- A Nation Divided Shall Surely Fall
A Nation Divided Shall Surely Fall
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
It is often said that a house divided will surely fall, and the same thing can now be said for the United States as a whole.
If there is anything that this election has made clear, it is the fact that there is little hope of healing the very deep divisions that exist in our country. Most of those on the political left absolutely hate those on the political right, and most of those on the political right absolutely hate those on the political left.
But it isn’t as if the two opposing sides are even united.
The radical left is absolutely disgusted with “moderate Democrats” such as Joe Biden and is very much looking forward to the day when their “progressive revolution” finally triumphs in America. Meanwhile, the right is hopelessly divided into countless political, religious and economic factions, and there is endless conflict between “conservatives” that are pro-Trump and those that are anti-Trump. Over the past 30 years, not much has actually gotten done in D.C., but what little has been accomplished has almost always involved more spending, more debt and more socialism.
One of the reasons why the United States became such a great nation is because originally we were united by a core set of values and principles. In the beginning, everything was about faith, family and freedom. Our notions of right and wrong were defined by the Christian faith, the family was the most important institution in our society, and early Americans were desperate for freedom after experiencing deep oppression over in Europe.
But now we have completely abandoned all of that. The Christian faith has been relentlessly pushed to the fringes of public life, the traditional family unit is mocked while rampant sexual immorality is celebrated all over America, and with each passing day our freedoms are being eroded even more.
At this point, our Constitution has essentially been relegated to being “just a piece of paper” that sits in the National Archives. It has been trampled on over and over again in recent years, and the courts do not seem to care.
In fact, much of the time it is the courts that are doing the trampling.
We have now gotten to a point where our nation is almost ungovernable. When Barack Obama first entered the White House, millions upon millions of Americans did not consider him to be a legitimate president. Then when Donald Trump won the election in 2016, even more Americans did not recognize the legitimacy of his presidency. Of course that trend is only going to intensify now that Biden is being installed as president. According to one brand new survey, a whopping 82 percent of all Trump supporters do not believe that Biden is the “legitimate winner of the 2020 election”…
A strong majority of Donald Trump supporters reject the legitimacy of Joe Biden as President-elect, with many citing election irregularities and the most pervasive censorship campaign in American history in support of Biden on the part of Big Tech companies.
A poll released Sunday by CBS News reveals that 82% of self-identifying Trump supporters do not recognize Biden as the “legitimate winner of the 2020 election.”
Of course if the election results were reversed and Donald Trump was given another four years, a similar percentage of Democrats would almost certainly not be willing to recognize the legitimacy of Trump’s victory.
No matter who is in the White House from now on, tens of millions of Americans are not going to accept that individual as being legitimate.
And thanks to the events of the past several weeks, the election fraud that has been going on for decades in this country has now been exposed for everyone to see. From this point forward, a very high percentage of Americans will not have any faith that our elections are fair.
If people don’t believe in the system, it is just a matter of time before it completely fails.
John Adams once made the following statement…
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
Today, the American people are neither moral nor religious. Instead, we have evolved into an “idiocracy” that is dominated by power-hungry control freaks.
If you go back and read the extremely eloquent things that our founders had to say in their time, you will quickly realize that the way that we speak and write today is completely different. If they could have traveled to our time and interacted with us, we would have seemed like cavemen to them. Most of us can barely hold conversations with others, and when we do it is mostly just a bunch of unintelligible gibberish.
But even though we have been dramatically “dumbed down” over the decades, if we could at least try to get along with one another we could still have a functional society.
Sadly, I have never seen more hatred in our country than I am seeing now, and it just keeps on growing.
You would think that Democrats would have an interest in at least trying to pull the country together, but instead they just keep rubbing their “victory” in the faces of their enemies. For example, just consider something that Debra Messing just said…
The “Will & Grace” star — one of Hollywood’s most vocal Trump critics — expressed a desire for the president to “live a long life in prison” in a tweet to her more than 677,000 followers last week.
She called Trump “a weak, scared, stupid, inept, negligent, vindictive, narcissistic, criminal” before writing she hoped he became “the most popular boyfriend to the all inmates.”
Can you feel the love in those words?
Yes, let the healing begin.
More blood was spilled on the streets of D.C. over the weekend, and the left and the right will continue to go after one another in the weeks and months ahead. We have now entered a period of semi-permanent civil unrest in this country, and what we have experienced so far is just the beginning.
If we would return to the values and principles that our nation was founded upon, our future could be very different.
But that is not what the American people seem to want.
So we will continue to steamroll toward oblivion, and there is no future for our nation if we stay on the road that we are currently on.
* * *
Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/23/2020 – 23:40 - US Army Hits Target 43 Miles Away With Long-Range Cannon
US Army Hits Target 43 Miles Away With Long-Range Cannon
The Army’s Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA) system hit a target 43 miles away last week, military officials told Defense News, which marks yet another successful demonstration of a powerful cannon that can fire smart projectiles at long-ranges across the modern battlefield.
ERCA’s latest demonstration took place at Arizona’s Yuma Proving Ground. The Army fired a Raytheon-made Excalibur extended-range smart artillery shell from a 30-foot gun tube gun that hit its intended target 43 miles away.
“I don’t think our adversaries have the ability to hit a target on the nose at 43 miles,” Brig. Gen. John Rafferty, director of the Army’s Long-Range Precision Fires Cross-Functional Team, told Defense News.
Even though it took ERCA three shots to hit the target successfully, the cannon still has to be tweaked before operational use is slated for 2023.
In March, ERCA fired two shots in a demonstration at Yuma Proving Ground, hitting a target 40 miles away.
A long-range artillery system will give the Army an advantage on the modern battlefield, especially in a hot contest with China and Russia.
“If you look at doctrinally how the U.S. military uses long-range fires to shoot and then maneuver … it’s one of the most important capabilities that we have as an entire Department of Defense,” Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy told The Washington Times last year. “If you also look at long-range precision fire capability, it will create the reverse effect for anti-access area denial capabilities that near-peer competitors have heavily invested against. It can reverse the paradigm.”
Earlier this year, we revealed that the Army “accidentally” shared the first images of a new super cannon on social media capable of firing an artillery shell more than 1,000 miles away.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/23/2020 – 23:20 - Drug Trafficking: The Dirtiest Little Secret
Drug Trafficking: The Dirtiest Little Secret
Authored by Chris Farrell via The Gatestone Institute,
Here is the answer: Law enforcement corruption. The question? Why are we continuing to fight and lose the “War on Drugs,” proclaimed by President Nixon, almost fifty years ago, in June 1971?
Think about the U.S. forces arrayed against Mexican drug cartels: DEA, FBI, Homeland Security, state police forces, county sheriffs, municipal police forces, even the postal service. We have established High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task forces with their own regional fusion centers.
The United States is incapable of defeating Mexican cartels? We can transport armored and special operations forces halfway around the world to the Middle East and Southwest Asia, and defeat both conventional and irregular military forces — but we cannot secure our southern border and stop the poisoning of our own population?
How can this be? Are we not smart enough? … Not strong enough? … Not enough money, or resources, or people? … Not enough technology? Are you prepared to believe any of those excuses?
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Over 81,000 drug overdose deaths occurred in the United States in the 12 months ending in May 2020, the highest number of overdose deaths ever recorded in a 12-month period…” That is equal to one-third of the total number of deaths supposedly attributed to the COVID pandemic.
Deaths equal to one-third of the pandemic? From another cause? Where is the wall-to-wall news reporting on that public health crisis? Why aren’t people marching in the streets demanding action and justice for that threat to human life? Since Joe Biden was elected president, we have not heard a peep from Antifa and BLM — maybe they can take up the drug overdose cause?
In October, federal law enforcement officials arrested Mexican General Salvador Cienfuegos as he arrived in Los Angeles for a family vacation. Cienfuegos was accused of taking bribes and protecting cartel leaders when he served as defense minister from 2012 to 2018. A month later, the U.S. dropped charges and returned Cienfuegos to Mexico. “Foreign policy considerations” was the official lie covering for the reversal of what might have been an incremental step forward towards legitimate justice in America’s decades-long, losing “War on Drugs.” Every thinking person who has contemplated the drug corruption crisis confronting America knows that absolutely nothing will happen to Cienfuegos now that he is back in Mexico. He gets off Scot-free, other than having to vacation in places other than the United States.
The Wall Street Journal, reporting on the Cienfuegos debacle, noted:
“Gen. Cienfuegos’s return puts an uncomfortable spotlight on Mexico’s judicial system. More than nine in 10 crimes are never reported or punished, according to the country’s statistics agency.”
Let us look more deeply at the drug crisis we face at the level of families and communities. We can get lost looking at national overdose numbers and corrupt foreign generals. Dirty cops are killing Americans, directly and indirectly. In a border community like El Paso, the Mexican cartels have an insidious, silent and powerful control that few people wish to acknowledge or accept — that includes a largely compliant news media who usually report what happens, but rarely, if ever, ask “Why?” or “How can this go on, decade after decade, without accountability or resolution?”
More than seven years of ongoing investigation by Judicial Watch in that region has revealed law enforcement corruption that ranges on a scale from merely turning a blind eye; to marked law enforcement vehicles being used to move burlap bales of marijuana; all the way up to senior officials communicating with and tipping-off cartel members about planned operations. That is what some of the supposedly “good guys” are doing.
This is a dark, dangerous and threatening side of life in American communities across the country. The drugs do not just materialize out of thin air in Dayton, OH, or Rockville Centre, NY, or Whitefish, MT. If a population is dying from overdoses that is one-third as large as the COVID pandemic — and we don’t see, don’t hear about it, and apparently don’t really care about it — what does that say about us?
Tens of thousands of law enforcement officers, billions of taxpayer dollars, nearly fifty years — and the highest overdose rate in history? It is terribly unpopular to blame law enforcement, especially when they are being unfairly attacked by the militant fringe elements like Antifa and various lunatic municipal officials seeking to defund them — but cleaning house within various agencies and increasing police pay would go a long way towards thwarting our greatest domestic threat.
A year ago, President Donald J. Trump declared he would name Mexican Cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. He paused his decision, and then tabled it, based on assurances from Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and a reported wave of resistance from his own cabinet.
The incoming Biden administration has the cartels virtually “high-fiving” each other — they know a Biden administration will do nothing to stop cartel dominance and control of the US-Mexico border. What law enforcement officer is going to put his life on the line for a Biden administration policy? None. Unless there is an unforeseen and dramatic positive change in law enforcement at the federal, state and municipal levels, expect more of our dirtiest little secret for years to come and a continuation of the United States’ longest war.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/23/2020 – 23:00 - Visualizing The Biggest Tech Mergers And Acquisitions Of 2020
Visualizing The Biggest Tech Mergers And Acquisitions Of 2020
For most businesses around the world, 2020 was a year of difficulties, lost business, and economic hardship. However, as Visual Capitalist’s Omri Wallach notes, for Big Tech, it was a boon.
After COVID-19 hit hard in March, tech companies started to see their customer bases and revenues grow at an increased rate as people were stuck at home and utilizing their services.
Since down markets are the perfect time to consolidate, 2020 also saw big tech companies take the opportunity to grow their business with major mergers and acquisitions (M&A). After a quieter year in 2019 that saw tech investment activity dip, it was a resurgence to expected form.
In this graphic, we visualize the year’s biggest tech deals above $1 billion using data from Computerworld, which tracked the year’s biggest acquisitions.
Deal Activity from the Get-Go
Though 2020 was all about COVID-19 and its impact on the market, the tech sector had major deal flow even before the pandemic began.
By the end of February, six of the 19 biggest tech mergers and acquisitions of the year had already occurred—and the month of February alone saw the most major deals of any month with four.
The first deals of the year were also some of the biggest. Morgan Stanley’s purchase of online brokerage E*TRADE for $13 billion and Koch Industries’ $11 billion completed takeover of software company Infor were the 4th and 5th biggest tech acquisitions of 2020.
Other big moves included purchases from tech and payments firms Salesforce, Visa, and Intuit, as well as private equity firm Insight Partners.
The Biggest 2020 Deals Were Saved for Last
After a quiet March, only a few large deals occurred from April to the summer.
Nvidia’s $6.9 billion purchase of network chip producer Mellanox Technologies in May was more than a year in the making, and Uber’s $2.65 billion acquisition of food delivery rival Postmates in July significantly consolidated the U.S. food delivery scene.
As it turned out, the biggest deals of 2020 were back-loaded for the end of the year. Just under half of 2020’s billion-dollar tech M&As happened from September‒December, including the year’s three largest tech acquisitions:
Of the 19 deals over $1 billion tracked above, Salesforce and Nvidia were the only companies to make multiple major acquisitions. And although tech saw gains across the sector, most of the major M&A activity was centered around semiconductors.
As 2020 winds down, the market focus on tech is expected to last into 2021. However, the markets and the world at large continue to deal with COVID-19. The rollout of vaccines has put the world on a timeline to reach a post-COVID era. How will the tech landscape be affected?
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/23/2020 – 22:40 - I Had COVID For 17 Days, Here's What It Was Like
I Had COVID For 17 Days, Here’s What It Was Like
Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,
A lot of folks are out there saying that COVID is a myth, that viruses don’t exist (wth?), or that the whole pandemic has been a scam. While I strongly disagree with the lockdowns and restrictions on our ability to make a living, there truly is a pretty bad virus out there. And I know this from personal experience.
I had Covid and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. It was brutal and I had what would be considered a “moderate” case. This article isn’t meant to be used as medical advice or political fodder. This isn’t a treatise about a magical cure being kept secret by Big Pharma nor is it about the Deep State, some villain who cooked up a bioweapon, or any other theory du jour. My medical and treatment choices may be different than yours. I’m simply relating my experiences.
This virus hits people very differently. If you were fortunate enough to have a mild case, don’t disregard your next door neighbor who ends up with permanent organ damage. Some people are asymptomatic, some have minor symptoms, some are moderately ill, and some die. This is definitely not “just the flu” for many people. I never had a case of influenza that took me down like this, particularly not for this length of time.
I don’t think that there is a “typical” case of Covid because there are so many variables.
The only thing notable about the week before I began to have symptoms was an insatiable thirst. This hasn’t been mentioned in any of the literature that I’ve read but anecdotally, several other people I spoke with who had a case lasting a few weeks agreed that they’d never had a thirst quite like it.
I generally drink 4 liters of water per day. I was up to 6 liters a day (that’s a gallon and a half of water!) as well as electrolyte beverages and still I felt parched. I was waking up in the middle of the night and guzzling a water bottle. It was a little weird but I didn’t think too much of the sudden dehydration.
How it started
First of all, to answer the inevitable question, I have no idea how I got Covid. I work from home. I have been following the local rules and staying on my property aside from trips to the grocery store. I haven’t been to any gatherings, I wear a mask as required by regulations in the city where I’m staying, and I wash my hands at the appropriate times.
As far as risk factors go, I have mild asthma, the cough variant kind, where instead of wheezing I sound like I’m dying of bronchitis. I’m pretty fit and active and walk 3-5 hilly miles most days, rain or shine, so my lung capacity is good and I don’t get winded going up hills or stairs, generally speaking. I’m 51 and could probably stand to lose about 20 pounds but I have no health issues for which I require regular medication. I rarely eat processed food, get plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables, and limit caffeine to one (okay two) cups of coffee per day.
Day 1: On Monday, the 7th, I started feeling kind of “off” for lack of a better word. I was tired – very, very tired – and I went to bed ridiculously early, at 7 o’clock because I just couldn’t keep my eyes open.
Day 2: When I woke up on Tuesday, I realized that I was sick and brushed it off as the flu or a cold. I figured a day with chicken soup, peppermint tea, and a nip of Jack Daniels for a stubborn cough would have me right as rain in no time. At that point, my symptoms were a dry cough, body aches, a very mild sore throat, and an all-encompassing fatigue. Later in the day, I got so cold that no amount of blankets and heat could warm me up. I was running a high (for me) fever that kept going up during the night.
What it was like to have Covid
Days 3-5: Over the next three days, chills and fever were almost constant. My joints and muscles hurt. Getting up to go to the bathroom felt like an expedition up a mountain. I was tired and winded. I had very little appetite and even less of an inclination to cook food so I existed mostly on peanut butter and crackers and leftover soup. I was absolutely exhausted and so cold that I shivered violently when I got out from under my bed piled high with blankets. I had super-weird dreams. My cough worsened, my head hurt, and my throat was still mildly sore.
I drank lots of water and electrolyte beverages. My thirst remained unquenchable regardless of how much I drank. I took vitamins (C, D3) and took Zinc supplements. These are my regular supplements but I doubled that.
Days 6-9: The line to get a test at the local clinic was long and filled with people who were coughing up a lung. There was no way I’d be able to stand in that line for an hour, as sick as I felt. Besides, I figured if I didn’t have Covid, I’d get it standing in the line so I opted not to be tested.
This part made me think of the worst case of the flu I ever had, except intensified by about four times. It was terrible.
I usually let a fever run its course but by Saturday I felt so awful that I gave in and began treating symptoms. My normal temp is in the 96s and my temperature throughout these days stayed between 101-103. I staggered ibuprofen and acetaminophen, and I also used a mild muscle relaxant and my Ventilyn inhaler. The meds didn’t get rid of my fever but reduced the chills to a tolerable level. I slept almost around the clock, waking up for a couple of hours here and there to check on website stuff. Fortunately, I have a wonderful team who kept things running for us. One day blurred into the next and I considered going to the doctor again, but couldn’t muster the energy. I felt like if I just got a little more sleep I’d be okay.
My cough was getting far worse and now my ribs and abdominal muscles hurt. It was a deep painful cough that caused me to clutch my chest every single time inhaled deeply.
Day 10: I woke up feeling slightly better. My fever had finally completely broken and I was no longer feeling chilled to the bone. My cough, however, was even worse than before and I recognized the wheezing sound that meant I was headed for a bout of pneumonia. I’ve got mild asthma and quite often upper respiratory issues end up with pneumonia for me so I know the signs. I upped the vitamin C and hoped for the best.
Day 11: I hadn’t been drinking coffee, just peppermint tea and I was really looking forward to a delicious cup of coffee now that I was feeling better. Unfortunately, the Keurig at the rental where I’m staying seemed to be putting out tinted water. I was bummed that the coffee was bad but I just refilled my water bottle and went on with my morning.
My cough was horrible. I decided that I’d put it off for as long as was safe and that I was going to need a steroid inhaler to heal my lungs. I planned to visit the doctor as soon as I finished my morning work on the website. I made myself some toast with peanut butter to eat before I left because there’s nothing worse than going to the doctor hungry and grouchy. I was texting with my friend while eating and thought, “This tastes awful. Why is my toast so bland and sweet? Ohhhhhhhhhh…….”
I had lost my sense of taste. I could pick up slightly sweet or slightly salty flavors but that’s it. Eating only sweet or salty styrofoam is probably the most effective diet ever.
My doctor’s appointments and treatment
I went to the doctor and was diagnosed with Covid and pneumonia, just as I had expected. My blood oxygen saturation level was 92. She prescribed an aggressive regimen and scheduled appointments for the next 4 days to give me injections and check my vitals. There are more details on the treatment below.
Plot Twist: Did I mention I’m in Mexico right now?
I went to the walk-in clinic recommended by local friends. Since it was midday, during the week, there was just one patient ahead of me. I basically had the waiting room all to myself. I typed out my saga in Google Translate and pasted the Spanish version into a document in case I got a doctor who didn’t speak English. I speak some Spanish but not nearly enough to convey all this stuff.
The doctor spoke a little bit of English, which, when combined with my small amount of Spanish and our respective Google Translate apps, got us through the question and answer segment of the appointment. She was extremely thorough in her exam, and I was very satisfied with the care I received. She was concerned that my pulse oximeter reading was low and instructed me on what to look for with my oxygen levels.
She confirmed that I did indeed have both Covid and pneumonia and wrote prescriptions for the treatment of both.
The protocol was:
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5 days of Ceftriaxone (Brand Name: Rocephin) injections (antibiotic)
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3 days of Dexamethasone injections (corticosteroids)
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4-8 grams per day of Vitamin C
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Salmeterol inhaler
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Loratadine and ambroxol cough syrup (a combined antihistamine and expectorant)
I received my first injection of antibiotics and steroids there at the clinic.
Day 11 continued: On the night of Day 11, I started perspiring heavily after having begun treatment earlier in the day. Kind of gross but I’m all about the TMI: I was sweating so much it looked like I’d been caught in a rainstorm. At the same time, I was cold and shivering, so I had to stay bundled up. My temperature was up and down constantly. Sometime around 2 am I fell into an exhausted sleep.
Day 12: I woke up on Day 12 with a pounding headache and some intestinal upset. I was expecting this because corticosteroids always affect me this way. I took some ibuprofen and an Immodium to manage the side effects because they were well worthwhile. My deep, uncontrollable cough was far less frequent, and no longer as brutally painful. As I wrote before, I’m very prone to pneumonia because of my asthma, and I’ve probably had it more than 30 times in my life. I’ve never responded to treatment as quickly as this, ever. I think the difference is that I was receiving steroids and antibiotics by injection instead of orally.
My ability to taste was beginning to return – I’d say I was about halfway back to normal. My internal thermostat was still wonky – one minute I was hot and the next I was cold, but at this point, I’d had no fever for 36 hours. I still had the heavy brain fog that makes tasks go a lot more slowly and the possibility of multitasking was completely out of the question. I hated the hazy, slow mental feeling I had been fighting through.
I felt like I had much more energy but that was until I tried to do a few things. It didn’t take long before my legs were wobbling, my hands were shaking, and I was feeling tired but not as thoroughly exhausted as before. I took a little nap then got up to go to my doctor’s appointment feeling more clear-headed.
The appointment went extremely well. My blood oxygen saturation level was up to 99% which thoroughly shocked the doctor given my condition the day before. I was deemed no longer contagious and given my second injection of antibiotics and steroids. The doctor asked me if I exercised a lot and I told him that I walked a few miles most days in the hilly area where I lived. I was told that my quick rebound in lung capacity was likely related to my good cardiovascular fitness.
Day 13: I always have difficulty sleeping when taking steroid medications so I slept in a bit on day 13. I woke up with that lovely corticosteroid headache again and a bit less energy than the day before. Today’s doctor’s appointment also went well with another 99% reading. Today was the last steroid injection, thank goodness. I just had two more injections of antibiotics to go.
My neighbor was beginning to show some symptoms so I stopped and picked up the vitamins that were recommended for me to give to him.
When I got back from my appointment I took my dogs on their first walk in almost two weeks that wasn’t just a quick pop-out-to-pee excursion. I was maybe a bit overly ambitious even though the total walk was less than half a mile. We went to the dog park where they could run around and I could sit. Walking back to the condo is uphill and I got pretty winded.
I got back and took a puff off my inhaler and sat down to rest for a bit but it didn’t help. It turned into a bit of an asthma attack that lasted for about an hour. I could still feel the heaviness in my chest three hours later and there was a wheeze to my cough.
It appears that recovery from this is not linear and there’ll be some good days and bad days. While it’s something I’ve heard others report, it’s discouraging.
I was able to finally get some dishes and a load of laundry done, and I called it an early evening.
Day 14: My improvement had ground to a halt.
The wheeze never left and got a whole lot worse. When I got to the doctor’s office for my checkup the next morning, they made me stay because my oxygen level was at 89%. I was given a medication to control bronchial spasms and a stronger inhaler. After a couple of hours, my levels were back up and I was allowed to leave.
Nobody really thinks about the oxygen saturation in their blood until they don’t have enough of it. Day 14 was terrible. I was so tired that walking to the bathroom and back to the couch felt like a trip up Mt. Everest. My oxygen levels were up and down all day, at one point dropping as low as 83%. My cognition was fuzzy and I felt terribly depressed.
The depression or change in mental status isn’t something that I’ve seen a lot written about in the mainstream media. But think about how much oxygen your brain uses to function and then cut off some of the supply. Science Daily reports that coronavirus infections can cause delirium and Medscape suggests that depression and anxiety in Covid patients could be indicators of the virus attacking the patient’s central nervous system.
Some of the causes of mood swings during Covid could be biological and related to the illness itself, but there’s also another factor.
People treat you very differently when you have this illness. The media-propelled fear justifying the lockdowns are every bit as infectious as the virus. You’re like a pariah. A leper. People you know wouldn’t even consider coming near you. I have a kindly neighbor who has dropped off supplies at the door for me, but aside from that, people locally who have done work for me in the past are hesitant to pick up my groceries or handle small errands.
Even some people who are long-distance friends who I talk to online on a daily basis completely disappeared. Some of them were so adamant that Covid is a “scamdemic” they didn’t want to hear about my experience. I didn’t expect emotional fallout from having Covid, but it was present, particularly as it seemed to go on and on. Two weeks feels like a really long time to be sick.
I didn’t have the energy to make food so I just ate some fruit that was in the refrigerator, followed by saltines. I drank water, took my drugs, and went to bed early to sleep it off.
Day 15: My oxygen levels were finally stabilizing a little bit. Today was to have been my last visit to the doctor but they asked me to return one more day because of the new medications for my lungs. The constant feeling of shortness of breath was still present, but the bronchial spasms had subsided.
Johns Hopkins reports that Covid can seriously damage the lungs of survivors.
COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, can cause lung complications such as pneumonia and, in the most severe cases, acute respiratory distress syndrome, or ARDS. Sepsis, another possible complication of COVID-19, can also cause lasting harm to the lungs and other organs. (source)
This damage can be reversed with diligent effort and in severe cases, respiratory therapy may be required.
After a serious case of COVID-19, a patient’s lungs can recover, but not overnight. “Recovery from lung damage takes time,” Galiatsatos says. “There’s the initial injury to the lungs, followed by scarring. Over time, the tissue heals, but it can take three months to a year or more for a person’s lung function to return to pre-COVID-19 levels.”
He notes that doctors and patients alike should be prepared for continuing treatment and therapy.
“Once the pandemic is over, there will be a group of patients with new health needs: the survivors. Doctors, respiratory therapists and other health care providers will need to help these patients recover their lung function as much as possible.” (source)
I began to take my dogs on short walks today. Normally we move briskly, we run around at the park, we hike down to the water, and we climb back up. I am definitely not able to do that at this point, not unless I want another repeat of the recent asthma attack. So we began today taking short, slow walks. The dogs are overjoyed to be out of the condo, and frankly, so am I.
We managed to walk 1.28 miles over a period of 3 walks today. It took forever because unless I want to be gasping for air, I had to move slowly, taking a moment to rest on the inclines.
It felt so strange and so unlike me to walk at this snail’s pace. I felt like I was walking with someone’s elderly grandmother, but it was me – I was the “elderly” person. But it seems the important thing is the movement.
Doctors don’t yet know how long it will take patients to regain their pre-Covid strength and endurance. In the case of acute respiratory distress syndrome or ARDS, which has been caused by other viruses and has similarities to Covid-19, full recovery can take over a year, but there are no such statistics for Covid yet.
However, the earlier patients start their rehabilitation, the faster they begin to bounce back, which may be another reason for doctors to take them off ventilators sooner, Ms. Al Chikhanie said. That may be possible, especially as scientists understand how to manage the acute infection phase better. (source)
Day 16: On Day 16 the line at the clinic was long again, and I opted not to wait for a recheck. I felt better able to catch my breath and less tired, although I still needed a nap in the middle of the day. Miles walked: 1.5. I walked slowly, trying not to get overly winded.
My cough was far less frequent and not as deep when I did cough. I still didn’t really have my appetite back. I could taste food but it didn’t really taste good or flavorful.
Day 17: I finally woke up feeling almost normal. I awoke at 6:30, my usual time, without an alarm clock. I took the dogs out, grabbed some coffee, and got a bit of work done before my appointment.
I got into the doctor earlier and was the first patient in. He looked at me and said, “You are feeling much better, I can see it.”
All my stats checked out normally and I was released from Covid and pneumonia care. I am not under any kind of quarantine because of how long it had been since my symptoms began and since I’d run a fever. I have no other follow-up visits scheduled unless I run into complications.
While I no longer have Covid, the doctor said that it will take a while before my lung capacity is where it was before I became sick. He warned that post-Covid can be dangerous because I would be susceptible to other upper respiratory infections during this healing stage and to keep up with the high dose Vitamin C, D, and Zinc. I was to continue walking but not push myself to the point of getting winded for a couple of weeks to give my lungs more time to heal. My sense of taste has not fully returned.
I still have to take a bronchodilator for another week, as well as an inhaler that compares to Symbicort in the US twice a day for the next 3 weeks.
Opinions
My treatment in Mexico – complete with 7 doctor’s visits, prescription medications, and supplements – cost well under $300. Because I happened to be here when I got sick, I don’t have to come up with thousands of dollars or become buried in debt to pay for my healthcare. I was fortunate. Despite all the talk about how Covid medical care and testing are covered by the government in the United States, many people are still facing enormous bills because it’s just not working out that way. People are getting bills they shouldn’t be getting and not being told the charges are covered. Others are discovering that not everything they were told would be covered, is.
I think that as awful as this illness is, there are other concerns that are falling through the cracks while all attention is focused on this one ailment. As a nation, our economy is suffering, our mental health is suffering, and our physical health is deteriorating as we lock ourselves away from others at the behest of the government and as care for other conditions remains nearly impossible to access.
There are a million opinions on this virus, the treatment thereof, the medical system, government restrictions, and other Covid-related minutae. I sincerely believe we as individuals should have choices about the medical treatment we do or do not receive and how we choose to protect ourselves. We should have both the right and responsibility to make these decisions.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/23/2020 – 22:20 -
- 18-Year-Old American Girl Jailed For "Selfish & Arrogant" Breach Of COVID Curfew In Cayman Islands
18-Year-Old American Girl Jailed For “Selfish & Arrogant” Breach Of COVID Curfew In Cayman Islands
An American college student has been jailed by the Royal Cayman Islands Police for blatantly violating COVID-19 restrictions, according to CBS News.
Skylar Mack, an 18-year-old college student at Mercer University in Georgia, was slapped with a two-month sentence for violating quarantine to attend her boyfriend’s jet ski competition.
Mack’s attorney Jonathan Hughes told CBS:
“Whilst it was our hope that Skylar would be able to return home to resume her studies in January, we accept the decision of the court and look forward to receiving its written reasons in due course,” Hughes said.
Along with Mack, her boyfriend, Vanjae Ramgeet, was also sentenced to two months by the Cayman Islands Grand Court for breaking quarantine.
After flying to Grand Cayman in late November, Mack was ordered by authorities to self-isolate for two weeks and given a wristband to track her movements. She signed a document to remain inside for the quarantine’s duration, but on day number two, she was spotted at a jet ski competition with Ramgeet, who lives on the island, without the wristband.
It was not clear by CBS who reported the couple for breaking quarantine.
Skylar Mack’s mom and stepfather say they are living through their worst nightmare as the jailed 18-year-old serves a 2-month prison sentence in the Cayman Islands for breaking quarantine rules. @VictorOquendo reports. https://t.co/i9rZzYvW4s pic.twitter.com/7dVCs21NIc
— Good Morning America (@GMA) December 23, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
At the hearing on Dec. 15, Judge Roger Chapple explained his decision for jailing Mack and Ramgeet:
“This was as flagrant a breach as could be imagined; it was borne of selfishness and arrogance,” Chapple said, according to local newspaper Cayman Compass. “This was entirely deliberate and planned, as evidenced by her desire to switch her wristband the day before to a looser one that she was then able to remove.”
The Grand Cayman has been a hot spot for Americans fleeing the country amid a “dark covid winter.” Remote work has allowed many to work internationally, in countries where the virus isn’t rapidly spreading.
Americans jailed during the pandemic for breaking quarantine rules has not been uncommon. Hawaii, back in May, arrested “rogue tourists” who ignored local virus rules.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/23/2020 – 22:00 - China And Iran Start Drilling In This Super Giant Gas Field
China And Iran Start Drilling In This Super Giant Gas Field
Authored by Simon Watkins via OilPrice.com,
Drilling operations of the first well of the game-changing but highly-controversial Phase 11 of Iran’s super-giant South Pars non-associated natural gas field officially began last week.
Significant gas recovery from the enormous resource will commence in the second half of the next Iranian calendar year that begins on 21 March 2021. The long-stalled Phase 11 development supposedly saw the withdrawal of all Chinese involvement in October 2019. In reality, though, China is still intimately involved in its development and is looking to further scale up its activities following the inauguration of Joe Biden as U.S. President on 20 January. Along with completing the crucial Goreh-Jask pipeline oil export route by the end of the current Iranian calendar year (ending on 20 March 2021), building out its value-added petrochemicals production to at least 100 million metric tons per year by 2022, and ramping up production from its hugely oil-rich West Karoun cluster of oil fields to at least 1 million barrels per day (bpd) within the next two years, optimising the natural gas production from its South Pars gas field is a top priority for Iran. With an estimated 14.2 trillion cubic metres (Tcm) of gas reserves in place plus 18 billion barrels of gas condensate, South Pars already accounts for around 40 per cent of Iran’s total estimated 33.8 tcm of gas reserves – mostly located in the southern Fars, Bushehr, and Hormozgan regions – and about 80 per cent of its gas production.
The 3,700-square kilometre (sq.km) South Pars sector of the 9,700-square km basin shared with Qatar (in the form of the 6,000-square km North Dome) is also critical to Iran’s overall strategy to sustain natural gas production across the country of at least 1 billion cubic metres per day (Bcm/d), with Phase 11’s target production capacity being 57 million cubic metres per day (mcm/d), and to its corollary plans to become a world-leader in the liquefied natural gas (LNG) market.
Given the size and scope of Phase 11, it became a focal point of U.S. attention in the aftermath of its unilateral withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in May 2018 and during the active re-imposition of sanctions toward the end of that year. “The pressure that the U.S. put on [French oil giant] Total [which at the time of its withdrawal in the middle of 2018 from Phase 11 held a 50.1 per cent stake in the US$4.8 billion project and had already invested around US$1 billion] was enormous,” a senior Iranian oil and gas industry source told OilPrice.com. “Its ruthless handling of Total was designed by the U.S. to show the E.U. [European Union] – which was trying to find a way to ignore the new U.S, sanctions – that, regardless of the E.U.’s efforts to avoid going along with the new U.S. restrictions on Iran, it had better do so, or else,” he added.
“On the eve of the signing of the next wave of financing for SP11, the U.S. Treasury Department telephoned senior bankers at the bank that was organising the money and told them that if the financing went ahead then the U.S. would instigate a full historic investigation of all of the bank’s dealings since 1979 to every country that had been blacklisted by the U.S., and it told the French government the same thing,” he underlined.
“The U.S. Treasury also said that all French companies would not win any major contracts with U.S. companies whilst Total stayed in Iran, but if Total withdrew then the U.S. would make a similar projects available to it to compensate,” he told OilPrice.com.
At that point, China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) automatically took over Total’s stake (of 50.1 per cent) in Phase 11 to add to its existing 30 per cent stake (with the remaining 19.9 per cent held by Iran’s Petropars) and was all set to continue with the development of the site, given the enormously beneficial terms that it was offered by China. Specifically, OilPrice.com understands, Iran’s Petroleum Ministry offered the Chinese a 15 per cent discount for nine years on the value of all gas it recovers, with this being the value of the gas as applied to CNPC’s cost/return formula against the open market valuation, with the net present value of the entire South Pars site at that time being US$116 billion (now it is US$135 billion, as exclusively revealed recently by OilPrice.com). Following this, CNPC said that, as a specific adjunct to SP11, it was prepared to use its ‘special’ banking unit – the Bank of Kunlun – as a funding and clearing vehicle if and when it took over the full operations of Phase 11 in line with its new 80 per cent+ stake. The Bank of Kunlun had – and still has – considerable operational experience in this regard, as it was used to settle tens of billions of dollars worth of oil imports during the United Nations’ sanctions against Tehran between 2012 and 2015. Most of the bank’s settlements during that time were in euros and Chinese renminbi and in 2012 it was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for conducting business with Iran. As the U.S. ramped up pressure on China in the Trade War, however – especially looking to increase sanctions on its most important technology companies, including Huawei – and with China already locked into the new supercharged 25-year deal with Iran, Beijing made a policy decision to take a lower public profile on project work on Iran’s high-profile oil and gas fields wherever possible.
Top of this list was Phase 11 of South Pars, so CNPC publically withdrew from the project in October 2019, having supposedly suspended further investment in it in December 2018. In reality, though, China’s activities on Phase 11 – and elsewhere in Iran and Iraq – did not cease but merely changed appearance into a less high-profile and therefore less U.S.-sanctionable form. “It was one thing for China to quietly ignore all sanctions that the U.S. had imposed on importing Iranian oil and gas, but it was quite another thing for it to blatantly put its major state companies on the ground in Iran at that point in the [President Donald] Trump administration when tensions were so high,” said the Iranian oil and gas industry source.
”At that time these included the U.S.’s sanctioning of China over its [alleged] human rights violations against Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang region, and the extension of U.S. sanctions against Huawei over cyber-espionage and technology theft concerns,” he added.
Consequently, China switched to developing Iran’s oil and gas fields – including the South Azadegan, North Yaran, and South Yaran oil fields, and the South Pars gas site – by engaging in a series of ‘contract-only’ projects, such as drilling-only, field maintenance-only, parts replacement-only, storage-only, technology-only, and so on.
“Most of these are being done through seemingly smaller firms that are less well-known than the big state players that attract little or no publicity but, as all companies in China are part of the state and are legally bound to work towards what they are told to do by the Communist Party, it doesn’t make any difference to the eventual outcome,” said the Iran source.
Neatly closing the circle on continued China involvement – through technology and financing right now – in Phase 11 is that Petropars is also the partner for the various Chinese ‘contract-only’ projects going on in South Azadegan.
As it now stands, then, according to comments last week from Reza Dehghan, the National Iranian Oil Company’s deputy chief executive officer for engineering, 40 such ‘contract-only’ work projects have been defined for the implementation of Phase 11’s drilling operations, following the installation recently of the first jacket near the zero-point of the border with Qatar.
“In total, the development plan of Phase 11 has 24 wells, two platforms and a gas flow pipeline to the coast, and the second platform will be installed in another location,” he said.
To this end, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-associated MAPNA Group has re-deployed an major offshore rig (MD-1) from the Soroush oil field to Phase 11 tasked with drilling 12 appraisal and later development wells in two stages. Stage one will comprise the drilling and completion of five appraisal-development wells, the installation of the SPD11B platform, and the initial production of 14 mcm/d of gas. Stage two will see another seven wells drilled and completed, in parallel with the initial production, which will increase the total rich gas recovery from the platform to 28 mcm/d before a further round of drilling in the third phase will enable full production of 57 mcm/d. According to Dehghan:
“The project was originally supposed to be financed by a foreign investor [but given] the existing conditions, the National Iranian Oil Company will tap internal instruments and resources like sale of participation bonds.”
As exclusively highlighted by OilPrice.com, these will include new sukuk offerings and, more importantly, new bond structures to be sold via China.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/23/2020 – 21:40 - US Navy Releases Rare Video Of Nuclear Sub Patrolling Near Iran
US Navy Releases Rare Video Of Nuclear Sub Patrolling Near Iran
We described earlier that the nuclear submarine USS Georgia and a fleet of accompanying warships is now patrolling the Strait of Hormuz since it reached the vital waterway days ago amid soaring tensions with Iran, also now less than two weeks away from the one year anniversary of the assassinaition of IRGC Quds Force chief Qassem Soleimani.
It’s clearly a major show of force to Iran, which previously vowed to retaliate both for Soleimani’s killing but also for the more recent death of top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, which leaders in Tehran have blamed on Israel and the US.
The US Navy after earlier making the announcement of the deployed location of the USS Georgia – something rare in its own right – followed up by releasing the below video of its maneuvers, also to regional and foreign media:
Here’s a brief review of its capabilities:
The Tomahawk cruise missiles contained by the USS Georgia – of which there can be up to 154 – can reach approximately 1,000 miles in any direction when launched, creating a wide target range for the submarine.
The ship can also hold up to 66 members of the Special Operations Forces.
The Georgia can be used to conduct intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance along the Iranian coastline as well as through the entire Persian Gulf while remaining shielded from adversaries.
Video footage released by the US Navy shows the submarine accompanied by two guided missile cruisers en route to the Persian Gulf after leaving the 5th Fleet base in Bahrain.
With just weeks to go in the Trump presidency, fears still linger of a last-minute conflict with Iran.
Via The Daily Mail While arguably the nuclear sub presence is part of a strong deterrence strategy, it’s also possible the administration could be planning a provocation along with close US ally Israel.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/23/2020 – 21:20 - The Great Mutation – Behold The Dawning Of The Age Of Aquarius
The Great Mutation – Behold The Dawning Of The Age Of Aquarius
Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Epoch Times,
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. – Oscar Wilde
Today all radio stations on Planet Earth should be playing this song. What the aptly named Fifth Dimension immortalized in their spring of 1969 psychedelic soul classic is now literally true: This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius – the Grand Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn on December 21st at 𝟬° in Aquarius.
Aquarius starts just as some dodgy, self-important elites gear up to impose a Great Reset on most of the planet – following a very specific, reductionist and exclusionist political agenda. Yet the real deal is not the Reset; it’s the Mutation.
So we’re all into something much bigger than any neo-Orwellian scenario. To shed much needed light into what seems our current, interminable darkness, I posed selected questions to Vanessa Guazzelli, a respected astrologer, writer and speaker in astrology conferences worldwide, as well as a practicing psychoanalyst and psychologist.
Let astrology fertilize geopolitics. Let the sunshine in.
The astro-cartographic map of the Great Mutation
All that is solid mutates into air
PE: Arguably not many people around the world are aware that a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction this December 21st seems to represent the ultimate game-changer – defined by serious astrology scholars as the Great Mutation.
Could you please elaborate on what this Mutation really means, astrologically, as it seems to take place every 200 years? And bringing it back to everyday life and politics, are we permitted to infer geopolitical parallels from what the stars are telling us?
VG: By Great Mutation we refer to when the Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions change elements, which happens every 200 years as you mentioned. Jupiter and Saturn are in conjunction, astrologically, by ecliptic longitude, every 20 years, not that long a period. However, they keep on intersecting in signs of the same element for 200 years, with the possibility of another 40 years of transition, indicating a greater cycle.
Jupiter and Saturn are what we call social planets and are to be considered in regards to politics and geopolitics. When the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction starts to effectively happen in the next element, it marks the Great Mutation, denoting important socioeconomic and cultural changes. That’s what is happening now.
Vanessa Guazzelli.
We come from a two-century period of conjunctions in Earth signs. The emphasis has been on matter and the more tangible dimension of life – material boys and girls in a material world. As we now move on into the element of air, as they conjoin at 0º of Aquarius, a call for sublimation takes place.
All that is solid mutates into air. Things and procedures can be less material and more digital and, to some extent, virtual. But not only that. Shared ideas and ideals gain yet more importance. More then what we materially have, with whom and what for is what matters most. Collaboration and cooperation are, now more than ever, the winds which make the world go around.
This is indeed a highly significant astrological aspect and configuration happening on December 21, at 18h20 UTC. In parts of Asia and Oceania, it will be already past midnight, on December 22.
This is not only the Great Mutation but a Great Conjunction, when the two farthest visible planets conjoin not merely by longitude but also by latitude (ecliptic coordinates), by both right ascension and declination (equatorial coordinates). That means they are not just aligned in the same direction but really, really close to each other in the sky as seen from Earth, almost as if they were one and the same star.
Last time the two heavenly bodies have been that close was in 1623, but that was not a Great Mutation, just a regular conjunction in terms of ecliptic longitude. Astrologically, the fact that all these enhancements happen together at this time intensifies the significance of what this conjunction now indicates, how powerful a mutation it marks.
In everyday life, it also speaks of an increase in technological development, digitalization of things and procedures, including crypto-currencies and digital money as a sort of “sublimed” money, from matter to a lighter, less material “substance” which can quickly circulate through air.
At a more personal level, we tend to lose interest in social contexts which are not in tune with our ideas and ideals, and we’re pulled towards groups, associations and projects in the same wavelength as we are. It is not a time to merely rely on institutions to take care of people, but a time to discern for oneself and then connect with others with shared interests, ideals, purposes.
The air element is where we open space and make room for the Other, be it in respect for differences or to collaborate and cooperate towards shared interests and projects. Co-op’s, where every participant gets a fair, proportional share, in a joint enterprise, is surely a way to go.
Aquarius is opposite to the centralizing sign of Leo. Geopolitically, that is to say, it is not the time for a hegemonic single star to rule the world, but a time of many stars illuminating the entire sky. It is not a time for a single empire. There can be empires, if in plural. The strength of powerful nations now lies, more than ever, in the quality of their partnerships and alliances in mutual respect, as equals.
Any power which loses sight of that crucial key will see it, in the short or long run, backfire. Some are more powerful than others and some will be more prominent than others. Nonetheless, they are not alone. It is time for a multipolar world – now that is the Mandate of Heaven.
Regarding the Great Mutation’s astro-cartographic map, which shows the lines of planetary positions on the face of the Earth, it is interesting to notice that the IC lines of Jupiter and Saturn go through Beijing, indicating the relevance of China in the foundation of this 200-year cycle, for the IC is the root of an astrological chart.
On the other side of the globe, we see the MC lines of the two planets going through South America (Venezuela, Brazilian Amazon, Bolivia, Argentina), showing the value of the continent’s resources in this new cycle.
What the Davos crew is up to
PE: Our current, turbulent juncture seems to be pointing towards increased bio-security and what some serious systemic analysis defines as techno-feudalism. All this implies hyper-concentration of power – and not only power exercised by the geopolitical hegemon, the United States. Should we now expect a serious mutation of the world-system – as studied by Immanuel Wallerstein, in the sense of serious changes to our capitalist system?
Immanuel Wallerstein. Source: Wikimedia Commons
VG: Yes, we should. We are at the very turning point of the world-system. Along with the Great Mutation, another immensely significant aspect in the 2020s is the Saturn-Neptune conjunction, in February 2026, at 0º of Aries. This is precisely the first degree of the whole Zodiac, also called the Vernal Point – crucial in astrological interpretation.
Saturn and Neptune conjoin every 36 years, which is a relatively short historical cycle. However, as with the Great Mutation, the way it occurs and where in occurs in the Zodiac can lead us to broader historical perspectives and indicate more expressive historical moments.
If we go back up to 7,000 years ago, this conjunction has occurred at the Vernal Point only in 4361 B.C. and 1742 B.C. If we look up three thousand years ahead, the closest it gets to the Vernal Point is 3º of Aries in 3172. Quite rare. So this conjunction at the first degree of the Zodiac, 0º of Aries – the very beginning – is not that small a deal.
Neptune impregnates and conceives; Saturn refers to the concrete structure of reality; and 0º of Aries means new, springing up. Saturn-Neptune on 0º Aries means a new conception of reality.
Aspects between Saturn and Neptune, by historical observation, are associated with socialism and communism – these movements on Earth coincide with the transiting contacts between these two planets in the sky. It has already been proven in mundane astrology historically. Moreover, this does not just tell us about the past, for it is in fact just about to begin – upgrading and advancing, reconfiguring itself in yet new forms of socialism.
According to Wallerstein, during the structural crisis which characterizes the final period of a world-system, a bifurcation of the system can tilt to one of either directions, or to multiple systems. Before passing away last year, he did consider us to be right in the middle of the structural crisis of capitalism, which lasts 60 to 80 years.
I’d say at this moment we are past the mid-point. It could, initially, go towards multiple systems in two branches: on the one hand, the freshness of the Eastern winds inspiring socialism and multipolarity through the Belt and Road Initiative and the integration of Eurasia and its partners; on the other hand, the whirlwind of the collapsing empire and its Western allies as a terminator cyborg operated by the perverse 0.0001% who are so lifeless they cannot conceive other people’s right to exist.
When I first heard about it in June 2020, it astonished me how they set the “Great Reset” for January 2021, so close to the Great Mutation at the end of December 2020. I doubt this is a mere coincidence or “synchronicity.” J P Morgan is known to have affirmed that millionaires don’t need astrologers, but billionaires do.
Possibly aware of this great transition, the Davos crew seem to be actually trying to reset the system they already rule with their own settings and revive the dying system as a cyborg from hell.
‘Wall Street Bubbles – always the same,’ 1901 cartoon by Keppler, depicts J.P. Morgan as a bull blowing soap bubbles for eager investors. Source: Wikimedia Commons
The nefarious potential of the Aquarian emphasis is the control of society through technology, be it techno-feudalism or, gods forbid, techno-slavery. On the brighter side of the Force, Aquarius is about a social project to sustain life and meet the needs of the people. Both dimensions or systems might co-exist on Earth for a while.
Western powers – not to mention the Masters of the Universe, as you say, who pull their strings – seem to have a long way to go before reaching a state of real and respectful cooperation. Perhaps more ancient civilizations found in the East have a deeper, more consistent root from which to draw the wisdom and maturity necessary in such challenging times for humanity.
Often remembered for the food and goods traded along the route, the Silk Roads involved in the past and involve nowadays the exchange of ideas. It is interesting to observe the strong Aquarian edge activated in China’s astrological progressions when the Belt and Road Initiative was first proposed by Xi Jinping in Astana, in 2013, and how it connected to the degree of the Great Mutation (progressed Venus and Jupiter conjunct AC at 1º Aquarius).
When some years before that Vladimir Putin gave his historical speech in Munich, proposing the Eurasian Integration, in February 2007, there was a Saturn-Neptune aspect – an opposition. When at the 70th UN Assembly, both Putin and Xi delivered long, strong and synchronized speeches affirming the multipolarity of the world, in 2015, there was also a Saturn-Neptune aspect – a square.
The next Saturn-Neptune aspect will be the conjunction, in February 2026, inaugurating a brand new cycle and we can expect it to be related to these previous movements, keeping in mind the cycle points towards multipolarity and new forms of socialism.
The Black Moon spell
PE: Could Covid-19, on a certain level, be interpreted as the – unpleasant – preamble towards a Great Mutation? After all the new social (un)reality represents a system upside down: near-total economic devastation, especially of small businesses; canceling of constitutional rights; governments practically ruling by decree, with no popular consultation; global corporations censoring any manner of informed dissent; whole societies practically under house arrest; most of the planet reduced to a sort of totalitarian theme park.
VG: Oh, Covid-19 – we could have a whole conversation just on the implications of it at so many dimensions, and how it can be, to some extent, astrologically tracked. It definitely can be interpreted as the unpleasant preamble, perhaps aiming to the Great Reset, one could ponder.
An unprecedented worldwide collective experience – and experiment. Nevertheless, serving to shake it all up, transforming our very perception of time, preparing for the conception of a new time. To all those paying attention, a call to be yet more alive, more vivid, against all odds.
A nearly black moon. Image: Getty/AFP
The very dichotomy which has been so emphasized between “either caring for life or caring for the economy” in and of itself shows how absurd a world it already was. How many people so easily got caught into separating one thing from the other, as if it was a means to resist the system and finally say no to the demands of capital accumulation. To eventually see, indeed, small businesses devastated, poverty increasing drastically, whilst billionaires concentrate wealth to yet more bizarre levels.
Something fundamental to consider is how it has affected the human body. The pandemic was declared with Black Moon (the lunar apogee) in Aries and that indicates the importance of being sharply present and responsive as Michael Jackson danced, Bruce Lee moved and Maria Zakharova responds.
In October, Black Moon, this astrological point representing the visceral and instinctive dimension of existence, moved into Taurus, highlighting the importance of being aware of how the life force in us is conditioned or channeled, shaping how we perceive our own existence. For instance, how the confinement of the body might – or might not – confine our psyche.
What are the psychological effects of the lack of touch or the physical experience of constantly having our mouths covered? How those situations affect our psyche is not irrelevant. Both René Descartes and Wilhelm Reich had Black Moon in Taurus. How are mind and body related? Are they a cartesian dichotomy or are they intertwined as bio-energetic unity moved by libido?
This is an important underlying issue in our collective until July 2021.
The fate of the American empire
PE: Astrology in History is full of fascinating stories about celestial interpretations opening the way to a crucial political or military move. For instance, right before the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258, the Great Khan, Hulegu, asked the court astrologer about the prospects ahead. The astrologer, Husam al-Din, said that if he followed his generals and invaded Baghdad, the consequences would be ominous.
But then Hulegu turned to a Shi’a astronomer, Tusi, a polymath. Tusi said the invasion would be a major success. That’s what happened – and Tusi was admitted into Hulegu’s inner circle. So the Mongols – who built the largest empire in history – were big fans of “celestial insurance.” Could “celestial insurance” in our times end up predicting the fate of another empire – the US?
VG: That’s true, there are so many fascinating stories. The end of the Byzantine Empire and conquest of Constantinople by Sultan Mehmet II of the Ottoman Empire was also marked by an astrological prediction of the Ottoman victory related to an eclipse.
The US Pluto return happens in 2022. That’s massive. It’s a cycle of approximately 247 years. Pluto has a sense of fate to it. The return of the lord of the underworld also speaks of the return of that which was repressed, hidden or rejected. It will have three exact hits throughout 2022, and the final and definitive of the next Pluto cycle has the planet of death and regeneration facing Black Moon Lilith in Cancer, in opposition. Karma is a bitch and hits home.
It is also a cycle related to power and power status. It won’t all be bad and some victorious moments will be there, but there is a change in the country’s position in the balance of powers in the world which is not so easy to digest. The power struggle will be intense, both externally and internally, with considerable risks of destructive manifestations. The best way to go through such a moment would be to purge – although it’s hard to believe “the swamp” can be so easily drained.
It is a call for a deep transformation, when all things under the rug and corpses out of the basement are to be dealt with. For the nation’s people it is a call for maturity (Saturn conjoins Moon), compassion and a more humanly receptive disposition (Neptune opposition), letting illusions dissolve and realizing the empire is losing its hegemony and status, but the nation will continue. What nation should it be for its people – as opposed to against other peoples?
This doesn’t mean the American Empire will fall by 2022, but it is collapsing and will undergo dramatic transformations in the coming decade.
A Dystopian Renaissance
PE: Amid so much gloom, looks like you are introducing a very hopeful concept: “Dystopian Renaissance”. That’s the exact opposite of what is being largely interpreted as our inevitable neo-Orwellian future. How would you characterize this Dystopian Renaissance – in terms of individual, collective, political and cultural struggle?
VG: The concept emerges precisely to elucidate the extreme complexity of our times. Well, the renaissance part seems very hopeful, doesn’t it? But, there’s the dystopian part to it too. It is not a utopian renaissance, as we well know. Perhaps in 200 years, when we reach the Great Mutation into water, the same element as the magnificent Italian Renaissance, humanity might be able to feel and better comprehend deeper dimensions of life. Why not aim for Utopia next? But whatsoever may be possible by then passes through right now.
It is now that, along with this special Great Mutation, a few significant astrological aspects point to a real change of the world-system. It takes this crucial moment in time and this period of air to elevate perspectives, to share ideas and ideals and understand how enriching it can be to build “a community with a shared future for mankind,” as Xi Jinping puts it.
A highly enhanced turning point, opening new horizons, offering the possibility of enriching exchanges in a multipolar world, and with a call for socialism like we haven’t known before.
Catalan Atlas, detail showing family Of Marco Polo 1254-1324 traveling by camel caravan, 1375, drawing by Spanish School. Source: Wikimedia
Let’s not forget this moment in time also resonates with the 13th century, when Venetian Marco Polo, traveling through the Silk Roads to Asia, brought back to Europe the freshness of the Eastern winds, with news from Kublai Khan’s Yuan Dynasty, including the “sublimation” of money into a lighter form, from coin to paper.
At that time, there was a stellium (a concentration of planets) in Capricorn just as we had in 2020, with the following Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Aquarius (although not as a Great Mutation), and Pluto’s ingress into Aquarius as we will also have in 2023/2024. It is an absurdly dystopian context, but a turning point for a new conception of reality and the possibility for surprising new horizons.
A new world system is in the air
PE: Giorgio Agamben has referred to that famous Foucault intuition in Les Mots et les Choses, when Foucault writes that humankind may disappear like a figure drawn in the sand being erased by waves hitting the shore. The striking image may apply to our present, mutating condition, as we are about to enter a trans-human and even post-human era, dominated by artificial intelligence (AI) and genetic engineering.
Agamben argues that Covid-19, global warming and, more radically, direct digital access to our psychic life – all these elements are destroying humanity. Would the Great Mutation install a different paradigm – and lead us away from post-humanity?
FG: The rapid development in technology will be something seriously complex to deal with. It will be amazing in many ways, but not all pretty, presenting undeniable challenges, some of which are already here and about to intensify.
What are the effects of technology and artificial intelligence in both our organic and our subjective bodies? Mind control with bidirectional devices, both collecting information and inducing commands is a work in progress.
Perverse levels of technological control of society are a serious concern as Pluto, aka Hades, lord of the underworld, will also transit in technological and futuristic Aquarius from 2023/24 on, up until 2043/44 – times of intense social transformation, when technological advancements will blow our minds and the very conception of science will change considerably, but with serious risks of trans-human and post-human madness.
We cannot disregard our organicity. We cannot disregard our subjectivity, either. Pluto is about transformation or domination – in other words, quoting a recent article of yours: “Here’s our future: hackers or slaves.”
We’ve got to go hacking not only in the objective sense – which surely becomes more and more a desirable skill – but in the subjective sense as well, finding lines of flight and keeping Eros alive, the life force in us vivid.
Considering we’re already here, living through dystopian times, we might as well make the best out of this undeniably epic adventure. Instead of succumbing to fear and isolation, overtaken by the doom and gloom, let’s not forget Wallerstein’s observation on destiny versus free will – a very cool take, by the way, which my experience as an astrologer observing collective and individual cycles very much confirms: Both exist.
During the stable period of a world-system, its normal life when its structure is functioning well, even if there are some fluctuations in it, it is very hard to change things in the system, it tends to stabilization. It’s destiny: you gotta put a whole lot of effort to get perhaps very little change trying to escape destiny.
But when the world-system has reached its final phase, it can no longer be rescued and there is a lot of instability. The crisis is not going away and the only possibility is change, in one way or another – it’s free will time. In the structural crisis, Wallerstein says we have more free will, our actions have a stronger impact and every little move counts to decide in which direction the change of the system will go.
In our personal lives at this turning point in time, as Foucault questions, we may also ask ourselves: As humans, are we an obstacle or obstruction? Are we a way of imprisoning life – or are we an opening, a line of flight?
In regard to Foucault’s words you and Agamben bring to light, please allow me to refer to the previous paragraph, just before that final one in Les Mots et les Choses, when he states that by “taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area – European culture since the sixteenth century – one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it.”
The “man” he is referring to as the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge a couple of centuries ago, with the newer arrangements perhaps about to end, is within European references. That is neither the beginning nor the end of man, nor its only interesting expression. With huge, deep appreciation for so much of European culture, perhaps one of the things coming to a necessary end is Eurocentrism.
Nonetheless, of course, it is deeply worrying how faces are being at the same time digitally traced by machines and hidden from other humans by masks – especially the effects of that in children. The current transition is not without epistemological effects and effects on how we conceive man, humans. But it’s not all said and done.
To counter the objectification of humans, it may be timely to draw from the Tupis’ conception of human beings: tu + pi , seated sound. A human being is a sound which has taken a seat, has taken place and vibrates. We gotta keep our bodies, faces and words vibrant. For the native South American Tupis, each human being is a new music, a new word vibrating and co-creating life with others and nature.
Albert Eckhout painting of a Tupi man. Source: Wikipedia
It seems that the deeper roots of aboriginal-indigenous wisdom still need to be more fully acknowledged and reintegrated in the Americas before the reinvention of the world in the West can take place.
Now winds blow from the East and from Eurasia, inspiring new forms of co-existence. But the controllers of capital, wealth and worldly power won’t give it up without a fight – or a few wars and a heavy load of social control via technology, capturing bodies and minds. What will it be – Great Reset or Great Mutation?
Is there a way out? Yes. And it seems to go along the New Silk Roads and the Eurasia Integration – literally to some important extent, but symbolically as well. The West can gain a lot from opening up to the Eastern winds, the news and the ideas they bring, stories of a community of shared future for mankind. A new world-system is in the air.
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Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/23/2020 – 21:00 - Over A Third Of California Bar Exams Flagged For Possible Cheating
Over A Third Of California Bar Exams Flagged For Possible Cheating
More than 1/3 of California bar exams taken online in October were flagged for possible cheating, the state bar reported after the testing software program alerted authorities.
California Bar’s Committee of Bar Examiners is “currently reviewing 3,190 applicants” out of 9,301 who took the exam, according to a Dec. 4 statement by state bar official Tammy Campbell. According to Bloomberg Law, test takers were flagged based on several rules infractions, including having cell phones or other electronic equipment during the test, as well as gazing off-screen or having food.
The inquiry, first reported by the ABA Journal, puts test takers flagged by the system at risk of being required to retake the exam, which is typically required before a law school graduate is allowed to work as an attorney in the state. Any review that substantiates widespread cheating also could give critics of bar exams in California and other states further ammunition to promote alternatives like diploma privilege, which allows law school grads to get licensed without taking an exam. –Bloomberg Law
“We believe there were multiple factors that contributed to the number of flagged videos, including the unprecedented nature of this first-ever online remote bar exam and the large and diverse population who took it in California,” said state bar spokeswoman Teresa Ruano, adding “We will continue to refine and improve this process based on learnings from this first online exam.”
Attorneys for several flagged test-takers say the allegations are preposterous and an overreaction. Georgia-based lawyer Megan Zavieh who has offices in California is representing over two-dozen of the applicants who were contacted by the CA Bar, and said that some of her clients received letters accusing people of moving their eyes out of camera range at the wrong moment.
“It’s not only, ‘no, I didn’t do that.’ It’s, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.
California shifted to an online bar exam in October due to the pandemic. Most states which have done so are using Dallas-based ExamSoft to provide software. The company uses AI proctors who are logged into test takers’ computers, including web cams, to monitor behavior.
So-called “Chapter 6 Notices” of potential violations were sent to numerous test takers after ExamSoft video-file software flagged the conduct to the Bar, according to ABA Journal.
That spurred students to hire lawyers like Zavieh and Pasadena, Calif.-based ethics attorney Erin Joyce.
Joyce said her clients are concerned because of the impact the notices they’ve received might have on their ability to gain permanent or even provisional law licenses—even if they’re ultimately exonerated. “They’re frightened and they’re angry,” she said. “They put a lot of effort and expense into the test.”
Chapter 6 Notices contain allegations that are either “disputable” or “indisputable,” according to a list of frequently-asked questions the Bar posted on its website. A dozen types of alleged infractions are disputable and thus eligible for a hearing, according to a state bar Chapter 6 “Decisional Matrix.”
Indisputable allegations include those in which the test taker possessed notes or other study aids, or electronic devices like cell phones or digital watches. Disputable allegations, which can be contested by a hearing, include having radios or stereos, or “food or beverages, including but not limited to coffee and water,” in exam rooms during a remote-proctored exam.-Bloomberg Law
The allegations of cheating comes fresh on the heels of a similar online cheating scandal at West Point, where over 70 cadets were accused of cheating on a calculus exam last spring.
Fifty-nine of the cadets admitted to cheating on the test, which was taken remotely rather than on academy grounds due to the pandemic, according to West Point officials. Two of the cases were dropped for lack of evidence, four cadets resigned, and eight cadets face honor code hearings which could result in their expulsion, according to public affairs director Lt. Col. Christopher Ophardt.
“The honors process is working as expected, and there have been no exceptions to policy for any of these cases,” said Ophardt, adding “Cadets are being held accountable for breaking the code.”
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/23/2020 – 20:40 - Back To Square One: GOP To Block Pelosi Bid For $2,000 Checks, Will Offer CR Separating State From Foreign Aid
Back To Square One: GOP To Block Pelosi Bid For $2,000 Checks, Will Offer CR Separating State From Foreign Aid
Update (1920ET): Following Pelosi’s earlier plea to Republicans to agree to a bill calling for $2,000 stimulus checks which she will put to a vote in the House on Tuesday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said he would object to a bill boosting stimulus payments for individuals to $2,000, Bloomberg reports citing a person who participated in a private call with GOP House members. Furthermore, the Republican also plans to offer a new Continuing Resolution separating state and foreign aid from the omnibus. And since McCarthy’s position will see objection from Dems, we are – as CNBC’s Kayla Tausche puts it – “Back at square one.”
If the measure fails on Thursday, which it now appears certain to do, Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal will introduce a new bill, called the Cash Act, to be put on the floor Monday. That bill would codify the larger stimulus payments, Pelosi told Democrats in a private call on Wednesday, according to a person on the call.
Trump’s demand for bigger checks came alongside various complaints about the tens of billions in pork, including hundreds of millions in foreign aid, contained in the $2.3 trillion ($900 billion in Covid-19 relief with $1.4 trillion in government funding) bill, which was passed with big bipartisan support on Monday despite virtually nobody reading the 5,500+ pages of the full legislation.
If Trump does not sign the approved legislation by Dec. 28, the government may shut down after midnight due to lack of approved funding: “The entire country knows that it is urgent for the president to sign this bill, both to provide the coronavirus relief and to keep government open,” Pelosi said in her letter.
Before McCarthy’s comment, Pelosi said she planned to convene the House at 9 a.m. Thursday, although that may now be moot. If her unanimous-consent request is blocked, Pelosi would then need to decide whether they want to the bring it before the entire House for a roll-call vote.
As we explained earlier, stocks mostly shrugged off the news on the complications in Washington and on the economy because as Vital Knowledge founder Adam Crisafulli wrote, Trump’s criticism and veto threat, “won’t alter the macro narrative” and that “even if Trump actually vetoes (unlikely) and Congress fails to override it (also unlikely, given the stimulus/budget passed with veto-proof majorities), this will only delay the inevitable by 27 days (which would be unfortunate, but not material).”
“The big debate isn’t whether the $900b stimulus gets passed into law but instead if it represents a ‘down payment’ or the last major fiscal response to the pandemic,” with the outcome of Georgia Senate races in early January playing a “big role in answering that question.”
Raymond James analyst Ed Mills’ base case remains that the bill passed by Congress will become law, as the package passed both the House and the Senate with veto-proof margins, and $2,000 payments have no support among Republican lawmakers. He added that Trump’s “demand is arguably a net positive for Democrats’ chances in the Georgia Senate races, as Republicans will be forced on the defensive.”
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Update (1056ET): Pelosi says she’s ‘waiting to hear from House GOP‘ over the $2,000 checks, after calling on GOP leadership to consent to a measure increasing direct stimulus payments to $2,000 during Thursday’s pro forma session at 9:00 a.m.
Pelosi says she plans to proceed Thursday with a bill to replace the $600 stimulus checks in this week’s pandemic relief bill which was kicked back by President Trump – who Pelosi encouraged to pressure GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to get behind.
“To do so requires the agreement of the Republican Leader.“
#NEW: @SpeakerPelosi in a letter to House Democrats: “If the President truly wants to join us in $2,000 payments, he should call upon Leader McCarthy to agree to our Unanimous Consent request.” pic.twitter.com/9ibgfxNuWf
— Reshad Hudson (@ReshadHudson) December 23, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
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Authored by Ivan Pentchoukov via The Epoch Times,
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) signaled that they are open to increasing the amount for the stimulus checks after President Donald Trump threatened to veto the COVID relief bill unless the direct payment was increased to $2,000 per individual.
“Republicans repeatedly refused to say what amount the President wanted for direct checks. At last, the President has agreed to $2,000—Democrats are ready to bring this to the Floor this week by unanimous consent. Let’s do it!” Pelosi wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.
“We spent months trying to secure $2,000 checks but Republicans blocked it. Trump needs to sign the bill to help people and keep the government open and we’re glad to pass more aid Americans need. Maybe Trump can finally make himself useful and get Republicans not to block it again,” Schumer wrote on Twitter shortly after Pelosi issued her message.
In a video message issued earlier on Tuesday, the president threatened to veto the $2.3 trillion omnibus spending and pandemic relief bill.
“Congress found plenty of money for foreign countries, lobbyists, and special interests,” the president said, “while sending the bare minimum to the American people who need it.”
“It wasn’t their fault. It was China’s fault.”
Trump said that lawmakers need to send him a suitable piece of legislation by his standards—or else the next administration will have to sign off on the measure.
“And maybe that administration will be me,” he added.
The president pointed to hundreds of millions of dollars tagged for the Egyptian military, Cambodia, Burma, “gender programs” in Pakistan, and numerous other countries. These provisions were also singled out by progressives and conservatives alike as an example of pork-barrel spending.
On Monday night, a number of lawmakers griped that they didn’t have enough time to look through the approximately 5,500-page bill (pdf).
Trump also noted that tens of millions of dollars are going to the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. “which is not even open for business,” as well as the National Gallery of Arts and the Smithsonian.
Other non-pandemic measures were included, such as combatting the spread of Asian carp in the Great Lakes area, construction projects at the FBI, and others.
The president said he would also veto the bill because stimulus payments are being doled out to “illegal aliens” and their families.
“Despite all of this wasteful spending, the $900 billion package provides hardworking taxpayers only $600 [to Americans] in relief payments,” he said, arguing that not enough cash is being provided to small business owners who have suffered during the pandemic induced lockdowns.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/23/2020 – 20:20 - San Francisco: Drug Overdoses Have Killed Four Times More People Than COVID
San Francisco: Drug Overdoses Have Killed Four Times More People Than COVID
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
Official figures out of San Francisco show that drug overdoses have killed almost four times more people than COVID-19 this year, and yet the government continues to hand out free needles to addicts.
“A record 621 people died of drug overdoses in San Francisco so far this year, a staggering number that far outpaces the 173 deaths from COVID-19 the city has seen thus far,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle.
“Many people overdosed in low-income apartment buildings and in city-funded hotel rooms for the homeless. Others died on sidewalks, in alleyways and parks around the city.”
Despite the deaths, the government continues to hand out some 5.8 million free syringes a year to drug users.
It also appears as though lockdowns have exacerbated illegal drug use throughout the state of California.
“Other areas of the state have seen a spike in drug use and overdoses amid lockdowns, including in Los Angeles County,” reports the Washington Examiner.
“In 2013 in the county, fentanyl accounted for 3% of drug-related deaths. At the start of 2020, 42% of drug deaths were fentanyl-related in the area, and that number jumped to 51% when lockdowns were enacted in March.”
San Francisco’s homeless drug user problem is so chronic that in 2019, residents began desperately installing boulders on the side of streets in an effort to prevent camping.
A knock-on effect of the massive increase in the city’s homeless population has been the routine sight of feces on the street.
A 2019 study discovered that each case of poop that has to be cleaned up on the streets of San Francisco costs the taxpayer $32 dollars, with 118,352 recorded reports of human feces since 2011.
As we document in the video below, San Francisco is a shit-stained cesspool that is only getting worse, a situation increasingly being mirrored in other major Democrat-run cities across America.
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Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/23/2020 – 20:20 - China Launches "Monopoly" Probe Into Alibaba, Summons Ma Over Ant Group Practices
China Launches “Monopoly” Probe Into Alibaba, Summons Ma Over Ant Group Practices
Update: The hits keep coming for Jack Ma as China has formally kicked off an investigation into alleged monopolistic practices at Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., escalating a campaign of scrutiny over the country’s internet giants. According to a statement by the regulator:
Recently, the State Administration of Market Supervision, based on reports, filed investigations into Alibaba Group Holdings Co., Ltd. for suspected monopolistic conduct such as “choosing one over the other”.
BABA shares tumbled in after hours trading to its lowest since July…
Regulators said separately they’ve summoned affiliate Ant Group Co. to a meeting intended to promote fair competition and consumer rights.
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In addition to everything else that took place in the year 2020, and as we listed earlier, a lot has happened in the past 12 months including…
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WW3 fears run rampant on social media as the US strikes Iranian army general Soleimani
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San Francisco 49ers lose a heartbreaking Super Bowl (ok maybe that only affected me)
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Black swan health event that leads to a historic equity market crash, and funding strains
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Fed takes US policy rates to near 0% and institutes QE at a magnitude that puts the post GFC period to shame
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Treasury institutes trillions of dollars of fiscal stimulus
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Unprecedented lockdowns lead to Tiger King craze
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The world learns how to school and work remotely, changing the office space landscape forever
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WTI front month contract trades with a negative price
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Subsequent epic equity bull market recovery rally that pierces March highs
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Australia burns
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Kobe Bryant tragically dies
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We begin to watch sports with no fans
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Pentagon releases UFO footage
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Quantas offers flight to nowhere
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California wildfires burn uncontrollably and wipe out parts of Napa
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US social unrest turns violent
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Murder hornets
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We lose Chadwick Boseman and Ruth Bader Ginsberg
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Overhyped US election that leads to a volatility collapse, year-end rally
… 2020 was also the year in which Chinese tech tycoons learned the hard way not to take on the dictator of a communist regime.
As the FT reports, for years Alibaba founder and China’s (formerly?) richest man, Jack Ma had a safe spot at the top table of Chinese business. Members of the Chinese Entrepreneurs Association even recall an evening outing on West Lake in Hangzhou some years ago when he boasted about his close relations with the president, dating from when Xi Jinping was a provincial Communist Party secretary.
But all that ended in the first week of November, which was supposed to end with the $37BN listing of Alibaba’s Ant Group financial business, instead saw China’s president Xi himself pulling the plug on what was meant to be the biggest IPO ever. Some time in September, China’s launched a coordinated regulatory crackdown, which in culminated with the scuttled Ant IPO and, together with tough new antitrust rules, triggered about a $140 billion, or 17%, decline in the market value of Ma’s Alibaba.
This was meant to be a lesson to Ma – courtesy of Xi – who really pulls the strings in China. To be sure, while there was significant tension stemming from the titanic clash of the two gigantic egos of China’s most powerful man, Xi and China’s richest man, Ma, in the background regulators and banks were threatened by the rise of nimble new competitors have been lobbying hard to rein the sector in, particularly Ant and its ebullient founder.
“He had become too arrogant,” said the head of Asian economics at one major international bank with close relations with regulators. “They needed to put a leash on the monster that Ant was becoming.”
In the aftermath of the pulled Ant IPO, the flamboyant Ma all but vanished from public view. As of early December, with his empire under regulatory scrutiny, the man most closely identified with the meteoric rise of China Inc. was advised by the government to stay in the country, a Bloomberg source said.
So what is Ma doing now? As Bloomberg reports, while his wealth and influence have been curbed, Ma isn’t on the verge of a personal downfall. Instead, his public rebuke is a warning that Beijing has lost patience with the outsize power of its technology moguls, increasingly perceived as a threat to the political and financial stability President Xi Jinping prizes most.
As Bloomberg adds, once praised as drivers of economic prosperity and symbols of the country’s technological prowess, the empires built by Jack Ma, Tencent Holdings’s chairman, “Pony” Ma Huateng, and other tycoons are now suspect after amassing hundreds of millions of users and gaining influence over almost every aspect of daily life in China. “The [Communist] Party is trying to make it clear that Ma is not bigger than the party,” says Rana Mitter, a professor specializing in Chinese politics at Oxford University. “But they also want to show that China is a good place to do business, and that means that the party needs to show that entrepreneurs can succeed.”
So in an attempt to make amends, a beaten down Jack Ma is starting to make changes.
As the WSJ reports, Ant Group – taking a page out of US credit card companies’ playbook – slashed borrowing limits for some users of its popular digital credit-card service, a sign the financial-technology giant is dialing back risk in its lending business following pressure from Chinese regulators. According to Ant, one of the fintech gian’ts consumer-lending platforms, Huabei, lowered credit limits for some younger borrowers “to promote more rational spending habits.” Ant didn’t provide the age range or other details about users who were affected by the changes.
Huabei – which means “just spend” – lets users of Ant’s ubiquitous Alipay mobile app borrow money to make purchases online and in stores using their smartphones. Ant, which is controlled by billionaire Jack Ma, calls Huabei a digital unsecured revolving-credit product for daily expenditures. It functions very much like a credit card, letting people borrow interest free for up to 40 days, then charging interest on their outstanding balances. And since Ant is unregulated like traditional Chinese state-owned banks, the company’s direct provisioning of credit has sparked concerns within Beijing that this is a critical part of China’s credit infrastructure the state has little control over.
Of course, it is this lack of regulation that makes Ant’s product that much more attractive: college students and working adults without established credit histories have been able to obtain loans from Huabei, which typically increases individuals’ borrowing limits after they repay their loans consistently.
Ant is also a major driver behind the consumer credit explosion in China in recent years: as the WSJ notes, the ease and convenience of getting online loans has helped fuel spending among young Chinese consumers, and short-term household debt in China has soared in recent years. Many shoppers on e-commerce websites operated by Ant’s affiliate Alibaba Group Holding also use Huabei to fund their purchases.
Ma’s Ant Financial has another popular service called Jiebei, which means “Just borrow,” and provides unsecured installment loans. Together the two digital-lending operations have been Ant’s biggest growth engine in recent years. They supplied credit to around half a billion Chinese consumers, who had a total outstanding loan balance equivalent to $263 billion at the end of June.
As a result of the limitations on new borrowing, some users of Huabei recently took to social media to complain that their credit limits were reduced by half or more to as low as 2,000 yuan to 3,000 yuan, equivalent to $306 to $458. Others with much higher borrowing limits of 30,000 yuan to 50,000 yuan said their caps didn’t change.
The self-imposed lending crackdown will send shockwaves across China’s economy, where an exponential increase in consumer lending has sparked an unprecedented consumption spree, one which had generally been welcomed by Beijing as part of China’s transformation away from a mercantilist economy, but as a result of the surge in new debt, even Beijing is starting to express concerns that there is simply too much debt sloshing around in the $46 trillion financial system, which is 125% bigger than the US banking system!
Ant, in particular, has become China’s biggest facilitator of this explosion in digital consumer loans, many of which have been funded by small banks and trust companies that often lack sophisticated risk controls. The company supplied funds for just 2% of the outstanding loans it facilitated as of June. About 10% was funded by the issuance of asset-backed securities, and the rest came from banks and trust companies that bore the risk of the loans going bad. In essence loan creation in China is one giant securitization game, where Ant holds just a fraction of the risk.
It’s also a big part for the feud between Ma and Beijing’s political oligarchy: when China’s government halted the Ant IPO in November, it released draft regulations that would force the company to cough up more of its own capital to support its lending operations, or scale them back.
It’s now scaling them back.
Guo Shuqing, chairman of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, said in a speech earlier this month that China would focus on “the new too-big-to-fail risk.” He said a few tech groups dominated the micropayments business, and it was important to focus on the complexity and potential risks posed by tech giants that ventured into finance.
The implicatios of this self-imposed slowdown inside China’s beating credit heart will be profound: just yesterday we explained that China’s credit impulse has peaked and would shrink aggressively in coming quarters before contracting, in the process jeopardizing the global reflation wave with potentially dramatic consequences for global asset prices.
The fact that Ant has now also joined in this self-imposed credit slowdown only confirms that the reflationary wave is almost over… ironically just as the reflation trade becomes consensus.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/23/2020 – 19:58 -
- Trump Pardons Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Charles Kushner
Trump Pardons Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Charles Kushner
Just 24 hours after Donald Trump issued some 15 pardons and commutations, including former campaign aide George Papadopoulos, former US congressmen Duncan Hunter and Chris Collins, and the four Blackwater guards, on Wednesday the President issued a second batch of pardons in as many days, this time naming two former associates, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, as well as Charles Kushner, the father of Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner.
Wednesday’s list also includes several people recommended by former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was part of Trump’s impeachment defense team, and Ike Perlmutter, the former CEO of Marvel Entertainment and a member of the president’s private Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, according to a statement from the White House.
Full statements below:
Paul Manafort – Today, President Trump has issued a full and complete pardon to Paul Manafort, stemming from convictions prosecuted in the course of Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation, which was premised on the Russian collusion hoax. Mr. Manafort has already spent two years in prison, including a stretch of time in solitary confinement — treatment worse than what many of the most violent criminals receive. As a result of blatant prosecutorial overreach, Mr. Manafort has endured years of unfair treatment and is one of the most prominent victims of what has been revealed to be perhaps the greatest witch hunt in American history. As Mr. Manafort’s trial judge observed, prior to the Special Counsel investigation, Mr. Manafort had led an “otherwise blameless life.” Since May, Mr. Manafort has been released to home confinement as a result of COVID-19 concerns.
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Roger Stone – Today, President Trump granted a full and unconditional pardon to Roger Stone, Jr. President Trump had previously commuted Mr. Stone’s sentence in July of this year. Mr. Stone is a 68-year-old man with numerous medical conditions. Due to prosecutorial misconduct by Special Counsel Mueller’s team, Mr. Stone was treated very unfairly. He was subjected to a pre- dawn raid of his home, which the media conveniently captured on camera. Mr. Stone also faced potential political bias at his jury trial. Pardoning him will help to right the injustices he faced at the hands of the Mueller investigation.
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Charles Kushner – President Trump granted a full pardon to Charles Kushner. Former United States Attorney for the District of Utah Brett Tolman and the American Conservative Union’s Matt Schlapp and David Safavian support a pardon of Mr. Kushner. Since completing his sentence in 2006, Mr. Kushner has been devoted to important philanthropic organizations and causes, such as Saint Barnabas Medical Center and United Cerebral Palsy. This record of reform and charity overshadows Mr. Kushner’s conviction and 2 year sentence for preparing false tax returns, witness retaliation, and making false statements to the FEC.
The latest list grants 26 full pardons and commutes all or part of the sentence of three additional individuals, after Trump on Tuesday issued 15 pardons and five commutations. Among those pardoned yesterday were two former Republican members of Congress, two targets of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, and four military contractors convicted in the 2007 killing of more than a dozen unarmed Iraqi civilians. Last month, Trump pardoned Michael Flynn, his first national security adviser.
Paul Manafort received the toughest sentence of any Trump associate entangled in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Manafort, who has a long roster of foreign clients and has worked for many Republican presidential candidates — including George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan — was charged and found guilty of multiple counts of false income tax returns, failure to file reports of foreign bank accounts, and bank fraud related to activity from before he joined the Trump campaign. He was sentenced by a federal judge to seven years but was released to home confinement in early 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Manafort joined the Trump campaign in March 2016 as the campaign’s convention manager. He served as Trump’s campaign chairman from May 2016 until he resigned in August 2016.
“Mr. President, my family and I humbly thank you for the Presidential Pardon that you bestowed on me today. Words cannot adequately convey how grateful we are,” Manafort said in a statement following the pardon. “History will record that your Presidency accomplished more in 4 years than any of your modern-day predecessors. You truly did ‘Make America Great Again.'”
Manafort’s prosecution was politically motivated. As his judges noted, charges had zero “to do with the [2016] campaign or with Russian collusion” & were “wholly irrelevant” to collusion. He was indicted on tax/lobbying charges that Russiagate hacks pretended amounted to treason. pic.twitter.com/np57HsKqna
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) December 24, 2020
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Roger Stone – a former campaign adviser to Donald Trump – had his 40-month prison sentence commuted in July by the president, days before he was scheduled to report to a federal penitentiary. The self-described political “dirty trickster” was charged and convicted on a seven-count indictment of obstructing justice, witness tampering and multiple counts of lying to Congress in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Trump’s full pardon nullifies Stone’s conviction entirely.
“On behalf of my family and myself, I wish to praise God and give my deepest thanks to President Donald J. Trump for his extraordinary act of justice in issuing me a presidential pardon, ” Stone said in a statement following the announcement.
Charles Kushner, the father of President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, pleaded guilty in 2005 to tax evasion, witness tampering and making illegal campaign contributions. He was sentenced to two years in prison but served only 14 months of that term. A nasty argument between Charles Kushner and his brother Murray led to charges of violations of campaign-finance rules as part of the same case. That led prosecutors to open an investigation into Charles’ conduct. Charles then tried to keep his sister from cooperating with prosecutors by setting up her husband with a prostitute, recording the encounter, and then threatening her with it. But that backfired when the sister handed over the tape. The elder Kushner had been one of the New York-New Jersey area’s leading Democratic donors and a key backroom political player in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Finally pardoning Jared’s dad might be the closest Trump gets to a concession speech
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) December 24, 2020
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/23/2020 – 19:44 - With Biden's New Threats, Russia Discourse More Reckless And Dangerous Than Ever: Greenwald
With Biden’s New Threats, Russia Discourse More Reckless And Dangerous Than Ever: Greenwald
Then-Vice President Joe Biden speaks at the Brookings Institute May 27, 2015 in Washington, DC spoke about the Russia-Ukraine conflict (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images) To justify Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss to Donald Trump, leading Democrats and their key media allies for years competed with one another to depict what they called “Russia’s interference in our elections” in the most apocalyptic terms possible. They fanatically rejected the view of the Russian Federation repeatedly expressed by President Obama — that it is a weak regional power with an economy smaller than Italy’s capable of only threatening its neighbors but not the U.S. — and instead cast Moscow as a grave, even existential, threat to U.S. democracy, with its actions tantamount to the worst security breaches in U.S. history.
This post-2016 mania culminated with prominent liberal politicians and journalists (as well as John McCain) declaring Russia’s activities surrounding the 2016 to be an “act of war” which, many of them insisted, was comparable to Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attack — the two most traumatic attacks in modern U.S. history which both spawned years of savage and destructive war, among other things.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) repeatedly demanded that Russia’s 2016 “interference” be treated as “an act of war.” Hillary Clinton described Russian hacking as “a cyber 9/11.” And here is Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) on MSNBC in early February, 2018, pronouncing Russia “a hostile foreign power” whose 2016 meddling was the “equivalent” of Pearl Harbor, “very much on par” with the “seriousness” of the 1941 attack in Hawaii that helped prompt four years of U.S. involvement in a world war.
With the Democrats, under Joe Biden, just weeks away from assuming control of the White House and the U.S. military and foreign policy that goes along with it, the discourse from them and their media allies about Russia is becoming even more unhinged and dangerous. Moscow’s alleged responsibility for the recently revealed, multi-pronged hack of U.S. Government agencies and various corporate servers is asserted — despite not a shred of evidence, literally, having yet been presented — as not merely proven fact, but as so obviously true that it is off-limits from doubt or questioning.
Any questioning of this claim will be instantly vilified by the Democrats’ extremely militaristic media spokespeople as virtual treason. “Now the president is not just silent on Russia and the hack. He is deliberately running defense for the Kremlin by contradicting his own Secretary of State on Russian responsibility,” pronounced CNN’s national security reporter Jim Sciutto, who last week depicted Trump’s attempted troop withdrawal from Syria and Germany as “ceding territory” and furnishing “gifts” to Putin. More alarmingly, both the rhetoric to describe the hack and the retaliation being threatened are rapidly spiraling out of control.
Democrats (along with some Republicans long obsessed with The Russian Threat, such as Mitt Romney) are casting the latest alleged hack by Moscow in the most melodramatic terms possible, ensuring that Biden will enter the White House with tensions sky-high with Russia and facing heavy pressure to retaliate aggressively. Biden’s top national security advisers and now Biden himself have, with no evidence shown to the public, repeatedly threatened aggressive retaliation against the country with the world’s second-largest nuclear stockpile.
Congressman Jason Crow (D-CO) — one of the pro-war Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee who earlier this year joined with Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) to block Trump’s plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan — announced: “this could be our modern day, cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbor,” adding: “Our nation is under assault.” The second-ranking Senate Democrat, Dick Durbin (D-IL), pronounced: “This is virtually a declaration of war by Russia.”
Meanwhile, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), who has for years been casting Russia as a grave threat to the U.S. while Democrats mocked him as a relic of the Cold War (before they copied and then surpassed him), described the latest hack as “the equivalent of Russian bombers flying undetected over the entire country.” The GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee also blasted Trump for his failure to be “aggressively speaking out and protesting and taking punitive action,” though — like virtually every prominent figure demanding tough “retaliation” — Romney failed to specify what he had in mind that would be sufficient retaliation for “the equivalent of Russian bombers flying undetected over the entire country.”
For those keeping track at home: that’s two separate “Pearl Harbors” in less than four years from Moscow (or, if you prefer, one Pearl Harbor and one 9/11). If Democrats actually believe that, it stands to reason that they will be eager to embrace a policy of belligerence and aggression toward Russia. Many of them are demanding this outright, mocking Trump for failing to attack Russia — despite no evidence that they were responsible — while their well-trained liberal flock is suggesting that the non-response constitutes some form of “high treason.”
Indeed, the Biden team has been signalling that they intend to quickly fulfill demands for aggressive retaliation. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Biden “accused President Trump [] of ‘irrational downplaying’” of the hack while “warning Russia that he would not allow the intrusion to ‘go unanswered’ after he takes office.” Biden emphasized that once the intelligence assessment is complete, “we will respond, and probably respond in kind.”
Threats and retaliation between the U.S. and Russia are always dangerous, but particularly so now. One of the key nuclear arms agreements between the two nuclear-armed nations, the New START treaty, will expire in February unless Putin and Biden can successfully negotiate a renewal: sixteen days after Biden is scheduled to take office. “That will force Mr. Biden to strike a deal to prevent one threat — a nuclear arms race — while simultaneously threatening retaliation on another,” observed the Times.
This escalating rhetoric from Washington about Russia, and the resulting climate of heightened tensions, are dangerous in the extreme. They are also based in numerous myths, deceits and falsehoods:
First, absolutely no evidence of any kind has been presented to suggest, let alone prove, that Russia is responsible for these hacks. It goes without saying that it is perfectly plausible that Russia could have done this: it’s the sort of thing that every large power from China and Iran to the U.S. and Russia have the capability to do and wield against virtually every other country including one another.
But if we learned nothing else over the last several decades, we should know that accepting claims that emanate from the U.S. intelligence community about adversaries without a shred of evidence is madness of the highest order. We just had a glaring reminder of the importance of this rule: just weeks before the election, countless mainstream media outlets laundered and endorsed the utterly false claim that the documents from Hunter Biden’s laptop were “Russian disinformation,” only for officials to acknowledge once the harm was done that there was no evidence — zero — of Russian involvement.
Yet that is exactly what the overwhelming bulk of media outlets are doing again: asserting that Russia is behind these hacks despite having no evidence of its truth. The New York Times’ Michael Barbaro, host of the paper’s popular The Daily podcast, asked his colleague, national security reporter David Sanger, what evidence exists to assert that Russia did this. As Barbaro put it, even Sanger is “allowing that early conclusions could all be wrong, but that it’s doubtful.” Indeed, Sanger acknowledged to Barbaro that they have no proof, asserting instead that the basis on which he is relying is that Russia possesses the sophistication to carry out such a hack (as do several other nation-states), along with claiming that the hack has what he calls the “markings” of Russian hackers.
But this tactic was exactly the same one used by former intelligence officials, echoed by these same media outlets, to circulate the false pre-election claim that the documents from Hunter Biden’s laptop were “Russian disinformation”: namely, they pronounced in lockstep, the material from Hunter’s laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information.” This was also exactly the same tactic used by the U.S. intelligence community in 2001 to falsely blame Iraq for the anthrax attacks, claiming that their chemical analysis revealed a substance that was “a trademark of the Iraqi biological weapons program.”
These media outlets will, if pressed, acknowledge their lack of proof that Russia did this. Despite this admitted lack of proof, media outlets are repeatedly stating Russian responsibility as proven fact.
“Scope of Russian Hacking Becomes Clear: Multiple U.S. Agencies Were Hit,” one New York Times headline proclaimed, and the first line of that article, co-written by Sanger, stated definitively: “The scope of a hacking engineered by one of Russia’s premier intelligence agencies became clearer on Monday.” The Washington Post deluged the public with identically certain headlines:
Nobody in the government has been as definitive in asserting Russian responsibility as corporate media outlets. Even Trump’s hawkish Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, crafted his accusation against Moscow with caveats and uncertainty: “I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity.”
If actual evidence ultimately emerges demonstrating Russian responsibility, it would not alter how dangerous it is that — less than twenty years after the Iraq WMD debacle and less than a couple of years after media endorsement of endless Russiagate falsehoods — the most influential media outlets continue to mindlessly peddle as Truth whatever the intelligence community feeds them, without the need to see any evidence that what they’re claiming is actually true. Even more alarmingly, large sectors of the public that venerate these outlets continue to believe that what they hear from them must be true, no matter how many times they betray that trust. The ease with which the CIA can disseminate whatever messaging it wants through friendly media outlets is stunning.
Second, the very idea that this hack could be compared to rogue and wildly aberrational events such as Pearl Harbor or the 9/11 attack is utterly laughable on its face. One has to be drowning in endless amounts of jingoistic self-delusion to believe that this hack — or, for that matter, the 2016 “election interference” — is a radical departure from international norms as opposed to a perfect reflection of them.
Just as was true of 2016 fake Facebook pages and Twitter bots, it is not an exaggeration to say that the U.S. Government engages in hacking attacks of this sort, and ones far more invasive, against virtually every country on the planet, including Russia, on a weekly basis. That does not mean that this kind of hacking is either justified or unjustified. It does mean, however, that depicting it as some particularly dastardly and incomparably immoral act that requires massive retaliation requires a degree of irrationality and gullibility that is bewildering to behold.
The NSA reporting enabled by Edward Snowden by itself proved that the NSA spies on virtually anyone it can. Indeed, after reviewing the archive back in 2013, I made the decision that I would not report on U.S. hacks of large adversary countries such as China and Russia because it was so commonplace for all of these countries to hack one another as aggressively and intrusively as they could that it was hardly newsworthy to report on this (the only exception was when there was a substantial reason to view such spying as independently newsworthy, such as Sweden’s partnering with NSA to spy on Russia in direct violation of the denials Swedish officials voiced to their public).
Other news outlets who had access to Snowden documents, particularly The New York Times, were not nearly as circumspect in exposing U.S. spying on large nation-state adversaries. As a result, there is ample proof published by those outlets (sometimes provoking Snowden’s strong objections) that the U.S. does exactly what Russia is alleged to have done here — and far worse.
“Even as the United States made a public case about the dangers of buying from [China’s] Huawei, classified documents show that the National Security Agency was creating its own back doors — directly into Huawei’s networks,” reported The New York Times’ David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth in 2013, adding that “the agency pried its way into the servers in Huawei’s sealed headquarters in Shenzhen, China’s industrial heart.”
In 2013, the Guardian revealed “an NSA attempt to eavesdrop on the Russian leader, Dmitry Medvedev, as his phone calls passed through satellite links to Moscow,” and added: “foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts.” Meanwhile, “Sweden has been a key partner for the United States in spying on Russia and its leadership, Swedish television said on Thursday,” noted Reuters, citing what one NSA document described as “a unique collection on high-priority Russian targets, such as leadership, internal politics.”
Other reports revealed that the U.S. had hacked into the Brazilian telecommunications system to collect data on the whole population, and was spying on Brazil’s key leaders (including then-President Dilma Rousseff) as well as its most important companies such as its oil giant Petrobras and its Ministry of Mines and Energy. The Washington Post reported: “The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.” And on and on.
Read the rest of the report here.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/23/2020 – 19:40 - Rich Millennials Plot The End Of Civilization
Rich Millennials Plot The End Of Civilization
Authored by Doug French via The Mises Institute,
The New York Times managed to find some young people whose silver spoons provide a sour taste in their mouths. To hear them talk, their good fortune is making them sick.
“I want to build a world where someone like me, a young person who controls tens of millions of dollars, is impossible,” Sam Jacobs, 25, told the Times.
Jacobs went off to college a normal young man and came back a socialist. Suddenly his family’s “extreme, plutocratic wealth” became too much of a burden for him.
“He wants to put his inheritance toward ending capitalism,” Zoë Beery wrote for the NYT, “and by that he means using his money to undo systems that accumulate money for those at the top, and that have played a large role in widening economic and racial inequality.”
Wow, that is some self-loathing. If only Ludwig von Mises were able to counsel young Jacobs, whose grandfather founded Qualcomm and who is set to inherit $100 million. In his book Epistemological Problems of Economics, Mises wrote, “Through all the changes in the prevailing system of social stratification, moral philosophers continued to hold fast to the fundamental idea of Cicero’s doctrine that making money is degrading.”
Beery writes that wealth is concentrated in the upper brackets and “Millennials will be the recipients of the largest generational shift of assets in American history.”
That doesn’t seem like a worrying thought; however, it is for Rachel Gelman, a thirty-year-old in Oakland, California, who described her politics to Beery as “anticapitalist, anti-imperialist and abolitionist.”
“My money is mostly stocks, which means it comes from underpaying and undervaluing working-class people, and that’s impossible to disconnect from the economic legacies of Indigenous genocide and slavery,” the guilty Gelman said.
“Once I realized that, I couldn’t imagine doing anything with my wealth besides redistribute it to these communities.”
Mises saw it differently.
“The riches of the rich are not the cause of the poverty of anybody; the process that makes some people rich is, on the contrary, the corollary of the process that improves many peoples’ want satisfaction. The entrepreneurs, the capitalists and the technologists prosper as far as they succeed in best supplying the consumers,” he wrote in The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality.
Elizabeth Baldwin is a thirty-four-year-old democratic socialist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was adopted from India by a white family when she was a baby. Now, thanks to her adoptive parents, she is wealthy, with a stock portfolio containing shares in Coca-Cola and Exxon-Mobil.
But, she hates the thought of having her wealth tied up in multinational corporation shares and instead “would rather put my money into a community that has been denied economic resources and disrupts the system.”
She’s directing her funds toward what she and other wealthy millennials describe as the “solidarity economy.” Fellow traveler and democratic socialist, Emma Thomas, a twenty-nine-year-old, described what she’s now investing in as “an economy that is about exchange and taking care of needs, that is cooperative and sustainable, and that doesn’t demand unfettered growth.”
“At some point, these numbers on a screen are imaginary,” Thomas told the Times.
“But what’s not imaginary is whether you have shelter, food and a community. Those are true returns.”
Where do these ideas come from? University faculty, of course. Richard D. Wolff, a Marxist and an emeritus economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst said he has been professionally arguing against capitalism’s selling points since his teaching career began, in 1967, but that his millennial students “are more open to hearing that message than their parents ever were.”
We can only thank goodness the parents of these young people believed in serving customers and saving their wealth. This wealth was not created nefariously. As Murray Rothbard explained, “On the free market, it is a happy fact that the maximization of the wealth of one person or group redounds to the benefit of all.”
What these millennials are up to is not to be ignored. As Mises wrote in his book Liberalism, “Modern civilization will not perish unless it does so by its own act of self-destruction.”
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/23/2020 – 19:35 - China To "De-Risk" Both Monetary And Fiscal Policy In 2021: SocGen
China To “De-Risk” Both Monetary And Fiscal Policy In 2021: SocGen
While the U.S. continues to print money as though there will be zero consequences and while a China-borne virus (or, rather, the response to the virus) continues to ravage economies globally, China is planning on shoring up and “normalizing” both its fiscal and monetary policy heading into 2021.
A new note from SocGen to clients on Monday of this week says that the Chinese government at the annual Economic Work Conference telegraphed that it is “poised to scale down both monetary and fiscal policy impulses from here, and that the focus have been shifted back toward controlling risks, including local governments’ implicit debt, banks’ capital adequacy, housing stability and too-big-to-fail companies.”
Regarding fiscal policy, SocGen predicts that China will be “still proactive but less accommodative.”
The stance was described as “proactive”, focusing on “effectiveness” and “sustainability”. The wording signals a less accommodative stance signalled up until 3Q, when it was stated that “proactive fiscal policy has to be even more proactive”. While the government should support important tasks such as promoting technological development, accelerating structural adjustment and improving income allocation, it also needs to further mitigate the risk of implicit local government debt.
“This echoes comments from policymakers that expressed concerns over local government debt sustainability,” SocGen said. “We expect the government to announce a smaller fiscal deficit target of 3% of GDP (versus above 3.6% this year), the quota of special LGB issuance to decline considerably from RMB3.75tn this year to around RMB3tn next year, and no special CGB issuance.”
But the bigger shock to the global financial system could be the result of “normalization” continuing for China’s monetary policy. At the CEWC, China said it would stick to “prudent” monetary
policy that aims to be “flexible”, “targeted” and “reasonably appropriate”. Which, naturally, contrasts with the rest of the world – especially the U.S. – whose monetary policy has become “print money and buy anything that isn’t bolted to the floor”.SocGen said that China’s statements regarding “maintaining M2 and TSF growth” and “keeping the macro leverage ratio largely stable” is likely a “clear reconfirmation that monetary policy intends to continue to normalise back toward a status of stable leverage, after credit growth significantly outpacing economic growth throughout 2020.”
The bank predicts that “TSF growth will slow from 13.5% currently to around 10% by end-2021.”
Among other initiatives, take on housing problems in big cities and promote green development. The note also says China’s focus will turn to expanding domestic demand in 2021. SocGen wrote:
The CEWC acknowledged that the key to expanding consumption is to increase employment, enhance the social security system and improve income allocation. It pledged to remove administrative measures that obstruct purchases in order to unleash the potential of rural consumption; to improve the occupational training and education system in order to support quality employment; and to increase public spending on education, healthcare and pensions in order to lower savings. Regarding investments, like this year, the government will focus on new infrastructure, manufacturing upgrades, old town renovation and logistics infrastructure upgrades. Mindful of debt sustainability concerns, it also stressed that over-investment in emerging industries needs to be avoided.
Assuming China’s idea of monetary normalization is different from Jerome Powell’s (to hike interest rates once before capitulating horrifically and, only months later, implementing infinite QE while embarrassingly explaining on national television that “we print it digitally”), the country could wind up taking the lead on leading the global economy onto a drastically different path in 2021.
What would be even more interesting would be if part of China’s “de-risking” includes the country deciding it no longer wants the “risk on” position of owning too many U.S. Treasuries.
Maybe there’s a reason China has been hoarding all that gold after all…
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/23/2020 – 19:20 - Ed and Ash's Holiday Send-Off: Looking Ahead to 2021 (LIVE)
Ed and Ash’s Holiday Send-Off: Looking Ahead to 2021 (LIVE)Tune in for this special edition of the Daily Briefing to hear from Ed and Ash live at 4:30 PM ET. They will answer audience questions, provide an update on what they’re seeing in markets this holiday season, and look ahead to the opportunities and macro risks for 2021.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/23/2020 – 19:12 - Mandatory Vaccines & Woke Logic
Mandatory Vaccines & Woke Logic
Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
In response to COVID-19, Cornell University requires that students returning to campus must receive a flu shot.
That’s not a typo: they want you to have a flu shot… to battle Covid.
Obviously the flu shot doesn’t protect you from COVID-19. But hey, this isn’t the first COVID response that makes absolutely no sense.
But it does indicate that Cornell, and other universities, might require students to receive a COVID vaccine when they become widely available.
In fact, in its “Behavioral Compact” which Cornell forced students to agree to before returning to campus, the very first line states,
“Until there is an effective vaccine for COVID-19, we live in a world of significantly enhanced community and personal health risks.”
The compact goes on to explain how everyone has a responsibility to adhere to the safety requirements, not just for themselves, but to keep the entire community safe, especially those most at risk.
And this, apparently, means requiring that everyone have a flu shot.
Well, not quite everyone:
The university will be happy to exempt Black, Ingenious, and People of Color (BIPOC) from the flu shot mandate.
Cornell’s website states that “due to longstanding systemic racism and health inequities in this country,” the university understands that these “requirements may feel suspect or even exploitative” to BIPOC people.
For example, “Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) have been mistreated, and used by people in power, sometimes for profit or medical gain.”
And to be clear, Cornell’s claim is 100% true.
The Tuskegee syphilis experiments come to mind, in which the United States Public Health Service and the Centers for Disease Control pretended to treat black subjects for syphilis from 1932-1972.
In reality the government was studying the progression of untreated syphilis, allowing the black subjects to be killed slowly and painfully, while spreading the disease.
The whole experiment was a disgusting lie that turned its subjects into unwitting lab rats.
The website continues:
“At the same time, we know that long-standing social inequalities and health disparities have resulted in COVID-19 disproportionately affecting BIPOC individuals. Higher percentages of individuals from these communities become infected with COVID, and the health outcomes related to infection are often more serious.”
So, to summarize:
– Cornell mandated the flu shot to keep the most vulnerable people safe from COVID.
– BIPOC people are among the most vulnerable.
– Therefore Cornell exempted BIPOC people from the flu shot.
MAKES PERFECT SENSE!
You’d think that if the flu shot truly were necessary to keep people safe, then Cornell would demand that EVERYONE take the shot.
You can’t have it both ways. Either the flu shot is critical and necessary to protect the most vulnerable, or it’s not.
And if it is critical, then why would Cornell allow the most vulnerable to slip through the cracks?
And if the university does not believe the flu shot is critical, then why subject anyone to the requirements?
Also– why are BIPOC people the only ones who are allowed to not trust the medical establishment?
I seem to remember a certain Dr. Fauci admitting that he lied at the beginning of the pandemic, when he told people that masks would not help slow the spread of COVID-19. And that doesn’t even scratch the surface of all the lies and coverup from the World Health Organization.
So haven’t we all been lied to, at least by certain key figures in the medical establishment, about COVID?
But if you’re not BIPOC, you’re apparently not allowed to have a different opinion, express skepticism, or raise any concerns at all.
The irony here is that Cornell is supposed to be a UNIVERSITY after all.
So if they really feel that a flu shot is critical and necessary to protect vulnerable people in their community, perhaps they might try EDUCATING their students about why they believe this is an appropriate public health policy, as opposed to coercing certain ethnic groups, while exempting others.
Don’t worry, Cornell addresses that too:
“we understand that someone may know the science and still feel distrusting of health care and may have addition (sic) questions.” [note the grammatical error from one of the nation’s top universities.]
You have to understand that the Social Justice Warrior is a walking contradiction.
They care so much about inequality in health outcomes for people of color, that they will hand them an excuse on a silver platter to allow that inequality to continue.
They recognize that BIPOC people have reasons not to trust the establishment, but everyone else is a science denier for simply asking questions, and wanting more information.
They say that vaccines are not just to keep the individual safe, but the community as well. But it’s acceptable for BIPOC people to ignore this.
Sort of like how opening your business causes COVID-19 to spread, but “peaceful protests” are so righteous that they can’t spread disease among their tightly packed crowds.
* * *
On another note… We think gold could DOUBLE and silver could increase by up to 5 TIMES in the next few years. That’s why we published a new, 50-page long Ultimate Guide on Gold & Silver that you can download here.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/23/2020 – 19:00
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