese PE websites where he is also referred to by the Chinese name ‘Hengte Baideng’ (亨特·拜登)

    SMRA records show HUNTER purchased 10% of BHR on October 23, 2017 (via his investment vehicle Skaneateles LLC) and was a director until April 20, 2020. Previously he was invested via other holding companies.

    BHR’s current shareholders are Bohai Capital (30%), Shanghai Ample Harvest Financial Services Group Co Ltd (上海丰实金融服务（集团）有限公司) (30%), Angju Investment (10%), Thornton (10%), Ulysses Diversified Inc (10%), Skaneateles LLC (10%). According to Chinese corporate records, the original owner of the US stake in BHR was Rosemont, Seneca Thornton, LLC with a 30% shareholding. This was split just under two years later into what is believed to be 20%/10% holding between Rosemont, Seneca, Bohai LLC and Thornton LLC. This was later changed again splitting Rosemont, Seneca, Bohai into Skanletes and Ulyssees. As Rosemont is the HEINZ KERRY vehicle and Seneca is the Biden vehicle, it is believed that the final split allowed HEINZ to exit the partnership divesting to ARCHER.

    In summary, the Chinese government funded a business that it co-owned along with the son of a sitting US vice president and Secretary of State who was with high probability directly or indirectly invested in the holding company.

    But if China funded a business, what was the value for Hunter? Here the report goes into detail calculating that the entity likely had $6.5BN in AUM, generating $100-$150MM in annual revenue, and if one day the business was sold, it could do so for ~$300 million (see page 14-15).

    This returns the entire partnership to the fundamental problem: two sons of the Vice President of the United States and the Secretary of State willingly entered into a financial partnership with a government their fathers were supposed to deal with in an impartial manner.

    Evidence indicates that the Secretary of State was directly or indirectly financially invested in his sons firms and benefitted from asset purchases made by firms directly linked to his son. HUNTER invested in a firm that by his own words has had almost nothing to do with, managed by state government with departments dedicated to elite capture, focusing on state enterprise deals in a foreign country, but has grown to manage $6.5 billion in assets and likely realize yearly revenue of $100-150 million. The ultimate sale price for his stake or the partnership would be whatever the Chinese Communist Party decides his partnership stake is worth.

    And this is where the Typhoon Investigations report, the Biden presidential campaign, and Hunter’s “laptop from hell” all converge:

    On May 2, 2019 BIDEN remarked, “They can’t figure out how they’re going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system. I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what, they’re not, they’re not competition for us.”

    On May 3, it was reported that BHR [where Hunter was an investor] invested in Face++, a Chinese surveillance company which develops facial-recognition software for law enforcement in China, including targeting ethnic minority Muslims Xinjiang.

    In September 2019, BIDEN said this of HUNTER’s business deals:

    “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,”

    Still, while Hunter benefiting monetarily from deals with China may be unethical, it’s hardly illegal (all else equal). Where things get dicey is if to curry favor with China, and continue the freeflow of China-sourced cash, Hunter or his father, is betraying his fellow Americans. Is this what happened? Read on and decide:

    Hunter Cultivated by Chinese Intelligence

    Our research shows that for more than decade, HUNTER has been personally targeted by China’s intelligence apparatus and its various ‘foreign relations agencies’. A U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs published on September 23, 2020, details HUNTER’s recent payoffs from a PLA linked tycoon, Ye Jianming , chairman of Chinese energy company CEFC China Energy Company Limited .

    YE’s first break came when he purchased a small piston factory that supplied the Chinese army, after which he was a proxy for PLA officials, based on a New York Times article, and our proprietary research of the PLA’s logistics network. In the early 2000s, YE was the deputy secretary of CAIFC, according to his CEFC biography. As explained, the CAIFC is a PLA front organization that has dual roles of intelligence collection and propaganda work, and worked with LIN and the SLLF a few years after YE left the organization. YE also knows Xu, who was a CAIFC special advisor, and arranged for LIN and HUNTER’s access to the highest levels of government.

    In line with his intelligence role, YE arranged events that brought together retired American and Chinese military officers. In 2015, YE arranged for an aide to meet with HUNTER and in May 2017, YE met privately with HUNTER at a Miami hotel. The purpose of the meeting was for HUNTER to use his contacts to help “identify investment opportunities for Ye’s company CEFC China Energy,” and afterwards YE gave HUNTER a 2.8-carat diamond.

    According to HSGAC’s Confidential Document 9, YE and his associate Dong Gongwen, applied to a bank and opened credit lines for a business named Hudson West III LLC, giving HUNTER, his brother James (and James’ wife Sarah Biden), credit cards which the Bidens used to buy extravagant items. The HSGAC report details a series of transfers and transactions worth millions of US dollars between CEFC, Hudson West and the Bidens. This – 11 years after HUNTER and James denied selling their political connections to foreigners for personal gain.

    In March 2018, YE was detained and put under investigation on suspicion of economic crimes. CEFC was then declared bankrupt in March 2020 alleged to have faked deals and bribed foreign governments for oil rights. Some of these were facilitated by Patrick Ho , CPPCC member and the former Hong Kong Secretary for Home Affairs in Tung’s administration. On November 18, 2017, Ho was arrested at the John F. Kennedy International Airport on bribery and money-laundering charges, and called HUNTER for legal assistance.132 HUNTER later told The New Yorker that he doesn’t see Ye as a “shady character at all,” and he characterized the outcome as “bad luck.”

    The report’s conclusion:

    Whether he understands it or not, it is apparent that HUNTER has been compromised by Chinese intelligence, who most likely have detailed files on HUNTER’s time spent in China, encompassing his personal meetings and any other activities. Furthermore, YE is associated with the PLA’s General Political Department, which directly opposes the US military in Asia, creating a serious conflict of interest for his father BIDEN.

    Putting it all together, the report concludes that the Chinese influence operation targeting Biden and Heinz, the two most important people in US foreign policy under the Obama administration, and their children can now be tied between a small group of organizations and individuals.

    “Dating back to Biden’s time in the Senate meeting with Yang, this was never from the Chinese perspective anything less than an official influence operation. Everything surrounding HUNTER took place with official Chinese organizations known to engage in and tasked with influence operations.

    Of course, in exchange for funneling tens of millions to Hunter (and, indirectly according to recent allegations, his father), China also got something: this:

    Over time BIDEN’s approach to China changed significantly. Under the Clinton and early part of the Bush administrations he could be considered moderately hawkish on China. However, during his time in the Obama administration as one of the key people tasked with China policy, his views became very dovish. Interestingly, BIDEN repeatedly is using preferred CCP language in describing approaches to relations or specific issues. The CCPIT specifically works with businessmen to convince their home governments it is in their best interest to avoid damaging measures such as sanctions to China. Other organizations mentioned work specifically to engage in elite capture or influence politicians or governments. The presence of all these institutions collectively strongly imply this was an influence operation by the Chinese state and whether directly or indirectly, BIDEN shifted his view from hawkish to dovish after HUNTER began receiving entrée into Chinese elite political and financial institutions.

    Finally, going back to Chris Balding who originally published the report, here is his own brief summary of everything laid out in the 64 page report:

    Beginning just before Joe Biden’s ascendancy to the Vice Presidency, Hunter Biden was travelling to Beijing meeting with Chinese financial institutions and political figures would ultimately become his investors.  Finalized in 2013, the investment partnership included money from the Chinese government, social security, and major state-owned banks a veritable who’s who of Chinese state finance.

    It is not simply the state money that should cause concern but the structures and deals that took place. Most investment in specific projects came from state owned entities and flowed into state backed projects or enterprises. Even the deals speak to the worst of cronyism. The Hunter Biden investment firm share of a copper mine in the Congo was guaranteed with assets put at risk by the larger copper company to ensure deal flow to Hunter’s firm.

    In another instance, Bank of China working on an IPO in Hong Kong gave its share allocation to the BHR investment partnership. They were able to do this because even though the Hunter Biden firm completed no notable work on the IPO, it is counted as a subsidiary of the Bank of China. The Hunter Biden Chinese investment partnership is literally invested in by the Chinese state and a subsidiary of the Bank of China owned by the Chinese Ministry of Finance.

    The entire arrangement speaks to Chinese state interests. Meetings were held at locations that in China speak to the welcoming of foreign dignitaries or state to state relations. The Chinese organizations surrounding Hunter Biden are known intelligence and influence operatives to the United States government. The innocuous names like Chinese People’s Institute for Foreign Affairs exist to “…carry out government-directed policies and cooperative initiatives with influential foreigners without being perceived as a formal part of the Chinese government.”

    Interestingly the CPIFA is under the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. When the investment partnership was struck in 2013, the Minister of Foreign Affairs was Yang Jiechi. Yang would have been very familiar with Hunter Biden from his days in Washington as the Chinese Ambassador to the United States from 2001 to 2005 during which he met regularly with Joe Biden chairing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Today the same individual who oversaw institutions helping shepherd Hunter’s investment partnership as the Minister of Foreign Affairs is Xi Jinping’s right hand man on foreign affairs and member of the powerful Politburo.

    Most worrying is the financial leverage this gives the Chinese state over a direct member of the Biden family.  Despite the widely reported $1-1.5 billion of investment the reality is likely much higher. A co-founder of the investment firm reports the total assets under management as $6.5 billion.  While this number cannot be completely replicated, given that two deal alone were worth in excess of $1.6 billion this number is not unrealistic at all.  A 2% annual fee on assets under management would generate $130 million annually. Add in the 20% fee on capital gains the firm would recognize and it is not difficult to see Hunter’s stake being worth in excess of $50 million.

    According to Hunter’s attorney, he did not invest his $400,000 in the company until 2017. Even assuming the veracity of this statement, this raises a major problem. Founded in 2013, the firm had large amounts of revenue and assets under management by 2017. In other words, his $400,000 stake would have already been worth far more than what he paid for it. This paltry $400,000 investment worth more than $50 million now would have realized a gain of more than 12,400% in three years.

    The difficulty in eluding these concerns is their documentability by anyone who cares to look.  There is no potential for hacking because it is all public record in China. Any journalist who wishes to look can go review IPO prospectuses, news reports, or corporate records. There is no secret method for discovering this data other than actually looking. There is simply no way to avoid the reality that Hunter Biden was granted a 10% stake worth far in excess of what he paid for a firm that is literally operated and owned by the Chinese state.

    I did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016 and have significant concerns about his policies in areas like immigration. Having lived in China for nine years throughout the Xi regimes construction of concentration camps and having witnessed first hand their use of influence and intelligence operations, the Biden links worry me profoundly.

    Whether Joe Biden personally knew the details, a very untenable position, it is simply political malpractice to not be aware of the details of these financial arrangements. These documentable financial links simply cannot be wished away.

    And this is why Beijing is desperate to get Joe Biden – whose son got extremely wealthy thanks to China’s influence peddling operation for the past a decade- into the White House.

    You can read the full report here (pdf link)

  • Russophrenia… Or How A Collapsing Country Runs The World
    Russophrenia… Or How A Collapsing Country Runs The World

    Tyler Durden

    Fri, 10/23/2020 – 00:00

    Authored by Patrick Armstrong via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    I am indebted to Bryan MacDonald for this brilliant neologism: Russophrenia – a condition where the sufferer believes Russia is both about to collapse, and take over the world.

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    An early example comes from 1992 when the then-Lithuanian Defence Minister called Russia a country “with vague prospects” while at the same time asserting that “in about two years’ time [it] will present a great danger to Europe” (FBIS 22 May 92 p 69).

    Vague prospects but great danger. Given the vague demographic prospects of his own country, it was a rather ironic assertion given that Lithuania’s future would appear to be a few nursing homes surrounded by forest. But he said it in the days of the full EU/NATO cargo cult. In 2014 U.S. President Obama immortalised this in an interview:

    But I do think it’s important to keep perspective. Russia doesn’t make anything. Immigrants aren’t rushing to Moscow in search of opportunity. The life expectancy of the Russian male is around 60 years old. The population is shrinking. And so we have to respond with resolve in what are effectively regional challenges that Russia presents.

    Wrong on all counts: all he did was display how poorly advised he was.

    Russia, Russia ever failing: will fail in 1992, finished in 2001, failed in 2006, failed in 2008, failing in 2010, failed in 2015. Russia’s failing economy, isolation, ancient weapons, instability; a gas station masquerading as a country. Doomed to fail in Syria and losing influence even in its neighbourhood in 2020.

    A country with GDP comparable to that of Australia cannot afford to be a superpower, fight a protracted war in Syria, fight in the Ukraine and develop its own stealth fighter and other equipment to match the United States.

    In 2016 Stratfor, predicting the world of 2025, thought it unlikely that the Russian Federation will survive in its current form. And neither will Putin. He was only a petty dictator with a Swiss bank account in 2000; a Lt. Col. Kije in 2001; another Brezhnev in 2003; facing his biggest crisis in December 2011, under dire threat and losing his leverage in January 2015; weak and terrified in July 2015; overextending his reach in May 2016; losing his shine in June 2017; losing his grip in October 2018; losing their trust in June 2019; losing control in September 2019; his house of cards was wobbling and he was the symbol of Russia’s humiliation in August 2019. His political demise was near in January 2020; more crises and coronavirus could topple him in April, another biggest crisis in May; losing popular support in June; running out of tricks in August; holed up in isolation, another gravest crisis in October. Soon gone. Russia’s economy won’t last much longer either: smaller than Spain’s or California’s in 2014; in tatters and facing a slow and steady decline in 2015; surprisingly small in 2017; about the size of Belgium plus the Netherlands and smaller than Texas’ in 2018; headed for trouble in 2019. Weak energy prices its Achilles heel in 2020. And on and on: really weak in 2006; its three biggest problems in 2013; Russia is not strong. And Putin is even weaker in 2015. Don’t fear Russia, marginalize it because it’s weak and has a rapidly aging and shrinking population in 2018. Still weak in 2019 and Paul Gregory tells us that’s it’s weak but with nukes in 2020.

    Occasionally – very occasionally – someone, more acute than most, wonders How Did A Weak Russia Ever Become A Great Power Again? or why with less money than Canada and fewer people than Nigeria, it “runs the world now”. But the explanations are facile: too much butter spent on guns or a passing situation:

    In the emerging post-Cold War-era Russia, no matter how poor it is in many key areas, can be #2 in the world for many years to come. Only when China rises in the next 20 years or a new kind of President emerges in the United States will that change. Until then Vladimir Putin can play his games to his heart’s content.

    Of course all of these headscratchers assume that the exchange rate of the ruble is the true measure of Russia’s economy; which is a pretty silly and misleading idea.

    * * *

    But at the same time Russia is an enormous, dangerous, existential threat functioning with enormous effectiveness in all dimensions.

    Far from having the deceptively weak military of 2015, it is developing the world’s most powerful nuclear weapon in 2018 and in future wars the U.S. will have nowhere to hide. The next January we’re told that it and China are building Super-EMP bombs for ‘Blackout Warfare’. Russia has imposed aerial denial zones and fields eye-watering EW capabilities; it has “black hole” submarines, a generational lead in tanks, an unstoppable carrier-killer missile and devastating air defence. It’s working on a new missile threat to the U.S. homeland. General Breedlove, former NATO Supreme Commander who did much to poke the bear, gives us a particularly striking example: he now fears that a war “would leave Europe helpless, cut off from reinforcements, and at the mercy of the Russian Federation.” The British army would be wiped out in an afternoon, NATO would lose quickly in the Baltics – NATO’s totally outmatched. The Russian threat is unlike anything seen since the 1990s. The worry is that Nato has under-reacted.

    Putin was the world’s most powerful man and, linking up with China, could soon become more powerful than the U.S. in 2018. He was wielding Russia’s formidable military and powerful economic policies in 2019. And never forget Russia’s major hacking threat and deadly malware. Its interference and influence in Western voting is stupendous: the 2016 U.S. election; Brexit; Canada; France; the European Union; Germany; Catalonia; Netherlands; Sweden; Italy; EU in particular and Europe in general; Mexico: Newsweek gives a helpful list. And, long before Putin: “100 years of Russian electoral interference“. As a covert influence actor and purveyor of disinformation and misinformation Russia is the primary threat in the U.S. election.

    Putin was a threat to the Rules-Based International Order in February 2007, May 2014, January 2017, February 2018, May 2018, June 2019 and many months before or since.

    During two decades as Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin has rarely concealed his contempt for Western-style democracy and the rule of law. The poisoning of Russian political activist Alexey Navalny, amid a widening Russia-supported crackdown on opposition leaders in Belarus, indicates the lengths to which Putin and his cronies will go to silence their enemies and maintain power.

    * * *

    So, on the one hand Russia is a failing country, with a trivial economy, a greatly over-rated military led by someone who is always facing a catastrophe at home. Nothing to worry about there: presently weak and future uncertain. On the other hand, Russia has a tremendously powerful military, an economy that does whatever its ever-young autocratic permanent ruler wants it to. Its propaganda power is immense and unbeatable, the background determinant of the world’s action. Russophrenia.

    And, out of the blue, COVID gives him another opportunity to bamboozle the helpless West and undermine its precious Rules-Based International Order. Somehow. See if you can make sense of this incoherence:

    This should worry the West once the pandemic has passed. Not because Russia poses a serious long-term threat to our interests; it doesn’t, although Putin would prefer us to think that his shrivelled realm does. But because Russia is not the only authoritarian state seeking to learn lessons from the current crisis which could be used in a future conflict.

    Russia’s Vaccine Stunt which experts worry is dangerous is being supported by attacks on the Oxford vaccine which Russia tried to steal. Russians, Russians everywhere!

    Russophrenics are unaffected by reality. Russia’s success? Forget maleficence and try competence. Its military is designed to defend the country, not rule the world: a less expensive and attainable aim. Its economy – thanks to Western sanctions – has made it probably the only autarky in the world. Election interference is a falsehood designed to damage Trump and exculpate Clinton which has been picked up by Washington’s puppies. But don’t bother with mere evidence; As the author of this New Yorker piece explains:

    Such externally guided operations exist, but to exaggerate their prevalence and potency ends up eroding the idea of genuine bottom-up protest—in a way that, ironically, is entirely congenial to Putin’s conspiratorial world view.

    Or as the Washington Post memorably put it: “Especially clever is planting tales of supposedly far-reaching influence operations that either don’t actually exist or are having little impact.”

    Scott Adams understands the process perfectly:

    Absence of evidence is evidence.

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    Pretty crazy isn’t it? And getting crazier.

    All this would be funny if it were Ruritania ranting at the Duchy of Strackenz.

    But it isn’t: it’s the country with the most destructive military in the world and a proven record of using it ad libitum that is sinking into this insanity. And that’s not good for any of us.

  • These Are The World's 100 Smallest Countries
    These Are The World’s 100 Smallest Countries

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 10/22/2020 – 23:40

    National borders may be mere human constructs, but they are powerful ones.

    Russia, Canada, the U.S., and so on – it’s easy to focus on the countries with the largest landmasses and seemingly endless borders. Their sheer size makes them hard to ignore, and their natural resources are often vast.

    But with the graphic below from TitleMax, we can focus on the power of small.

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    As Visual Capitalist’s Therese Wood notes, from economic might to religious influence, many of the smallest countries in the world are surprisingly powerful. Let’s take a closer look at the world’s 100 smallest countries and their spheres of influence.

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    Although several of the national borders shown above may be contested, the graphic gives us a clear overview of the globe’s smallest nations.

    The Power of Small

    Small size doesn’t mean less power. In many cases, it’s the contrary.

    The Vatican—the smallest country on Earth at 0.19 square miles—is renowned for its leader and main inhabitant, the Pope. As leader of the Catholic Church, the pontiff and his papal staff make up a sizable part of the country’s tiny population of 825. Most of the Church’s 219 Cardinals, its leading dignitaries, live in their respective dioceses.

    With more than 1.2 billion Roman Catholics in the world, the Vatican’s sphere of influence is of course far larger than its small physical size. Although the walls of the Vatican are situated inside the city of Rome, Italy, its centuries-old influence spans continents.

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    Nearly 40% of Roman Catholics live in the Americas, while the fastest-growing Catholic population can be found in Africa—home to more than 17% of the world’s Catholics.

    Purchasing Power

    Where the Vatican’s power lies in religion, plenty of spending power is held by the tiny country of Monaco, the second smallest country on Earth.

    Situated along the French Riviera, Monaco is surrounded entirely by France—but it also sits fewer than 10 miles from the Italian border.

    At 0.78 square miles, Monaco could be compared to the size of a large farm in the U.S. Midwest. Despite its small size, Monaco has a GDP of nearly US$7.2 billion, and boasts over 12,000 millionaires living within one square mile.

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    Along with Luxembourg and Liechtenstein—both of which are included in the smallest countries list—Monaco is one of the only countries globally with a GDP per capita higher than $100,000.

    Switzerland and the Netherlands, both found in this graphic at ranks 63 and 64, also hold large shares of the global economy given their size. These two nations rank 20th and 17th in the world in economic output, respectively.

    Similarly, Singapore is the 20th smallest country on the planet, but it ranks in the top 10 in terms of GDP per capita ($65,233) and sits in 34th place globally in terms of nominal GDP.

    Perspective is Everything

    To give us a better idea of just how small the tiniest countries are, let’s take a look at some simple size comparisons:

    • Monaco could fit inside New York City’s Central Park, with room to spare

    • Brunei is roughly the same size as Delaware

    • Nicaragua, the largest country in Central America, is similar in size to the state of Mississippi

    • Nauru is the smallest island nation, and smaller than Rhode Island

    • North Korea is roughly the size of Pennsylvania

    “Small,” of course, is a qualitative factor. It depends on your vantage point.

    As of September 2020, there are 195 countries on Earth. Although this graphic shows the smallest countries in the world, it is worth noting that a list of the world’s 100 largest countries would also include some of the same countries on this list, including North Korea, Nicaragua, and Greece.

    Is It A Small World Afterall?

    Viewed from space, there are no borders on our tiny blue dot. But from ground level, we know how much power national borders hold.

    Although globalization may make our world feel smaller, our nations significantly impact our lives, societally and economically.

    And, as this chart shows, power comes in all sizes.

  • There Is A Solution To Big Tech Censorship – But No Politician Will Touch It
    There Is A Solution To Big Tech Censorship – But No Politician Will Touch It

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 10/22/2020 – 23:20

    Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

    The issue of censorship by major tech companies is a precarious one, and I’m becoming increasingly suspicious of the nature of the debate. There are some complexities, but it can all be boiled down to this:

    Big tech social media conglomerates argue that their websites are like any other private business and that they are protected from overt government interference by the US constitution. In other words, they have a right to platform or deplatform anyone they choose. Of course, this is the exact OPPOSITE of what most leftist groups have argued in the past when it comes to private businesses refusing to cooperate with people they disagree with on basic principle, such as LGBT activists, but let’s set that hypocrisy aside for now.

    Social media companies have decided that the people they want to deplatform most are conservatives, along with anyone else who disagrees with hard left ideologies such as social justice or the handling of the pandemic situation. Statements or content that run contrary to leftist philosophies are simply labeled “hate speech” or “conspiracy theory” and are erased.

    Conservatives argue that big tech is a monopoly with far too much power, that social media should be treated more like a public resource or “town square” and that these companies are violating the free speech rights of conservatives by specifically targeting them for censorship. Many conservatives are also demanding that Donald Trump and the government step in to regulate or punish such companies for these actions.

    The truth is that both sides are right, and both sides are wrong. The real solution to the problem requires a radical change in how we view the institution of corporations and how they interact with government, and it’s a solution I doubt ANY political official will consider, and that includes Trump.

    Let me explain…

    Social media and big tech do in fact represent a monopoly, but not in terms most people are familiar with. Instead of acting only as an economic monopoly controlling market share, big tech is also a political monopoly controlling the majority of communication platforms. If only one political and social ideological group dominates every major social media and digital information outlet, this in my view represents a completely unbalanced power dynamic that does indeed threaten the free speech rights of the populace.

    Rabid censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, a scandal that is supported by facts and evidence that big tech has chosen to bury because it’s inconvenient to them rather than a violation of their community guidelines, is just one more example of the incredible danger that social media monopolies present.

    Obviously, there is the issue of private property rights to consider. I fully support and defend private property rights and I do believe that a business has the freedom to refuse service to anyone for any reason. Just because you open your doors to the public does not mean the public now owns your labor. You should have the right to refuse labor whenever you wish.

    If a business refuses a customer based merely on personal bias, then word is going to get around quickly and that business may lose a large number of potential buyers in the future (this is happening right now with multiple alternative social media companies on the rise). The free market should determine the fate of that business, not state or federal governments.

    Government itself is an untrustworthy entity that craves a monopoly of power, and by handing government the authority to micromanage the policies and internal practices of web companies we might be trading the big tech monster for an even more dangerous governmental monster.

    Who is to say that the government will stop with sites like Facebook or Twitter or Google? Maybe they will exploit their newfound powers to go after smaller websites as well. Maybe they will attempt to micromanage the entire internet. Maybe they will start dominating and restricting conservative websites instead of the leftist conglomerates we intended, and then we will be doubly screwed.

    If you value freedom and the Bill of Rights, then this debate leaves us at an impasse. Both sides (perhaps conveniently) lead to a totalitarian outcome. The thing is, the publicly presented argument is a contrived one, a manipulated discussion that only presents two sides when there are more options to consider. The narrative is fixed, it is a farce.

    The public has been led to believe that government and corporations are separate tools that can be used to keep each side in check. This is a lie. Big government and big corporations have always worked together while pretending to be disconnected, and this needs to stop if we are to ever defuse the political time bomb we now face.

    To solve the social media censorship debacle we need to examine the very roots of corporations as entities. First, corporations as we know them today are a relatively new phenomenon. Adam Smith described the concept of a corporation as a “joint stock company” in his treatise ‘The Wealth Of Nations’, and stood against them as a threat to free market economics. He specifically outlined their history of monopoly and failure, and criticized their habit of avoiding responsibility for mistakes and crimes.

    Joint stock companies were chartered by governments and given special protections from risk, as well as protection from civil litigation (lawsuits). But, they were supposed to be temporary business entities, not perpetual business entities. The point was to allow for the creation of a joint stock company to finish a particular job, such as building a railroad, and once the job was finished the company was dissolved and the government protections were no longer needed. Smith knew that if corporations were ever allowed to become permanent fixtures in an economy, they would result in disaster.

    This is exactly what happened in 1886 when the Supreme Court allowed companies like Southern Pacific Railroad to use the 14th Amendment, which was supposed to protect the constitutional rights of newly freed slaves, as a loophole to declare corporations as “legal persons” with all the protections of an individual citizen. Not only that, but with limited liability, corporations actually became super-citizens with protections far beyond normal individuals. Corporations became the preeminent force in the world and it was their relationship with governments that made this possible.

    This fact completely debunks today’s notion of what constitutes free markets. Corporations ARE NOT free market structures. They are, in fact, government chartered and government protected monopolies. They are SOCIALIST creations, not free market creations, and therefore they should not exist in a free market society at all.

    The alternative option to corporations was for businesses to form “partnerships”, which did not enjoy protection from government, limited liability or the ability to form monopolies. When the owners of a partnership committed a crime, they could be personally held liable for that crime. When a corporation commits a crime, only the company as a vaporous faceless entity can be punished. This is why it is very rare to see company CEOs face prosecution no matter how egregious and catastrophic their actions.

    Today, certain corporations continue to enjoy government protections while also enjoying government welfare. Meaning, these companies get a legal shield while also basking in the advantage of tax incentives and taxpayer dollars.

    For example, Google (Alphabet and YouTube) has long received huge tax breaks and is rarely if ever forced to pay in full for the massive bandwidth the company uses. In fact, YouTube was facing bandwidth affordability issues until it was purchased by Alphabet and Google, then it no longer had to worry about it – Google gets over 21 times more bandwidth than it actually pays for because of government intervention.

    The same rules apply to companies like Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, Apple, etc. All of them enjoy extensive tax breaks as well as cheap bandwidth that makes it impossible for small and medium sized businesses to compete, even if they operate on a superior model or have superior ideas. Many times the corporations pay no taxes whatsoever while smaller businesses are crippled by overt payments.

    A true free market requires competition as a rule, but the current system deliberately crushes competition. Again, we live in a socialist framework, not a free market framework.

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    Now that we understand the nature of big tech and what these companies actually are (creations of government), the debate on social media censorship changes.

    How? Take for example the fact that public universities in the US are not legally allowed to interfere with free speech rights because many of them survive by consuming taxpayer dollars. They are PUBLIC institutions, not private. Why then are we treating major corporations that survive on endless taxpayer infusions and incentives as if they are private businesses? They are not – They are publicly funded structures chartered by the government and therefore they should be subject to the same rules on free speech that universities are required to follow.

    Said corporations will surely argue against this and will attempt to use legal chicanery to maintain their monopolies. Trying to dismantle them could take decades, and there are no guarantees that government officials will even make the attempt? Why would they? The relationship between government and corporations has been an advantageous one for establishment elites for decades.

    Instead of challenging the corporate model in the Supreme Court, an easier option would be to simply take away all welfare and tax incentives for any big tech companies that refuse to allow free speech on their platforms. If Google had to pay normal price for the bandwidth it uses, the corporation would either implode or it would be forced to break apart into multiple smaller companies that would then compete with each other. More competition means lower prices for consumers along with better products. The threat of losing tax incentives would mean more large companies would refrain from censorship.

    Donald Trump as president could conceivably make this happen, but he will not, and neither will any other political official. The partnership between government and corporations will continue, I believe, because there are other agendas at play here. The establishment WANTS the public to argue in favor of tech totalitarianism on one side and in favor of government totalitarianism on the other side.

    They aren’t going to allow any other solutions to enter the discussion.

    The only available strategy left for fighting back against big tech is to continue leaving their platforms and building our own. This will take many years to accomplish. The point is, there is a more permanent option, but it requires a complete deconstruction of the socialist government/corporate framework now in place. To confront the power dynamic between governments and major conglomerates is to confront one of the fundamental sources of corruption within our society, which is why it won’t be allowed. And when the system refuses to police itself, public upheaval becomes inevitable.

    *  *  *

    If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch.  Learn more about it HERE.

  • Debate Post-Mortem: "Malarkey" Takes On "401K's In Hell" In Informative But Firework-Free Spectacle
    Debate Post-Mortem: “Malarkey” Takes On “401K’s In Hell” In Informative But Firework-Free Spectacle

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 10/22/2020 – 23:00

    Thursday night’s debate kicked off with both candidates behaving themselves, more or less, until the two engaged in several spats over the Hunter Biden scandal which quickly dissipated.

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    For a quick summary of how the candidates did aside from Huntergate:

    • COVID-19 – Tie, both stuck to well-worn talking points
    • American Families – Trump with the edge due to a ‘kids in cages’ moment. “Who built them?”
    • Race in America – Trump steamrolled Biden over the 1994 crime bill and inaction, plus Biden had a very senior moment
    • Climate Change – Trump, who successfully got Biden to admit he would ‘shift’ the country away from petroleum
    • National Security – Tie, as the topic devolved to Hunter Biden’s laptop, however Biden defended against Trump’s attempts to paint him as a corrupt politician – hammering back on Trump’s tax returns and China bank account.
    • Leadership – Biden, who argued that he would represent all Americans

    Overall, both candidates were much calmer and better organized than they were during the first debate – albeit Biden came off as very angry most of the debate. We doubt anyone is changing their mind after tonight.

    Moderator Kristen Welker, who – while asking several loaded questions against Trump, allowed each candidate to follow up more than once on questions. That said, she interrupted Trump 30 times, and Biden twice.

    *  *  *

    Full Debate Post-Mortem

    The second and final debate between President Trump and Joe Biden predictably went off the rails in short order, after a week of bombshell claims about Joe Biden’s involvement in international corruption with his son Hunter – accusations which the Biden campaign and its MSM surrogates implied, without evidence, are part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

    In the audience, however, was whistleblower Tony Bobulinski, a former Hunter Biden associate who has come forward with texts, emails and personal testimony that Joe and Hunter Biden peddled influence during the Obama administration.

    The first question was on COVID-19

    President Trump defended his administration’s response, saying that while 2.2 million people were ‘modeled to die,’ that ‘we’re fighting it and we’re fighting it hard.’ Trump spoke of his personal experience with the disease, noting “I was in for a short period of time and I got better very fast” thanks to his treatment. Trump added that a vaccine will be ‘announced within weeks.’

    Biden launched into attack mode – blaming 220,000 US deaths on President Trump, and suggesting that he doesn’t deserve to remain president because of it. “The president has no plan. No comprehensive plan,” said Biden, who added that he would mandate masks.

    When asked about the vaccine in ‘two weeks,’ Trump said that it’s not a guarantee, but that Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson were very close, and it would be here “by the end of the year” and that there are “generals lined up” to will assist in the rapid distribution of said vaccine.

    Trump got in a hit during one testy exchange over shuttering the country, saying “We can’t lock ourselves up in a basement like Joe does. He has the ability to lock himself up. I don’t know; he’s obviously made a lot of money someplace.”

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    The two went back and forth regarding policy response to the virus – with Biden mostly spitting Venom at Trump’s response – claiming “I’m going to shut down the virus, not the country.”

    Biden denied calling Trump’s closure of travel to China ‘xenophobic.’ Except…

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    On the topic of National Security

    Biden said that foreign nations meddling in US elections ‘will pay a price,’ noting “Russia’s been involved, China’s been involved to some degree, and Iran’s been involved.”

    “We are in a situation where we have foreign countries trying to meddle in the outcome of the election,” before suggesting that Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney, is a ‘Russian pawn’ – alluding to the recent disclosure of Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop contents.

    And then things went off the rails…

    ‘You were getting a lot of money from Russia. They were paying you a lot of money. And what came out today – all of the emails, the horrible emails of all the money you were raking in, you and your family. And I think you owe an explanation to the American people.‘

    To which Biden responded, ‘I have not taken a single penny from any country whatsoever,’ before claiming Trump as a “secret bank account in China.” Biden then said that because he’s released “22 years of my tax returns” he’s clearly clean.

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    Trump: ‘I don’t make money from China, you do. I don’t make money from Ukraine, you do. I don’t make money from Russia, you do.’

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    When asked about Hunter’s position on the board of Ukrainian energy giant Burisma, Biden said he had no dealings with the company.

    “I did my job impeccably,” he said, adding that there’s no evidence his son did anything wrong in Ukraine, and that nobody has claimed he did.

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    Then, during a brief spat over North Korea, Biden barked “We had a good relationship with Hitler before he invaded Europe.”

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    The topic turned to American Families – in particular, healthcare.

    Biden claims he supports private insurance and will pass ‘Bidencare‘ – which he described as Obamacare plus a public option. He then claimed that he will reduce premiums and drug prices.

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    “He wants socialized medicine,” said Trump of Biden, adding that VP running mate Kamala Harris wants socialized medicine as well.”

    The two then went back and forth on the coronavirus stimulus package – with President Trump blaming Nancy Pelosi for not wanting to do a deal before the election, and Biden blaming Republicans for not accepting Democrats’ HEROES Act over the summer – which President Trump says ‘bails out poorly run Democratic cities and states.’

    Biden said Trump brought up “malarkey” over alleged Biden family corruption because the president doesn’t want to discuss substantive issues affecting the country.

    On Minimum Wage, President Trump said it should be a state option, while Biden insisted that the federal minimum wage should be a minimum of $15 per hour.

    On Border Security, Trump and Biden fought over the child separation policy – to which Biden blamed Trump for separating children from their parents after Trump claimed children are being brought over by coyotes and ‘bad people.’ Later in the exchange, Trump repeated “Who built the cages?” referring to the Obama-Biden administration.

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    When Welker asked about the Obama administration’s failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform, Biden replied that he will be “president” and not “vice president” this time – seemingly throwing President Obama under the bus.

    At one point, Trump said ‘I ran because Joe Biden and Barack Obama did a horrible job.’

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    Race in America was the next topic

    When asked about the “talk” that black families give their children regardless of class, Biden says his daughter, a social worker, worked in African-American areas, which we guess makes Biden not racist. Trump claimed that Obama and Biden ‘never wanted criminal justice reform.’

    “It’s all talk and no action,” Trump said of Biden, who he slammed for doing ‘nothing in 47 years except pass the Crime bill that was detrimental to black Americans.’

    “Nobody has done more for the black community than Donald Trump,” Trump said, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.

    Biden then appeared to have a senior moment, calling Abraham Lincoln a racist.

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    The debate then turned to Climate Change

    Welker asked both candidates how they would combat it, to which Trump discussed the ‘trillion tree program’ after saying he loves the environment, and that the United States has incredibly low carbon emissions. He added that he hasn’t heard Biden use the term, because he wasn’t sure if ‘Biden knows what it means.’

    Trump said that China, Russia and India are “filthy” compared to the US, and that he pulled the country out of the Paris accord because he’s not willing to sacrifice jobs because of the agreement – particularly when China’s obligations don’t kick in until 2030 and Russia ‘goes to a lower standard.’

    Biden then claimed he never opposed fracking, challenging President Trump to play a tape of him saying he did. The former VP then said that global warming is an “existential threat” to humanity, which has a “moral obligation” to solve it. Biden claims we have 8-10 years until we reach the point of no return.

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    Perhaps most significantly, Trump was able to get Biden to admit to ‘shifting away’ from petroleum.

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    The last topic was leadership

    When asked what each candidate would say in inauguration day to the losing side, President Trump said ‘before the plague came in, I was getting calls’ from Democrats about the booming economy. He noted that unemployment among blacks, women and other groups were at record lows.

    Trump says we have to rebuild the country to the point it was before the ‘China plague’ hit – and warned that if Biden is elected we will have a depression the likes of which we’ve never seen, and that ‘401(k)’s will go to hell.’

    Biden responded that he’ll be an American president who will represent all Americans – even those who didn’t vote for him. He hopes voters will choose ‘hope and science over fiction while dealing with systemic racism and creating millions of clean energy jobs.’

    “What’s on the ballot is the character of the country,” said Biden.

    Hot takes and hilarity:

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    Frank Luntz went the extra mile to prove he isn’t a Biden shill

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    Comedy ensued:

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  • "Probably A Hypersonic Missile" – Video Shows Chinese Bomber With Large Rocket 
    “Probably A Hypersonic Missile” – Video Shows Chinese Bomber With Large Rocket 

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 10/22/2020 – 23:00

    China has stepped up war preparations by deploying hypersonic missiles at several military bases across from Taiwan. The new type of missile gives China’s People’s Liberation Army significant leverage over Taiwan’s anti-ballistic missile shield due to the glide vehicle’s unpredictable ballistic trajectory. 

    For more hints that China is beefing up its forces with advanced weaponry. Sputnik News reports footage of a Chinese Xian H-6 twin-engine jet bomber that has emerged on various social media networks, allegedly showing the aircraft carrying a new hypersonic missile. 

    “Although the video is interesting regardless of the type of weapon of the bomber, since the new type of X-6 bomber debuted only last year, the analysis of the missile gave a startling conclusion: it is probably a hypersonic missile,” Sputnik said. 

    Xian H-6 With Large Rocket Strapped To Belly 

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    Sputnik notes, “while military analysts have considered numerous possibilities that hypersonic weapons could be in question, insiders from the People’s Liberation Army claim that it is a hypersonic cruise missile, modified from the slower Changjian missile.” 

    “Changjian- 20 has existed for more than a decade. “While other countries are racing to develop increasingly advanced defense systems and other hypersonic weapons, it was time for the Chinese Air Force to have an upgraded missile with an increased range of attack,” a military source told Sputnik. 

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    “Currently, the Chinese air force is limited by the capabilities of its bombers. Of the H-6 bombers, only the H-6N variant can be refueled with airborne fuel, resulting in an obvious weakness in range. That forced the air force to upgrade the missile in order to alleviate the range problem “, the sources continued.

    Another observer points out that the air-launched missile “looks almost to feature a DF-17 like hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) on top of the rocket.” 

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    Defense News also agrees the missile “closely resembles the ground-launched DF-17 hypersonic missile:” 

    “Despite the video’s low quality, a freeze-frame analysis by Defense News suggests the payload is a missile with a warhead and booster section that closely resembles the ground-launched DF-17 hypersonic missile, which is believed to use the booster section from a DF-16 medium-range ballistic missile combined with a DZ-ZF hypersonic glide vehicle as its warhead,” said Defense News. 

    China’s move to modernize its forces with hypersonic weapons implies that it’s preparing for a fight. 

  • Senate Demands Hunter Biden Turn Over Bank Records Wire Transfers Account Balances And Travel Records
    Senate Demands Hunter Biden Turn Over Bank Records Wire Transfers Account Balances And Travel Records

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 10/22/2020 – 22:50

    Senate investigators have demanded that Hunter Biden turn over a mountain of evidence following bombshell emails and text messages which appear to show he and his business partners engaging in an international influence-peddling scheme while his father was Vice President of the United States, according to CBS News’ Catherine Herridge – who brought receipts as usual.

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    “According to recent reports that published emails allegedly from your client’s laptop, the Committees have identified your client as an individual involved in one or more of these business arrangements or financial transactions,” reads a Wednesday letter from Sens. Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley. 

    “As part of the ongoing efforts to validate and verify the information in those emails, the Committees request that your client provide all records related to any of your client’s business dealings—including, but not limited, to bank records, wire transfers, account balances, gifts, business transactions, travel records—with Joe Biden, James Biden, Ye Jianming, Chi Ping Patrick Ho, Zang Jian Jun, Gongwen Dong, Mervyn Yan, Gabriel Popoviciu, or any other associates regarding CEFC China Energy Co. Ltd or any other transactions related to business in Romania, China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Czech Republic, or any other countries.”

    Biden’s lawyers have until Friday to comply.

    Over the last week, alleged emails, text messages and compromising photographs from Hunter Biden’s laptop and his former business partners reveal that Joe Biden was directly involved in Hunter’s business dealings, and appears to have directly profited from them.

    The deals span several countries, from Ukraine – where Joe was ‘introduced’ to a representative from energy giant Burisma before strong-arming the Ukrainian government into firing their chief prosecutor who was investigating the company, to China, where a top Chinese official offered the Biden family a $5 million “interest-free” loan, to Russia, where Hunter took $3.5 million from the former mayor of Moscow’s ex-wife.

    Meanwhile, Former Hunter Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski – who will be at tonight’s debate – confirmed that an email published in the New York Post‘s  bombshell exposé is indeed genuine – something the Biden camp hasn’t disputed, and that the “Big Guy” described in one of those emails is none other than Joe Biden himself. Bobulinski also says Joe Biden was lying when he said he and Hunter never discussed business dealings.

    “My name is Tony Bobulinski. The facts set forth below are true and accurate; they are not any form of domestic or foreign disinformation. Any suggestion to the contrary is false and offensive. I am the recipient of the email published seven days ago by the New York Post, which showed a copy to Hunter Biden and Rob Walker. That email is genuine.’ -New York Post

    Bobulinski issued the statement late Wednesday, affirming that, contrary to Joe Biden’s claims that he never discussed business dealings with Hunter, the former Veep actually profited from his son’s dealings, which were undertaken with the full support of the Biden family. 

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    Bobulinski claims cash and equity positions and 10% stakes in dealings were set aside for “the big guy,” – aka Joe Biden. 

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    And guess who’s turning over his electronic devices and business records to the FBI?

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    If Trump doesn’t call Biden ‘Big guy’ at tonight’s debate, it will be a missed opportunity.

  • Is There Hope For The US?
    Is There Hope For The US?

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 10/22/2020 – 22:40

    Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

    For the entire lives of anyone under the age of seventy-five, the US has been at the top of the heap in almost every way. For decades, it had greater freedom, greater prosperity and higher production than any other country in the world.

    America was a cornucopia – the centre for innovation and trends in technology, the arts and social development. And today, many Americans, even if they complain about changes for the worse in their country, come back quickly to say, “This is still the greatest country in the world.” Or, “Everybody is still trying to come here.”

    Well, truth be told, neither of these knee-jerk comments is accurate any longer. But even those who have come to that realisation tend to resort to the inevitable fall-back comment: “Well, whattaya gonna do? It’s just as bad everyplace else.”

    And yet, this is also inaccurate. Throughout the history of the world, whenever a country had entered its decline stage, others were in the process of rising up.

    And this is just as true today. There are countries where prosperity and production are far greater than in the US and, increasingly, countries where the key ingredient that made America great – Liberty – is present to a far greater degree.

    In fact, this is the one characteristic of America that’s most rapidly in decline. This is especially true in 2020, when a virus has been used as a justification to dramatically increase governmental dominance of the populace.

    It matters little whether the US had a hand in creating the virus, or whether it was merely co-opted as an opportunity to expand control.

    The result has been heavy-handed governmental meddling in medicine, business and personal freedoms.

    As regards the latter concern, the odd halfway measure of personal movement control is not great enough to keep a virus from spreading, but it has been sufficient to collapse businesses, create record unemployment and make it impossible for some people to feed themselves.

    In the bargain, it has served as an ideal cover story for an economic collapse that had been inevitable. The government can say, “Don’t blame us for the collapse; it was those naughty Chinese and their pesky virus that did it.”

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    The decline is not an accident. It’s a planned demolition. And it’s going well. For those who actually pull the strings, profit will be made from the unfolding crisis. Not for everyone, of course, but most certainly for those few who are creating it.

    But many say that the US is waking up, that its citizenry are coming to the conclusion that the Deep State – that corporatist ruling class that are made up of governmental and big-business leaders – has increasingly destroyed the prosperity, production and liberty that once existed and replaced them with massive debt, an exit of production to other countries and a vanishing middle class.

    And they’d be entirely correct. The endgame for the once-great US Empire is now underway, and over the next few years, we shall bear witness as it tumbles downhill.

    So, what are Americans to do?

    Well, my belief is that – as is always the case when a country declines – the populace will divide into several groups.

    The first group, which will be by far the largest, will increasingly grumble, but ultimately do little or nothing to save themselves. They will go down with the ship.

    The second group will say, “We don’t have to accept this.” They’re the preppers, the ones who have a store of food and have been stashing away guns and ammunition. They’re the folks who are seen at the corner bar, saying, “If they come for me, I’m locked and loaded.” Their friends nod in agreement, but in fact, if a trained and outfitted SWAT team were to arrive on their porch, there would be very few who would succeed in getting off a single shot, and for those who did, their remaining life would be brief.

    On the more thoughtful side of this group would be the third group. They would also say, “We don’t have to accept this,” but their choice of a solution will be to “work within the system.”

    This is a much larger group – the ones who wait for each election as though it holds a solution. Each time, they’re disappointed. If the party they supported is elected, the winners somehow fail to return the country to the free society it had once been. If the other party is elected, the decline only accelerates.

    Incredibly, the lightbulb never seems to go on for this group. They never get to the point of realisation that, “Oh, I get it: neither party has any intention of returning the country to a state of liberty. The only question is which group of pretenders gets to be in charge of the decline this time around. Either way, I lose.”

    It could be said that this is the most tragic group. They’re sincere and dedicated. They endlessly hope that a solution is just around the corner, without there being any actual substance for their hope.

    The commonality in all three of these groups is that they all end up as casualties. They may differ in their approach to the decline, but they’ll share in the loss of their wealth (however large or small) and their liberty.

    But there’s also a fourth group – those who leave. Their numbers are small and they tend not to make a large impact on the consciousness of the other three. In fact, they’re never even mentioned by the media. It’s as though they don’t exist.

    So, let’s step back a few centuries. America was founded by a hardworking assortment of settlers who came from several countries in Europe. In their home countries they witnessed oppression – limitations to both their liberty and their ability to create a good life for themselves and their families.

    They were independent-minded and self-reliant. They carved out lives in the wilderness and later built towns, then cities. But all the while, they hung on to their core belief of independence and liberty.

    Today, they’re still revered as being the backbone of what made America great. And this view is accurate. Yet, today’s Americans are nothing like them. None of the three groups above thinks like them, although the middle group would like to believe they do, merely by owning guns. They’re not independent-minded. They’re not self-reliant.

    The key here is that the founders of America recognised that there was no chance that they could change the corrupt and controlling systems they were born into in Europe.

    So they left Europe and started over elsewhere.

    The fourth group are following a similar path: Seek out a destination where the government does not yet have the power to rob you of your wealth and freedoms.

    The choice is a simple one. If you value your liberty – the ability to make your own decisions and to keep more of what you’ve earned – pack your bags and go.

    *  *  *

    The upcoming election may be the most important in US history. At least as important as that of 1860, which led directly to the War Between the States. If you’re wondering what comes next, then you’re not alone. The political, economic, and social implications of the 2020 vote will impact all of us. That precisely why legendary investor Doug Casey, former “Economic Hit Man” John Perkins, Geopolitical forecaster and intelligence expert George Friedman, Father of Reaganomics David Stockman, and more, are revealing the specific moves they’re taking to prepare for what comes next. Click here to see the urgent video now.

  • Radiation 'Sniffer' Helicopter Takes Flight Above Washington, DC
    Radiation ‘Sniffer’ Helicopter Takes Flight Above Washington, DC

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 10/22/2020 – 22:20

    Starting Monday, a helicopter registered to the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE/NNSA), equipped with specialized sensors, will measure and map radiation levels across downtown Washington, D.C. and the surrounding metro area, read a government press release. 

    NNSA’s Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST) aircraft, a Bell 412 utility helicopter outfitted “with sensitive, state-of-the-art passive radiation sensing technology” will fly across the region at “150 feet (or higher) above the ground at a speed of approximately 80 mph” to conduct “aerial surveys” of radiation levels as part of security efforts ahead of the presidential inauguration on Jan. 20. 

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    The low-flying flights across the District will continue through Nov. 6, at a rate of about two per day. The agency wants to survey and update its radiation maps in the event of a nuclear or radiological incident. 

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    NNSA’s helicopter has already been spotted over a DC neighborhood.  

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    NNSA’s helicopter flying near Chevy Chase on Monday (Oct. 19). h/t @HelicoptersofDC & @hutton_sj

    The Warzone said in early June NNSA’s helicopter was deployed in the District but wasn’t certain if radiation readings were scheduled or in response to civil unrest. 

    “There’s been no such incident in Washington, D.C., but NNSA does send the AMS-equipped helicopters to conduct mapping surveys of background radiation ahead of significant public events, such as presidential visits or Super Bowls. The helicopters then fly additional patrols of the area afterward to monitor for any concerning changes,” said The Warzone. 

    Jay Tilden, NNSA’s Associate Administrator for Counterterrorism and Counterproliferation, told Defense News last year, “We deploy the helicopter right as a security bubble is being established around a major public event.” 

    “Oftentimes in a city, you’ll find a hospital or a cancer treatment center, and so that will pop up depending on the location of the source and what it’s in [and] that will show [in the mapped data] and it will allow then the local and/or the federal officials to determine that it should be there,” said Tilden in 2019.

    The agency’s latest statement said: “NNSA is making the public aware of the upcoming flights, so citizens who see the low-flying aircraft are not alarmed.” 

    While NNSA indicates the radiation sniffing helicopter is being deployed for matters related to the presidential inauguration – maybe – or perhaps – there are more imminent threats situated around or after the Nov. 3 elections. 

  • Armenia Launches Ballistic Missiles On Azerbaijan Amid Retreat In Nagorno-Karabakh Region
    Armenia Launches Ballistic Missiles On Azerbaijan Amid Retreat In Nagorno-Karabakh Region

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 10/22/2020 – 22:00

    Submitted by SouthFront.org

    On the morning of October 22, Armenian forces launched ballistic missiles at targets inside the territory of Azerbaijan. According to the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry, 3 missiles were fired in the direction of the Siyazan region, two in the direction of the Gabala region, and one in the direction of the Kurdamir region. Baku claimed that the strike was aimed at the civilian population and civilian infrastructure. The report provided no details regarding the type of missiles employed. Nonetheless, Armenian forces have so far only employed R-17 Elbrus and OTR-21 Tochka missiles. The Armenian Armed Forces also have several much more modern 9K720 Iskander shot-range ballistic missile systems, but the complex has not yet been employed because the leadership of Armenia is in no hurry to enter a full-out war with Azerbaijan to protect the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (also known as the Republic of Artsakh).

    The Armenian Defense Ministry denounced the reports as fake but it should be noted that Yerevan was also denying a ballistic missile strike on the Azerbaijani city of Ganja on October 16, a strike, which killed or injured several dozens of civilians. Later, Armenian sources spent much time marking military objects located in the city on maps. However, the civilian casualties from that strike are the confirmed fact. In their turn, Azerbaijan claims that it has destroyed at least 3 Armenian tactical ballistic complexes. A few of them were struck on the Armenian border area near Karabakh.

    On the evening of October 21 and the morning of October 22 , Azerbaijani forces were developing their offensive operations in the Aghdere-Aghdam, Fizuli-Jabrayil, and Zangilan-Gubadli directions. The Azerbaijani military claimed that it had captured important grounds in Gubadli and destroyed the D-20 battery of the 155th artillery regiment of the Armenian Armed Forces in the Khojavend area. In the Aghdere area, Azerbaijani forces allegedly delivered strikes on the 5th mountain rifle regiment inflicting heavy casualties to the Armenians.

    According to Azerbaijani President Ilham Alyiev, in the recent operations Azerbaijani forces captured 22 settlements in the districts of Fuzuli, Jabrayil, and Zangilan. These are Gejagozlu, Ashaghi Seyidahmadli, Zargar, Balyand, Papi, Tulus, Hajili, Tinli, Khurama, Khumarli, Sari Babayli, Ucunju Aghali, Hajalli, Girakh Mushlan, Udgun, Turabad, Ichari Mushlan, Malikli, Jahangirbayli, Baharli and Minjivan. Several Armenian T-72 battle tanks as well as BMP-1 and BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicles were also captured by Azerbaijan.

    Fierce clashes in the contested region continue as both Armenia and Azerbaijan accuse each other of sabotaging the diplomatic talks on a non-military settlement of their differences. On October 12, Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan even said that there is no diplomatic solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict at this stage.

    “Azerbaijan no longer agrees with what we agree or will agree, which means that at this stage it is at least pointless to talk about any diplomatic solution,” the Armenian Prime Minister said. Pashinyan also touched on the ongoing battles in Nagorno-Karabakh calling on all Armenians to take arms to repel the Azerbaijani advance. He said that Armenian forces are inflicting heavy losses on the Azerbaijani troops. The PM claimed that more than 10,000 Azerbaijani soldiers have been killed so far. This number exceeds even that claimed by the Armenian Defense Ministry, according to which Azerbaijan has thus far lost 6,459 troops, 584 armoured vehicles and rocket systems, 23 military planes, 16 helicopters and 202 UAVs. Thus, according to the Armenian side, in recent clashes Azerbaijan has lost over 200 personnel.

    Even amid the victorious statements about multiple Azerbaijani casualties, the Armenian side admits that clashes have reached the area of the Akari River. Even as Armenia provides few details regarding the current positioning of the sides, this is a de-facto confirmation of the recent Azerbaijani advance.

    Meanwhile, Turkey’s Vice President Fuat Oktay repeated an earlier claim of the Turkish leadership that his country is ready to openly send its forces to support Azerbaijan if needed. Therefore, even if Armenia is able to stabilize the current situation in the south of Karabakh, Turkey will continue providing Azerbaijan with the means, measures and specialists needed to continue their operations aimed at recapturing the entire region.

  • Watch Live: Second And Final Presidential Debate Between Trump And Biden
    Watch Live: Second And Final Presidential Debate Between Trump And Biden

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 10/22/2020 – 21:45

    After a week of devastating info-dumps from Hunter Biden’s (alleged) laptop and on-record admissions from his former business associates who say Joe Biden was the “Big Guy” at the center of an international influence-peddling racket, perhaps an appropriate drinking game for tonight’s debate would be to take a shot every time the candidates stays on topic.

    Which, by the way, are: “Fighting COVID-19,” “American Families,” “Race in America,” “Climate Change,” “National Security” and “Leadership.”

    Things should be extra interesting, as President Trump’s guest will be none other than Biden whistleblower Tony Bobulinski, who gave a press conference earlier today confirming Joe Biden’s involvement in the alleged corruption.

    So, make a drink, grab the popcorn, and settle in as Post-COVID Trump vs. Bombshelled Biden lock horns in the second and final debate before the 2020 US election, and stick around for our post-mortem analysis.

    WATCH LIVE:

    Perhaps you could play along with the Babylon Bee‘s BINGO game, which features eight cards.

    *  *  *

    As President Trump and Joe Biden prepare to face off during tonight’s second and final debate before the November 3rd election, America, if not the world, is preparing for a ‘shitshow‘ of epic proportions thanks to “October Surprise” revelations of Biden family corruption contained on an abandoned laptop, and attested to by former Hunter Biden business partners.

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    But, assuming for a moment that things won’t immediately and irrecoverably go off the rails out of the gate (they will), the six topics for tonight’s debate are as follows:

    “Fighting COVID-19,” “American Families,” “Race in America,” “Climate Change,” “National Security” and “Leadership.”

    The Debate Commission notably changed the main theme from foreign policy to ‘national security,’ undoubtedly in light of recent Biden bombshells.

    “All the issues voters care about are places where President Donald Trump has succeeded,” Hogan Gidley, national press secretary for the Trump campaign told “Just the News AM” television show. “People’s lives have been improved by Donald Trump’s policies — regardless of race, religion, color or creed. You don’t have to guess what Donald Trump would do with the economy. We’ve seen record high employment for African-American, Asian American, Hispanic Americans, women employed at record numbers. We saw more jobs than there were people to fill them.” –Just The News

    More from Just The News:

    “You also notice they took away the topic of foreign policy? Of course they would,” Gidley said. “President Trump has a record of success there too, already. He’s already been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize multiple times because of his work in the Middle East, something that Joe Biden couldn’t have thought about ever accomplishing. And all the experts told Donald Trump he couldn’t get it done. He got two peace deals. He’s drawing down troops from our foreign wars.”

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    Or as Philip Wegmann of RealClearPolitics notes:

    Donald Trump and Joe Biden will soon meet for a final debate tonight in Tennessee to discuss that pandemic and to argue over who is better suited to lead the country through that crisis and for the next four years. The moderator will have a mute button.

    This is unusual, as the Commission on Presidential Debates is not in the business of silencing speech. But the chaos of the last Trump-Biden debate so closely mirrored the chaos of the last year that that the commission decided it needed a way to shut up either candidate, or at least lower their decibel levels. There is a lot to argue about, and it will get personal.

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    The Trump campaign complained in an open letter when the debate commission changed the topic from international affairs to domestic issues. The president and his team described the decision as unfair on the grounds it ignored major administration achievements in foreign policy during the last four years. Left unsaid was that the topic change makes it more difficult for Trump to bring up Hunter Biden and his foreign business deals. It seems likely he’ll do it anyway.

    Trump tried repeatedly, with limited success, to label his opponent “Corrupt Joe.” More recently he has pointed to reporting by the New York Post to argue that the former vice president used the influence of that office to direct foreign policy and to benefit his son’s business dealings in both China and Ukraine.

    “This is major corruption, and this has to be known about before the election,” Trump said during a Tuesday interview on “Fox and Friends.”

    But while the president has publicly said the Department of Justice should look into the matter, the major media outlets have declined to take the allegations seriously. During an ABC News town hall last week with Biden, moderator George Stephanopoulos never mentioned it. The final debate may be Trump’s last time to force the question.

    The former vice president has mainly ignored the allegations so far except to belittle journalists who bring it up. “I knew you’d ask it,” Biden fired back at a CBS reporter who asked last week. “I have no response, it’s another smear campaign, right up your alley, those are the questions you always ask.”

    Trump isn’t likely to let him off the hook so easily, even as some of his own advisers urge him to focus on the pre-pandemic economy rather than allegations of international graft. Biden would rather discuss the coronavirus than the latest October surprise. His campaign has spent the better part of the pandemic hammering the president over his response to it, and recently Trump offered his challenger another gift.

    Trump warned an Arizona crowd that his opponent would bring back the lockdowns if elected and “wants to listen to Dr. Fauci,” the most visible member of the COVID-19 task force who has advocated for the measures. The Biden campaign responded quickly with an ad copping to the charge – yes, he would most definitely listen to Dr. Anthony Fauci.

    “Trump’s closing message in the final days of the 2020 race is to publicly mock Joe Biden for trusting science,” the Biden campaign later wrote in a statement. “Trump is mocking Biden for listening to science. Science. The best tool we have to keep Americans safe, while Trump’s reckless and negligent leadership threatens to put more lives at risk.”

    Asked during a town hall in the Rose Garden on Tuesday if there were anything he would have done differently to combat the pandemic, Trump responded, “Not much.”

    Like the polarized country they want to lead, the two candidates profess to have little in common, and no one seriously expects bipartisanship to break out on stage. But they share one trait. Even though the RealClearPolitics National Average has Biden leading Trump by 7.5 points, neither campaign says it believes the polls.

    “We cannot become complacent because the very searing truth is that Donald Trump can still win this race,” Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote in a memo obtained by Fox News. “And every indication we have shows that this thing is going to come down to the wire.”

    Republicans are banking on the same dynamic.

    “We’re going to win,” Trump told reporters last week.

    “I wouldn’t have told you that maybe two or three weeks ago.”

    On the same call, his campaign manager Bill Stepien added, “I don’t often agree with the Biden campaign, but I do agree with the Biden campaign when they say that this is a close race, because it absolutely is. When we look at the numbers we very, very much like the trajectory of this race.”

    Republicans are in the habit of summoning the ghost of 2016 to ward off concerns about their current polls. They note that Hillary Clinton led Trump by a similar margin, 6.1 points per the RCP average, at this time in that race. Aggregate polling of top battleground states from 2016 and 2020 is also nearly identical. The Trump campaign argument? Another upset is possible.

    Tonight is Trump’s last chance to make that case against Biden, the final debate in supposedly the most important election ever.

  • Huawei "Outhustles Trump" By Successfully Stockpiling Enough Chips For 5G Rollout
    Huawei “Outhustles Trump” By Successfully Stockpiling Enough Chips For 5G Rollout

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 10/22/2020 – 21:40

    As fully expected and predicted it’s now confirmed that that Huawei has successfully thwarted Trump’s sanctions by stockpiling chips to ensure their global 5G rollout runs smoothly with no expected major hitches. Bloomberg writes Thursday that it has effectively “outhustled Trump”:

    Huawei Technologies Co. quietly spent months racing to stockpile critical radio chips ahead of Trump administration sanctions, ensuring it can keep supplying Chinese carriers in their $170 billion rollout of 5G technology through at least 2021.

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    The restrictions were first announced on Aug. 17 to essentially bar Huawei from buying and using any and all microchips without a license from the US. But Huawei had time to rush to stockpile as many chips as it could before midnight on Sept. 14, which is when the new sanctions took effect.

    But steps were apparently also put in place long before, as White House rhetoric targeting Huawei and Chinese tech began ramping up in 2019. The result was, as Bloomberg writes:

    Partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. began ramping up output in late 2019 of Huawei’s 7-nanometer Tiangang communications chips, the most crucial element in 5G base stations, people familiar with the matter said. The Taiwanese contract manufacturer eventually shipped more than 2 million units at Huawei’s behest ahead of the sanctions cutoff last month, one of the people said, asking not be identified discussing internal matters. The sheer magnitude of orders at one point got TSMC executives wondering whether they had underestimated global demand, the person said.

    Bloomberg still concludes the Trump crackdown on sales of American-made circuitry and software to the Shenzhen-based multinational tech firm has had “mixed success” given it ultimately “knee-capped Huawei’s smartphone business and forced it to curtail device production.”

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    Via Reuters

    Recall that Huawei last year managed to unseat Samsung as the world’s biggest smartphone maker. But analysts have warned that the company’s smartphone shipments could fall 75% next year. Above all, Huawei covets chips used in 5G smartphones, which are required for the company’s latest generation of phones, which are 5G compatible, a fact that was supposed to drive an ambitious upgrade cycle.

    In the long term, given the Trump administration’s blacklisting a who’s who of China’s tech companies which has put into doubt the country’s continued access to the most advanced chips, China plans to pursue an ambitious new program to establish its own domestic semiconductor industry — crucial in all advanced computerized electronics.

    According to multiple reports last month, Beijing national security policies are now rapidly prioritizing this in order to ultimately sever dependency on American tech in the near and long term. American companies remain by far the most advanced in the production of semiconductors. 

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    You will find more infographics at Statista

    Bloomberg underscored in a report last month that Beijing will confer “the same kind of priority on the effort it accorded to building its atomic capability.” But such a revolution in China’s domestic chip production would still be many years away, leaving Huawei and others in “survival” and “stockpile” mode for the time being.

    Toward this end, Beijing has recently had a benchmark in place to see at least 40% of China’s semiconductor needs met by local manufacturers by middle of next decade.

  • Don't Vote For A Psychopath: Tyranny At The Hands Of A Psychopathic Government
    Don’t Vote For A Psychopath: Tyranny At The Hands Of A Psychopathic Government

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 10/22/2020 – 21:20

    Authored by John Whitehead via Te Rutherford Institute,

    “Politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths. I think you would find no expert in the field of sociopathy/psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this… That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow – but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one.”

    – Dr. Martha Stout, clinical psychologist and former instructor at Harvard Medical School

    Twenty years ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: “What’s the difference between a politician and a psychopath?”

    The answer, then and now, remains the same: None.

    There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians.

    Nor is there much of a difference between the havoc wreaked on innocent lives by uncaring, unfeeling, selfish, irresponsible, parasitic criminals and elected officials who lie to their constituents, trade political favors for campaign contributions, turn a blind eye to the wishes of the electorate, cheat taxpayers out of hard-earned dollars, favor the corporate elite, entrench the military industrial complex, and spare little thought for the impact their thoughtless actions and hastily passed legislation might have on defenseless citizens.

    Psychopaths and politicians both have a tendency to be selfish, callous, remorseless users of others, irresponsible, pathological liars, glib, con artists, lacking in remorse and shallow.

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    Charismatic politicians, like criminal psychopaths, exhibit a failure to accept responsibility for their actions, have a high sense of self-worth, are chronically unstable, have socially deviant lifestyles, need constant stimulation, have parasitic lifestyles and possess unrealistic goals.

    It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Democrats or Republicans.

    Political psychopaths are all largely cut from the same pathological cloth, brimming with seemingly easy charm and boasting calculating minds. Such leaders eventually create pathocracies: totalitarian societies bent on power, control, and destruction of both freedom in general and those who exercise their freedoms.

    Once psychopaths gain power, the result is usually some form of totalitarian government or a pathocracy. “At that point, the government operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups,” author James G. Long notes. “We are currently witnessing deliberate polarizations of American citizens, illegal actions, and massive and needless acquisition of debt. This is typical of psychopathic systems, and very similar things happened in the Soviet Union as it overextended and collapsed.”

    In other words, electing a psychopath to public office is tantamount to national hara-kiri, the ritualized act of self-annihilation, self-destruction and suicide. It signals the demise of democratic government and lays the groundwork for a totalitarian regime that is legalistic, militaristic, inflexible, intolerant and inhuman.

    Incredibly, despite clear evidence of the damage that has already been inflicted on our nation and its citizens by a psychopathic government, voters continue to elect psychopaths to positions of power and influence.

    Indeed, a study from Southern Methodist University found that Washington, DC—our nation’s capital and the seat of power for our so-called representatives—ranks highest on the list of regions that are populated by psychopaths.

    According to investigative journalist Zack Beauchamp, “In 2012, a group of psychologists evaluated every President from Washington to Bush II using ‘psychopathy trait estimates derived from personality data completed by historical experts on each president.’ They found that presidents tended to have the psychopath’s characteristic fearlessness and low anxiety levels — traits that appear to help Presidents, but also might cause them to make reckless decisions that hurt other people’s lives.”

    The willingness to prioritize power above all else, including the welfare of their fellow human beings, ruthlessness, callousness and an utter lack of conscience are among the defining traits of the sociopath.

    When our own government no longer sees us as human beings with dignity and worth but as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police, conned into believing it has our best interests at heart, mistreated, jailed if we dare step out of line, and then punished unjustly without remorse—all the while refusing to own up to its failings—we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic.

    Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.”

    Worse, psychopathology is not confined to those in high positions of government. It can spread like a virus among the populace. As an academic study into pathocracy concluded, “[T]yranny does not flourish because perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous.”

    People don’t simply line up and salute. It is through one’s own personal identification with a given leader, party or social order that they become agents of good or evil.

    Much depends on how leaders “cultivate a sense of identification with their followers,” says Professor Alex Haslam. “I mean one pretty obvious thing is that leaders talk about ‘we’ rather than ‘I,’ and actually what leadership is about is cultivating this sense of shared identity about ‘we-ness’ and then getting people to want to act in terms of that ‘we-ness,’ to promote our collective interests. . . . [We] is the single word that has increased in the inaugural addresses over the last century . . . and the other one is ‘America.’”

    The goal of the modern corporate state is obvious: to promote, cultivate, and embed a sense of shared identification among its citizens. To this end, “we the people” have become “we the police state.”

    We are fast becoming slaves in thrall to a faceless, nameless, bureaucratic totalitarian government machine that relentlessly erodes our freedoms through countless laws, statutes, and prohibitions.

    Any resistance to such regimes depends on the strength of opinions in the minds of those who choose to fight back. What this means is that we the citizenry must be very careful that we are not manipulated into marching in lockstep with an oppressive regime.

    Writing for ThinkProgress, Beauchamp suggests that “one of the best cures to bad leaders may very well be political democracy.”

    But what does this really mean in practical terms?

    It means holding politicians accountable for their actions and the actions of their staff using every available means at our disposal: through investigative journalism (what used to be referred to as the Fourth Estate) that enlightens and informs, through whistleblower complaints that expose corruption, through lawsuits that challenge misconduct, and through protests and mass political action that remind the powers-that-be that “we the people” are the ones that call the shots.

    Remember, education precedes action. Citizens need to the do the hard work of educating themselves about what the government is doing and how to hold it accountable. Don’t allow yourselves to exist exclusively in an echo chamber that is restricted to views with which you agree. Expose yourself to multiple media sources, independent and mainstream, and think for yourself.

    For that matter, no matter what your political leanings might be, don’t allow your partisan bias to trump the principles that serve as the basis for our constitutional republic. As Beauchamp notes, “A system that actually holds people accountable to the broader conscience of society may be one of the best ways to keep conscienceless people in check.”

    That said, if we allow the ballot box to become our only means of pushing back against the police state, the battle is already lost.

    Resistance will require a citizenry willing to be active at the local level.

    Yet as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if you wait to act until the SWAT team is crashing through your door, until your name is placed on a terror watch list, until you are reported for such outlawed activities as collecting rainwater or letting your children play outside unsupervised, then it will be too late.

    This much I know: we are not faceless numbers.

    We are not cogs in the machine.

    We are not slaves.

    We are human beings, and for the moment, we have the opportunity to remain free—that is, if we tirelessly advocate for our rights and resist at every turn attempts by the government to place us in chains.

    The Founders understood that our freedoms do not flow from the government. They were not given to us only to be taken away by the will of the State. They are inherently ours. In the same way, the government’s appointed purpose is not to threaten or undermine our freedoms, but to safeguard them.

    Until we can get back to this way of thinking, until we can remind our fellow Americans what it really means to be free, and until we can stand firm in the face of threats to our freedoms, we will continue to be treated like slaves in thrall to a bureaucratic police state run by political psychopaths.

  • China Blasts US As "Empire Of Hacking" After Damning NSA Report Spotlights Beijing
    China Blasts US As “Empire Of Hacking” After Damning NSA Report Spotlights Beijing

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 10/22/2020 – 20:40

    Earlier this week the National Security Agency released a cybersecurity advisory which focused on attempts of Chinese state-backed hackers to gain access to intellectual property such as coronavirus research or advanced technologies, or political and military information.

    Tuesday’s NSA advisory identified “vulnerabilities” in US systems that have been “recently leveraged, or scanned-for, by Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors” — for example bugs in software like Microsoft Windows or Citrix Systems.

    But now China’s Foreign Ministry has slammed the NSA report, calling out the spy agency’s ‘hypocrisy’ and shining a light on vast US domestic surveillance exposed years ago by Edward Snowden. Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian on Wednesday slammed the United States as an an “empire of hacking” and specifically cited the 2013 Snowden revelations. 

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    “It is indeed ironic news that the US National Security Agency, as the main implementer of the Prism programme and the world’s largest cyber espionage agency, publicly accuses other countries of cyber espionage,” Zhao said.

    Zhao called the US and specifically the NSA as “among the worst offenders of mass surveillance” in his fiery comments.

    Recall that the Prism program as revealed by Snowden involved the NSA gaining backdoor access to major internet companies like Microsoft and Google unbeknownst to the public as part of its years-long practice of sweeping up domestic communications with no warrant. 

    Zhao also expressly denied widespread allegations that Beijing is involved in the exact same thing which has gotten major firms like Huawei banned in the US and parts of the West, and which has placed particular Chinese apps and software under the spotlight.

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    NSA headquarters file, via Breaking Defense

    “The Chinese government has never asked Chinese companies to install back doors and provide overseas data to the government,” Zhao claimed.

    More recently, China as well as other US rivals and enemies like Iran have been accused of hacking and stealing valuable coronavirus research and data from US medical institutions and laboratories amid the international race to be the first to produce a reliable vaccine. 

  • Why Crude-Tanker Collapse Could Be Long And Painful
    Why Crude-Tanker Collapse Could Be Long And Painful

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 10/22/2020 – 20:20

    By Greg Miller of FreightWaves

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    Chinese water torture is defined as “a painful process in which cold water is slowly dripped onto the scalp, forehead or face for a prolonged period of time, allegedly making the restrained victim insane.” Crude-tanker owners and investors may face their own version of this ancient torment. Today’s agonizingly low rates could be just the beginning.

    The massive floating storage volumes that built up earlier this year are unloading. But very, very slowly. In aggregate, they’re dripping out. Meanwhile, oil demand is growing, but again, very slowly. Incremental oil demand is a trickle, not a flood.

    First the party, now the hangover

    Crude tankers filled up with storage cargoes in April-June after Saudi Arabia opened its spigots despite COVID-weakened demand. Tanker rates hit historic highs of over $250,000 per day but did so by pulling forward demand via storage deals and borrowing from the future.

    The best hope for tanker markets was that storage would unwind quickly as global consumption rebounded. This was the so-called “short hangover” or “rip off the Band-Aid” scenario. It would depress rates in the near term as storage tankers unloaded and swiftly reentered the spot-market scrum. But it would hasten a return to normalcy.

    Alas, new data provided to FreightWaves by intelligence company Kpler confirms that the Band-Aid is not being ripped off. It also implies that barring a major geopolitical event to supercharge spot rates, the hangover could be long and painful.

    Rates sink to multiyear lows

    Cratering crude-tanker rates are now well below both breakeven levels and where they normally are at this time of year.

    According to Clarksons Platou Securities, rates for very large crude carriers (VLCCs, tankers that carry 2 million barrels of crude oil) averaged $17,000 per day on Wednesday. Rates were $100,000 per day at this time last year, propelled by tankers attacks in the Middle East and U.S. sanctions against China’s COSCO. Looking beyond last year’s anomaly, current VLCC rates are less than a third of their 2015-19 average.

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    (Chart provided by Clarksons Platou Securities AS; data source: Clarkson Research Ltd, Clarksons Platou Securities AS)

    Clarksons estimates that average spot rates for Suezmaxes (tankers that carry 1 million barrels) are $4,000 per day. A year ago, they were $86,600 per day. Current Suezmax rates are about one-tenth of their 2015-19 average.

    Clarksons puts spot rates for Aframaxes (tankers that carry 750,000 barrels) at $4,500 per day. A year ago, rates were $55,100 per day. Current rates are about one-sixth of their 2015-19 average.

    Floating storage unwind stuck in neutral

    Kpler collects data on laden crude- and condensate-tanker capacity for ships stationary for 12 or more days.

    This reveals how much crude is in floating storage over time, including intentionally stored cargoes and those suffering lengthy delivery delays. Kpler also breaks out how much of this laden storage is off the shores of China, where port congestion has been particularly acute in recent months.

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    The data shows that global crude floating storage peaked at 190 million barrels on July 1 and had fallen 31% (or 29.5 VLCC-equivalents) to 131 million barrels as of Sunday.

    The negative signal for oil demand is that storage volumes have been hovering around the 130-million-barrel level since late August. Chinese storage has fallen. But non-Chinese storage has risen from around 60 million barrels in late August to 80 million barrels currently. Chinese floating storage accounted for around half of global floating storage in the beginning of September. It’s now down to around a third.

    Kpler Global Energy Economist Reid l’Anson told FreightWaves that Kpler has seen the largest gains off the North Sea, on the production side, and on the destination side, off India, Japan, South Korea and in the Malacca Strait. Floating storage off the shores of destination nations is inherently bad for tanker transport demand (the oil has already been transported). And regardless of whether storage is offshore of production centers or consuming nations, it’s a bearish on current oil demand.

    Crude-tanker utilization keeps falling

    Kpler also provided FreightWaves with data on the percentage of unladen (empty) crude/condensate tankers versus the total fleet, based on deadweight tonnage, regardless of size category.

    The numbers are ugly and confirm why rates are so low. There are too many empty ships chasing too few cargoes. And it’s getting worse.

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    Chart data source: Kpler

    The laden/unladen mix was roughly evenly split at the beginning of the year, until the Saudi production decision. That caused a surge in crude-tanker rates in March and April. That rate spike — and the ships chartered for floating storage — brought the unladen percentage down to 40%-42% in May.

    But then the unladen percentage began rising. The scope of unemployed ships in the spot market increased in June even as floating storage rose. As ships have been released from floating storage starting in July, the percentage has increased further.

    The higher the unladen crude-tanker percentage, the more bearish the signal for crude-oil demand (particularly in light of static floating-storage levels in late August through today). On Wednesday, the unladen share hit a year-to-date high of 52.5%.

    Air-travel fears chop tanker demand

    Listed companies heavily exposed to crude-tanker spot rates include Euronav, DHT, International Seaways, Frontline, Nordic American Tankers Diamond S Shipping and Teekay Tankers.

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    Ridgebury Tankers CEO Bob Burke (Photo: John Galayda/Marine Money)

    As recent history has shown, tanker rates can go from bust to boom overnight as the result of major geopolitical events. But barring such an occurrence, rate prospects rely on oil demand, a topic highlighted by panelists at last week’s virtual Capital Link New York Maritime Forum.

    According to International Seaways CEO Lois Zabrocky, “In the fourth quarter, we’re at 92-93 million barrels of [global oil] consumption versus 101 million barrels a year ago. COVID is still not really letting go of its grasp on a lot of the world’s population. That’s part of it. In addition, we’ve got [floating storage] destocking and OPEC is holding back [on production].

    “I think there’s a structural problem in the market,” maintained Bob Burke, CEO of Ridgebury Tankers.

    “I don’t think anyone on this [panel] has experienced an 8% decline in demand that seems semi-permanent. We are down about 8 million barrels a day and there’s one answer for why this is: airlines.

    “The barrel-per-day [loss] seems very highly correlated to airline travel, especially long-haul travel. And because of the psychology of the consumer, there’s going to be a lot more pain in that sector,” opined Burke.

    Seasonal upside vs structural downside

    Higher seasonal demand in the Northern Hemisphere should bump up crude-tanker rates in the coming months. However, a combination of tepid underlying consumer demand and a languid storage unwind that slowly drips out more tankers into the spot market could create dual headwinds well into next year.

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    Evercore ISI analyst Jon Chappell (Photo: John Galayda/Marine Money)

    Jon Chappell of Evercore ISI, who was just named the top shipping analyst of 2020 by Institutional Investor, told FreightWaves: “The mismatch in supply and demand is not likely to ease anytime soon.

    “Although there will be traditional seasonal patterns, we expect the upside to be severely capped this year until global inventories normalize — which may take until late 2021.

    “I think the VLCCs have held in better on a relative basis owing to congestion in China ports and still-elevated floating storage,” he continued. “As these issues unwind — and they are, just more slowly than many hoped — the relative performance of VLCCs and midsized asset classes should ‘normalize,’ meaning that Aframaxes and Suezmaxes will rise from above sub-OPEX [operating expense] levels, but VLCCs will likely remain under pressure.”

    On the plus side, the crude-tanker orderbook is extremely low and owners should scrap older tankers if rates stay this bad. “Fortunately, we’re in a business where about 5% of the ships on average go away [via scrapping],” said Burke.

    Scrapping activity has been minimal, but could increase. COVID temporarily restricted scrapping but those restrictions should ease. In addition, there has been very little scrapping of VLCCs in 2019 and 2020 because until recently, rates have been unusually strong.

    As Burke put it, “If you have a pocketful of cash, you’re inclined to take another bet. So, there’s resistance to scrapping even when it would be the natural choice with rates so low.”

    Scrapping and low orderbook to the rescue?

    “If you look at history, it usually takes at least six months of a depressed environment to really see vessels get recycled,” added Zabrocky. “At the [rate] levels we’re at, I think we should start to see more vessels getting taken out of the market.”

    Burke also pointed out that the very oldest VLCCs were inordinately placed into floating-storage duty and once those cargoes unload, these ships are prime scrapping candidates — which should temper the spot-rate headwind of the storage unwind. “A lot of the older ships that went into storage will probably go right to the scrapyard,” he said.

    But can tanker rates recover in 2021 due to reductions on the vessel-supply side? Or does it ultimately hinge on reversing the cargo-demand shortfall highlighted by the new Kpler data?

    Burke himself acknowledged that “if you look to the orderbook to save you on the spot market, you’re grasping for straws.”

    Diamond S Shipping CEO Craig Stevenson, an industry veteran, addressed the scrapping question back in March 2009. In the midst of the financial crisis, Stevenson told Connecticut Maritime Association conferencegoers: “You’re not going to scrap your way to prosperity. Ever. You’re not going to reduce the orderbook and turn it into a good market. It won’t happen. In the history of shipping, it hasn’t worked that way.

    “It’s demand,” emphasized Stephenson. “It starts with demand.”

  • How Total Spend by U.S. Advertisers Has Changed, Over 20 Years
    How Total Spend by U.S. Advertisers Has Changed, Over 20 Years

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 10/22/2020 – 20:00

    With an advertising economy worth $239 billion in 2019, it’s safe to say that the U.S. is home to some of the biggest advertising spenders on the planet.

    However, as Visual Capitalist’s Katie Jones notes, the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the major upheaval of advertising spend, and it is unlikely to recover for some time.

    The graphic below uses data from Ad Age’s Leading National Advertisers 2020 which measures U.S. advertising spend each year, and ranks 100 national advertisers by their total spend in 2019.

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    Let’s take a look at the brands with the biggest budgets.

    2019’s Biggest Advertising Spenders

    Much of the top 10 biggest advertising spenders are in the telecommunications industry, but it is retail giant Amazon that tops the list with an advertising spend of almost $7 billion.

    In fact, Amazon spent an eye-watering $21,000 per minute on advertising and promotion in 2019, making them undeniably the largest advertising spender in America.

    Explore the 10 biggest advertisers in 2019 below:

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    The report offers several ways of looking at this data—for example, when looking at highest spend by medium, Procter & Gamble comes out on top for traditional media spend like broadcast and cable TV.

    On the digital front, Expedia Group is the biggest spender on desktop search, while Amazon tops the list for internet display ads.

    The Rise and Fall of Advertising Spend

    Interestingly, changes in advertising spend tend to fall closely in step with broader economic growth. In fact, for every 1% increase in U.S. GDP, there is a 4.4% rise of advertising that occurs in tandem.

    The same phenomenon can be seen among the biggest advertising spenders in the country. Since 2000, spend has seen both promising growth, and drastic declines. Unsurprisingly, the Great Recession resulted in the largest drop in spend ever recorded, and now it looks as though history may be repeating itself.

    Total advertising spend in the U.S. is estimated this year to see a brutal decline of almost 13% and is unlikely to return to previous levels for a number of years.

    The COVID-19 Gut Punch

    To say that the global COVID-19 pandemic has impacted consumer behavior would be an understatement, and perhaps the most notable change is how they now consume content.

    With more people staying safe indoors, there is less need for traditional media formats such as out-of-home advertising. As a result, online media is taking its place, as an increase in spend for this format shows.

    But despite marketers trying to optimize their media strategy or stripping back their budget entirely, many governments across the world are ramping up their spend on advertising to promote public health messages—or in the case of the U.S., to canvass.

    The Saving Grace?

    Even though advertising spend is expected to nosedive by almost 13% in 2020, this figure excludes political advertising. When taking that into account, the decline becomes a slightly more manageable 7.6%

    Moreover, according to industry research firm Kantar, advertising spend for the 2020 U.S. election is estimated to reach $7 billion—the same as Amazon’s 2019 spend—making it the most expensive election of all time.

    Can political advertising be the key to the advertising industry bouncing back again?

     

  • Iran To Import North Korean Missiles In 25-Year Military Deal With China
    Iran To Import North Korean Missiles In 25-Year Military Deal With China

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 10/22/2020 – 19:40

    Authored by Simon Watkins via OilPrice.com,

    Following the end on the 18th of October of the 13-year United Nations’ embargo on Iran buying or selling weapons, the roll-out of the military component of the 25-year deal between China and Iran will begin in November, as exclusively revealed by Oil Price.com.

    After a series of meetings in China on the 9th and 10th of October between Iran’s Foreign Minister, Mohammad Zarif, and his China counterpart, Wang Yi, this military component may now also feature the deployment in Iran of North Korean weaponry and technology, in exchange for oil, according to sources very close to the Iranian government spoken to by OilPrice.com last week. Most notably this would include Hwasong-12 mobile ballistic missiles, with a range of 4,500 kilometres, and the development of liquid propellant rocket engines suitable for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) or satellite launch vehicles (SLVs). This will all be part of a broader triangular relationship co-ordinated by Beijing and further facilitated by the imminent launch of a new digitised currency system by China.

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    This sort of co-ordination – between North Korea and Iran and also between North Korea, Iran, and China – is nothing new, although its resumption at such a scale and in such products is. According to a number of defence industry sources – and recorded in various ‘Jane’s Intelligence Reviews’ (JIR) – over the first five-year period from the onset of Iran’s ballistic missile program in 1987, Iran bought up to 300 Scud B missiles from North Korea. Pyongyang, though, did not just sell Iran weapons but it was also instrumental in helping Iran to build-out the infrastructure for what has become an extremely high-level ballistic missile program, beginning with the creation in Iran of a Scud B missile plant that became operational by the end of 1988.

    According to JIR and other defence sources, this early-stage co-operation in this area between North Korea and Iran also included Iranian personnel travelling to North Korea for training in the operation and manufacture of these missiles and the stationing of North Korean personnel in Iran during the build-out of missile plants. This model of knowledge and skills transference, of course, has been a key part of the 25-year deal between Iran and China since it was formally agreed back in 2016, including the training of up to 130 young, fast-tracked officers from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) every year at various military institutions across mainland China.

    The simple idea of paying North Korea in oil is also far from new, having been a key method by which Iran helped to fund the development of North Korea’s more powerful Nodong series of missiles as early as the 1990s, according to Kenneth Katzman, Middle Eastern affairs specialist at the Congressional Research Service, in Washington. According to sources close to Iran’s Petroleum Ministry spoken to by OilPrice.com last week, oil shipments are the number one suggestion from North Korea to any country that has oil and wants weapons as a means of payment for any weaponry that Pyonyang has available.

    The Hwasong-12, first revealed internationally in a military parade on 14 April 2017 celebrating the birthday anniversary of North Korea’s founding President, Kim Il-sung, is being made available to Iran in such a way and, from Tehran’s perspective, fits neatly into the delicate military strategy in which it is currently involved. This is founded on the fact that decades of various sanctions have left the Islamic Republic with a severely constrained ability to defend itself against attacks from hostile aircraft or missiles with its own air force, which leaves a massive standing army as the primary deterrent for land invasion and its own missile defence systems as the primary deterrent for aerial attacks. On the other hand, though, the Islamic Republic is aware that any major long-range missile attack on any foreign power allied with the U.S. will end in absolute disaster for it. As former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once said:  “The threat of committing suicide is a poor deterrent to being murdered.”

    Consequently, Iran has consistently stated since 2017 – by order of the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei – that it will limit itself to developing ballistic missiles with a maximum range of 2,000 kilometres. Clearly, the Hwasong-12 has a range of double this but, crucially from Iran’s political impact modelling undertaken over recent months, this is unlikely to make the existing relationship with the U.S. worse.

    “The U.S. wanted more specific prohibitions on ballistic missiles in a new JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] to be drawn up at the beginning of 2018 but that did not happen, so it withdrew,” said one of the Iran sources.

    “Iran believes that the next U.S. President, be it Trump or Biden, will want to do a deal to get some form of JCPOA back on track, so from that perspective being able to offer the withdrawal of the Hwasong-12s would be a useful negotiating tool,” he said.

    “At the same time, though, there is the threat that the Hwasong-12 IRBM [intermediate range ballistic missile] could be upgraded through the addition of an 80-ton thrust engine to either the Hwasong-14 [two-stage, 10,000 km range] or the Hwasong-15 [two rocket engines cluster in first stage, 13,000 km range] ICBMs,” he added.

    This ‘upgrade’ would be regarded by the U.S. as a serious proposition, as there have been signals over the years that Iran might already have been working on such a higher-powered rocket booster configuration. According to a New York Times report from December 2011, the previous month had seen the destruction of a supposed development site in Iran for long-range solid-propellant missiles.

    “This was the first public indication that Iran was working on such systems, which would need much more energetic – and thus, explosive – propellants than used in Iran’s current Fateh-110-based solid-propellant short range ballistic missiles and Sejil medium range ballistic missiles, and press reports in May 2018 indicate that the program has continued at a new location where ICBM-class solid rocket motor production facilities and evidence of ground testing of ICBM-class motors have been detected in open source imagery,” said Robert Einhorn, senior fellow in the foreign policy program at Brookings Institution in Washington.

    He added that various sources since 2013 suggest Iran has been receiving cooperation from North Korea in the development of a large, liquid-propellant rocket engine suitable for ICBMs or SLVs and that a U.S. Treasury Department sanctions notice from January 2016 refers to Iranian work on a North Korean ‘80-ton rocket booster.’

    China, for its part, has been warned by the U.S. in the past for failing to adhere to the Missile Technology Control Regime in supplying missile equipment and technology to various countries, which is why it has frequently used North Korea as an agent to do so, allowing itself to plead ignorance of any illegal activity. It is obvious, however, that there are many benefits for China in seeking to expedite the movement of such missile technology from North Korea to Iran as part of the 25-year deal’s military component.

    • First, as Iran is paying North Korea in oil it takes some pressure off China in its obligations to its neighbour.

    • Second, it cements China’s clear position to the U.S. as having influence over not just one but two nuclear and near-nuclear states.

    • Third, it further binds Iran (and the rest of the Shia crescent of power, especially Iraq) into China’s geopolitically game-changing ‘One Belt, One Road’ project.

    • Fourth, it creates a counterpoint of influence and power in the Middle East akin to the U.S.-Israel axis.

    • And fifth, it will shift more of the U.S.’s attention on the Persian Gulf and away from the Asia-Pacific region that China regards as its backyard of power.

    All of this is set to be facilitated further by the imminent roll-out of China’s digital currency electronic payments system (DC/EP), on which the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has been working since at least 2014. The DC/EP will operate on a two-tiered system, with the digital currency itself, like cash, being a direct claim on the central bank denominated in renminbi (RMB), Rory Green, Asia analyst for TS Lombard, in London, told OilPrice.com last week. The PBoC will exchange CBDC with chosen banks and financial intermediaries, which, in turn, will make the funds available to users via existing electronic banking platforms, and clients will be able to convert RMB to CBDC (at a rate of 1:1) via their digital wallets.

    “The digital RMB could certainly help the integration of Iranian financial companies into the Chinese banking system and avoiding the US$/Swift monopoly,” highlighted Green.

    “China could set up an entity completely unconnected to its traditional banking system to receive all the payments via digital RMB, with the payments then sent on via digital RMB,” he added.

    “This would be similar to the function currently performed by the Bank of Kunlun, and some of the North Korea trading houses but with fewer of the downside risks for other banks/companies in China to associate with the processing entity,” he concluded.

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