Jan 24

Today’s News 24th January 2021

  • Is The Dis-Uniting Of America Now Inevitable?
    Is The Dis-Uniting Of America Now Inevitable?

    Authored by Robert Bridge via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Joe Biden will ram through warped liberal social experiments masquerading as credible, time-tested programs designed to stabilize the nation.

    It was a stark image never before seen in Washington, DC, and one that bodes ill for the future prospects of the country. A locked down capital ringed in barbed wire, with 25,000 troops encompassing the Capitol building, provided a surreal backdrop to Joe Biden’s inauguration as the 46th POTUS.

    The excuse Democrats have provided for turning the ‘citadel of democracy’ into a maximum security prison is not due to a growing distrust with the electoral process. Nor was it blamed on the spectacle of the mainstream media and Big Tech silencing the voices of exactly one half of the U.S. electorate – up to and including that of the now former president, Donald J. Trump. No, to suggest such irrational things would attract howls of ‘conspiracy theory’ from the liberal gallery.

    Thankfully, we have Silicon Valley fact checkers and corporate media commentators to lead us to the valley of truth, which informs us that all those Trump “insurgents” who invaded the Capitol building on January 6th were motivated by pure evil intentions rooted in racism, sedition and white supremacist ideology. And as Hillary Clinton suggested during an off-the-rails interview with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Trump and his motley crew of deplorables may have taken their marching orders from none other than Vladimir Putin himself. Who needs fiction writers these days when we have the Democratic Party?

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    Conservatives need to come to grips with the realization that they are not dealing with rational people who will be willing to engage in cool-headed discussion and debate. Despite a full sweep of the political landscape, the left remains consumed by a collective fit of rage, hysteria and raw emotion that shows no sign of abating. Why? Partly due to political immaturity in the ranks, and partly because ‘victory’ for the left no longer means victory at the polls; these fanatics, for that is really what they are, will not rest easy until the political opposition is shorn of its voice and representation. In other words, when it is completely and unequivocally obliterated. And given the political proclivities of Big Tech and Big Media, those dreams are dangerously within reach. Unless the right is able to essentially build its own internet architecture to bypass the left’s censorship machine, they will eventually go the way of the dinosaurs as a political force.

    In the meantime, Joe Biden, or whoever will be pulling his strings, will ram through warped liberal social experiments masquerading as credible, time-tested programs designed to stabilize the nation. Of course they are nothing of the sort. These are globalist-backed policies – such as defunding the police, opening the border, vilifying the right as ‘racist,’ and sexualizing the minds of elementary-age children – designed to utterly destabilize the nation and all of its core institutions, including not least of all the nuclear family. Anyone who speaks out against these reckless initiatives will be struck down by the harshest cancel culture cult ever known to man. In fact, ‘domestic terrorism’ legislation is already drafted that, if passed by Congress, will go far at stifling any dissenting voices from the right.

    The very first line of the proposed legislation, entitled ‘Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2020,’ which was conveniently prepared just weeks before the Capitol riots erupted, states that “White supremacists and other far-right-wing extremists are the most significant domestic terrorism threat facing the United States…” Buried deep in the text is a single line devoted to Antifa, and nothing whatsoever about Black Lives Matter, yet these groups were responsible for torching and looting a swath of destruction across the United States following the death of George Floyd during an arrest by a while police officer.

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    Days before Biden’s ironclad inauguration, the media was out in full force propagating the notion of a connection between right-wing Trump supporters and – wait for it – terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda.

    “I did see a similar dynamic in the evolution of al-Qaida in Iraq, where a whole generation of angry Arab youth with very poor prospects followed a powerful leader who promised to take them back in time to a better place, and he led them to embrace an ideology that justified their violence,” Retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former head of Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and the commander of all U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan, said in an interview.

    “This is now happening in America.”

    So there you have it, straight from the horse’s mouth: the ‘deplorable’ right in the United States is almost on par with the same guys who carried out the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

    Needless to say, with such outrageous comments making the rounds, there was little chance of a balanced message from Joe Biden’s inaugural speech with regards to the myriad problems now stalking America. Indeed, the address was top heavy with warmed-over clichés about “unity,” as well as references to racism and inequality.

    After four years of groundless rhetoric about “racist Trump supporters” (yet no other conservative president has been so successful at attracting members of the Black and Latino community to the Republican standard than Donald Trump), it was only natural that Biden would allude to “a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.” Coming just days after the riots at the Capitol building by Trump supporters, which the hapless mainstream media has been at great pains to label a “racist” event, the message made it amply clear for whom the bell tolls.

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    Once again, at this dangerous crossroads in American history, any hope for a true bipartisan breakthrough is doomed to failure, and more so now as the radical progressives in the Democratic Party are demanding the most outrageous social, cultural and political overhaul the nation has ever witnessed. No true conservative will ever abide by these changes.

    At the same time, the voice and demonstrations of the right is not only being brutally vanquished, it is actually being assimilated under the banner of “domestic terrorism.” This marks the widest chasm between the two primary political parties in the United States, which, unless quickly bridged, will end in imminent disaster for the American experiment in democracy.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/23/2021 – 23:30

  • Putting The Cost Of COVID-19 In Perspective
    Putting The Cost Of COVID-19 In Perspective

    When it comes to the toll on human life, mental well-being, and any long-term complications, the true cost of COVID-19 (and government’s response) can be difficult to quantify.

    That said, from a purely economic angle, Visual Capitalist’s Avery Koop notes that researchers can and do examine these things – as well as economic data like unemployment and lost GDP, to assign dollar figures to the pandemic.

    Using data from a study out of Harvard University, these visualizations focus on putting the economic cost of COVID-19 in the U.S. in perspective. To help us understand the immense price associated with a pandemic, the study looked at other comparables like the costs of running America’s longstanding war on terror.

    The Cost of COVID-19

    Since the pandemic took hold in the U.S. in March 2020, job loss has been one of the most significant consequences. Unemployment claims in the U.S. have recently reached a total of 60 million, while lost GDP is estimated to be around $7.6 trillion.

    Unemployment, uncertainty, lost loved ones, and lost social connections, have led to spikes in depression and anxiety. In April 2020, around 40% of U.S. adults reported having at least one of these mental illnesses. Based on the sheer number of people struggling, the cost of mental health impairment could be as high as $1.6 trillion, according to these researchers.

     

     

    The economic value of a human life can be put in terms of ‘statistical lives’, a notion used in both American and global health policy. While human life is priceless, the value tied to one using this metric sits between $7-$10 million. Even when using the lower end of the scale, the cost of premature death due to COVID-19 is estimated to be $4.4 trillion.

     

    Finally, when looking at the long-term healthcare costs that could impact people who contract COVID-19, the price comes out to almost $2.6 trillion. These costs will go on for decades as certain lifelong conditions can emerge out of COVID-19, like respiratory and cardiovascular issues.

    Many of these conditions could also end up causing premature deaths, drawing out the total cost of COVID-19 even further.

    The Cost of War

    Both a global pandemic and a war have long-term health consequences and are extremely pricey.

    The estimated cost of the post-9/11 wars rises to over $6 trillion. This is measured by the spending of the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and USAID. The estimate also takes into consideration current and future spending on medical and disability care for veterans, the cost of war appropriations and spending, the estimated interest on borrowing for different departments, and the spending the Department of Homeland Security has done in order to prevent and respond to terrorism.

    Medical and disability care for veterans from the post-9/11 wars specifically comes out to $437 billion, with estimated future obligations for their care going up to $1 trillion.

    The increases to the Department of Defense’s budget was $803 billion thanks to the post 9/11 wars, and the Department of Homeland Security has spent more $1.05 trillion on terrorism prevention and response.

    While the costs associated with war are immense, and while the consequences of fighting in a war are usually lifelong, the estimated price is still about $10 trillion cheaper than the cost of COVID-19 in the United States.

    Throwing Money at the Problem?

    The short-term solution to COVID-19 seems to be vaccine investment, with the U.S. currently purchasing more than one billion doses. Vaccines could spell the return to a more normal life, both in terms of physical health and the health of the economy.

    While economic recovery is on the horizon, the U.S—and other nations around the globe—will continue to pay the cost of COVID-19 for years to come.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/23/2021 – 23:00

  • Biden Will Keep US Embassy In Jerusalem, Unlikely To Reverse Trump's Israel Policies
    Biden Will Keep US Embassy In Jerusalem, Unlikely To Reverse Trump’s Israel Policies

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

    During this week’s Senate confirmation hearings, Joe Biden’s secretary of state nominee said the new administration will keep the US embassy in Israel in Jerusalem.

    “Do you agree that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and do you commit that the United States will keep our embassy in Jerusalem?” Antony Blinken was asked by Republican Senator Ted Cruz (TX).

    “Yes and Yes,” Blinken responded. His answer was not a surprise, as Joe Biden said he would not reverse Trump’s embassy move back in 2020 while on the campaign trail.

    The question now is if President Biden will reverse any of the Trump administration’s pro-Israel policy changes, like the recognition of the Golan Heights as Israeli territory and the legal status of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

    According to analysis featured in Al Jazeera while Biden was on the campaign trail:

    Nonetheless, experts do not expect the modus operandi to change significantly under Biden. While the president-elect has already stated he would not move the embassy back to Tel Aviv, he will also not reverse Trump’s recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights either, a senior Biden campaign official stated on Tuesday.

    Moreover, Biden has also vehemently opposed pro-Palestinian initiatives from within his party. During the Democratic primaries, Senator Bernie Sanders suggested the US ought to utilize its Israel support as leverage and demand concessions for the Palestinians.

    Biden’s response was concise as it was unmistakable: “ridiculous and unacceptable”, he called Sanders’ idea.

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    In 2019, the Trump administration said the US no longer considered settlements in the occupied West Bank illegal. In the final weeks of the Trump administration, Israel moved forward plans for thousands of new settlements, a clear message to Biden.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/23/2021 – 22:30

  • Chesapeake Bay Oyster Prices Collapse As Diners Ditch Restaurants Amid Pandemic 
    Chesapeake Bay Oyster Prices Collapse As Diners Ditch Restaurants Amid Pandemic 

    According to The Southern Maryland Chronicle, the ripple effect of restaurant closures and indoor capacity limits at eateries across the Baltimore–Washington metropolitan area has decimated the oyster industry on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay. 

    For many who make a living off the Chesapeake Bay’s oysters, this past fall and winter have been a living nightmare. 

    Watermen in Maryland and Virginia say the problem isn’t supply but rather demand. 

    “We got lots of oysters, and they’re excellent quality,” said Bill Sieling, executive vice president of the Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association, representing Maryland crab and oyster processors. “I’ve bought two bushels this fall, and I’ve never seen oysters this fat.”

    The coronavirus pandemic and resulting lockdowns and continuing restaurant restrictions have led to a decline of diners at restaurants. This has indirectly impacted the local seafood industry as oyster demand from restraunts has plummeted. 

    Market research firm NDP Group, which tracks 75 restaurant chains, warned transactions at major chains slumped 10% in December versus the same month one year ago. 

    Watermen on the bay are saying wild-caught bushels that wholesaled for $50 dockside in 2019 only brought $30 last year. Margins collapsed for watermen making many of their operations unprofitable and unsustainable as 2021 is another year of uncertainty. 

    “Come Oct. 1, the bottom just fell out of the market,” said Fred Tull, who raises oysters on 10 acres in the Little Annemessex River by Crisfield, MD. In mid-December, when holiday demand for shellfish is usually strong, he said, “I’ve got oysters to sell and no market.”

    Mobjack Bay Seafood, a wholesaler of oysters in Ware Neck, Virginia, said sales were down 70% last year thanks to plummeting demand for oysters from restaurants. 

    The restaurant industry’s collapse is having indirect impacts on other industries that will persist through 2021. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/23/2021 – 22:00

  • "Here Are The Superheroes To Come And Save Us All": Media Waste No Time Fawning Over Biden
    “Here Are The Superheroes To Come And Save Us All”: Media Waste No Time Fawning Over Biden

    Authored by Alan Macleod via MintPressNews.com,

    We rely on the media to hold the powerful to account. But in its first hours in office, the corporate press has celebrated, rather than challenged, the new Biden administration.

    It began immediately during the 78-year-old Delawarean’s inauguration, with senior figures in the media barely able to contain their emotions watching what they saw.

    “As Lady Gaga sang the national anthem, the sky opened up and sunlight reflected off of the Capitol, illuminating the flag,” wrote Olivia Nuzzi, the New Yorker’s Washington correspondent.

    The New York Times was in a similarly poetic mood. “Whether or not related to the former president’s absence, a bipartisan lightness seemed to prevail across the stage at President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Snow flurries gave way to sun,” ran its subheadline.

    If it were not clear enough that corporate media intends to spend the next four years propping up, rather than scrutinizing President Biden, then senior CNN figures spelled it out.

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    “Trump—>Biden. Lies—>truth. Ignorance—>knowledge. Amorality—>decency. Cruelty—> empathy. Corruption—>public service” wrote CNN’s White House correspondent John J. Harwood on Twitter, attributing several extremely positive (and questionable) qualities to the incoming president. Meanwhile, the company’s head of strategic communications, Matt Dornic, was in an even more bombastic mood. Sharing a picture of fireworks exploding over the Washington Monument, he remarked that, “This team truly understands optics. These images will inspire our friends and shake our foes.”

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    Leaving aside why some colorful pyrotechnics would terrify Russia, China or any nation, Dornic’s rhetoric worried many who felt the nation’s top journalists should see themselves as the government’s adversaries, rather than their allies. “Note how this CNN imperial stenographer fearmongers about foreign bogeymen with his “foe” rhetoric. The real foe of average working-class Americans isn’t any foreign nation; it’s the parasitic capitalist oligarchs who control everything and their lackeys in politics and the media,” replied Ben Norton of The Grayzone.

    Channeling similar energy to a born again Christian preacher praising Trump, former Fox News and NBC News host Megyn Kelly announced that, “Today, I feel deep love for our country, and am praying for President Biden, Vice President Harris and for all of us as we navigate what comes next.”

    Perhaps the most adulatory coverage of the inauguration came from MSNBC, however, with analyst John Heilemann depicting the senior politicians present as almost mythical ubermensch. “What was to me so striking about today was that comforting sense,” he said. “The sight of the Clintons and the Bushes and the Obamas — The Avengers, the Marvel superheroes back up there together all in one place with their friend Joe Biden.” He later went on to compare Biden’s speech to Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address of 1865 after the union victory in the American Civil War and claimed there was a deep sense of relief washing over the nation’s capital..

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    This sentiment was apparently not shared by ordinary people on the street. Even as it was praising Biden, the New York Times reported that “The few who ventured near the Capitol were mostly somber, as if they were attending a vigil.” “It feels a little postapocalyptic, to be honest,” one told them.

    Comparing politicians they are, in theory, supposed to be challenging to superheroes has unfortunately become a common occurrence on corporate media. In November, PBS NewsHour White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor said Biden and co. were like The Avengers. “It felt like we are being rescued from the craziness and now here are the superheroes to come and save us all.”

    Today on MSNBC, Alcindor insisted that she and her White House press colleagues would “ask tough questions” of Biden even as she was heaping praise on his administration. Yet this has already proven not to be the case. On her first day as White House press secretary, Jen Psaki was thrown a number of softball questions by reporters, including whether Biden was planning to stick with Trump’s color scheme change on Air Force One.

    The president’s stenographers

    Trust in media has been falling since the 1970s, and particularly in the last few years. Part of that is due to ultra partisan reporting, a practice pioneered by Fox News in the 1990s. What Rupert Murdoch realized was that capturing a loyal following from a small segment of the population could actually be more profitable than trying to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. Since then, Fox’s model has been copied by other outlets, notably MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, who have positioned themselves as anti-Trump and pro-Democrat news sources. The result has been to create an extremely polarized media ecosystem, with each side championing their leaders and not willing to listen to the other. Unsurprisingly, Fox has been highly critical of the new president, with top host Sean Hannity attacking Biden, claiming he is physically and mentally unfit for office. “The country should be asking tonight, Mr. Unity, Mr. Frail, Weak, Cognitively Struggling Joe, I know this is past your bedtime,” he opined.

    This has seriously deleterious effects on the political system. An adversarial media is the cornerstone of any functioning democracy. Thomas Jefferson once remarked that “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government … I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Unfortunately, if Biden’s first few days are any indicator, the press will choose to prop up rather than scrutinize the new president. Media that behaved as attack dogs against Trump for four years (unless he was carrying out aggressive actions abroad) are likely to turn into lap dogs now that there is a Democrat in the White House — something that is unlikely to be a positive thing for the country.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/23/2021 – 21:30

  • US Economy Set To Overheat As Households Are Flooded With $2 Trillion In Excess Savings
    US Economy Set To Overheat As Households Are Flooded With $2 Trillion In Excess Savings

    Something unprecedented happened in the immediate aftermath of the passage of the $2.2 trillion CARES act: as a result of the unprecedented transfer of wealth from the government to consumers in the form of countless stimulus measures, personal incomes soared and personal spending plunged (as the economy was largely shut down especially for spending on services), resulting in what we showed in May was an explosion in the annualized amount of Personal Savings, which soared by a mindblowing $4 trillion in May, rising from $2.1 trillion to $6.1 trillion…

    … and accounting for a record 33% of disposable personal income!

    As an aside, and as we pointed out back in May, contrary to economist expectations that “rational” consumers would promptly use this “one-time” universal basic income wealth transfer to pay down debt and get their financial affairs in orders, it appears that many splurged these government “stimmy checks” to buy stonks.

    We bring all this up because the US savings rate, which has since dropped of substantially as a result of the gradual reopening of the economy as Americans spent much of their covid stimulus checks…

    … is about to soar again when the latest personal spending and income data is released next month to account for the passage of the December $900 billion stimulus package, and then even more once Biden’s various covid stimulus programs kick in.

    In a note explaining why the US economy is likely to grow well above the bank’s baseline assumption of 5.0% GDP (the strongest since 1984), the bank’s head global economist  Ethan Harris writes that “we have all become a bit numb to big numbers in the past year. Thus when the Biden administration announced its $1.9tn stimulus proposal, on top of $0.9tn already enacted, it triggered a relatively low-key response in the press and the markets. “Been there, done that” seemed to be the reaction.”

    According to BofA, the Biden stimulus proposal is in fact, “a very big deal” because if enacted, it would mean the recent stimulus packages match the stimulus last spring, despite the dramatic improvement in the economy. That’s not all; restrictions on activity last year meant much of that stimulus went into savings, savings that can be deployed when the service sector reopens. As explained below, this creates major upside risks to our above-consensus forecast.

    But first, a quick walk down memory lane.

    • Last April, the consensus for 2020 GDP was for a -3.3% decline and by May that had worsened to -5.7%. Today, the consensus looks for 2021 growth of about 4.1% and BofA sees 5.0% growth. That would be the strongest year for US GDP growth since 1984. Again, this is without factoring in a second stimulus package.
    • Last April, the consensus expected unemployment to hit 7.3% in the year ahead and by May that had risen to 9%. In reality, the unemployment rate has dropped to 6.7%, and the consensus expects the unemployment rate to fall to 5.3% by year-end.

    The differences are equally stark in capital markets. On 23 March 2020, the S&P500 hit bottom, 34% off of its peak and most forecasters expected a slow, painful recovery at best. Nine months later the equity market is hitting all-time highs with no sign yet of leveling off. Similar stories apply to credit markets and risk appetite in general. These strong markets pre-date the “blue wave” and the $1.9tn proposal.

    The outlook for the COVID crisis has also changed dramatically. Last spring and summer the end of the crisis was nowhere in sight. Most experts argued that a vaccine would likely be years away and many warned of a major resurgence of cases in the fall. Today, we are nearing the exit of the COVID cave, as increasingly more vocal Wall Street banks now believe. The vaccine is rolling out at an accelerating pace – and is expected to reach 1 million people per day – so that by the spring, hospitalizations – which just saw their fastest weekly drop on record – will have likely fallen by more than half. Herd immunity is likely sometime in the second half of this year.

    Going back to the question of the wave of stimulus that is about to wash over the US economy, both the consensus and apparently Administration economists seem to be ignoring how COVID containment measures can delay the benefits of fiscal stimulus according to BofA. Last year, fiscal authorities were operating with one hand tied behind their back. No amount of fiscal stimulus was going to revive the service sector. The stimulus boosted goods spending and some of what would have been spent on services went to goods, but a major portion went into excess savings (see charts above). This is why the multiplier effects of the stimulus were unusually low.

    How much excess saving was accumulated? Consider two simple calculations:

    • First, comparing actual household savings to savings assuming a flat 8.25% saving rate, a cumulative $1.4tn in “excess savings” piled up on household balance sheets through November of last year.
    • Second, comparing the monetary aggregate M2 to a baseline of steady 7% growth, there was $2.9tn of excess M2 balances-checking accounts, savings accounts, and so on-at the end of last year.

    As BofA’s Ethan Harris then writes, by the time the economy starts to reopen in the spring, those numbers could get considerably bigger. Specifically, BofA estimates that the $0.9tn package alone will add another $200bn or so to excess saving. If the $1.9tn is deployed quickly, total excess savings could approach $2tn by the spring!

    The surge in savings will happen because, as Credit Suisse writes in a note on Friday, disposable “personal income will rise sharply in Q1 to just shy of its April peak after the $900bn relief bill (Figure 3). More stimulus under the Biden administration will push income even higher.”

    What happens then, and will all these government transfer payment and excess savings send the economy into overdrive? To Credit Suisse Biden’s relief package – the third substantial stimulus in 12 months, following the $2.2tn CARES act and the $900bn bipartisan relief bill that passed in December – will lead to an even stronger economic tailwind, “perhaps blowing hardest just as normal social interactions are resuming while the pandemic ends.” It’s also why the bank just revised up its GDP growth forecasts this year higher from 5.5% (Q4/Q4) to 6.6%.

    Perhaps it’s not all that simple: as BofA’s Harris explains, it is unfortunately hard to know how much of this spending power will be deployed when the economy reopens as we simply do not have any historical experience to draw on. However, “it does suggest that net stimulus today could be a good deal higher than the effective stimulus last summer” as much of it will be focused on serves as BofA explains next:

    We expect there to be a rotation of the consumer basket towards experience-based spending from goods spending once the virus is sufficiently contained and people feel comfortable reengaging in COVID-sensitive activities (See Table 2 & Table 3 for a breakout of goods and services spending performance).

    The timing will depend on a number of factors, including the potential spread of more contagious strains of the virus, the speed of vaccine distribution and the efficacy of vaccines.

    If the US is able to sustain the current pace of vaccination (nearly 1mn per day), we think the turning point where consumers begin to shift money toward experiences will be mid-year. But there are two other important assumptions: what is the normalized level and how long does it take to return?

    Focusing on services spending, we define normal as a return to pre-COVID level for “lost” spending, 50% overshoot for partial and complete offset for the full make-up spending categories (see Table 3). For argument’s sake, if we assume that the normalized level of services spending is reached by the end of 2022, it could require $2.9tn of spending (Chart 2,-Chart 4). This implies an average monthly growth rate of 1.1% mom SA for service spending as compared to the pre-COVID average monthly rate of 0.3% mom SA.

    The above analysis only looks at the data on the aggregate. However, it is important to understand the distributional dynamics. We believe that much of the pent-up demand for services is among the higher-income population which, conveniently, is also where much of the excess savings is concentrated. Our view is supported by the fact that 1) the labor market has healed faster for the higher income population and 2) our BAC credit and debit card data suggest there is more room for recovery among high-income  households, and 3) higherincome individuals tend to have a larger share of dollars allocated toward leisure activity in “normal” times, suggesting more pent-up demand from this group for services spend.

    Of course, it will take some time to see how this plays out, but as we pointed out last week, we have already seen a significant boost to spending in the first half of January (see “Real-Time Card Spending Data Shows The Next Stimulus-Funded Buying Spree Has Arrived“). It will also take some time to figure out how much of the $1.9tn package is going to pass (consensus appears to believe that the final number will be around $1.1 trillion). And we will not know the lagged impact of fiscal stimulus on the service sector until it starts to reopen in the spring. Finally, the new variants of COVID could force new shutdowns, delaying the recovery.

    The bottom line however is this: as BofA economist Michelle Meyer writes, “the need for massive “rescue package” could be fading” as her work “suggests there is already significant excess savings to be spent once the economy reopens. We estimate that spending on services was cut by about $900bn as a result of the pandemic but yet durable goods spending was only boosted by about $20bn. Contrary to popular belief, the money that otherwise would have been used for services spending was not just pumped into goods but instead much went to “unintentional” savings.” Meanwhile savings were also boosted by extraordinary fiscal stimulus. The bottom line, as noted above, is that there could be $1.4tn in excess savings currently which is heading to $1.6tn in January following the $900bn stimulus package. And, if  If Biden’s $1.9tn stimulus is deployed quickly, total excess savings could approach $2tn by the spring! All that money could send the economy, and inflation, into overdrive.

    The good news: as Harris summarizes, “what we feel confident about already is that there are considerable upside risks to our above-consensus forecast.” That’s also the bad news, because while the Fed is confident that there is absolutely no basis for expecting a surge in inflation, should US household savings soar to $2 trillion and then proceed to be aggressively spent in the coming months, it is a guarantee that prices will rise sharply in the second half of the year… which incidentally is when increasingly more Wall Street strategists expect a market crash (see “”6 Months For A Regime Change”: Why One Strategist Believes The Market Will Crash In The Second Half Of 2021“.)

    Why? Because once even the Fed concedes that fiscal and monetary policies have unleashed inflation, the Fed will once again be boxed in, and will soon be forced to aggressively start tightening financial conditions, especially if inflation surges above the 2.5% tentative threshold that the Fed is indifferent toward as a result of last year’s change to the Fed’s average inflation targeting policy.

    It’s also why Wells Fargo strategist Chris Harvey said that the biggest “pain trade” for 2021 is an economic recovery:

    “Funny enough, I think the big pain trade for a lot of people on the buy side is a recovery or a strong recovery, because many people haven’t traded in a post-recessionary environment. Many people have been trading in a low-growth or recessionary environment. And when growth is abundant, different things happen. The market rewards value and small caps and cyclicals and that could cause a lot of pain for much of the buy side, because they’re so steeped in that growth trade.”

    In short, good news for the economy will be the worst possible news for risk assets.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/23/2021 – 21:00

  • Greenwald: The Moronic Firing Of Will Wilkinson
    Greenwald: The Moronic Firing Of Will Wilkinson

    Authored by Glenn Greenwald via greenwald.substack.com,

    Will Wilkinson is about as mainstream and conventional a thinker as one can find, and is unfailingly civil and restrained in his rhetoric. But yesterday, he was fired by the technocratic centrist think tank for which he worked, the Niskanen Center, and appears on the verge of being fired as well by The New York Times, where he is a contributing writer. This multi-pronged retribution is due to a single tweet that was obviously satirical and sarcastic and for which he abjectly apologized. But no matter: the tweet has been purposely distorted into something malevolent and the prevailing repressive climate weaponized it against him.

    Will Wilkinson, who worked until Monday at the Niskanen Center think tank and as a Contributing Writer at The New York Times (Twitter)

    Neither Wilkinson nor his tweet are particularly interesting. What merits attention here is the now-pervasive climate that fostered this tawdry episode, and which has unjustly destroyed countless reputations and careers with no sign of slowing down.

    During the Bush and Obama years, Wilkinson worked at the libertarian CATO Institute but, even then, he was not much of a libertarian. As he himself explained, he is far more of a standard-issue neoliberal that one finds everywhere throughout DC think tanks, the op-ed pages of large newspapers, and the green rooms of CNN, just with a bit wonkier style of expression and a few vague libertarian gestures on some isolated issues. That self-description was in 2012, and he since then has become even more of a standard liberal during the Trump era, which is why the Paper of Record made him a contributor opinion writer where he published articles under such bold and groundbreaking headlines as “Trump Has Disqualified Himself From Running in 2020.”

    On Wednesday, the night of Joe Biden’s inauguration, Wilkinson posted this now-deleted tweet in which he was obviously not calling for violence. He was instead sardonically noting that anti-Pence animus became a prevailing sentiment among some MAGA followers over the last month, including reports that at least a few of those who breached the Capitol were calling for Pence’s hanging on treason grounds, thus ironically enabling liberals and MAGA followers to “unite” over that desire:

    The next morning, a right-wing hedge fund manager and large-money GOP donor, Gabe Hoffman, flagged this tweet and claimed to believe that Wilkinson “call[ed] for former Vice President Mike Pence to be lynched.” Hoffman also tweeted at Wilkinson’s New York Times bosses to ask if they have “any comment on your ‘contributing opinion writer’ calling for violence against a public official?,” and then tweeted at Wilkinson’s other bosses at the think tank to demand the same.

    It is unclear whether Hoffman really believed what he was saying or was just trying to make a point that liberals should be forced to live under these bad faith, repressive “cancel culture” standards he likely blames them for creating and imposing on others. This is how he responded when I posed that question:

    I was not attempting anything. Numerous major news outlets reported on Wilkinson’s tweet, including Fox News. I simply documented the events on my Twitter feed yesterday. Clearly, many liberal journalists were outraged at his firing, noticed my documentation, and decided to inexplicably blame me for his firing. It’s ridiculous that many liberal journalists apparently had nothing better to do on Twitter, than blame a guy with less than 10,000 followers documenting events, for getting Wilkinson fired, considering many major news outlets reported on Wilkinson’s tweet.

    When I pressed further on whether he really believed that Wilkinson’s tweet was an earnest call for assassination or whether he was just demanding that perceived “cancel culture” standards be applied equally, he responded: “I did not take a position either way on the matter. Wilkinson is perfectly capable of explaining the tweet and his intended meaning, since he wrote it. Clearly, given the content, the least one can expect is that he should give that explanation.”

    Either way, intentional or not, Hoffman’s distorted interpretation of Wilkinson’s tweet produced instant results. That afternoon, Wilkinson posted a long and profuse apology to Twitter in which he made clear that he did not intend to advocate violence, but still said: “Last night I made an error of judgment and tweeted this. It was sharp sarcasm, but looked like a call for violence. That’s always wrong, even as a joke. It was especially wrong at a moment when unity and peace are so critical. I’m deeply sorry and vow not to repeat the mistake. . . . [T]here was no excuse for putting the point the way I did. It was wrong, period.”

    At least for now, that apology fell on deaf ears. The president and co-founder of the Niskanen Center, Jerry Taylor, quickly posted a statement (now deleted without comment) announcing Wilkinson’s immediate firing, a statement promptly noted by Hoffman:

    Statement of Niskanen Center, posted to Twitter the evening of Jan. 21 and now deleted without comment, by President Jerry Taylor

     

    Wilkinson’s job with The New York Times is also clearly endangered. A spokesperson for the paper told Fox News: “Advocating violence of any form, even in jest, is unacceptable and against the standards of The New York Times. We’re reassessing our relationship with Will Wilkinson.”

    So a completely ordinary and unassuming liberal commentator is in jeopardy of having his career destroyed because of a tweet that no person in good faith could possibly believe was actually advocating violence and which, at worst, could be said to be irresponsibly worded. And this is happening even though everyone knows it is all based on a totally fictitious understanding of what he said. Why?

    It is important to emphasize that Wilkinson’s specific plight is the least interesting and important aspect of this story. Unlike most people subjected to these sorts of bad faith reputation-wrecking attacks, he has many influential media friends and allies who are already defending him — including New York Times columnists Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat — and I would be unsurprised if this causes the paper to keep him and the Niskanen Center to reverse its termination of him.

    All of this is especially ironic given that the president of this colorless, sleepy think tank — last seen hiring the colorless, sleepy Matt Yglesias — himself has a history of earnestly and non-ironically advocating actual violence against people. As Aaron Sibarium documented, Taylor took to Twitter over the summer to say that he wishes BLM and Antifa marchers had “rushed” the St. Louis couple which famously displayed guns outside their homes and “beat their brains in,” adding: “excuse me if I root for antifa to punch these idiots out.” So that’s the profound, pious believer in non-violence so deeply offended by Wilkinson’s tweet that he quickly fired him from his think tank.

    Whatever else might be true of them, the Niskanen Center’s president and The New York Times editors are not dumb enough to believe that Wilkinson was actually advocating that Mike Pence be lynched. It takes only a few functional brain cells to recognize what his actual intent with that tweet was, as poorly expressed or ill-advised as it might have been given the context-free world of Twitter and the tensions of the moment. So why would they indulge all this by firing a perfectly inoffensive career technocrat, all to appease the blatant bad faith and probably-not-even-serious demands of the mob?

    Because this is the framework that we all now live with. It does not matter whether the anger directed at the think tank executives or New York Times editors is in good faith or not. It is utterly irrelevant whether there is any validity to the complaints against Wilkinson and the demands that he be fired. The merit of these kinds of grievance campaigns is not a factor.

    All that matters to these decision-makers is societal scorn and ostracization. That is why the only thing that can save Wilkinson is that he has enough powerful friends to defend him, enabling them to reverse the cost-benefit calculus: make it so that there is more social scorn from firing Wilkinson than keeping him. Without the powerful media friends he has assembled over the years, he would have no chance to salvage his reputation and career no matter how obvious it was that the complaints against him are baseless.

    Humans are social and political animals. We do fundamentally crave and need privacy. But we also crave and need social integration and approval. That it is why prolonged solitary confinement in prison is a form of torture that is almost certain to drive humans insane. It is why John McCain said far worse than the physical abuse he endured in a North Vietnamese prison was the long-term isolation to which he was subjected. It is why modern society’s penchant for removing what had been our sense of community — churches, mosques, and synagogues; union halls and bowling leagues; small-town life — has coincided with a significant increase in mental health pathologies, and it is why the lockdowns and isolation of the COVID pandemic have made all of those, predictably, so much worse.

    Those who have crafted a society in which mob anger, no matter how invalid, results in ostracization and reputation-destruction have exploited these impulses. If you are a think tank executive in Washington or a New York Times editor, why would you want to endure the attacks on you for “sanctioning violence” or “inciting assassinations” just to save Will Wilkinson? The prevailing culture vests so much weight in these sorts of outrage mobs that it is almost always easier to appease them than resist them.

    The recent extraordinary removal of the social media platform Parler from the internet was clearly driven by these dynamics. It is inconceivable that Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos and Google executives believe that Parler is some neo-Nazi site that played anywhere near the role in planning and advocating for the Capitol riot as Facebook and YouTube did. But they know that significant chunks of liberal elite culture believe this (or at least claim to), and they thus calculate — not irrationally, even if cowardly — that they will have to endure a large social and reputational hit for refusing mob demands to destroy Parler. Like the Niskanen and Times bosses with Wilkinson, they had to decide how much pain they were willing to accept to defend Parler, and — as is usually the case — it turned out the answer was not much. Thus was Parler destroyed, with nowhere near the number of important liberal friends that Wilkinson has.

    The perception that this is some sort of exclusively left-wing tactic is untrue. Recall in 2003, in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when the lead singer for the Dixie Chicks, Natalie Maines, uttered this utterly benign political comment at a concert in London: “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence. And we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.” In response, millions joined a boycott of their music, radio stations refused to play their songs, Bush supporters burned their albums, and country star Toby Keith performed in front of a gigantic image of Maines standing next to Saddam Hussein, as though her opposition to the war meant she admired the Iraqi dictator.

    But two recent trends have greatly intensified this mania. Social media is one of the most powerful generators of group-think ever invented in human history, enabling a small number of people to make decision-makers feel besieged with scorn and threatened with ostracization if they do not obey mob demands. The other is that the liberal-left has gained cultural hegemony in the most significant institutions — from academia and journalism to entertainment, sports, music and art — and this weapon, which they most certainly did not invent, is now vested squarely in their hands.

    But all weapons, once unleashed onto the world, will be copied and wielded by opposing tribes. Gabe Hoffman has likely seen powerless workers fired in the wake of the George Floyd killing for acts as trivial as a Latino truck driver innocently flashing an “OK” sign at a traffic light or a researcher fired for posting data about the political effects of violent v. non-violent protests and realized that he could use, or at least trifle with, this power against liberals instead of watching it be used by them. So he did it.

    It’s exactly the same dynamic that led liberals to swoon over Donald Trump’s banning from social media and the mass-banning of his followers only to watch yesterday as numerous Antifa accounts were banned for the crime of organizing an anti-Biden march and how, before that, Palestinian journalists and activists have been banned en masse whenever Israel claims their rhetoric constitutes “incitement.”

    Unleash this monster and one day it will come for you. And you’ll have no principle to credibly invoke in protest when it does. You’ll be left with nothing more than lame and craven pleading that your friends do not deserve the same treatment as your enemies. Force, not principle, will be the sole factor deciding the outcome.

    If you’re lucky enough to have important and famous media friends like Will Wilkinson, you have a chance to survive it. Absent that, you have none.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/23/2021 – 20:30

  • Morgan Stanley CEO Gorman Hauls In $33 Million In 2020
    Morgan Stanley CEO Gorman Hauls In $33 Million In 2020

    Morgan Stanley’s CEO James Gorman passed J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon in total compensation for 2020, racking up $33 million in salary.

    The 2020 take marked a 22% rise in Gorman’s pay from the year prior. In 2020, Morgan Stanley posted its “third consecutive year of record earnings”, according to Bloomberg. 

    Gorman’s salary was $1.5 million and included a $7.8 million bonus. He also received $23.6 million in long-term stock awards, which vest over time. “Consistent with previous years, 75% of Gorman’s incentive compensation is deferred over three years and is subject to clawback, and 100% of Mr. Gorman’s deferred incentive compensation is delivered in the form of equity awards,” Bloomberg noted.

    Gorman had taken a surprise pay cut in 2019, tied to cost-cutting efforts and a round of layoffs at the firm. In 2020, the firm didn’t undertake any new cuts while some of its banking rivals reneged on promises to due the same, citing the Covid-19 pandemic as a scapegoat.

    Also in 2020, Morgan Stanley carried out two of the largest deals done on Wall Street. Its market cap is now nearly 30% higher than Goldman Sachs. 

    A company filing said the compensation committee based his salary on  “outstanding individual performance, including both significant progress in implementing a long-term strategy previously articulated by Mr. Gorman that has led to transformational change and a resilient business model, and the Firm’s record financial performance for 2020.”

    Recall, we noted late last week that competitor Jamie Dimon’s salary had held steady for 2020 at $31.5 million. 

    J.P. Morgan noted that “amid the unprecedented health and economic consequences of Covid-19” it was also still able to post record revenue and hold a strong balance sheet, even while provisioning $12 billion for credit losses. Its shares wound up down 8% for the year, despite a weeks-long rally to end the year. 

    Dimon’s pay package similarly included $1.5 million base pay, a $5 million bonus and $25 million in “performance share units” that vest over time.

     

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/23/2021 – 20:00

  • New Law Allows China's Coast Guard To Fire On Foreign Vessels
    New Law Allows China’s Coast Guard To Fire On Foreign Vessels

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

    China’s legislature passed a law on Friday that gives its coast guard more freedom to fire on foreign vessels. According to the text of the law released by China’s Xinhua, it aims to safeguard “national sovereignty, security and maritime rights.”

    The law allows China’s Coast Guard to take “all necessary means”, including the use of weapons, to stop or prevent threats from foreign vessels. The law will allow the coast guard to stop and board vessels in China’s “jurisdictional waters”.

    Via Bloomberg

    China’s Coast Guard is relatively young, having formed in 2013 after previously being part of Beijing’s People’s Armed Police. The new law gives China’s Coast Guard an authority most country’s coast guards have. Still, the law is significant because of China’s maritime disputes in the South and East China Seas, disputes that the US has involved itself in.

    In the South China Sea, Beijing and several Southeast Asian countries have overlapping claims. Since 2015, the US began sailing warships near Chinese-claimed waters in the region, maneuvers that were stepped up during the Trump administration and will likely continue under President Biden.

    In the East China Sea, China and Japan both claim the Senkaku Islands, known as the Diaoyus in China. Japan currently administers the uninhabited islands. Chinese coast guard vessels were recently spotted in waters near the Senkakus, which drew condemnation from Tokyo.

    After winning the November presidential election, Joe Biden assured Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide that the Senkakus are covered under the US-Japan mutual defense treaty.

    Back in October, then-National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien announced that the US Coast Guard was deploying ships to the Western Pacific. It’s not clear how far west the cutters have sailed, but O’Brien cited Beijing as the reason for the deployment, so there’s a chance the US Coast Guard can cross paths with China’s coast guard.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/23/2021 – 19:30

  • Amazon Demands In-Person Union Vote After Arguing Mail-In Ballots 'Raise Risk Of Fraud'
    Amazon Demands In-Person Union Vote After Arguing Mail-In Ballots ‘Raise Risk Of Fraud’

    Surprise! Mail-in ballots raise the risk of fraud – according to Amazon.

    In a Thursday filing with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the Seattle-based online retail giant formally requested that a group of Alabama warehouse trying to form a union be required to vote in person, rather than by mail, according to Bloomberg. The company also requested a postponement of the vote so the NLRB can reconsider its earlier ruling which gives workers the next two months to vote by mail.

    A group of workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse filed paperwork in November for an election to decide whether to be represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, a rare step for workers at a company whose U.S. workforce isn’t unionized. The NLRB, which oversees union votes, earlier this month said the vote would be conducted by mail, citing standards set up during the pandemic to keep workers and staffers safe. –Bloomberg

    Amazon objected to the NLRB’s decision – saying they had ‘unfairly dismissed the company’s argument’ that its facility is safer than the surrounding Jefferson County, which hit a 20% COVID-19 positive test rate earlier this month. The company argues that in-person voting would have “fully minimized any risk of transmission,” and that the NLRB’s decision on mail-in votes was “based on speculation and conjecture, and without ever balancing the purported risk of virus spread against the public policy that ‘strongly favors’ allowing employees to vote in person.”

    The world’s largest online retailer said that a mail election raised the risk of fraud and the coercion of workers. It also said the process would depress turnout, arguing that as many as 29% of its more than 5,800 employees eligible to vote wouldn’t do so or would return incorrectly completed ballots. –Bloomberg

     The solution, according to Amazon? Hold the election in a heated tent in the facility’s parking lot in conjunction with software designed to ensure social distancing. The NLRB says conditions are too dangerous for in-person voting, and that acquiescing to Amazon’s demands might give workers the impression that government employees conducting the vote might be receiving inappropriate benefits from the company.

    “The most important factors in my decision are the safety of all election participants and the enfranchisement of all voters,” wrote the NLRB’s acting regional director in the Board’s decision, adding “Both of these factors weigh in favor of a mail ballot election.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/23/2021 – 19:00

  • California Refuses To Disclose COVID-19 Data Used To Drive Lockdowns
    California Refuses To Disclose COVID-19 Data Used To Drive Lockdowns

    California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) promised months ago that the state’s COVID-19 policy decisions would be driven by transparent data that would be shared with the public.

    Now, his administration is refusing to disclose key information used to determine when lockdown orders are implemented or rescinded – and has denied a public records request filed with the California Health and Human Services (CHHS) Agency on May 28 by the Center for American Liberty (CAL) seeking both the data and science behind the state’s lockdown decisions, according to Fox News.

    State health officials now say they rely on a ‘very complex set of measurements that would confuse and potentially mislead the public,’ AP reports.

    In short, California says you’re too stupid to understand their rationale for mandating thousands of businesses into financial ruin through what appear to be arbitrary and unscientific decisions. To wit, at least two California judges have struck down the state’s draconian mandates over lack of scientific evidence to support lockdowns and restaurant restrictions.

    Not only that, according to SFGATE, there’s growing speculation that California’s ban on outdoor dining may have contributed to the state’s COVID-19 surge. Not the best of optics as as a GOP effort to recall Newsom continues to gain momentum.

    According to CAL executive director Mark Trammel, the Golden State won’t answer why, for example, they won’t answer why indoor religious services are strictly forbidden while other venues where people gather are just fine.

    “If it’s safe enough to go to a marijuana dispensary or Macy’s or Costco that same standard should apply to parishioners in our congregation they should be able to sep in pews and wear a mask,” Trammel told Fox News in a recent interview.

    Dr. Lee Riley, chairman of UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health infectious disease division thinks the state’s lack of transparency is troubling.

    “There is more uncertainty created by NOT releasing the data that only the state has access to,” he told the Associated Press in an email.

    More via AP:

    Newsom, a Democrat, imposed the nation’s first statewide shutdown in March. His administration developed reopening plans that included benchmarks for virus data such as per capita infection rates that counties needed to meet to relax restrictions.

    It released data models state officials use to project whether infections, hospitalizations and deaths are likely to rise or fall.

    As cases surged after Thanksgiving, Newsom tore up his playbook. Rather than a county-by-county approach, he created five regions and established a single measurement — ICU capacity — as the determination for whether a region was placed under a stay-at-home order.

    In short order, four regions — about 98% of the state’s population — were under the restrictions after their capacity fell below the 15% threshold. A map updated daily tracks each region’s capacity.

    At the start of last week, no regions appeared likely to have the stay-at-home order lifted soon because their capacity was well below 15%. But within a day, the state announced it was lifting the order for the 13-county Greater Sacramento area.

    Suddenly, outdoor dining and worship services were OK again, hair and nail salons and other businesses could reopen, and retailers were allowed more shoppers inside.

    Local officials and businesses were caught off guard. State officials did not describe their reasoning other than to say it was based on a projection for ICU capacity.

    State health officials relied on a complex formula to project that while the Sacramento region’s intensive care capacity was below 10%, it would climb above 15% within four weeks. On Friday, it was 9%, roughly the same as when the order was lifted.

    “What happened to the 15%? What was that all about?” asked Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist and infectious-diseases control expert at University of California, San Francisco. “I was surprised. I assume they know something I don’t know.”

    Trying to explain the quagmire, CA Health and Human Services Agency spokeswoman Kate Folmar said (with a straight face?) that officials are committed to transparency – and that projected ICU capacity is based on several variables – including available beds and staffing that can change regularly.

    “These fluid, on-the-ground conditions cannot be boiled down to a single data point — and to do so would mislead and create greater uncertainty for Californians,” she said.

    According to First Amendment Coalition Executive Director David Snyder, the state’s lack of disclosure is disturbing. 

    “The state is wielding extraordinary power these days — power to close businesses, to directly impact people’s livelihoods and even lives — and so it owes it to Californians to disclose how and why it makes those decisions,” he said, adding that secrecy “is exactly the wrong approach here and will only breed further mistrust, confusion and contempt for the crucial role of government in bringing us out of this crisis.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/23/2021 – 18:45

  • Confessions Of A Deprogrammed Trump Supporter
    Confessions Of A Deprogrammed Trump Supporter

    Authored (satirically) by Matthew Ehret via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    As many people are aware, CNN recently aired a wonderful interview by former Moonie-turned-cult-deprogrammer Steve Hassan giving advice to Americans wishing to deprogram their MAGA-hat wearing loved ones, now that the age of Trump is coming to an end.

    I was fortunate enough to have read Hassan’s book and had the loving scrub-brush of truth wash my brain of all of its formerly pro-Trump sympathies and can honestly say that I am most certainly better off for having left those old delusions in the past.

    For one thing, I used to enjoy my right to free speech… but thanks to the terrible events of January 6, 2021 that left 3 people dead, horned Q supporters doing photo ops for media, pro-Trump rioters let into the capitol building by guards, and busloads of conspicuous violent figures whom some say were “provocateurs” (whatever that means), I have come to realize that I was all wrong. Free speech is actually very dangerous. Words we took for granted like “patriot”, “nationalism”, or “vote fraud” are actually very racist and using them is a sure fire sign that you might be a domestic terrorist. At any rate, using them should at least be enough to get someone banned from social media and put under surveillance.

    For a long time, I thought that record numbers of Black and Hispanic voters supporting Trump in 2020 meant that Trump was not racist, but I now realize that these poor folks just suffered from “multiracial whiteness”.

    I thought that questioning voting machines that had been caught red handed manipulating elections across the world was patriotic and that somehow some conglomeration of Big Tech, the media, intelligence agencies and a thing called “deep state” were colluding to create a color revolution in the USA… but I now realize that I was actually supporting conspiracy theories and thus violence and thus domestic terrorism.

    I was so far gone that my pre-deprogrammed self was actually persuaded in the crazy idea that depopulation agendas hid behind the cover of a “Great Reset agenda”, concocted by a shadowy elite of sociopathic oligarchs. I have now learned that this was either a silly conspiracy theory, the result of my own delusions or if it was true, then I can at least say with certainty that it is all for my own good.

    The truth that I have now come to discover, is that free speech has just gone too far.

    This practice has reached its limits, and Twitter’s legal executive Vijaya Gadde is absolutely right. Social Media should do its civic duty and extend its censorship of “dangerous thoughts” to citizens and political officials outside of the USA in order to protect the world from itself.

    If other world leaders are worried about this new truth, then they should seriously do some soul searching and learn to think differently.

    The old me is long gone, and now all I can say is “thank god” Joe Biden has found himself in the position of leader of the free world at this historic moment of change.

    For awhile it was looking like Donald Trump would actually stop forever wars, and untie the U.S. military’s involvement from the CIA. That white supremacist actually came precariously close to destroying the foundations of globalization that many enlightened billionaires had put decades of energy into organizing- first destroying Obama’s Transpacific Partnership, then the Paris Climate Accords and THEN he had the nerve to scrap NAFTA itself by giving nation states a say in economic affairs!

    He even committed the sin of criticizing NATO itself- the very foundation of western collective security from the obvious threats of Russia and China!

    He called for insane things like “bringing back manufacturing to the USA”, “restoring protectionism”, and “making space exploration and arctic development a priority for the nation” and everyone knows that this is all so 1963.

    But now the “disturbance” is over, and the age of Biden has arrived!

    Joe Biden is a man who understands what liberal values and the “rules-based order” are really about.

    He was wise enough to get onto the unipolar bandwagon before it was popular by drafting the 1994 surveillance bill that John Ashcroft later used verbatim for the Patriot Act after 9/11.

    He was smart enough to know that Wall Street couldn’t lead America into the 21st century as long as Glass-Steagall was in place and voted for its repeal in 1999.

    He was one of the loudest supporters of NAFTA which helped reduce carbon emissions drastically by exporting dirty industrial jobs oversees where they should be.

    He also gave the Credit Card companies the political support they needed to stop citizens from abusing their generosity which went a long way to help Americans build character and take responsibility for their short sighted consumer decisions.

    After 9/11, Biden also brilliantly supported the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq (who may not have had anything to do with 9/11 but at least showed the terrorists who’s boss).

    Unlike those cultish Trumping fascists, Biden was courageous enough to proclaim even before the horrible insurrectionary riots of January 6th, that a new Patriot Act/Domestic Terror Bill would be needed to purge the republic of dangerous terrorism and the insidious thought crimes which spread doubt in honest elections, and distrust in the benevolent political structures leading the western world. Thinking people know, that thought does sometimes cause action… and if we want to truly remedy wrong actions like the riots of January 6th, or dangerous COVID-denialism, then we should most certainly take the battle to the realm of the mind.

    The brilliant Steve Hassan even recognized this reality in his CNN interview when he said that “the bottom line is all of America needs deprogramming because we’ve all been negatively influenced by Donald Trump.”

    Sure, some people think that the 46 deaths and 32 riots caused by Antifa and BLM over the past six months might qualify as domestic terrorism, but that’s only because they are infected with racist wrong think and don’t realize that these groups were just fighting against fascism and racism.

    Certainly, the first 100 days after Biden’s inauguration will be inspired.

    Already, Biden has made commitments to sign the USA back onto the legally binding Paris Climate Accords to help us win the war against climate, and has shown the good sense to reverse Trump’s disastrous decision to break the anti-China TPP in 2016. Biden always said he would renegotiate the TPP in order “to hold China accountable”, and everyone knows Trump’s selfish decision only helped China by freeing up its neighbors to work together on the BRI. If only Trump hadn’t killed TPP, then the 14 nation strong Regional Cooperation Economic Partnership which China just finalized would never have happened.

    Most importantly, our benevolent overlords who meet at Davos every year are happy once more and have even kicked off Biden’s inauguration with a special celebration entitled “the Davos Agenda” running from January 25-29. According to the WEF, this event will “mark the launch of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset Initiative and begin the preparation of the Special Annual Meeting in the spring. Each day will focus on one of the five domains of the Great Reset Initiative.”

    The USA’s new Special Envoy on Climate, John Kerry, captured the excitement of this wonderful moment perfectly when he said:

    “The notion of a reset is more important than ever before… we’re at the dawn of an extremely exciting time.”

    According to the Great Reset architects, this is definitely the right idea.

    WEF President Klaus Schwab has taught us that the “age of owning things” is so passe, and we know that this obsolete relic of capitalism isn’t compatible in our new age of global peace and brotherhood.

    Ownership of “things” just makes us selfish and forget about the real purpose of life.. which is really about sacrifice. Establishing new supranational organizations to manage the levers of consumption and production according to evidence-based standards and scientific realities of carrying capacity is the only remedy to the evils of populism and being ignorant to this reality doesn’t lessen the fact that boards of experts who are smarter than you say that it is so.

    According to the WEF’s Great Reset website global CO2 output collapsed by over 7% during the 12 months of global COVID-19 shutdowns… which means the COVID-19 is more of a blessing than many dim witted selfish nationalists who like owning things realize.

    So what if the world population will contract under the shutdown of the world economy under COVID lockdowns? And so what if we lose our capacity to support industrial civilization through the imposition of global green energy grid?

    Didn’t the late great Maurice Strong (who was WEF Executive Director and father of the Great Reset), ask the question in 1991:

    “What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? The group’s conclusion is ‘no’. The rich countries won’t do it. They won’t change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

    So get ready for an exciting time in history, and hopefully China finally learns that the new world order is Unipolar – with a big green hug for all well behaved leaders who get rid of such silly ideas as “nationalism”, “industrial progress” or “ending poverty through development” which dangerous concepts like the Belt and Road Initiative threaten to unleash.

    Most importantly, China has to really deprogram itself from her belief that Russia is a worthwhile partner in the 21st century.

    Xi made a good decision to attend this month’s Great Reset conference and both he and Modi would do well to abandon dirty fossil fuels, their support of nuclear energy development or space mining in order to adapt their realities to the computer models which have been telling us how to hitch our destinies to a world of entropy and diminishing returns.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/23/2021 – 18:35

  • "6 Months For A Regime Change": Why One Strategist Believes The Market Will Crash In The Second Half Of 2021
    “6 Months For A Regime Change”: Why One Strategist Believes The Market Will Crash In The Second Half Of 2021

    By now it is clear to everyone that: i) we are living in an “epic” market bubble (as defined by Jeremy Grantham, who also see s “spectacular” crash coming), and ii) one which is made all that more acute by a historic level of euphoria (according to Citi, Goldman and BofA), with Citi’s euphoria sentiment indicator at the euphoria-est stage in history as the latest Panic/Euphoria model shows

    Ok, fine, the market is now more insane than it has ever been and the result are Volkswagen-esque short-squeeze explosions like the one we just saw in Gamestop, which made the Big Short (Squeeze) Michael Burry even richer.

    But while everyone knows this is a bubble of unprecedented euphoria proportions, what everyone wants to know is how – and more importantly when – it will end.

    Just yesterday we got two attempts to answer that question, the first from Jeremy Grantham, who told Bloomberg that he sees a “spectacular” crash in “the next few months.” Another, less alarmist prediction, came from BofA CIO Michael Hartnett, who while not expecting anything “spectacular”, predicted a sharp drawdown in risk as soon as this quarter, as this simply has to happen to reduce the record froth in this “late-stage speculative blow-off” and allow the normal move higher to resume.

    Adding to the pile up, in his latest Weekly Kickstart note even the ever-cheerful Goldman head equity strategist, David Kostin, admits that a part of the market that appears frothy “and may pose a broader risk is extremely high-growth, high-multiple stocks.” As the Goldman strategist points out, “like negative earners and penny stocks, trading volumes and share prices of stocks with EV/sales multiples over 20x have soared.”

    However, these firms are much larger, collectively accounting for 23% of trading volumes during the past month (96thpercentile since 1985) and 9% of market cap. Some of this appreciation is appropriate given record low interest rates. Firms with EV/sales ratios greater than 20x accounted for 2% of trading volumes in 2019. That share rose to 10% in August 2020 as interest rates plunged. However, their share of volumes has doubled again during the most recent market rally.

    Another way of showing this: the Fed’s injections of trillions have made it so investors have run out of new trash to buy, so they are piling into the same old trash to the point where the riskiest assets are also the most attractive ones.

    The chart above should come as no surprise to our regular readers: after all for the past decade we have said that we are now in a (non) “market” where fundamentals and logic don’t matter, so instead you have armies of retail daytraders rushing into the most shorted names – something we said was the best trading strategy as far back as 2013 – and also everyone turning into a momentum trader, and just buying anything that goes up (and selling anything that doesn’t). The FT had an amusing take on that:

    … the stock market has totally lost its marbles, and in a bid to make as much money in as little time as possible has decided to become one giant momentum trade which consumes ever more of itself as it feeds itself.

    Incidentally, those who wonder what may be the “next Gamestop” where an violent short squeeze sends the stocks soaring, yesterday we showed a handful of companies where the short interest as a % of float is over 50% and are ripe to explode higher.

    Source

    Now, these staggering meltups across stocks, sectors and the broader market, are starting to be a problem for Wall Street, whose analysts are once again badly behind the curve. Take Bank of America, which has a 2021 year end target of 3,800, or below the S&P’s Friday close. Or Wells Fargo which is at 3,850 and also below the recent all time high in the S&P, which was reached before January was even over.

    So are strategists rushing to lift their price targets as they so always do when they chase prices and try to justify their recos to clients? Some – like Goldman, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley are. Others, however, like Wells Fargo head strategist Chris Harvey refuses to do so and is keeping his S&P target of 3,850. Speaking with Bloomberg’s “What Goes Up” podcast, he discussed why he’s not ready to throw in the towel on his conservative target. He also discussed how Tesla Inc.’s entrance into the S&P 500 reminds him of when AOL joined the benchmark index more than 20 years ago, and why he sees it as a potential signal of the end of “growth-at-any-price” (not to be confused with GARP) type of investing,

    Here are the highlights from his interview starting with why he’s sticking with his S&P 500 target:

    “We knew that this is a very conservative target and we bias ourselves on the conservative side. Last year, we also had a lower target than the marketplace. And one of the things that was different from us is we had a lot of confidence in it. We never cut our price target. And when things got really dicey, we found real value. We felt comfortable in and around the market lows, telling people to put money to work. Also at this time last year, we ran into a similar situation where people were saying, ‘Hey Chris, are you going to raise your price target? Or what are you going to do?’ We said no. And right now the answer is no.”

    “We have very conservative earnings estimates. Part of that is because we don’t know what the tax regime is going to look like. It’s a long year and we’ll see, and we have no problems raising our targets or changing when the information changes. What we really don’t want to do is to cut our target because we don’t want to tell people there’s value there when there really isn’t. And so we tend to err on the more conservative side.”

    On why investment opportunities based on stimulus may be short-lived:

    “To get to the tax situation: One of the reasons why we see the opportunity being much shorter is it appears to be a rent, not own, type situation. We’re super cheap, right? And frugal as the day is long. We don’t want to stick around for the bill. You’re going to have to pay that bill. You’re going to have to do that before the midterm elections. So that’s saying somewhere in the second half of this year, or the beginning of next year. It’s hard to say granularly what’s going to occur, but we know that we’ve spent a lot of money and sooner or later we do have to pay the bill and we think it’s coming. And so, unlike a lot of my peers, I’m a little bit worried about that because that’s not going to be a whole lot of fun.”

    Why Tesla gives him an AOL flashback:

    “The Spidey sense is starting to tingle, right? I remember 1998, 1999 and I remember what was happening. You had a lot of speculation, you had a lot of retail investors getting involved. And we have a lot of funny things going on now. But what was amazing to me is AOL at the time was a game changer. It was an amazing technology. The stock had an incredible run, a run I really hadn’t seen before.”

    “And it was added to the S&P late in the year at a very large market cap, or very large weighting. That to me was the beginning of the end, right? ‘99 was a fantastic year for stocks, but after ‘99, many of your tech companies and many of your growth companies lost 50% to 100% of their value. Now you have another game-changing technology in Tesla. And you have a stock that has performed amazingly well. And it’s going into the S&P 500 when? December last year. At a very large weight or market cap. This is signaling that we’re close to the end of the ‘growth-at-any-price’ type investment strategy. It’s not a call-out on a particular stock, but what it shows you is that we’ve reached that level.”

    “And so back in the late ‘90s, it took 12 months for that, for the regime change to occur. And what I’m telling clients now is in 2020, everything is accelerated, right? Everything that I thought was going to happen more or less occurred, but just in a very compressed time period. So if it took 12 months in the late ‘90s, we think it probably takes six months now for that regime change really to occur.”

    Finally, on the potential “pain trade” for 2021:

    “Funny enough, I think the big pain trade for a lot of people on the buy side is a recovery or a strong recovery, because many people haven’t traded in a post-recessionary environment. Many people have been trading in a low-growth or recessionary environment. And when growth is abundant, different things happen. The market rewards value and small caps and cyclicals and that could cause a lot of pain for much of the buy side, because they’re so steeped in that growth trade.”

    There is one more reason why the second half of 2021 will be very painful. As we first explained one month ago, the Chinese credit impulse has just peaked and is now set for a period of freefall as China scrambles to contain its recent lending spree, a move which will send its first derivative, the impulse, reeling and will have profoundly adverse impacts not only on Nominal GDP…

    … but virtually every other asset class too.

    Source

    To listen to the complete podcast with Harvey, click here.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/23/2021 – 18:26

  • DoorDash Accused Of Steering Customers Away From Nonparticipating Restaurants
    DoorDash Accused Of Steering Customers Away From Nonparticipating Restaurants

    By Brian Straight of FreightWaves

    Does DoorDash set up fake landing pages for restaurants in an effort to steer customers to preferred restaurants? That is the basis of a potential class action lawsuit filed by Lona’s Lil Eats, a St. Louis Asian fusion restaurant.

    The suit, originally filed in September in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, where DoorDash is based, alleges DoorDash posted a Lona’s landing page on its app, even though the restaurant had no existing relationship with the delivery service. Lona’s further alleges that when a customer clicked the landing page, the customer was able to see a complete menu and proceed as if an order could be placed. In the end, though, the customer was shown one of two messages: that Lona’s was closed or that it was “too far away” for delivery, even when the customer was standing within 200 feet of the location, the suit alleges.

    Lona’s lawyers argue that DoorDash, which takes up to a 30% commission on each order, is impacting Lona’s business and other potential members of the class.

    “Accordingly, DoorDash is publishing false and deceptive information about the ability to get food from Lona’s as a means of punishing it for not partnering with it, and/or pressuring it to partner with it and to redirect would-be Lona’s business to its partner restaurants,” the suit alleges. “Defendant’s conduct has an obvious, significant and unfair impact upon the competitive landscape within the restaurant industry and results in damage to plaintiff and members of the class.”

    On Monday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson for the San Francisco-based District Court denied DoorDash’s motion to dismiss, allowing the suit to move forward. The judge has ordered DoorDash to file its answer to the amended complaint within 14 days.

    In the original complaint, Lona’s attorneys said that DoorDash engaged in “unfair, deceptive and anticompetitive practice regarding the manner in which it displays information about businesses with whom it does not have an agreement to provide service.” It further alleged that DoorDash “has engaged in a pattern of behavior whereby customers are deceptively steered away from restaurants with whom DoorDash does not have a relationship by DoorDash’s practice of affirmatively representing to consumers that those restaurants are closed, cannot deliver to them or are not accepting orders at the time.”

    The attorneys – led by Francis J. Flynn Jr. of the Law Office of Francis J. Flynn Jr. – are asking for a jury trial with class action status for similarly impacted businesses, seeking damages and injunctive relief for false advertising in violation of the Lanham Act, of California’s False Advertising law (FAL) and of California’s unfair competition law (UCL).

    “DoorDash takes advantage of the existing market demand for Lona’s and other restaurants to drive traffic to its site, at which time it will redirect customers to other partner restaurants by suggesting that Lona’s is not an option,” the suit alleges.

    DoorDash argued that Lona’s lacked standing and failed to offer “specificity as required by Rule 9(b)” and that its Lanham Act claim is false.

    The court rejected each of these arguments.

    “We’re proud of the role DoorDash plays in helping restaurants connect with new customers and generate additional revenue, and remain committed to demonstrating the value of the DoorDash platform and the variety of options available to support the merchant community,” a DoorDash spokesperson said in an emailed statement to FreightWaves.

    A request for comment from Flynn’s law office had not been returned as of publishing time.

    In arguing that Lona’s did not have standing, DoorDash said that “to have standing under the FAL, [Lona’s] must allege that it suffered an injury due to its own actual and reasonable reliance on the purported misleading statements.”

    The additional claims were similarly dismissed by the court. The court also acknowledged that while one part of Lona’s allegations have been remedied – the removal of the listing saying the restaurant was closed – the notice that the restaurant was out of delivery range persisted for more than a month after the original complaint was made.

    The food delivery app went public in early December, raising $3.37 billion on the offering of 33 million shares at $102 per share. It spiked 78% in its first day of trading, closing at a market value of $68 billion. In midmorning trading Thursday, the stock was at $186.09.

    In its IPO filing, DoorDash reported revenue of $1.92 billion for the first nine months of 2020, more than triple that of the same period a year earlier, and a profit of $23 million in the second quarter of 2020.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/23/2021 – 17:45

  • "Does Joe Biden Hate Black Teenagers?" Rand Paul Routs $15 Minimum Wage Miasma
    “Does Joe Biden Hate Black Teenagers?” Rand Paul Routs $15 Minimum Wage Miasma

    “‘Why does Joe Biden hate Black teenagers?’ should be the question. Why does Joe Biden want to destroy all of these jobs?”

    During an interview with Fox host Sean Hannity, GOP Senator Rand Paul pummeled the Biden administration’s decision to push for a minimum wage increase that would put 4 million people out of work.

    “The people who lose their jobs first when you hike up the minimum wage are Black teenagers,” Paul said.

    And despite the ramblings of various left-ist economists, claiming this or that study shows no impact from such a drastic minimum wage hike…

    …common sense (and historical experience) for anyone who has ever run an actual business is that raising costs on the lowest-skilled workers in your organization will ripple all the way up, forcing either higher prices to the end-user (eradicating the ‘living wage’ improvement) and or forcing layoffs as management hold margins and reduce costs (the least-skilled first).

    And if all that sounds very racist, the following chart shows that Senator Paul is, of course, correct…

    Source: @McClellanOsc

    That’s not an “alternative” fact, that’s the awkward reality of ‘unintended consequences’ from nanny-state intervention write large for the last 70 years.

    Need some more ‘facts’?

    According to a recent nonpartisan analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, President Biden’s effort to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 per hour is estimated to kill as many as 3.7 million jobs, 

    Based on the CBO’s median estimate,1.3 million workers who would otherwise be employed would be jobless in an average week in 2025, an 0.8% reduction. However, the CBO also noted that a federal minimum wage of $15 per hour would increase the wages of 17 million workers in an average week in 2025.

    While the $15 federal minimum wage would boost workers’ earnings, the CBO says that some of the higher earnings would be offset by higher rates of joblessness.

    Paul also blasted Biden for canceling the Keystone XL oil pipeline:

    “It’s kind of a strange beginning to an administration,” Paul said.

    “You’re going to put your best foot forward and the first thing you say is, ‘This is how I’m going to kill jobs’ … ‘I’m going to kill thousands of jobs of the Keystone pipeline with ending it.'”

    Watch the full interview below:

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/23/2021 – 17:20

  • Pentagon Intelligence Purchased Troves Of Warrantless Phone Location Data On Americans
    Pentagon Intelligence Purchased Troves Of Warrantless Phone Location Data On Americans

    Authored by Brett Wilkins via CommonDreams.org,

    Digital rights advocates reacted with alarm to a report published Friday detailing how Defense Intelligence Agency analysts in recent years bought databases of US smartphone location data without first obtaining warrants. 

    The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is part of the Department of Defense and is tasked with informing military and civilian policymakers about the activities and intentions of foreign governments and nonstate actors. 

    File image: Alamy/Wired

    The new revelation, first reported by the New York Times, initially came in the form of DIA responses to questions from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) regarding the agency’s warrantless purchase of commercial location data generated by phones both inside and outside of the United States. 

    Wyden asked the DIA to clarify its interpretation of Carpenter v. United States, a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court decision barring law enforcement agencies from requesting personal location information from a cellphone company without first obtaining a search warrant from a judge.

    “DIA does not construe the Carpenter decision to require a judicial warrant endorsing purchase or use of commercially-available data for intelligence purposes,” the agency replied, implicitly acknowledging its exploitation of an apparent loophole in the case that DIA believes permits its warrantless acquisition of location data from third-party brokers. 

    Furthermore, Wyden asked whether DIA operatives differentiated between phone location data obtained inside the U.S. and abroad. 

    “DIA’s data provider does not supply separate streams of U.S. and foreign location data,” the agency explained, “and so DIA processes the location data as it arrives to identify U.S. location data points, which it segregates in a separate database.”

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

    “DIA personnel can only query this database of U.S. location data when authorized by the DIA chief of staff and DIA’s office of general counsel,” it added. “Permission to query DIA’s database of commercially acquired US device location data has been granted five times in the past two-and-a-half years, when DIA first started buying this source of data.” 

    Last September it was revealed that the US military was purchasing device location data from apps—including a Muslim prayer app used by tens of millions of people around the world—and using it for counterterrorism purposes. 

    “The military industrial complex and the surveillance state have always had a cozy relationship with tech,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said at the time. “Buying bulk data in order to profile Muslims is par for the course for them—and is absolutely sickening. It should be illegal!”

    To that end, the ACLU in December filed a lawsuit to determine how and why federal agencies are buying access to bulk databases of Americans’ cellphone location information and skirting  the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.

    And as The Hill reported Friday, Wyden plans to introduce legislation—the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act—which would prohibit government agencies from buying personal information from data brokers. 

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    “I think we’ve really reached the point where you have so much data floating around that governments can essentially buy their way around the Fourth Amendment,” Wyden lamented last November. 

    In a Senate speech on Wednesday, Wyden condemned the status quo “in which the government, instead of getting an order, just goes out and purchases the private records of Americans from these sleazy and unregulated commercial data brokers who are simply above the law.”

    Digital and pivacy rights advocates agree. 

    “The government cannot simply buy our private data in order to bypass bedrock constitutional protections,” senior ACLU staff attorney Ashley Gorski told The Hill. “Congress must end this lawless practice and require the government to get a warrant for our location data, regardless of its source.”

    News of the DIA warrantless data acquisition came a day after Avril Haines was sworn in as President Joe Biden’s director of national intelligence. Haines will oversee the nation’s 18 intelligence agencies, including the DIA.

    Wyden supports Haines’ appointment, in part due to what he called her “commitments related to transparency issues.” A broad range of progressive groups, however, strongly opposed her nomination. 

    During her Senate confirmation hearing earlier this week, Wyden asked Haines about government abuse of commercially available location data.

    “I would seek to try to publicize, essentially, a framework that helps people understand the circumstances under which we do that and the legal basis that we do that under,” she replied. “I think that’s part of what’s critical to promoting transparency generally so that people have an understanding of the guidelines under which the intelligence community operates.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/23/2021 – 16:55

  • Taiwan Reports 13 Incursions By Chinese Air Force In One Day
    Taiwan Reports 13 Incursions By Chinese Air Force In One Day

    During the final months of the Trump administration Chinese PLA military exercises near Taiwan grew as part of the tit-for-tat escalation of Washington moves in support of the self-declared Republic. 

    Lately Chinese jets have breached Taiwan’s claimed airspace as part of ongoing ‘show of force’ maneuvers in the contested area. But on Saturday, a mere few days following President Joe Biden’s entry into the White House, China’s military undertook one of its biggest flyovers yet.

    Via AP

    According to local press “Taiwan recorded no fewer than 13 incursions by Chinese military planes into its air defense identification zone (ADIZ) in a single day Saturday (Jan. 23), the most of any such incidents within one day so far this year.” As Reuters adds, “Eight Chinese bomber planes and four fighter jets entered the southwestern corner of Taiwan’s air defense identification zone on Saturday, and Taiwan’s air force deployed missiles to ‘monitor’ the incursion, the island’s Defense Ministry said.” Additionally, a Chinese Y-8 anti-submatine aircraft also entered Taiwan’s ADIZ.

    Taiwan reportedly scrambled its American-supplied fighter jets to “warn off” the Chinese formation.

    “Airborne alert sorties had been tasked, radio warnings issued and air defense missile systems deployed to monitor the activity,” a Taiwan military statement said.

    Chinese H-6K strategic bomber aircraft, via Reuters

    PLA military flyovers of contested territory around the island have now become an almost daily occurrence, but as Reuters points out:

    However they have generally consisted of just one or two reconnaissance aircraft.

    The presence of so many Chinese combat aircraft on this mission – Taiwan said it was made up of eight nuclear-capable H-6K bombers and four J-16 fighter jets – is unusual.

    In this instance it was said to be in the vicinity over the contested waters of the Paracel islands.

    The new White House National Security Council has this week vowed that America’s commitment to Taiwan would remain “rock-solid”. But it remains to be seen if Biden keeps up the provocative level of Trump’s weapons sales to Taiwan, which reached a historic peak in the latter part of 2020.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/23/2021 – 16:30

  • Not The Onion – Gender-Neutral Playing Cards?
    Not The Onion – Gender-Neutral Playing Cards?

    Authored by Ned Barnett via AmericanThinker.com,

    The media has been buzzing with this news about the young forensic psychologist from Oegstgeest, Netherlands and her amazing creation.  A quick Google review of this story found more than 100 news stories about this innovation – not just (or even primarily) in fringe online media outlets – but in mainstream media from the Reuters to the New York Post.

    “If we have this hierarchy that the king is worth more than the queen,” Ms. Mellink said in a press interview, “then this subtle inequality influences people in their daily life (sic) because it’s just another way of saying ‘hey, you’re less important.’  Even subtle inequalities like this do play a big role.”

    Toxic masculinity?

    Despite their hearts being in the right place on the left side of their chests, both Ms. Mellink and the fawning media who’ve been both reporters and cheerleaders for this long-overdue innovation have managed to miss the main point. 

    Playing cards – and indeed most, if not all – games, are politically incorrect, and for a variety of reasons. 

    Consider, for instance, a deck of cards – even Ms. Mellink’s gender-neutral deck of cards.  They have four suits – Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs and Spades – as well as two colors – Red and Black.  “Red,” obviously, is a not-so-subtle allusion calling to mind the Red States, where – in the most recent two Presidential elections – white supremacists voted overwhelmingly for Trump.  “Black,” especially when connected to the name of one of the four suits in the card deck, is an obvious and historically-offensive racist reference to a pejorative label for black men.  This clearly racist sub-text is also present in the game of checkers, where Red and Black compete for power and dominance.

    Another major offender is the board game Scrabble. The fact that the game’s rules contain no restriction on the use of specific words ignores the risk of allowing players to use excluding terms. It is well within the rules to marginalize individuals or groups, and insult groups of disadvantaged or discriminated-against people.   Verbal micro-aggressions, such as the use of demeaning gender-specific pronouns, are freely permitted in the game.  Specifically, trigger words, hate speech and the cultural appropriation of words – all of which must be avoided at all cost – are freely permitted in Scrabble.  The game does nothing to prevent their use, nor does it encourage virtue signaling by players offended by their opponents’ use of hurtful and exclusionary words.  That signaling should be rewarded as a necessary part of the process of excluding hateful, hurtful words from the game.

    Monopoly – in some ways the worst offender – is symbolized by a cartoon caricature of a white male capitalist, an oligarch and almost certainly a Republican … a Trump Republican.  This raises some important questions, including, “Is Donald Trump consciously channeling the Monopoly icon, or is this merely a coincidence of cosmic proportions?”  Other questions include: “How does this paternalistic affirmation of the patriarchy makes right-thinking people feel while playing such a game?”  Or, “What does Monopoly’s embrace of rapacious exploitation of workers and tenants teach our children about life in a society dominated by unfettered capitalism?  Shades of Gordon Gekko …

    However, perhaps the most offensive game – as well as perhaps the oldest board game in human history, is chess. This game is also the most blatantly offensive of the lot.  The reason is obvious to even the color-specific visually-impaired around us.  Chess pieces are either white or black, and white ALWAYS goes first, while black ALWAYS goes second.  The racist message of chess is hardly obscure or subtle.  Players are told that white is always better than black.

    So, while Ms. Mellink has identified the risk of politically-incorrect games and gaming devices, she has barely scratched the surface.  If we want a “safe space” for games and gaming, we must take collective action to enforce decent, inoffensive standards on those games.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/23/2021 – 16:05

  • A Large US Military Convoy Rolled Into Syria On 1st Day Of Biden Presidency
    A Large US Military Convoy Rolled Into Syria On 1st Day Of Biden Presidency

    Two separate reports from Middle East news sources at the end of this week strongly suggest that both Russia and the United States are building up their forces in war-torn Syria within the opening days of the Joe Biden administration.

    First, Syrian state media is alleging a major US build-up and reinforcements sent to “illegitimate bases in Hasakah countryside”. The report in Syria’s SANA details:

    “…that a convoy consisted of 40 trucks loaded with weapons and logistical materials, affiliated to the so-called international coalition have entered in Hasaka countryside via al-Walid illegitimate border crossing with north of Iraq, to reinforce illegitimate bases in the area.”

    Illustrative file image of US convoy in northeast Syria

    Damascus said further that tons of US heavy equipment was observed going toward building up US positions at Conoco oil and gas field: “Over the past few days, helicopters affiliated to the so-called international coalition have transported logistical equipment and heavy military vehicles to Conoco oil field in northeastern Deir Ezzor countryside, after turning it into military base to reinforce its presence and loot the Syrian resources,” SANA wrote further.

    This comes at a moment Biden’s Syria policy and direction is still largely a big unknown – though it remains that his cabinet looks to include foreign policy hawks – particularly many of the same officials responsible for Obama’s both overt and covert interventions in Libya and Syria upon the start of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’.

    For now President Biden is likely simply to continue Trump’s policy of keeping a contingent of American special forces troops stealing occupying Syria’s oil and gas fields.

    Meanwhile a separate story on the same day as the reported US convoy reinforcements says Russia too is busy building up its forces in an area near where Americans and Turkish patrols are occupying northeast Syria.

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

    According to Beirut-based Al Masdar News:

    The Russian Armed Forces sent more reinforcements and heavy military equipment to the Al-Qamishli Airport this week, as they strengthen their presence east of the Euphrates River.

    According to the latest reports from the Al-Hasakah Governorate, the Russian Armed Forces deployed more troops to the frontlines with the Turkish military and their allied militants near the key town of Tal Tamr.

    This is based on Russian military sources featuring footage of a Russian IL-76 cargo landing a Qamishli Airport which is the “second time in ten days that they have brought in more reinforcements and military equipment.”

    Russian military cargo plan landing in northern Syria on Thursday:

    Russia has also lately sent more ships to patrol off Syria’s Mediterranean coast, out of the naval base at Tartus.

    Likely this latest rush to ensure greater Russian ‘readiness’ is based on the “unknowns” represented by the presidential transition in Washington. However, there’s little doubt Biden will keep up the severe sanctions which are currently crushing what’s left of the Syrian economy, with civilians bearing the brunt of suffering.

    Israel also appears to be ramping up its airstrikes inside Syria, claiming to be targeting Iranian positions amid concerns Biden will be “soft” on the Islamic Republic and so-called Iranian influence in Syria and Lebanon.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 01/23/2021 – 16:04

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