- Turkey Demands Greece "Demilitarize" 16 Aegean Islands Amid Gas Drilling Dispute
Turkey Demands Greece “Demilitarize” 16 Aegean Islands Amid Gas Drilling Dispute
At a moment tensions are soaring over Turkey’s expansive East Mediterranean claims, and after starting early last summer it began sending oil and gas exploration and drilling ships off Cyprus’ coast, Ankara is demanding that Greece “demilitarize” its islands in the Aegean Sea, reports Bloomberg.
The demand from Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar, who formally requested Greece move to withdraw armed forces and weaponry from 16 Aegean islands near Turkey on Wednesday, is rich given it’s Turkey that’s been provocatively sending warships and military jets to accompany illegal gas drilling in the area, something lately condemned by the EU.
Greek islands file image (Lemnos) “Greece, arming 16 out of 23 islands with non-military status, in violation of agreements in the Aegean sea, should act in accordance with international law,” said Defense Minister Akar, cited in state-run Anadolu Agency. “We expect Greece to act in line with international law and the agreements it has signed,” he added.
Though becoming increasingly internationally isolated over the drilling issue in EU-member Cyrpus’ Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), Turkey has remained unmoved and at times is positively boastful about it.
Not shying away from admitting Turkish maritime claims now stretch from Cypriot waters all the way to Libya (based on a controversial recent maritime boundary ‘deal’ signed with the Tripoli Government of National Accord), Akar further had this to say according to state media:
In addition to the fight against terrorism, Turkey’s activities are ongoing in the Aegean, Eastern Mediterranean, off Cyprus, and Libya, Akar said, adding that they are carried out in accordance with international law and the territorial integrity of the countries.
Turkey is a guarantor country for the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) and is committed to fulfilling its responsibilities, he said.
“The Cyprus issue is our national issue. Whatever we need to do there, we’ve done so far and will continue to do so. We will continue to protect the rights of both our own and Cypriot brothers,” he added.
Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar, via Anadolu Agency Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has for the past half-year been sending warships near Cypriot waters in order to ward off foreign competition to oil and gas research, according to Cypriot officials, also seeking to bar Cypriot ships and planes from freely traversing its own European recognized waters.
But Erdogan is also bumping up against other Mediterranean countries’ plans in the region — notably Israel and Egypt as well, at a moment he’s engaged in multiple crises both domestic and related to the West — even as Turkey has long sought EU membership.
Greece’s recognized waters and Exclusive Economic Zone (above) vs. Turkey’s proposed and expansive maritime claims (blue, below), with areas it now demands Athens must “demilitarized” in red.
And the above has since extended out to here via deal signed with Tripoli’s GNA:
Turkey has in the past demanded that Cyprus formally recognize the breakaway Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (since 1974) and allow it to share revenues from Cypriot gas exploration.
Furthermore Turkey has laid claim to a waters extending a whopping 200 miles from its coast, brazenly asserting ownership over a swathe of the Mediterranean that even cuts into Greece’s exclusive economic zone.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/24/2020 – 01:00 - They Killed King For The Same Reason They Killed Kennedy
They Killed King For The Same Reason They Killed Kennedy
Authored by Jacob Hornberger via The Future of Freedom Foundation,
Amidst all the anti-Russia brouhaha that has enveloped our nation, we shouldn’t forget that the U.S. national-security establishment — specifically the Pentagon, CIA, and FBI — was convinced that Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist agent who was spearheading a communist takeover of the United States.
This occurred during the Cold War, when Americans were made to believe that there was a gigantic international communist conspiracy to take over the United States and the rest of the world.
The conspiracy, they said, was centered in Moscow, Russia — yes, that Russia!
That was, in fact, the justification for converting the federal government to a national-security state type of governmental structure after the end of World War II. The argument was that a limited-government republic type of governmental structure, which was the nation’s founding governmental system, was insufficient to prevent a communist takeover of the United States. To prevail over the communists in what was being called a “Cold War,” it would be necessary for the federal government, they said, to become a national-security state so that it could wield the same type of sordid, dark-side, totalitarian-like practices that the communists themselves wielded and exercised.
The conviction that the communists were coming to get us became so predominant, primarily through official propaganda and indoctrination, especially in the nation’s public (i.e., government) schools, that the matter evolved into mass paranoia. Millions of Americans became convinced that there were communists everywhere. Americans were exhorted to keep a careful watch on everyone else, including their neighbors, and report any suspicious activity, much as Americans today are exhorted to do the same thing with respect to terrorists.
Some Americans would even look under their beds for communists. Others searched for communists in Congress and within the federal bureaucracies, even the Army, and Hollywood as well. One rightwing group became convinced that even President Eisenhower was an agent of the Soviet government.
In the midst of all this national paranoia, the FBI, the Pentagon, and the CIA became convinced that King was a communist agent. When King began criticizing U.S. interventionism in Vietnam, that solidified their belief that he was a communist agent. After all, they maintained, wouldn’t any true-blue American patriot rally to his government in time of war, not criticize or condemn it? Only a communist, they believed, would oppose his government when it was committed to killing communists in Vietnam.
Moreover, when King began advocating for civil rights, especially in the South, that constituted additional evidence, as far as the FBI, CIA, and Pentagon were concerned, that he was, in fact, a communist agent, one whose mission was to foment civil strife in America as a prelude to a communist takeover of America. How else to explain why a black man would be fighting for equal rights for blacks in nation that purported to be free?
The website kingcenter.org points out:
After four weeks of testimony and over 70 witnesses in a civil trial in Memphis, Tennessee, twelve jurors reached a unanimous verdict on December 8, 1999 after about an hour of deliberations that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. Mrs. Coretta Scott King welcomed the verdict saying, “There is abundant evidence of a major high level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband Martin Luther King Jr…. The jury was clearly convinced by the extensive evidence that was presented during the trial that, in addition to Mr. Jowers, the conspiracy of the Mafia, local, state and federal governments were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband.”
And why not? Isn’t it the duty of the U.S. national-security state to eradicate threats to national security? What bigger threat to national security than a person who is supposedly serving as an agent for the communists and also as a spearhead for an international communist conspiracy to take over the United States?
State-sponsored assassinations to protect national security were among the dark-side practices that began to be utilized after the federal government was converted into a national-security state. As early as 1953, the CIA was developing a formal assassination manual that trained its agents in the art of assassination and, equally important, in the art of concealing the CIA’s role in state-sponsored assassinations.
In 1954, the CIA targeted the democratically elected president of Guatemala for assassination because he was reaching out to Russia in a spirt of peace, friendship, and mutual co-existence. In 1960-61, the CIA conspired to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the head of the Congo because he was perceived to be a threat to U.S. national security. In the early 1960s, the CIA , in partnership with the Mafia, the world’s premier criminal organization, conspired to assassinate Fidel Castro, the leader of Cuba, a country that never attacked or invaded the United States. In 1973, the U.S. national-security state orchestrated a coup in Chile, where its counterparts in the Chilean national-security establishment conspired to assassinate the democratically elected president of the country, Salvador Allende, by firing missiles at his position in the national palace.
The mountain of circumstantial evidence that has accumulated since November 1963 has established that foreign officials weren’t the only ones who got targeted as threats to national security. As James W. Douglas documents so well in his remarkable and profound book JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, the U.S. national-security establishment also targeted President John F. Kennedy for a state-sponsored assassination as well.
Why did they target Kennedy?
For the same reason they targeted all those other people for assassination — they concluded that Kennedy had become a grave threat to national security and, they believed, it was their job to eliminate threats to national security.
After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy achieved a breakthrough that enabled him to recognize that the Cold War was just one great big racket for the national-security establishment and its army of “defense” contractors and sub-contractors.
That’s when JFK announced an end to the Cold War and began reaching out to the Soviets and the Cubans in a spirit of peace, friendship, and mutual coexistence. Kennedy’s Peace Speech at American University on June 10, 1963, where he announced his intent to end the Cold War and normalize relations with the communist world, sealed President Kennedy’s fate. That’s also what had sealed the fate of President Arbenz in Guatemala and what would seal the fate of President Allende in Chile. (See FFF’s bestselling book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas P. Horne, who served on the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s. Also see FFF’s bestselling book The Kennedy Autopsy by Jacob Hornberger and his recently published The Kennedy Autopsy 2.”)
But what many people often forget is that one day after his Peace Speech at American University, Kennedy delivered a major televised address to the nation defending the civil rights movement, the movement that King was leading.
What better proof of a threat to national security than that — reaching out to the communist world in peace and friendship and then, one day later, defending a movement that the U.S. national-security establishment was convinced was a spearhead for the communist takeover of the United States?
The loss of both Kennedy and King constituted conclusive confirmation that the worst mistake in U.S. history was to abandon a limited-government republic type of governmental system in favor of a totalitarian governmental structure known as a national-security state. A free nation does not fight communism with communist tactics and an omnipotent government. A free nation fights communism with freedom and limited government.
There is no doubt what both John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. would have thought about a type of totalitarian-like governmental structure that has led our nation in the direction of state-sponsored assassinations, torture, invasions, occupations, wars of aggression, coups, alliances with dictatorial regimes, sanctions, embargoes, regime-change operations, and massive death, suffering, and destruction, not to mention the loss of liberty and privacy here at home.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/23/2020 – 23:45 - The Future We Deserve: Your App-Enabled Dildo Or Butt Plug Could Be Spying On You
The Future We Deserve: Your App-Enabled Dildo Or Butt Plug Could Be Spying On You
Modern times come with modern problems, undoubtedly.
And look no further for proof of that than a recent C|Net write up detailing how some internet enabled sex toy manufacturers may not be taking privacy as seriously as one might like – especially given the sensitive nature of the types of data it is collecting.
And enabled sex toys are big business. In November of last year, we highlighted how one Nevada brothel was using sex robots and internet-enabled toys to help “satisfy” its customers.
Sex was on full display at the CES in Las Vegas last week, with all types of internet enabled toys on display. Almost all of these toys connect to apps, which then, in turn, collect data. There are apps that monitor orgasms, save vibration patterns and let you connect with your long-distance partner’s toy.
And while some in the industry are taking security seriously, the rest of the products are “all over the map”, according to Nicole Schwartz, a researcher for Internet of Dongs (yes, that is actually her company’s name).
She said: “Two out of three of these companies are not conscientious about security. The ones you are going to see at CES are obviously a little more tech-minded, so you’re seeing a particularly biased section of the market.”
Back in 2016, when the industry was still budding, Brad Haines founded Internet of Dongs after discovering just how bad security was for sex-toy apps. “It was rather terrifying at the beginning, just how bad it was, This was an industry that never had to deal with connectivity before. There’s no one around to say, ‘That doesn’t seem like a good idea,'” he said.
The device isn’t so much the issue – the app software is where compromises are “more likely” to happen, he notes.
And it isn’t just software that can be compromised that users have to worry about, it’s companies’ misuse of their data. One company, Hong Kong-based Hytto, was accused of “secretly stor[ing] and monitor[ing] the personal data of users of its Lush vibrator — including the time and date of use — without their consent.”
The company’s chief marketing officer responded: “We don’t sell our users’ data, and we only use it for customer service issues, and we wipe those logs regularly.”
We bet you do.
Soum Rakshit, CEO of another internet enabled sex toy company, MysteryVibe said: “We have no profiles, because we strongly believe nothing is unhackable. A lot of people spend months debating the color of a product. If we can give security the same level of design importance, then we won’t have to worry about it later. The biggest selling point is it saves you time and money if you do it in the beginning.”
Internet of Dongs researcher Schwartz offered several things you can do if you’re in the market for a toy and want to do your research: “Check their website and see — do they require you to create an account? Do they talk about security? Are they specific at all — do they say things like ‘We encrypt everything’?”
The consequences of playing it fast and loose (no pun intended) with data are real. They led sex tech company We-Vibe into a lawsuit that ultimately cost them $3.75 million in 2016.
And this isn’t the only risk that internet-enabled sex toy owners take on. Last September, we also wrote about criminals were hacking these devices and sexually assaulting people using them.
Welcome to the future we all deserve.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/23/2020 – 23:25 - The American Chaos Machine – Mad Policies For A Mad World
The American Chaos Machine – Mad Policies For A Mad World
Authored by US Army Major (ret.) Danny Sjursen, via TomDispatch.com,
In March 1906, on the heels of the U.S. Army’s massacre of some 1,000 men, women, and children in the crater of a volcano in the American-occupied Philippines, humorist Mark Twain took his criticism public. A long-time anti-imperialist, he flippantly suggested that Old Glory should be redesigned “with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.”
I got to thinking about that recently, five years after I became an antiwar dissenter (while still a major in the U.S. Army), and in the wake of another near-war, this time with Iran. I was struck yet again by the way every single U.S. military intervention in the Greater Middle East since 9/11 has backfired in wildly counterproductive ways, destabilizing a vast expanse of the planet stretching from West Africa to South Asia.
Chaos, it seems, is now Washington’s stock-in-trade. Perhaps, then, it’s time to resurrect Twain’s comment – only today maybe those stars on our flag should be replaced with the universal symbol for chaos.
After all, our present administration, however unhinged, hardly launched this madness. President Trump’s rash, risky, and repugnant decision to assassinate Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani on the sovereign soil of Iraq was only the latest version of what has proven to be a pervasive state of affairs. Still, that and Trump’s other recent escalations in the region do illustrate an American chaos machine that’s gone off the rails. And the very manner — I’m loathe to call it a “process” — by which it’s happened just demonstrates the way this president has taken American chaos to its dark but logical conclusion.
The Goldilocks Method
Any military officer worth his salt knows full well the importance of understanding the basic psychology of your commander. President George W. Bush liked to call himself “the decider,” an apt term for any commander. Senior leaders don’t, as a rule, actually do that much work in the traditional sense. Rather, they hobnob with superiors, buck up unit morale, evaluate and mentor subordinates, and above all make key decisions. It’s the operations staff officers who analyze problems, present options, and do the detailed planning once the boss blesses or signs off on a particular course of action.
Though they may toil thanklessly in the shadows, however, those staffers possess immense power to potentially circumscribe the range of available options and so influence the future mission. In other words, to be a deft operations officer, you need to know your commander’s mind, be able translate his sparse guidance, and frame his eventual choice in such a manner that the boss leaves a “decision briefing” convinced the plan was his own. Believe me, this is the actual language military lifers use to describe the tortured process of decision-making.
In 2009, as a young captain, fresh out of Baghdad, Iraq, I spent two unfulfilling, if instructive, years enmeshed in exactly this sort of planning system. As a battalion-level planner, then assistant, and finally a primary operations officer, I observed this cycle countless times. So allow me to take you “under the hood” for some inside baseball. I — and just about every new staff officer — was taught to always provide the boss with three plans, but to suss out ahead of time which one he’d choose (and, above all, which one you wanted him to choose).
Confident in your ability to frame his choices persuasively, you’d often even direct your staffers to begin writing up the full operations order before the boss’s briefing took place. The key to success was what some labeled the Goldilocks method. You’d always present your commander with a too-cautious option, a too-risky option, and a “just-right” course of action. It nearly always worked.
I did this under the command of two very different lieutenant colonels. The first was rational, ethical, empathetic, and tactically competent. He made mission planning easy on his staff. He knew the game as well as we did and only pretended to be fooled. He built relationships with his senior operations officers over the course of months, thereby revealing his preferred methods, tactical predilections, and even personal learning style. Then he’d give just enough initial guidance — far more than most commanders — to set his staff going in a reasonably focused fashion.
Unfortunately, that consummate professional moved on to bigger things and his replacement was a sociopath who gave vague, often conflicting guidance, oozed insecurity in briefings, and had a disturbing penchant for choosing the most radical (read: foolhardy) option around. Sound familiar? It should!
Still, military professionals are coached to adapt and improvise and so we did. As a staff we worked to limit his range of options by reverse-ordering the choices we presented him or even lying about nonexistent logistical limitations to stop him from doing the truly horrific.
And as recent events remind us, such exercises play out remarkably similarly, no matter whether you’re dealing at a battalion level (perhaps 400 to 700 troops) or that of this country’s commander-in-chief (more than two million uniformed service personnel). The behind-the-scenes war-gaming of the boss, the entire calculus, remains the same, whether the options are ultimately presented by a captain (me, then) or — as in the recent decision to assassinate Iranian Major General Suleimani — Mark Milley, the four-star general at the helm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Soon after President Trump’s egregious, a-strategic, dubiously legal, unilateral execution of a uniformed leader of a sovereign country, reports surfaced describing his convoluted decision-making process. Perhaps predictably, it appears that The Donald took his military staff by surprise and chose the most extreme measure they presented him with — assassinating a foreign military figure. Honestly, that this president did so should have surprised no one. That, according to a report in the New York Times, his generals were indeed surprised strikes me as basic dereliction of duty (especially given that, seven months earlier, Trump had essentially given the green light to such a future assassination — the deepest desire, by the way, of both his secretary of state and his then-national security advisor, John Bolton).
At this point in their careers, having played out such processes at every possible level for at least 30 years, his generals ought to have known their boss better, toiled valiantly to temper his worst instincts, assumed he might choose the most extreme measure offered and, when he did so, publicly resigned before potentially relegating their soldiers to a hopeless new conflict. That they didn’t, particularly that the lead briefer Milley didn’t, is just further proof that, 18-plus years after our latest round of wars began, such senior leaders lack both competence and integrity.
Bush, Obama, and the Chaos Machine’s Tragic Foundations
The current commander-in-chief could never have expanded America’s wars in the Greater Middle East (contra his campaign promises) or unilaterally drone-assassinated a foreign leader, without the militaristic foundations laid down for him by George W. Bush and Barack Obama. So it’s vital to review, however briefly, the chaotic precedents to the rule of Donald Trump.
Guided by a coterie of neoconservative zealots, Bush the Younger committed the nation to the “original sin” of expansive, largely unsanctioned wars as his chosen response to the 9/11 attacks. It was his team that would write the playbook on selling an ill-advised, illegal invasion of Iraq based on bad intelligence and false pretenses. He also escalated tensions with Iran to the brink of war by including the Islamic Republic in an imaginary “axis of evil” (with Iraq and North Korea) after invading first one of its neighbors, Afghanistan, and then the other, Iraq, while imposing sanctions, which froze the assets of Iranians allegedly connected to that country’s nuclear program. He ushered in the use of torture, indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, illegal domestic mass surveillance, and drone attacks over the sovereign airspace of other countries — then lied about it all. That neither Congress, nor the courts, nor his successor held him (or anyone else) accountable for such decisions set a dangerous new standard for foreign policy.
Barack Obama promised “hope and change,” a refreshing (if vague) alternative to the sins of the Bush years. The very abstraction of that slogan, however, allowed his supporters to project their own wants, needs, and preferred policies onto the future Obama experiment. So perhaps none of us ought to have been as surprised as many of us were when, despite slowly pulling troops out of Iraq, he only escalated the Afghan War, continued the forever wars in general (even returning to Iraq in 2014), and set his own perilous precedents along the way.
It was, after all, Obama who, as an alternative to large-scale military occupations, took Bush’s drone program and ran with it. He would be the first president to truly earn the sobriquet “assassin-in-chief.” He made selecting individuals for assassination in “Terror Tuesday” meetings at the White House banal and put his stamp of approval on the drone campaigns across significant parts of the planet that followed — even killing American citizens without due process. Encouraged by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he also launched a new regime-change war in Libya, turning that land into a failed state filled with terror groups, a decision which, he later admitted, added up to a “shit show.” After vacillating for a couple years, he also mired the U.S., however indirectly, in the Syrian civil war, empowering Islamist factions there and worsening that already staggering humanitarian catastrophe.
In response to the sudden explosion of the Islamic State — an al-Qaeda offshoot first catalyzed by the Bush invasion of Iraq and actually formed in an American prison in that country — its taking of key Iraqi cities and smashing of the American-trained Iraqi army, Obama loosed U.S. air power on them and sent American troops back into that country. He also greatly expanded his predecessor’s nascent military interventions across the African continent. There, too, the results were largely tragic and counterproductive as ethnic militias and Islamic terror groups have spread widely and civil warfare has exploded.
Finally, it was Obama who first sanctioned, supported, and enabled the Saudi terror bombing of Yemen, which, even now, remains perhaps the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. So it is that, from Mali to Libya, Syria to Afghanistan, every one of Bush’s and Obama’s military forays has sowed further chaos, startling body counts, and increased rates of terrorism. It’s those policies, those results, and the military toolbox that went with them that Donald J. Trump inherited in January 2017.
The Trumpian Perfect Storm
During the climax to the American phase of a 30-year war in Vietnam, newly elected President Richard Nixon, a well-established Republican cold warrior, developed what he dubbed the “madman theory“ for bringing the intractable U.S. intervention there to a face-saving conclusion. The president’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, recalled Nixon telling him:
“I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button’ and [North Vietnamese leader] Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”
It didn’t work, of course. Nixon escalated and expanded the war. He briefly invaded neighboring Cambodia and Laos, secretly (and illegally) bombed both countries, and ramped up air strikes on North Vietnam. Apart from slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocents, however, none of this had a notable effect on the ultimate outcome. The North Vietnamese called his bluff, extending the war long enough to force an outright American withdrawal less than four years later. Washington lost in Southeast Asia, just as today it’s losing in the Greater Middle East.
So it was, with the necessary foundations of militarism and hyper-interventionism in place, that Donald Trump entered the White House, at times seemingly intent on testing out his own personal “fire and fury” version of the madman theory. Indeed, his more irrational and provocative foreign policy incitements, including pulling out of the Paris climate accords, spiking a working nuclear deal with Iran, existentially threatening North Korea, seizing Syrian oil fields, sending yet more military personnel into the Persian Gulf region, and most recently assassinating a foreign leader seem right out of some madman instruction manual. And just like Nixon’s stillborn escalations, Trump’s most absurd moves also seem bound to fail.
Take the Suleimani execution as a case in point. An outright regional war has (so far) been avoided, thanks not to the “deal-making” skills of that self-styled “stable genius” in the White House but to Iran’s long history of restraint. As retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, a former top aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell, recently put it: “The leadership in Tehran is far more rational than the leadership in Washington.”
In fact, Trump’s unprecedented assassination order backfired at every level. He even managed briefly to unite a divided Iranian nation, caused the Iraqi government to demand a full U.S. troop withdrawal from that country, convinced Iran to end its commitment to restrain its enrichment of uranium, and undoubtedly incentivized both Tehran and Pyongyang not to commit to, or abide by, any future nuclear deals with Washington.
If George W. Bush and Barack Obama sowed the seeds of the American chaos machine, Donald Trump represents the first true madman at the wheel of state, thanks to his volatile temperament, profound ignorance, and crippling insecurity.
The Rapture as Foreign Policy
All of which raises another disturbing question: What if this administration’s chaos-sowing proves an end in itself, one that coheres with the millenarian fantasies of sections of the Republican Christian Right? After all, several key figures on the Trump team — notably Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence — explicitly view the Middle East as evangelical Christians. Like a disturbing 73% of evangelicals (or 20% of the U.S. population), Pompeo and Pence believe that the Rapture (that is, the prophesied Christian end of the world) is likely to unfold in this generation and that a contemporary conflict in Israel and an impending war with Iran might actually be trigger events ushering in just such an apocalypse.
Donald Trump is, by all indications, far too self-serving, self-absorbed, and cynical to adhere to the eschatological blind-faith of the two Mikes. He clearly believes only in Donald Trump. And yet what a terrible irony it would be if, due to his perfect-storm disposition, he unwittingly ends up playing the role of the very Antichrist those evangelicals believe necessary to usher in end-times.
Given the foundations set in place for Trump by George W. Bush and Barack Obama and his capacity to throw caution to the wind, it’s hard to imagine a better candidate to play that role.
* * *
Danny Sjursen, a TomDispatch regular, is a retired U.S. Army major and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now lives in Lawrence, Kansas. He has written a memoir of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his podcast “Fortress on a Hill,” co-hosted with fellow vets Chris Henriksen and Keegan Ryan Miller.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/23/2020 – 23:05 - Vail Resorts Season-To-Date Skier Visits Plunge 7.8%
Vail Resorts Season-To-Date Skier Visits Plunge 7.8%
Maybe the consumer is too broke to ski this year?
A day at Vail Resorts, that is, if you rent skis and purchase a lift ticket, could cost upwards of $300 per day. And that doesn’t include lodging!
All said and done, a heavily indebted consumer, or let’s say a broke millennial, could spend upwards of $500 per day on ski rental, lift ticket, and lodging (ex. food expenses).
A typical visit to Vail isn’t just one day but rather a weekend trip. So, the consumer might spend upwards of $1,500 – all charged to their credit cards with an average rate of 17%.
The consumer has had to make some tough choices at the start of the 2020 ski season – it comes down to debt servicing payments, like student debt, auto loans, and credit cards, or experience a weekend at Vail. The holiday hangover, where consumers loaded up their credit cards with holiday purchases, might be another reason why they can’t afford to ski. The exact causes are unknown.
Vail Resorts reported Friday that the ski season, which started on January 05, was off to a very slow start compared to the beginning of last season.
Season-to-date skier visits were down 7.8% compared with the first several weeks of the opening ski season last year.
The report said season-to-date lift ticket revenue was up 0.40% over the same period.
Ski school revenue was up 2%, and dining revenue was down 3% over the first several weeks compared to last year.
Retail/rental revenue for North American resorts and ski area store locations was also down 1.8%.
Commenting on the start of a possible disastrous ski season is Rob Katz, Chief Executive Officer, who said:
“Relative to the strong conditions in the prior year, the 2019/2020 North American ski season got off to a slower start, impacting both our local and destination guest visitation in the pre-holiday period through December 19, 2019.
“Given the strong conditions last year, the initial guidance for the fiscal year 2020 incorporated the possibility of a slower start to the season.”
So if it’s a $300 to $500 per day or upwards of $1,500 for the weekend for a Vail trip, does the broke consumer really have that much to spend? So far, the answer to the question at the start of the season is no.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/23/2020 – 22:45 - The Debate Is Over: In Two Months "Not QE" Officially Becomes QE 4
The Debate Is Over: In Two Months “Not QE” Officially Becomes QE 4
While Neel Kashkari may be theatrically appealing to the intellect of “QE conspiracists” – which as of today in addition to Robert Kaplan, Larry Kudlow and James Gorman also includes as per the chart below Bank of America, in addition to any other person with an even modest understanding of monetary policy…
… to explain to him how the Fed is moving prices with its $60BN in monthly purchases of T-Bills (something we did last week), an key development is coming that will make all such debates moot: in a few months the Fed’s “Not QE” will officially become “QE 4.”
The reason: following an update to BMO’s bill supply forecasts, the bank’s rates strategist Jon Hill sees a great likelihood that the Fed will need to reduce its “demand burden” on the bill market, i.e., there won’t be enough Bills available for the Fed to monetize without it distorting the market, and will extend the purchase program to include short coupons in the process officially ending any debate whether the Fed’s manipulation of the market under the guise of saving repo, is “Not QE”, because it is limited to Bills and thus no duration is taken out of the market, or is “QE 4”, in which the Fed purchases at least some coupon securities in addition to Bills.
Once the Fed makes the shift, BMO expects the monthly sizes of $60 bn, or $30 bn post assumed taper, would be composed of both bills and short coupons, “helping to reduce expected pressure in the bill market. “
At this point, Hill puts 75% odds on this change occurring by mid-March, meaning that any farcical “debate” whether the Fed’s injection of anywhere between $60 and $100BN in liquidity each month into the equity market, is or isn’t QE, will very soon be mercifully over.
What if BMO is wrong, and the Fed does not adjust purchases to include short coups? In that case, the Canadian banks foresees a $321 billion reduction in bill supply in Q2 2020…
… which would be the largest quarterly drop in privately available outstandings on record.
Furthermore, Hill predicts that that the Treasury’s introduction of 20-year supply would also marginally contribute to reduced Q2 bill issuance.
This squeeze is driven more by the Fed’s purchase program, rather than a sudden shift in the Treasury Department’s cash needs. Indeed, a look at borrowing needs less net coupon issuance shows Q2 2020 will be -$236 bn, essentially in line with -$229 bn in Q2 2019. In other words, what makes Q2 2020 different is the full consequences of the Fed’s footprint in the bill market.
It is also worth noting that that these figures reflect BMO’s assumption that the Fed tapers their “reserve management program” (and soon, QE-4) from $60 billion per month to $30 billion per month in mid-March, so if the tapering does not occur, the squeeze will be that much more.
Now, “why doesn’t the Fed stop their Bill (and soon Note) Purchases earlier?” one may ask? The short answer, according to Hill, is that the system still requires reserve injections – after all anything less and the equity market will crack – and the Fed wants to gradually reduce its repo footprint. While repo take-up from the Fed has fallen by $80 bn since year-end, there remains nearly $200 bn in demand. Since the beginning of December, the combined reserve management purchases plus repo injections has been approximately $400 bn.
As a result, in BMO’s baseline scenario, the bill purchase program will total $390BN by the time it is unwound (before it returns again, of course). This will continue to displace demand for Fed repo operations, but not at a sufficient pace as to allow for a full stop of the reserve management purchases before Q2. Instead, and as we predicted last October, the most prudent policy adjustment per Hill, appears to be expanding the program to include short coupons in the next couple months
One key question which may be asked by all those who still don’t get the nuance of the debate among the “Not QE” and “QE” crowd, is “what’s the hesitation for the Fed buying coupons in addition to bills?”
The answer is simple: by focusing only on T-bill purchases, the Fed was given a semantic loophole, and was able to fall back on Powell’s October 2019 vow that “in no sense is this QE”, since it’s easier to make the argument because it does not directly drive long-end yields down (of course, as we explained the mere continued injection of up to $100BN in liquidity each month is all the market cares about). This would also be the case if they only purchased coupons maturing in one year
or less.The second reason why the Fed is reluctant to expand purchases to include short coupons is the way they have signaled their reaction function on the topic. According to BMO, “in the current framework, it appears that they would need to actually observe liquidity impairment in bills before tweaking the program details.” One reason not mentioned by BMO is that with the Fed officially set to transition to QE, it will no longer be possible for Powell to evade a discussion over the new round of monetary easing – i.e., QE4 – and the cascade of question why this is happening when unemployment is 3.5%, when wage growth is 3.0%, and when the US economy is nowhere near a crisis like the one that launched the original QE. Unless, of course, the US is very near a crisis, and the Fed knows much more than it is letting on…
The last question: “If the Fed pivoted to short coupons, when would they announce the change?”
In terms of timing, the focus on disconnecting the reserve management purchases from true monetary policy makes
it unlikely (though not impossible) that the announcement would come at an FOMC meeting. Instead, our focus will
be on the upcoming operational announcements – the next one is February 13 at 3:00 PM ET.
If the FOMC wanted to signal that a pivot into short coupons was imminent, we see two primary avenues: Powell’s
press conference on January 29 (he’s sure to receive a question or two on the topic) and the January meeting Minutes
which will be released on February 19.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/23/2020 – 22:25 - General Dynamics Releases New Video Of Its Next-Generation Assault Rifle
General Dynamics Releases New Video Of Its Next-Generation Assault Rifle
General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems, a business unit of General Dynamics, tweeted a new video of its next-generation assault rifle.
Defense Blog said General Dynamics is developing the weapon for the Army’s Next Generation Squad Weapon – Automatic Rifle (NGSR-AR) program.
Long range lethality, reduced signature, minimum soldier load ➖ The future is back on the show floor at #shotshow2020 #NGSW pic.twitter.com/GGSwtDI8Tp
— General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems (@GD_OTS) January 21, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The NGSR-AR is expected to replace the M249 squad automatic weapon, while the NGSW-R (Rifle) will replace M4 carbine.
NGSR-AR and NGSW-R are expected to replace the current field weapons in the next several years.
These new weapons are expected to include “sophisticated technologies such as ballistic calculation, intelligent targeting and tracking capabilities, wireless communication and advanced camera-based capabilities,” said Defense Blog.
We’ve noted before, NGSR-AR and NGSW-R’s firepower will be able to shoot at much greater distances, able to penetrate the world’s most advanced body armor. The weapons are expected to be lightweight and have reduced acoustic and flash signature.
Last week, the Special Operation Command (USSOCOM) granted Sig Sauer a safety certification for its new MG 338 Machine Gun, 338 Norma Mag Ammunition, and Next Generation Suppressors.
Last year, Textron Systems’ AAI Corporation delivered its next-generation machine gun to the Army that chambers a telescoped round between 6.5mm and 6.8mm and is expected to be another weapon that could replace either the M249 or M4 carbine.
The Pentagon, flush with new cash from President Trump’s $2 trillion military spending spree, is expected to fully outfit combat troops with next-generation weapons in the next 2-4 years.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/23/2020 – 22:05 - $180 Billion Asset Manager: "There Is No Way Out, Fed Policies Can No Longer Be Exited Without Provoking The Next Crisis"
$180 Billion Asset Manager: “There Is No Way Out, Fed Policies Can No Longer Be Exited Without Provoking The Next Crisis”
When just over three years ago, TCW’s Chief Investment Officer in Fixed Income, Tad Rivelle, who oversees roughly $180BN in assets, or more than Jeff Gundlach, stated that we are now living through the third consecutive asset bubble in a row, “the central bankers’ bubble” which followed the dot com and housing bubbles…
… he naturally caused a stir as back then he was still one of the first established professionals to confirm and admit that this particular “tinfoil conspiracy theory” website had been right all along: the market’s performance was entirely due to the Fed, and that the longer the Fed’s “emergency” measures continued, the more locked in the central bank would be as the reverse process, namely price discovery without Fed intervention, would result in a catastrophic crisis that could even lead to global war.
A few years later, Tad Rivelle’s then shocking report would have barely registered, as it is now common knowledge that every single market is distorted beyond comprehension due to Fed policies (with a handful of idiots still pretending that’s not true), and while everyone knows that continued central bank intervention will only make the ensuing final crash that much greater, nobody has any idea how to detach the Fed from capital markets.
Which brings us to Rivelle’s latest note, which while far less controversial this time, still manages to hit the nail on the head with punchlines which once again excoriates the “free market” for becoming more centrally planned than the USSR had ever hoped to become.
We urge everyone to read it.
* * *
The Fed Continues to Continue to Pretend
<!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>
In his seminal work, The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam wrote how rather than being dazzled by the extraordinary resumes of the Kennedy cabinet, then Vice President Johnson remarked he’d feel a whole lot better had just a single one of them ever run for something practical, such as local sheriff. There is no denying the erudition of the modern central banker, but practically speaking, a decade and more has passed since the financial crisis, and crisis era policies are not only still with us – they have been expanded. The $60 billion per month that the Fed is now purchasing for its balance sheet is a new record rate of asset accumulation. It’s no denying: QE played a pivotal role in the bull market in everything. Yet, virtually everyone, everywhere sees the conundrum: growth fostered by rising leverage can never be sustainable. And yet, unsustainable monetary policy continues for the simple reason that ending it would bring consequences that no one can accept.The intended consequences of the last decade’s worth of Fed policies are obvious for all to behold. It is the unintended consequences, those that undermine the sustainability of the current asset price regime that are of most interest here.
In the land that monetary policy forgot, when a worker worked, he received his paycheck, from which he freely consumed. Any surplus – or savings – was added to his pool of “loanable funds” which would then be auctioned out to a willing “bidder,” say a bank, a mutual fund, or a rental income opportunity. But when the 2008 crisis hit, market clearing levels for loanable funds were exorbitant. Credit was priced out of reach for all but the most pristine (prudent) borrowers, asset prices were in free fall, and a financial system that had built an excess of leverage was at risk of implosion.
So it was with the best of intentions, the Fed initiated a suite of policies that included QE. Technocratic justifications aside, QE enabled the “printing” of new loanable funds. Unlike the worker who had to provide something of value in exchange for receipt of his loanable funds, the Fed simply conjured new funds from the electronic ether, thereby massively diluting the existing private sector pool of loanable funds. Predictably, bank deposit rates tanked, credit spreads tightened and cap rates were yanked downwards.
Of course, an asset price inflation spurred on by an expansion of credit is exactly what Dr. Bernanke initially ordered up, though you may recall that he never intended the artificial expansion in loanable funds to be a permanent policy. That all changed with the 2013 “taper tantrum” and was reinforced by the 2018 abortive attempt by the Powell Fed to “normalize” rates and balance sheet so slowly that it was supposed to be like watching “paint dry.” Policies implemented as a response to crisis now can’t be exited without provoking the next crisis.
Monetary policies have long since become more problem than solution. This ought not to be such a surprise as the supply side of any economy will invariably configure itself to meet its demand side. And those activities spurred by artificially cheap credit will disappear once that credit is repriced. Raising rates and normalizing the Fed’s balance sheet would now be tantamount to pulling the pegs out from the bottom of the Jenga tower. Fundamentally, you can’t exit a Potemkin economy without forcing changes in the kind and quantities of demand. But, that, of course, would force the supply side to adjust. In other words, we’d have recession.
Exhibit 1: Fed Policies Have Lifted P/E Multiples, Yet Aggregate Profits Have Stagnated
* NIPA pretax profits for U.S. companies adjusted for inventory valuation (IVA) and capital consumption (CC Adj.)
Source: BEA, Bloomberg, IMF, national central banks, TCWAbsent a crisis, faith in the power of monetary tools to foster a healthy configuration of labor and capital has long been severely misplaced. But market forces are powerful precisely because they are rooted in practical realities. Economics is always about the management of scarcity and while expansions in the supply of credit may shift who gets to buy what resources from whom and when, the plain fact is that a scarce commodity remains so regardless of whether interest rates are high or low. While we may be glossing over notions of relative scarcity versus absolute scarcity, an approachable example, say the supply of oceanfront homes, can serve to illustrate the point.
In the example, market forces must necessarily balance the number of people who can buy oceanfront real estate to match the scarcity of oceanfront homes. These constraints can and do, at different times, take the form of high mortgage rates, home price, or loan underwriting standards. And if sales of oceanfront homes were languishing for some reason, the Fed could “stimulate” activity by lowering mortgage rates.
Yet while the Fed can print new loanable funds it can’t add to the supply of oceanfront real estate. So when access to such real estate is no longer limited by say high mortgage rates, home prices will necessarily rise so that a proper rationing mechanism remains in place for the scarce commodity. Indeed, is this not an apt metaphor for what has happened to the price of much U.S. real estate across many metropolitan areas?
While a card carrying Keynesian would point out that rising real estate prices is “obviously” stimulative because higher prices spur such activities as home improvement adding revenue to the construction trades, one has to wonder: an instructive critique of this way of thinking can be found in the entertaining 19th century treatise by Bastiat on the fallacy of the “broken window.” Wherever you might come down on the argument, the basic point is that trying to fool Mr. Market works about as well as trying to fool Mother Nature. If monetary policy were the key to an earthly prosperity, surely all nations would have bootstrapped themselves by the simple artifice of helicopter money.
Indeed, rather than igniting an economic boom, cheap and abundant credit have, instead, fostered an elevation in asset prices relative to fundamentals. For instance, enterprise profits for corporate America have gone more or less nowhere for five years (Exhibit 1), but through the magic of share repurchases, higher EPS has helped lift stock prices. In a similar vein, covenant lite loans have enabled private equity to purchase businesses at high multiples all the while retaining an abundance of optionality vis-à-vis the loan/noteholder that has been unprecedented. In short, the right side of the corporate balance sheet can be profoundly altered by central bank policy, but long-term growth is a function of businesses operating more effectively, a reality that shows itself not on the right but rather on the left side of the balance sheet. Operational improvements work best when the incentives to do so are market based – not when credit is artificially cheap.
Exhibit 2: Covenant-Lite Loans As % of All Newly Issued Institutional Loans
Source: LCD, S&P Global Market Intelligence And, this brings us full circle to the reality of the past decade: credit binges are always popular because while the benefits of leverage come today, the costs of bad debt come tomorrow. Improving a business or learning a skill requires dedication and hard work. Monetary “stimulus” offers a siren like promise of effortless prosperity yet ignores the reality that credit binges always sow the seeds of their future destruction.
If this sounds a tad abstract, consider September 15 last. On that day, the normally dull as dishwater overnight repo lending rate soared to an astonishing 10% annualized rate. A shocked Fed felt compelled to “do something,” which these days invariably means adding still further to the pool of loanable funds. The size of the add (via the Fed’s T-bill purchases and expansion of its repo facility) has been nearly a cool half-trillion, well over half of the total size of the Fed’s pre-crisis balance sheet. The Fed justified adding this tidal wave of liquidity notwithstanding its characterization that what happened was a mere “technical” glitch in the repo market. Technical, really? A practical take is that the market is talking to the best and brightest minds in central banking, and the Fed doesn’t like what it’s hearing: the repo market wants to clear at rates above the Fed’s IOER fiat rate, which, if allowed to do so, would likely invert the front-end of the yield curve. Inverting curves sounds a bit too much like ending a credit binge, leading to recession, and so the Fed’s response function is to “veto” (Latin for “I forbid”) the market’s signal. Now, who’s fooling whom?
And, so the Fed continues to continue to pretend the cycle need never end. But markets will be what they must be, and investors must face the consequences of the last decade’s credit binge…tomorrow.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/23/2020 – 21:45 - Audio: Harvey Weinstein Threatens Actress Over Massage; Accuser Breaks Down In Tears For 'Letting Him Rape Her'
Audio: Harvey Weinstein Threatens Actress Over Massage; Accuser Breaks Down In Tears For ‘Letting Him Rape Her’
Journalist Ronan Farrow has released an audio recording of Harvey Weinstein threatening actress Amber Guttierez with missing out on ‘big opportunities’ if she didn’t trust her and do “relaxing things” with him such as “Massages” and “something fun,” that her career would suffer.
“If you want to spend time with me I will mentor you, I will teach you or whatever but you have to, you know, relax with me, have fun, enjoy,” Weinstein can be heard on the covert recording used in a failed 2015 sting orchestrated by the NYPD.
“What things?” asks Guttierez.
“Nothing, just relaxing things. Massages, something fun,” Weinstein replies.
After the back-and-forth continues, the disgraced movie mogul says “If you do not trust me, then we have no reason to do anything and you will lose big opportunities.”
Today’s #CatchAndKill Podcast looks at Harvey Weinstein’s pattern of dangling career opportunities that quickly turned into traps—and lets you hear him doing it through astonishing new tape from a police sting operation. Subscribe here: https://t.co/649mmaiRam pic.twitter.com/vv1lNtRBgb
— Ronan Farrow (@RonanFarrow) January 21, 2020
In a second recording, Weinstein accuser Lucia Evans describes how she allowed Weinstein to overpower her – recalling ‘giving up’ in a 2004 incident at his Miramax office in Tribeca.
“I tried to struggle away but he’s a big guy, you know?” Evans told Farrow when she called him before the journalist released his bombshell report on Weinstein.
“So he overpowered me but I don’t know if I, along the process, I think I just sort of gave up,” she added, while breaking into tears.
“Right? Like that’s where I feel like… if he 1000 percent forced me and I was like screaming and like fighting him to the death I would feel like a little more proud of this whole situation but I think.”
On this week’s #CatchAndKill Pod, Lucia Evans offers a public service, letting me air our first call, where she breaks down describing her assault. It reveals a lot about the stakes of abuses of power. (Also upsetting—take care while listening.) Subscribe: https://t.co/649mmaiRam pic.twitter.com/2ar04Crqbk
— Ronan Farrow (@RonanFarrow) January 22, 2020
Weinstein will return to court in Manhattan on Tuesday for his ongoing trial for five counts of sexual assault. If convicted on all of them, he faces life in prison.
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jshttps://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/23/2020 – 21:25 - China's Cultural "Group-Think" Is Worth Exploring
China’s Cultural “Group-Think” Is Worth Exploring
Authored by Bruce Wilds via Advancing Time blog,
For decades China has been pushing its people towards a more “homogeneous way of thinking.” This article is focused on exploring some of the cultural “group-think” countries tend to breed into their population. This is especially true in a country like China where the controlling party assumes the role of plotting society’s course “for the greater good.” I’m very concerned that governments across the world will up their game when it comes to shaping public opinion. Across the world, all the new technology available is rapidly tightening the noose around the neck of individual thought.
China’s Cultural And “Group Think”
Reducing political descent was a core principle of the cultural revolution led by Mao Tse-tung. The Red Guards formed by his youthful followers conducted a mass purge of the “undesirables.” They then went on to send the young intellectuals living in the cities into the countryside to be “re-educated” through hard manual labor. This is an example of how propaganda can turn a population to a single focus and direction which causes its members can march in lockstep. With this in mind, it has only been in the last couple of years that the narrative of China being a threat to America has been bantered about. Before that America was busy patting itself on its back for bringing a backward China into the modern world.
Recently a person commenting on another article wrote;
I have worked in China several times over the years and the rate of change has been incredible. In 1976, state store shelves were nearly empty, later, huge multistory department stores were packed with Western-style goods and customers. But, the people were not totally happy. The Chinese have been described as bandits with a thin patina of civilization. They are as greedy as the West used to be for social progress.
Younger Americans seem to seek after this Chinese ‘miracle,’ thinking that Communism is responsible for the wealth increase. In reality, it is Communism with a capitalist bent. When this slows down we will be “equal.” Then America will follow China back to individualism and populism as was common in an earlier China and the West.
This person may or may not have a good grasp of where things are headed. With this in mind, trying to understand and learn about different cultures is important. The world is at a place in its development where individuals may soon lose their ability to influence the path forward. This means our future is becoming more concentrated in the hands of a few. These elite have assumed the role of leading and shaping society. The problem with this is these so-called leaders will most likely be quick to place their best interest solidly in front of those they govern.
We get a rather different view of China and its people from these videos posted online from two young well-grounded fellas that have lived there for a while. It is a bit different from what has been portrayed over the last few decades by mainstream media. Below are a slew of their videos currently on YouTube. In their videos, they give their take on the area from a boots on the ground perspective rather than an economist view from an ivory tower. This means they seem to look at the Chinese and its current culture from the bottom up rather than the top down. I highly recommend this “ADVChina” series. It is more or less an Adventure Travel show on motorbikes, while it may not be super polished, it is real.
* This video gives their take on China’s lack of interest and sensitivity to other cultures.
* China has a phrase, and it’s “mei ban fa”. You will hear this everywhere you go. Can you fix this? This is very important in understanding the Chinese “no solution I don’t care attitude.”
* In this video, the guys give their take on China’s “Belt and Road” initiative which they see as problematic and declare it will be a failure.
* Ghost City-Inside The China Housing Bubble (very important-7 minutes in) they explain this deck of cards. If you listen closely you can almost hear the empty buildings deteriorating in the distance.
* Living in Japan versus China
* The secrets of Chinese HOTELS
* Collectivism vs. Individualism is a major mental block for people in different countries. They discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both and why China will beat America
* The fellas talk about China’s dystopian social credit system which we have heard so much about.
Without a doubt, China is far less polarized and divided than America where people seem unable to agree on much of anything. The Chinese people, however, appear far more accepting and less willing to take responsibility for much of anything. Individuality runs strong in the human animal, there are pros and cons about the fact we can agree on so little. This is why so many people desire to create a homogeneous society. This is perhaps the most ancient, universal, and subconscious goal that leaders have sought to achieve. This idea stands as a utopian goal where humanity can flourish without strife and conflict.
Forced group-think is evident in how China treats the millions of its citizens that do not make an effort to march in step. It is also why many Americans recoil at the thought of it happening here. The ruling Communist Party in China has built “re-education camps” in an attempt to bring these people into the “modern, civilized” world promote what the government calls “ethnic unity” but in simpler terms, the apparent goal is to force detainees to embrace the Chinese communist party and an effort to fully control the hearts and minds of its population. Much of this is aimed at the ethnic minorities of Uighurs in the western region of Xinjiang.
China’s Great Fire Wall which is considered the largest, most extensive and most advanced Internet censorship regime in the world censors content critical of the Chinese government or contrary to Communist Party policy is key to this suppression. Another is that people simply “disappear” in China and their families are left with little or no information as to where they have gone. The term “group-think” is sometimes associated with George Orwell. He wrote about how the power of groupthink tends to be infectious. Shades of this are exposed in the videos. I contend that China’s culture suffers from a kind of deteriorating mental efficiency. This includes a reduced ability to deal with reality and moral judgments due to in-group pressures to think as one.
It is becoming clear the desire for achieving harmony, conformity, and cohesiveness through group-think comes at a cost. The advantage of allowing diversity is that it increases the competition of ideas and brings out the best in people. If you don’t want every place and every person to be exactly alike it means learning to accept that humanity is by nature fragmented and rejecting the idea we would be drastically better off is society was one homogeneous group. We do not need to be indoctrinated into thinking alike but must learn to be more tolerant.
The overriding advantage of a fragmented world is that it offers a competitive environment for economic, social, and judicial systems. All of these play huge roles in our culture and have been the driving force of human progress. Circling back to the issue of the above videos, if you take a gander at one or more, you might find they give you a bit more hope that things here in America are not nearly as bad as we are often led to believe.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/23/2020 – 21:05 - Pharma Founder Gets 66 Months For Bribing Doctors To Overprescribe Deadly Opioids
Pharma Founder Gets 66 Months For Bribing Doctors To Overprescribe Deadly Opioids
Millions of Americans who lived through the financial crisis probably recall that not a single executive of a major investment bank was jailed in the aftermath, despite running organizations seemingly dedicated to perpetuating a criminal fraud on nearly every counterparty and client.
But when Americans look back at the opioid crisis, they’ll remember that at least one executive of a major opioid manufacturer and distributor was sentenced to a fairly weighty sentence – five-and-a-half years (66 months) in federal prison – for an illegal kickback scheme that effectively involved bribing doctors to prescribe potentially lethal doses of fentanyl. That’s right: Packaged under the name brand Subsys, Insys sold a painkiller made from the same ultra-powerful synthetic opioid responsible for tens of thousands of deaths across America.
According to the FT, which, in partnership with PBS’s Frontline, is producing a documentary on the opioid crisis, John Kapoor, the founder of Insys, was sentenced to prison time on Thursday after being prosecuted under the RICO act – a law adopted decades ago to help the DoJ prosecute the mafia.
Kapoor
Kapoor joins seven other Insys executives who have already received jail time for their role in the company’s illegal shenanigans, which included uses “ruthless” sales tactics to encourage doctors to prescribe more of their drug. Several doctors who took money from the company in exchange for kickbacks transparently disguised as speaking fees are also either being prosecuted, or have already been sentenced to jail time.
Earlier on Thursday, Alec Burlakoff, Insys’s former head of sales and one of the government’s key cooperating witnesses accepted a sentence of 26 months in prison. The jail sentences were handed down despite a long tradition of allowing big pharma to skate by with fines that often amounted to a slap on the wrist.
Subsys was approved by the FDA to target so-called “breakthrough pain”, something experienced by many patients with advanced cancer. But most of the doctors Insys targeted weren’t oncologists. The company encouraged them to prescribe the drug “off label” – meaning not for its approved purpose – to treat normal chronic pain.
Kapoor is a serial entrepreneur who immigrated to the US from India in his early 20s. The fentanyl spray that was the company’s main product was approved in 2012.
Under the company’s kick-back scheme, doctors who prescribed large quantities of the drug could earn up to $125,000 a year in speaking fees.
The company depended on sales associates whom Kapoor described as “PHD” – “poor, hungry and desperate” or “poor, hungry and dumb.” One of the sales reps who got mixed up in the prosecution was a former stripper, a detail from the investigation that was widely covered in the press.
Kapoor’s insistence that the company meticulously track the ROI from its illegal kickback scheme is what eventually did him in. Prosecutors managed to get their hands on a spreadsheet calculating the return on investment for every dollar spent on doctor “honorariums”. Kapoor insisted that, for every dollar a doctor received, they must bring in at least $2 in sales for Insys.
Kapoor’s legal team insisted that their client was unfairly portrayed as a “caricature of a mob boss” by the prosecution. But the firm’s “callous culture” was exemplified by a sales video featuring a “rapping bottle of Subsys” encouraging doctors to raise the dose for their patient’s – effectively encouraging them to accidentally overdose and kill their own patients.
Burlakoff, who played the rapping Subsys bottle in the video, told the press that the video was a big part of the incriminating evidence against him. He now regrets participating in it, even though he thought it was ‘cool’ at the time.
Fred Wyshak, the prosecutor who handled the Insys case, gained notoriety for prosecuting the mob, and having a hand in the conviction of Whitey Bulger, the former Boston crime boss who was murdered while serving a life sentence last year
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/23/2020 – 20:45 - The Empire's War On Oppositional Journalism Continues To Escalate
The Empire’s War On Oppositional Journalism Continues To Escalate
Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,
Journalist Glenn Greenwald has been charged by the Bolsonaro government in Brazil with the same prosecutorial angle used by the US to target WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Per The New York Times:
Citing intercepted messages between Mr. Greenwald and the hackers, prosecutors say the journalist played a “clear role in facilitating the commission of a crime.”
For instance, prosecutors contend that Mr. Greenwald encouraged the hackers to delete archives that had already been shared with The Intercept Brasil, in order to cover their tracks.
Prosecutors also say that Mr. Greenwald was communicating with the hackers while they were actively monitoring private chats on Telegram, a messaging app. The complaint charged six other individuals, including four who were detained last year in connection with the cellphone hacking.
This argument is essentially indistinguishable from the argument currently being used by the Trump administration in charging Assange with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act. The US Department of Justice alleges that Assange attempted to provide Private Manning with advice and assistance in covering her tracks while leaking documents she already had access to, therefore making Assange party to a conspiracy against the United States.
It is not surprising that Brazil is advancing the same war on journalism we’ve been seeing in the US, UK, Australia and France. With the election of the overtly fascist Jair Bolsonaro in October 2018 (an election whose corrupt foundations were exposed by Greenwald’s reporting with The Intercept Brasil), the Brazilian government moved into full alignment with the the US-centralized empire, which was why his inauguration was enthusiastically celebrated by characters like Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Benjamin Netanyahu.
In exactly the same way we saw a coordination between the US, UK, Sweden, Ecuador and Australia to immobilize, and then silence, and then imprison Julian Assange, we are seeing a uniform movement toward silencing oppositional journalism throughout the entire US-centralized empire. This is because a rising China and the increasing coziness of the cluster of nations which have resisted absorption into the imperial blob greatly imperil the USA’s position as the unipolar global dominator, meaning that the empire needs to quickly shore up global control in order to avoid being surpassed and replaced by other power structures.
In order to accomplish this there’s going to have to be a lot of nefarious behavior. A lot of military escalations, a lot of CIA coups, a lot of bullying and subversion, and a whole lot of propaganda to grease the wheels of public consent. Such large, frantic, flailing movements can be easily exposed by a free press, which is precisely why the free press is being clamped down upon now. The empire is setting all these legal precedents against oppositional journalism because it fully intends to use those precedents in the future. It fully intends to use those legal precedents in the future because it knows it’s going to have to make things ugly.
Whenever a nation’s government capitulates to the empire, it gets absorbed into the blob. The bigger the blob of empire gets, the stronger it gets. The stronger it gets, the more capable it becomes of absorbing other not-yet-absorbed nations. https://t.co/KIZboo3xwN
— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) March 19, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
This is all being done to prevent the public from gaining a clear understanding of what’s really going on in their world, because if the public had a clear understanding of what’s going on in their world, the empire would forever lose its ability to control them and rule them.
Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. The imperialists understand this. The public, by and large, do not. And the imperialists intend to keep it that way.
Glenn Greenwald has spent the last three years being falsely smeared as a stooge of authoritarian governments while he was actually doing more damage to an authoritarian government than all of his critics combined. Public trust in oppressive institutions (like the oppressive institutions that empire loyalists have been protecting by smearing Greenwald as a Kremlin agent and a Putin puppet) can be severely weakened by the exposure of their dark underbellies to the light of truth.
The imperialists know this, and they are determined not to allow it to continue. Hence their persecution of Assange, and hence their persecution of Greenwald.
* * *
Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/23/2020 – 20:25 - Libya's Haftar Threatens To Target Civilian Planes, Declares Blanket 'No Fly Zone'
Libya’s Haftar Threatens To Target Civilian Planes, Declares Blanket ‘No Fly Zone’
With the world’s attention focused on the Coronavirus outbreak and to a lesser extent on Trump’s impeachment trial, the war in Libya just got a lot more scary in terms of the potential for mass civilian death.
Incredibly, Gen. Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA) just threatened to shoot down civilian planes after days ago declaring a ‘no fly zone’ over Tripoli following increased Turkish intervention. The BBC reports the unambiguous and shocking declaration as follows:
Gen Haftar’s spokesman, Ahmad al-Mesmari, said in a statement on Wednesday that “any military or civilian aircraft, regardless of its affiliation, flying over the capital will be destroyed”.
File image via Middle East Monitor In the past days Haftar has accused Turkey, which has lately openly transferred both Turkish national army troops as well as Syrian FSA mercenaries into Tripoli to fight on behalf of Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, of using the Libyan capital’s only functioning international airport as a military base.
It appears the LNA is saying it will consider even commercial flights as ‘fair game’ because it’s alleging Turkey and the GNA are using civilian aviation in a ‘human shield’ capacity.
BBC reporting that Haftar’s spokesman said in a statement Wednesday that “any military or civilian aircraft, regardless of its affiliation, flying over the capital will be destroyed”
Said spokesman’s utterances often dismissed as bluster by apologists. https://t.co/AdoHqQ7WVx
— Mary Fitzgerald (@MaryFitzger) January 23, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The BBC has further details as follows:
The GNA branded the strikes a “flagrant threat” to the safety of air traffic and a “new violation” of a ceasefire agreed earlier this month.
Gen Haftar’s forces did not immediately respond to the accusations, but did say they had shot down a Turkish drone after it took off from the airport.
Mitiga is a former military airbase which has been used by civilian planes since Tripoli’s international airport was damaged in fighting in 2014.
Pro-Haftar officials have also charged that Mitiga international airport has become a drone headquarters, and further that foreign troops are disembarking there.
On Wednesday Mitiga airport was forced to suspend all flights for hours after it was rocked by six surface-fired missiles by LNA militia which for months has been laying siege to Tripoli. The LNA said it was targeting foreign drones (operated by Turkey) which have been used to attack its own troops.
#BREAKING #Libya‘s Haftar threatens to down civilian planes
The spokesperson of warlord Haftar, Al-Mismari, said they declared ‘no-fly zone’ over the capital Tripoli
Al-Mismari said that they would target any flying objects including passenger planes. pic.twitter.com/L5ZdJylvLF
— EHA News (@eha_news) January 22, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The AFP reported Thursday that after announcing indefinite closure of the airport, the GNA “decided to restore air traffic at Mitiga Airport” according to a statement published on Facebook. However, the status remains anything but clear.
The GNA said it plans to notify the UN Security Council of the Haftar military statement, which constitutes threat of a war crime.
Needless to say this is a major escalation which won’t help Haftar’s bid to curry favor within international bodies like the UN, which currently backs the Tripoli GNA.
Haftar has rejected recent international attempts for a ceasefire, recently at summits in Moscow and Berlin.
Libya’s Mitiga Airport announced that all flights have been suspended until further notice after Haftar forces threatened to down any aircraft flying in the airspace around Tripoli, including civilian passenger planes. pic.twitter.com/V9JMCfj8Ml
— ANews (@anewscomtr) January 23, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Should his forces actually do the unthinkable and down a civilian airplane, his own backers (like the UAE, Egypt, and Russia) would be forced to cut all political and military support.
And likely more external assistance would pour in to the Tripoli GNA, alongside Turkey’s already substantial and growing military help.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/23/2020 – 20:05 - Localism In The 2020s, Part 3 – Scaling Politics
Localism In The 2020s, Part 3 – Scaling Politics
Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
Read Part 1 here – The 2nd Amendment Sanctuary Movement
Read Part 2 here – Facial Recognition, Psilocybin, And Beyond
Today’s post will outline a framework through which I’ve come to view politics, as well as life in general. It will identify and examine various units of sovereignty as they exist in the contemporary U.S., since that’s the political system I’m most familiar with. Nevertheless, the overall framework should prove useful to people living all over the world.
Let’s start from the beginning. The most basic and meaningful unit of sovereignty is the individual, followed by the family, the municipality/county, the state (California, New York, Texas, etc) and finally the federal government (Washington D.C.). It’s my view that within a healthy society the scope of governance should decline as you add more and more individuals to the mix. It’s at the most basic unit of sovereignty (the individual), where authority over most of life’s decisions should reside. This runs the gamut from the really big decisions, such as what sort of work to do, who to marry, what religion (if any) to believe in; to the completely mundane, such as what to eat for breakfast.
As a person starts to add more members to their daily life in the form of a family (spouse and children), a wide range of complexities are added to the equation which call for a more expansive approach to individual agency. You suddenly find yourself sharing an intimate existence with people who are not you, and who’ll invariably have conflicting views on a wide variety of subjects, both significant and trivial. Compromise becomes necessary in the pursuit of a harmonious coexistence amongst spouses, as well as within the larger family unit, and you start to relinquish a certain degree of individual sovereignty.
It’s important to note that the creation of a family by consenting adults tends to be a voluntary choice by which individuals agree to put some of their more selfish proclivities to the side in order to create a cohesive, expansive unit. Since the decision to form a family is in most cases voluntary, the decision to relinquish some measure of individual sovereignty is likewise voluntary. While it’s not romantic to consider the transition from an individual-centric lifestyle to a family-focused one in the context of politics and governance, it can be quite helpful.
After the family, the next major unit of sovereignty is found at the municipal or county level. At this stage, a significantly larger number of humans have been added to the structure, ranging from thousands to millions depending on where you live. Unless you reside in the smallest of towns, this unit will consist of countless people you don’t personally know and never will. Nevertheless, a common geography will almost always lead to some level of coordination and decision-making for stuff that applies to and affects the larger unit.
What this means in practice should be determined by those living in the communities themselves. As anyone who’s travelled extensively around the U.S. knows, distinct cities and counties tend to have very different vibes and attitudes about all sorts of life issues, and in some cases counties bordering one another even within the same state demonstrate dramatic differences. It’s important to accept this as perfectly normal and healthy, just as two neighboring families can have distinct views on all sorts of issues and still get along just fine. Each family runs their affairs as they deem appropriate.
Moving further up the scale, political units beyond the municipality/county level in the U.S. consist of the 50 states. This is where things start getting far more complex, as you begin adding millions if not tens of millions of additional people of very diverse opinions and geography under the umbrella of a much larger governance structure. In the case of the U.S., some of these states are as large, in terms of population and economy, as entire countries. After that, there’s the dreaded federal government, which covers an unwieldly large and diverse political unit of 325 million people.
It seems one major source of our current problems stems from an improper understanding and delegation of sovereignty along the scale of our existing political units. For example, as you move up the scale from individual, to family, to city/county, then state and finally country, you add more and more people as well as geography, and the bonds become more complex and impersonal. The political relationships also tend to become less voluntary as you move up the scale, which is meaningful. For example, it’s relatively easy and common to get up and move from one city to another, but changing national citizenship is a major ordeal which most people never consider let alone consummate.
The nature of sovereignty and politics under this framework is that as the unit expands to more individuals, some degree of individual sovereignty is relinquished each step of the way. Equally significant, is as the units grow the voluntary nature of the relationship starts to fade. Since a political unit becomes less voluntary as it scales, the larger the unit, the less authority it should have to exercise political power in relation to the smaller, more voluntary units. Does anyone reading this actually think they have as much capacity to first understand the issues and then impact decision making in Washington D.C. as they do at the local level? As political relationships become less voluntary and fluid (lack of clear exists), the proper scope of governance should decline.
Specifically, whatever can be done at the municipal/county level, should be done at the municipal/county level, with the larger state only chiming in when it’s absolutely necessary for decisions that require larger scale coordination. This same principle should be applied to the relationship between the states themselves and Washington D.C. What requires no input or assistance from the country-level political unit should be left to the smaller units as appropriate. Only the small number of issues that require national coordination should be considered at the country level, and even then there should be direct input from the smaller units in the form of referendums.
The men whom the people ought to choose to represent them are too busy to take the jobs. But the politician is waiting for it. He’s the pestilence of modern times. What we should try to do is make politics as local as possible. Keep the politicians near enough to kick them. The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree. It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.”
– G. K. Chesterton
The spirit of the U.S. Constitution is based upon this general idea, though I place more emphasis on the municipal/county level vs. the states. A good example of the proper role of the federal government as outlined in the founding document is the Bill of Rights. These consist of what are seen as inalienable individual rights that should never be infringed upon across the country irrespective of where you reside within the smaller political units. The principle here isn’t to create a structure whereby Washington D.C. is in charge of micromanaging the everyday lives of people across the land, but rather the opposite. It’s a principle aimed at preventing the micromanagement of individual sovereignty by making certain core rights unassailable.
Though we pay lip service to checks and balances, decentralization of power and a defense of core civil liberties explicit in the U.S. Constitution, we most certainly do not live these ideals in reality. The big elephant in the room that many people still refuse to talk about is that the U.S. in 2020 is an imperial oligarchy, and an imperial oligarchy is a system defined by gross concentrations of power and centralization. Much of the frustration in the county can be traced to this state of affairs. We’ve been losing control of our individual lives and communities in order to feed the insatiable beast of empire, and worst of all, we’ve been convinced that the answer is to fight each other for this centralized power so at least our team can be in charge of the bossing around.
Not everything should be about efficiency and convenience. At this point in time it’s more crucial to empower and restore communities across the country than it is to make everything a hyper-efficient homogeneous blob.
— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) January 13, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
This is a twisted and deranged mindset guaranteed to end in tyranny of one flavor or another, civil conflict, or both. Nothing good can come of it, which is why I firmly believe we need to turn in the opposite direction.
We need to turn away from Washington D.C. and focus on the smaller units of sovereignty outlined in this post, specifically the individual, the family and the municipality/county. These relationships tend to be more intimate, manageable and voluntary and, as such, should be were political life is centered. This what localism means to me.
* * *
Liberty Blitzkrieg is an ad-free website. If you enjoyed this post and my work in general, visit the Support Page where you can donate and contribute to my efforts.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/23/2020 – 19:45 - Russiagate Spy Paid $1 Million By Obama Was WaPo Deep Throat
Russiagate Spy Paid $1 Million By Obama Was WaPo Deep Throat
Stephan Halper, the longtime CIA and FBI operative who conducted espionage on the 2016 Trump campaign, was feeding information to Washington Post reporter David Ignatius through his handler, according to The Federalist, which describes his actions as “more evidence that the intelligence community has co-opted the press to push anti-Trump conspiracy theories.”
According to a court filing by Michael Flynn’s defense team, Halper’s ‘handler’ in the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), Col. James Baker, “regularly lunched with the Washington Post reporter.“
(Also leaking to Ignatius was Christopher Steele)
As we noted in May of 2018, Halper was paid over $1 million by the Obama administration through the Office of Net Assessment – nearly half of which came during ‘Russiagate’ – in which he not only surveilled multiple Trump campaign aides, he was involved in an effort to tie General Flynn to a Russian academic, Svetlana Lokhova, as part of a smear campaign.
Svetlana Lokhova, the Russian-born English citizen and Soviet-era scholar, told The Federalist that she only realized the significance of her communications with and about Ignatius following the filing of attorney Sidney Powell’s reply brief in the Michael Flynn case.
In last week’s court filing, Powell highlighted how the CIA, FBI, Halper, and possibly James Baker used the unnamed and unaware Lokhova and the complicit Ignatius to destroy Flynn. This James Baker is not the one who worked under James Comey at the FBI, but a James Baker in the Department of Defense Office of National Assessment. –The Federalist
Powell wrote:
Stefan Halper is a known long-time operative for the CIA/FBI. He was paid exorbitant sums by the FBI/CIA/DOD through the Department of Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment in 2016. His tasks seem to have included slandering Mr. Flynn with accusations of having an affair with a young professor (a British national of Russian descent) Flynn met at an official dinner at Cambridge University when he was head of DIA in 2014. Flynn has requested the records of Col. James Baker because he was Halper’s ‘handler’ in the Office of Net Assessment in the Pentagon, and ONA Director Baker regularly lunched with Washington Post Reporter David Ignatius. Baker is believed to be the person who illegally leaked the transcript of Mr. Flynn’s calls to Ignatius. The defense has requested the phone records of James Clapper to confirm his contacts with Washington Post reporter Ignatius—especially on January 10, 2017, when Clapper told Ignatius in words to the effect of ‘take the kill shot on Flynn.’ It cannot escape mention that the press has long had transcripts of the Kislyak calls that the government has denied to the defense.
Lokhova sued Halper and multiple MSM outlets for defamation after Halper-fuelled rumors that she was a Russian spy who had ‘honeypotted’ Flynn, which were first promoted by Lokhova’s mentor at Cambridge University – Professor Christopher Andrew, who wrote in the London Sunday Times in February 2017 that her brief meeting with Flynnn during a 2015 dinner event was the beginning of the former National Security Adviser’s relationship with a Russian spy.
Prior to Andrew’s article, other outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and the New York Times had published rumors of a Flynn connection to a supposed Russian spy, however Lokhova had no clue it was her until she was outed.
“Halper had been pushing the story that I was a Russian spy and Flynn’s mistress since December of 2016,” Lokhova told The Federalist. “The New York Times’ Mathew Rosenberg told me a source had been circulating these stories since December 2016,” she said, adding “but they held the story until they could find a second source and someone at the Cambridge dinner.”
In his book “The Plot Against the President,” Lee Smith confirms that the story about a Flynn-Lokhova intrigue was circulated to the press starting in December 2016.
But it wasn’t until the Wall Street Journal published its March 17, 2017, article suggesting she had inappropriate contacts with Flynn that Lokhova discovered the earlier article Andrew had written about her for the Sunday Times, Lokhova said. Before then, within days of February 28, 2017, several journalists reached out to her for comment, including two working for the Wall Street Journal, but Lokhova didn’t know why.
She also didn’t comprehend who the inquiring journalists were at the time. That remained true even after her mentor and unknown betrayer, Andrew, wrote Lokhova telling her that “David Ignatius of Washington Post is in UK at moment. I’ve known him for years and trust him. I’ve given him your email and he accepts that if you don’t wish to respond, that an end to it.” –The Federalist
Via The Federalist It is unknown what Andrew meant by Ignatius’s “inside track,” however the above email was sent to Lokhova just one month after Ignatus reported the illegally leaked details of Flynn’s conversation with Russia’s ambassador – leading to his firing.
Read the rest of the report here.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/23/2020 – 19:44 - Worldwide Searches For 'Virus Mask' Erupt Amid Deadly Outbreak
Worldwide Searches For ‘Virus Mask’ Erupt Amid Deadly Outbreak
As the number of confirmed coronavirus cases at 830 with 25 deaths, worldwide Google searches for “virus mask” have erupted ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday.
The deadly virus is causing alarm because of how easily it spreads between people. So far, there are no drugs, known at the moment, that can prevent human to human transmission.
Videos are surfacing on social media, showing people in China dropping dead as authorities have locked down seven cities in an unprecedented effort to contain the outbreak.
In #Wuhan，people are collapsing on streets due to the deadly #WuhanPneumonia .
so helpless.#WuhanCoronavirus #WuhanOutbreak pic.twitter.com/X5ho3Llpcm— 巴丢草 Badiucao (@badiucao) January 23, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
More and more…pic.twitter.com/z5Dpu7RASa
— Turkish Market (@kamerknc) January 23, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Bugün kaçıncı oldu bu yerde rastgele yatanların videosu… Vücut pat diye gidiyor. pic.twitter.com/29YA3uZCCu
— Turkish Market (@kamerknc) January 23, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
There have been multiple cases of people collapsing on the streets due to the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan & various parts of China#WuhanCoronavirus #Wuhan#WuhanOutbreak #China pic.twitter.com/4iIwJCGl0M
— Jimmy Lee Curtains (@WulfMunkey) January 23, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Worldwide searches for “virus mask” have surged in the last five days as cases of the deadly virus have spread from China to the U.S., Singapore, Thailand, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam.
Top regions for “virus mask” searches are in Singapore, China, Macao, Hong Kong, and the Philippines.
Other related global queries are “n95 mask,” “buy n95 mask,” “wuhan,” “wuhan virus,” and “where to buy n95 mask.”
More related global queries include “china virus,” “3m n95 mask,” “n95 respirator mask,” “n95 respirator,” and “chinese virus.”
Google searches for “n95 mask,” a medical respirator designed to protect the wearer from liquid and airborne particles contaminating the face, was the most searched across the world, and in Macao, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, and the Philippines over the last five days.
Since the first coronavirus case was confirmed just north of Seattle on Tuesday, searches for “virus mask” across the U.S. have exploded. People in Washington, Hawaii, California, District of Columbia, and Massachusetts Googled it the most.
On related queries within the U.S. – many searched “n95 mask,” and where to buy the surgical respirator. Some searches include”n95 mask cvs,” “n95 mask home depot,” and “n95 mask target.”
It seems the global run on surgical masks has started as the deadly virus spreads across the world.
As far as world epidemics and the global stock market performance, here’s a chart showing what could happen next:
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/23/2020 – 19:25 - Coronavirus Death Toll Hits 25 As Beijing Confirms 830 Patients Infected
Coronavirus Death Toll Hits 25 As Beijing Confirms 830 Patients Infected
Summary:
-
8 Chinese cities, more than 23 million people, effectively under quarantine
-
Multiple cases across the world – from Scotland to Singapore and USA
-
830 Infected in mainland China according to Chinese officials (Mainland China: 830 Taiwan: 1 Macau: 2 Hong Kong: 2 Vietnam: 2 Thailand: 3 Singapore: 1 Japan: 1 South Korea: 1 US: 1).
-
25 Dead (following 1st death outside Wuhan)
-
WHO says “not the time to declare a global health emergency”
-
Patient in Texas recently traveled to Wuhan
-
WHO estimates coronavirus is about as contagious as the Spanish flu, more than twice as infectious as the common flu.
In #Wuhan，people are collapsing on streets due to the deadly #WuhanPneumonia .
so helpless.#WuhanCoronavirus #WuhanOutbreak pic.twitter.com/X5ho3Llpcm— 巴丢草 Badiucao (@badiucao) January 23, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
* * *
Update (1920ET): As Friday begins in Beijing, Chinese state media has announced that the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in mainland China has climbed to 830, while the number of deaths has climbed to 25. As Beijing expands its efforts to crack down on the virus ahead of the LNY holiday, media reports claim that Beijing has requested the closing of all indoor activities involving more than 100 people.
Meanwhile, more disturbing videos out of Wuhan are circulating online as reports about a growing number of sick health-care workers circulate in the Hong Kong press.
Siguen llegando imágenes tranquilizadoras de China. pic.twitter.com/7cylO20DpY
— Alejo Schapire🥕 (@aschapire) January 23, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
In other news, US lawmakers are set to be briefed on the virus Friday morning.
* * *
Update (1750ET): Japan’s health ministry confirmed a second case of coronavirus on Friday, reported Reuters.
The infected man who lives in Wuhan, China, traveled to Japan on Sunday — has been hospitalized in Tokyo, the health ministry said in a statement.
Details are limited at the moment. There was no mention of how many people the infected man came in contact with before being quarantined. New reports out of the UK are claiming that 14 people are now being tested for the virus after earlier reports said 3 people in Scotland were under quarantine as suspected carriers of the virus.
Meanwhile, the number of cities in Hubei province facing a travel ban/lockdown/quarantine has been expanded to eight: Wuhan, Huanggang, Ezhou, Chibi, Xiantao, Qianjiang, Zhijiang and Lichuan.
SCMP has also released some more details about the first death outside of Hubei: An 80-year-old man died in the town of Hebei after spending two months in Wuhan visiting relatives.
Back in Wuhan, ride-share company Didi has suspended its service, as China’s finance ministry announced that 1 billion yuan ($144 million) would be used by Hubei authorities to halt the spread of the illness.
Also, in the latest sign that the regime in Beijing hasn’t kept its promise of complete transparency, the SCMP reports that health-care workers in Wuhan are getting sick at a rate that is faster than previously revealed. Initially, Chinese authorities insisted that health care workers weren’t being sickened, indicating that the virus didn’t spread via human to human contact. But we’ve since learned that this was a lie.
Fifteen cases of the coronavirus have been officially reported among health care workers in the city, though doctors say the real number is much higher.
Just as we expected, the situation in Wuhan has gotten so out of hand that videos of health-care workers collapsing from exhaustion are circulating online.
Shocking video said to be from a Wuhan hospital. Shows medical staff collapsing due to exhaustion(?) pic.twitter.com/rhAO6QQhOW #ncov2019
— Gregor Peter (@L0gg0l) January 23, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
If it seems like every person who managed to escape Wuhan is carrying the virus, here’s one possible explanation: the WHO estimated that the coronavirus has a Ro (a measure of how contagious a virus is) of 2, equivalent to the Spanish flu that sickened 500 million during the first half of the 20th century. The common flu, by comparison, has a Ro of 0.9.
* * *
Update (1600ET): Markets recovered on Thursday after the WHO declined to label the coronavirus as a global pandemic threat (though we suspect they might change their view once the market has closed).
But now that Beijing’s shock-and-awe approach to containing the viral panic appears to have convinced health officials that the virus won’t make it to the next generation of transmission, it’s worth remembering that Beijing’s attempt to quarantine more than 20 million people was hardly comprehensive.
For examples, look at this Vice story, which claims one woman evaded airport checks by taking medication that lowered a fever. According to Vice, the Chinese embassy in Paris is hoping to speak with her after she visited a Michelin-starred restaurant and shared the whole experience on WeChat.
The warning came after one woman from Wuhan took medicine to bring down her temperature to avoid detection as she boarded a flight to France, where she dined at a Michelin-starred restaurant.
The woman was heavily criticized for her actions after she posted photos and details of her trip on WeChat. On Wednesday night the Chinese embassy in France responded with a warning and asked the woman to contact their emergency phone number.
Some people won’t let the risk of contagion spoil their holiday plans.
* * *
Update (1530ET): 7News reports that an individual suspected of coronavirus infection has been quarantined in Sydney.
* * *
Update (1510ET): Investigators are reportedly examining another potential case of coronavirus in Texas’s Brazos County.
Possible coronavirus case in Texas being investigated in Brazos County – DMN
— FXHedge (@Fxhedgers) January 23, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The patient recently traveled from Wuhan and is reportedly suffering from symptoms similar to those who have been infected by the virus .
Meanwhile, a passenger at LAX has been quarantined after showing symptoms of the virus. That patient arrived at LAX from Mexico City and exhibited “disturbing” symptoms, according to health officials, per Fox 5.
This development comes a day after Los Angeles County public health officials said it was “very possible” the area will see at least one patient, given the number of people traveling between the Southland and China.
* * *
Update (1325ET): The World Health Organization, after a second day of meetings, have decided AGAINST declaring an international virus alarm. The panel was reportedly split on the decision and may revise the decision but for now states that “now is not the time” to declare an emergency.
“Make no mistake: This is an emergency in China,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
“But it has not yet become a global health emergency. It may yet become one.”
* * *
Update (1300ET): CNBC’s Eunice Yoon just provided a shocking update to the status of the deadly virus in China:
“7 cities and 23 million people are effectively under quarantine.”
The cities under effective martial law – with all travel in, around, and out halted – are Wuhan, Huanggang, Zhijiang, Ezhou, Qianjiang, Chibi, and Xiantao.
CNBC’s @onlyyoontv breaks down what’s happening on the ground in China with the coronavirus spreading on @CNBCTheExchange . What cities are closed, how many people are impacted, the precautions they’re taking and the huge impact on the Lunar New Year. pic.twitter.com/YFEHjQP0Cy
— The Exchange (@CNBCTheExchange) January 23, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
That is more people quarantined than the population of Florida (21.6m).
Outside of China, cases keep appearing (map does not include recent cases in Scotland and Ireland):
* * *
Update (1150ET): If you haven’t cancelled those tickets to Wuhan yet, you might want to hold off: The State Department has just reverted its safety warning on travel to China to “exercise caution” from “reconsider your travel plans”.
Clearly, somebody in the Chinese government complained, and with US stocks deep in the red, it seems the Trump Administration was perceptive.
After all, the point is to convince the public not to panic.
* * *
Update (1130ET): As the number of confirmed coronavirus cases nears 650 (the latest count put the number at 647), the US State Department has decided to reassure Americans that they are ‘safe’ from the virus.
China has nearly competed its quarantine of four cities in Hubei, even as experts warn it won’t be enough. As millions prepared to travel, George Gao Fu, head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, warned the Chinese public to stay home during the holiday season, warning that this was a “crucial time” to stop the virus.
With 444 confirmed cases, Wuhan remains the epicenter of the epidemic. Reports about another virus-related death are circulating on social media, along with a terrifying video of first-responders in full-body gear treating an individual who had seemingly collapsed in the middle of the road.
More and more…pic.twitter.com/z5Dpu7RASa
— Turkish Market (@kamerknc) January 23, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
That’s not exactly reassuring.
Meanwhile, in Wuhan, shortages of medical supplies and facemasks are already prompting hospitals, universities and charities to reach out to the surrounding area for donations.
But sure – everything is under control.
* * *
Update (1045ET): Just in case you had plans to celebrate LNY at a fish market in Wuhan, the US government has published a travel warning advising Americans to ‘reconsider traveling to China’ amid the latest viral outbreak.
- U.S. URGES TRAVELERS TO RECONSIDER CHINA VISITS DUE TO VIRUS
Even if you made it to Wuhan at this point, one might encounter difficulties trying to enter the city, especially as a foreigner.
* * *
Update (0950ET): The BBC is reporting that a suspected case of coronavirus has been detected in Scotland.
Note: These are only suspected cases – not yet confirmed.
3 people who’ve recently travelled from Wuhan to Scotland are being treated as suspected cases of Coronavirus.
The head of infection medicine at the University of Edinburgh, Professor Jurgen Haas, said all 3 had respiratory symptoms and had been in Wuhan in the last 14 days.
— James Shaw (@JGBS) January 23, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
If confirmed, this would be the first case of the virus in the UK, and would indicate another intrusion into the developed world, this time in Europe.
The UK Health Secretary said Friday morning that the coronavirus is “increasingly likely” to hit Britain, the Times of London reports.
According to CNN, the number of coronavirus cases confirmed around the world has climbed to 622 (once again, the graphic below is ever-so-slightly out of date):
And the scramble for facemasks continues, with Hong Kong stores swiftly running out of stock, and black-market sellers engaging in widespread gouging of terrified customers.
There’s a real scramble for face masks in Hong Kong. The only ones I could find were these: HK$850 for a box of 20 (about US$100) ones, and some small ones for kids. People are still lining up to buy what’s left. https://t.co/JqYOE1MW5O pic.twitter.com/AnY7ABPHSN
— Tracy Alloway (@tracyalloway) January 23, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
* * *
Update (0935ET): India’s foreign office said Thursday that an Indian nurse in Saudi Arabia has been diagnosed with the Wuhan coronavirus.
“About 100 Indian nurses mostly from Kerala working at Al-Hayat hospital have been tested and none except one nurse was found infected by Corona virus,” tweeted Vellamvelly Muraleedharan, Indian Minister of State for External Affairs, on Thursday.
Spoke to @CGIJeddah on Indian nurses quarantined at Al-Hayat Hospital, Khamis Mushait, Saudi Arabia due to Corona virus threat.
They are in touch with hospital management and Saudi foreign Ministry. Have asked our Consulate to provide all possible support. @MEAIndia @PMOIndia
— V. Muraleedharan (@MOS_MEA) January 23, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Update from @CGIJeddah : About 100 Indian nurses mostly from Kerala working at Al-Hayat hospital have been tested and none except one nurse was found infected by Corona virus. Affected nurse is being treated at Aseer National Hospital and is recovering well. @PMOIndia @MEAIndia https://t.co/jM0u5243GV
— V. Muraleedharan (@MOS_MEA) January 23, 2020
Cases have also been reported in Russia, Hong Kong and Macau, in addition to all of the countries listed below:
Confirmed cases of Coronavirus:
– China
– US
– Singapore
– Thailand
– Japan
– Taiwan
– South Korea
– Vietnam
– Saudi Arabia— Breaking News Feed (@pzf) January 23, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Saudi Arabia’s economy depends on millions of migrant workers, a group that includes many Indians.
* * *
Update (0841ET): Beijing says the number of confirmed Wuhan cases in China has climbed to 634, bringing the global total to 641.
Here’s a breakdown of cases by region (though it might be slightly out of date, it gets the point across):
In keeping with China’s insistence that the Wuhan virus is far less deadly than the 2003 SARS outbreak, the SCMP reports that almost half of the 17 people who have succumbed to the virus so far were aged 80 or older, and most of them had pre-existing health conditions. All of those who died, 13 men and four women so far, were from the central province of Hubei, and were treated in hospitals in its capital, Wuhan, epicenter of the outbreak. Chinese authorities have quarantined most of the biggest sources in the province.
Here’s some more information on the victims, including the types of illnesses they faced:
At least nine of those who died had pre-existing conditions such as diabetes, coronary artery disease and Parkinson’s disease. Eight were in their eighties, two in their seventies, five in their sixties and one man was in his fifties. The youngest woman was 48 and had a pre-existing condition.
One 89-year-old man, surnamed Chen, had a history of high blood pressure, diabetes, coronary heart disease and other conditions. He began experiencing symptoms on January 13, including difficulty breathing but not fever. Five days later, he was admitted to the Wuhan Union Hospital with severe breathing difficulties, and tested positive for pneumonia. He died the following evening.
The 48-year-old woman, surnamed Yin, had suffered from diabetes and had also had a stroke. She first had a fever, aches and pains on December 10 and her condition slowly deteriorated. She was treated at two hospitals in Wuhan before she died on Monday.
Officials in Beijing have been cautious about making definitive statements about the origins and characteristics of the disease, including its incubation period, saying more investigation was needed.
“There’s still a need for further study of the virus over time,” said Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, at a press briefing on Wednesday.
“As for the impact on younger people, according to current epidemiology and what we know right now, they really aren’t susceptible,” he said.
Patients as young as 15 have been infected with the pneumonia-like virus, according to Wuhan health officials. There are now more than 570 confirmed cases, including some reported in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, the United States, Japan, South Korea and Thailand.
* * *
Update (0800ET): CNA, an English-language news website based across Asia, has just reported that Singapore has confirmed the first case of the Wuhan coronavirus.
In a media briefing on Thursday evening, the Ministry of Health said the carrier is a 66-year-old Chinese man from Wuhan. The man arrived in Singapore with his family on Jan. 20 after flying in from Guangzhou via China Southern. The man reported having a soar throat on the flight, but no fever.
Earlier, St. Petersburg reportedly confirmed its third case of the Wuhan virus.
The man traveled to Singapore General on Wednesday, and was immediately placed in isolation. He tested positive for the virus at 6 pm local time on Thursday. Singaporean authorities have already begun a contact tree, and are isolating all those with whom the suspect had contact.
The diagnosis is just the latest indication that, even as more Chinese cities cancel LNY celebrations, too many Chinese, including Chinese from Wuhan, have already traveled abroad. And the week-long holiday doesn’t even start until Saturday.
This live NYT map of confirmed Wuhan cases appears to be out-of-date, despite having just been updated.
The number of confirmed cases is closer to 600. Still, it gets the point across.
* * *
Update (0700ET): Beijing is reportedly planning to quarantine a third city in Hubei Province, where the coronavirus outbreak originated, while a fourth city in the province is planning to shut down train travel.
Media reports claim that Chibi, a city with half a million Chinese, will be quarantined like Wuhan and Huanggang. Meanwhile, Ezhou, a city with 1 million people in Hubei, is seeing some transportation shut down.
Meanwhile, officials in Beijing have joined several other Chinese cities in cancelling Chinese New Year celebrations.
#China locks down more cities due to #WuhanCoronavirus. Huanggang (7.5mln pop.) will suspend public bus, railway from midnight (11a ET). Internet cafes, movie theaters, tourist sites, entertainment venues temporarily closed. Ezhou (1mln pop.) said it shut train stations.
— Eunice Yoon (@onlyyoontv) January 23, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Beijing joins Wuhan, Zhejiang, Macau in canceling #LunarNewYear celebrations. #China capital’s culture & tourism bureau says all public gathering activities, incl. traditional temple fairs, are off. (Holiday is normally major consumer spending time. #WuhanCoronavirus) @TheDomino
— Eunice Yoon (@onlyyoontv) January 23, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Conflicting report are alternatively claiming that Ezhou and Chibi will be the third Chinese city to face a quarantine. Does that mean officials are planning to quarantine the entire province?
BREAKING: Chinese officials say a 3rd city, Chibi with a population of nearly half a million, will be put on lockdown to prevent the spread of coronavirus
— BNO News (@BNONews) January 23, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
BREAKING: City of Ezhou becomes the third to be put under lockdown to contain the #coronavirus #China #virus @guardianhttps://t.co/BxeTr9Unls
— Healthwire (@HealthwireMedia) January 23, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
There have also been reports about a third patient being identified in St. Petersburg, while other cities, including Hong Kong, stock up on facemask supplies.
* * *
As cases of the new coronavirus popped up around the globe, Chinese health officials managed to assuage the worries of the public, and the market, by insisting that the new, deadly coronavirus that emerged late last month in Wuhan had been ‘contained’ and that the outbreak would swiftly die down.
Despite imposing some draconian travel bans, it’s becoming increasingly clear that this isn’t going to happen. Even after quarantining an entire city of 11 million people – Wuhan is the 7th largest city in China and larger than any US city – experts are warning that it’s too late: The cat is already out of the bag.
But that won’t stop Beijing from trying: Now that Wuhan has been effectively cut off, Chinese officials announced another city-wide quarantine on Thursday: Huanggang city, which is in Hubei province and situated close to Wuhan, will suspend outbound train and bus services, as well as all bus services within the city effective Friday. All public places, including movie theaters, have been ordered to close until further notice, practically guaranteeing that the quarantine will take a bite out of GDP. Though even after authorities cut off all flights, Reuters reports that a few airlines were still running flights out of Wuhan.
As the SCMP pointed out, Wuhan, the city at the center of the outbreak, is five times larger than London.
The decision comes as more than 600 cases of the virus have now been confirmed. The death toll has been steady since yesterday at 17, as the WHO ponders whether to label the outbreak as a global pandemic risk.
Chinese state broadcasters shared images of Wuhan’s ghostly transport hubs, including the Hankou rail station, with all gates barred or blocked. Highway toll booths were shutting down as guards patrolled major highways. Inside the city, residents crowded into hospitals and rushed to buy up essential supplies from supermarkets and gas stations.
Interestingly, at least one Western journalist is reporting from Wuhan. We imagine Beijing allowed ABC access to the city to try and calm the growing panic in the West.
.@ABC News’ @BobWoodruff travels to Wuhan, China, the center of the coronavirus outbreak, which has killed 17 people, and gives an inside look on how airports and travelers are trying to prevent the virus from spreading. https://t.co/ofUij4RhlH pic.twitter.com/MEmMWoJFbT
— ABC News (@ABC) January 23, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
As more barriers rise, one well-known public health expert known for his work on the SARS outbreak warned that the quarantines likely wouldn’t be enough to stop the virus from becoming a global pandemic, according to the New York Times.
Dr. Guan Yi, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Hong Kong who visited Wuhan earlier this week, warned there was a potential for the virus to spread rapidly despite the controls put in place Thursday morning.
“We have a chance to have a pandemic outbreak,” said Dr. Guan, who was part of the team that identified the coronavirus that caused the deadly SARS outbreak in 2002 and 2003. SARS infected more than 8,000 people and killed nearly 800.
Dr. Guan also told Caixin, an influential Chinese magazine known for investigative reports, that he had traveled to Wuhan earlier in the week hoping to help track the virus’s animal source and control the epidemic. But he left, he said, feeling “powerless, very angry.”
Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who advised the Chinese government and the World Health Organization during the SARS outbreak, said that infected people outside Wuhan would continue to spread the disease.
“The horse is already out of the barn,” he said.
Another expert warned that there could already be as many as 4,000 cases of coronavirus in Wuhan, meaning that the vast majority of infections likely haven’t yet been reported.
Meanwhile, regulators around the world are scrambling to cut off flights from Wuhan (even though Beijing has supposedly cut off all rail and plane travel out of the city): The Philippines is the latest country to cut off flights from the city. The country’s Civil Aeronautics Board added that flights from elsewhere in China would be placed under ‘strict monitoring’, according to CNN Philippines. Manila, the Philippines’ crowded capital city, has started handing out 100,000 face masks.
The director of the country’s Civil Aeronautics Board explained that, even though Beijing is quarantining entire cities, it’s up to the Philippines to take their own steps to curb the outbreak.
“When you look at the seriousness of the outbreak, Wuhan should be the focus of attention,” CAB Executive Director Carmelo Arcilla told reporters.
“Even if they lift it, we have to look at our side first and make our own assessment. So our assessment is different from theirs, I mean, even their decision is different from ours,” Arcilla said.
Experts have warned that quarantining an entire city of 11 million would be virtually impossible. But the nabobs in Beijing refuse to be deterred: Videos circulating on social media show Chinese police setting up barricades across roads leading out of the city. Anybody in Wuhan who had New Year’s travel plans should probably cancel them and ask for a refund.
Roads leading to and from Wuhan have now been blocked as the city has been placed in quarantine to try and stop the spread of the coronavirus #China #Wuhan #Coronavirus pic.twitter.com/ONlDM0T9Oe
— CNW (@ConflictsW) January 23, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
After a suspected case of coronavirus was discovered in Macau yesterday, officials in the special autonomous region warned that they might close all casinos in the territory, a move that would spoil the vacation plans of millions of Chinese planning to travel to Macau for the Chinese New Year. A second case was reportedly discovered on Thursday.
Across the world, a mildly risk-off mood is once again dominating markets. That means US stocks are one outbreak headline away from deeper declines.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/23/2020 – 19:22 -
- The "Twin Threats" Facing Big Oil
The “Twin Threats” Facing Big Oil
Authored by Nick Cunningham via OilPrice.com,
The global oil and gas industry is facing the “twin threats” of the loss of profitability and the loss of social acceptability as the climate crisis continues to worsen. The industry is not adequately responding to either of those threats, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
“Oil and gas companies have been proficient at delivering the fuels that form the bedrock of today’s energy system; the question that they now face is whether they can help deliver climate solutions,” the IEA said.
The report, whose publication was timed to coincide with the World Economic Forum in Davos, critiques the oil industry for not doing enough to plan for the transition. The IEA said that companies are spending only about 1 percent of their capex on anything outside of their core oil and gas strategy. Even the companies doing the most are only spending about 5 percent of their budgets on non-oil and gas investments.
There are some investments here and there into solar, or electric vehicle recharging infrastructure, but by and large the oil majors are doing very little to overhaul their businesses. The top companies only spent about $2 billion on solar, wind, biofuels and carbon capture last year.
Before even getting to the transition risk due to climate change, the oil industry was already facing questions about profitability. Over the past decade the free cash flow from operations at the five largest oil majors trailed the total sent to shareholders by about $200 billion. In other words, they cannot afford to finance their operations and also keep up obligations to shareholders. Something will have to change.
But, of course, as climate policy begins to tighten, oil demand growth will slow and level off. Most analysts say that it won’t require a big hit to demand in order for the financial havoc to really begin to devastate the balance sheets of the majors. Demand only needs to stop growing.
The IEA said there are things the industry can do right now – and should have done a long time ago. Roughly 15 percent of the energy sector’s total greenhouse gas emissions comes from upstream production. “Reducing methane leaks to the atmosphere is the single most important and cost-effective way for the industry to bring down these emissions,” the IEA said. But, the Permian is flaring more gas than ever, and methane leaks at every stage of the extraction and distribution process. Drillers have promises improvements, but the industry’s track record to date is not good.
Meanwhile, the IEA also noted that while attention is often focused on the oil majors, national oil companies (NOCs) account for more than half of global oil production. The majors only account for about 15 percent.
It is one thing for ExxonMobil or Chevron to face an existential crisis – which, absent an attempt to transition to a low-carbon business, they certainly do – but it’s an entirely different thing for the NOCs who will struggle to deal with the energy transition. The threat from the energy transition is not just to a specific business, but to whole governments and entire populations. “Some are high performing, but many are poorly positioned to adapt to changing global energy dynamics,” the IEA said. “None of the large NOCs have been charged by their host governments with leadership roles in renewables or other noncore areas.”
Ultimately, the report from the IEA should be worrying for the industry. The agency itself has faced criticism for not being more at the forefront of calling for a clean energy transition, and its forecasts for renewables have consistently undershot actual improvements for renewable technologies. The agency also continues to call for more upstream oil and gas investment. In other words, the IEA is somewhat conservative, and has been slow to recognize major shifts in the energy sector.
As such, the majors should probably take note when the IEA says something like “the transformation of the energy sector can happen without the oil and gas industry.” They can drag their feet, and will become increasingly ravaged by policy change and a deterioration in their core business. Or, they could proactively transform themselves, as the IEA says they should. Solutions to climate change “cannot be found within today’s oil and gas paradigm,” the agency said.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/23/2020 – 19:05 - US To Deploy Anti-Missile Systems In Iraq As Trump Downplays Troop Injuries As "Headaches"
US To Deploy Anti-Missile Systems In Iraq As Trump Downplays Troop Injuries As “Headaches”
President Trump was dismissive of widespread reports of eleven US soldiers sustaining head injuries as a result of the Jan.8 Iranian ballistic missile attack on Ayn al-Asad airbase in Iraq. At least eight had been airlifted to a medical facility in Germany for possible “traumatic brain injuries”, which the Pentagon and administration kept mum about in the days following.
While fielding questions at Davos on Wednesday, Trump downplayed what he likened as mere “headaches” when pressed about the issue and the administration’s evolving narrative, which initially emphasized “no US casualties” as a result of the Iranian attack.
Trump explained at the news conference his view that the injuries were “not very serious,” and added that “I heard they had headaches.” This prompted some veterans groups to reportedly say Trump is “somewhat out of touch” with the seriousness of it.
‘THEY HAD HEADACHES’: President Trump told reporters injuries sustained by several U.S. service members airlifted from Iraq after the Iran missile attacks were “not very serious” compared to combat injuries he’s seen that have resulted in lost limbs. https://t.co/2UHJ5xQXUq pic.twitter.com/kKSbMOrXTL
— World News Tonight (@ABCWorldNews) January 22, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is preparing for a ‘likely’ deployment of anti-air defense systems to Iraq in order to provide greater protection for US forces against future Iranian missile threats.
In the wake of the Iranian assault, a number of pundits and officials questioned why there weren’t anti-air defenses already in place.
According to FOX:
Fox News previously reported that the U.S. military didn’t shoot down any of Iran’s ballistic missiles because there was no missile defense system in position.
A senior Pentagon official told Fox News that they believed an Iranian missile attack was “unlikely.” U.S. officials say a Patriot air defense system will now likely be deployed.
There is a worldwide shortage of Patriots. Some units are currently bogged down protecting bases in Saudi Arabia.
Patriots are also currently deployed in defense of US assets, especially expensive military aircraft, around bases in Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE.
US Army Patriot missile battery file image. These defensive systems could be placed in Iraq at a time when the entire question of a future US military presence there is in doubt, given Iraq’s parliament is moving to expel the Americans.
Trump recently threatened sanctions on its uneasy ally should Baghdad go through with it. Washington fears ‘Iranian expansion’ and entrenchment should it bring the troops home.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/23/2020 – 18:45
Digest powered by RSS Digest
Saving...![<!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>](https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/Lemnos.jpg?itok=zGwiYLg_){kind=link}
![<!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>](https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/akar.jpg?itok=gDvvqxme){kind=link}
![<!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>](https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/011520-TradingSecrets-02.png?itok=v7F4nyKd){kind=link}
![<!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>](https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/011520-TradingSecrets-03.png?itok=c144SMXa){kind=link}
![<!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>](https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/libyan-airlines.jpg?itok=qmS9aUWd){kind=link}
![<!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>](https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/via%20federalist.PNG?itok=DDP6Tbsn){kind=link}
![<!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>](https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/patriotsfile.jpg?itok=nE14esQc){kind=link}