Sep 24

Today’s News 24th September 2020

  • Sweden Dominates Drug-Deaths In Europe
    Sweden Dominates Drug-Deaths In Europe

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/24/2020 – 02:45

    As highlighted by the latest edition of the European Drug Report, Sweden is the country with the most drug-induced deaths per million of the population in Europe.

    In 2018, 81 people died per million inhabitants, ahead of the United Kingdom’s 76 drug-induced deaths per million. Finland and Ireland jointly had the third-highest death rate with 72 deaths per million.

    Infographic: Drug deaths in Europe | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    As tragic as these figures are, Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes that they pale in comparison with the toll of America’s opioid crisis.

    In 2018, the U.S. experienced 314.5 drug-related deaths per million of its population and it lost more inhabitants to drugs than the next 20 countries combined.

  • Psychiatrist Testifies That Julian Assange Is "Preparing To Kill Himself In Prison"
    Psychiatrist Testifies That Julian Assange Is “Preparing To Kill Himself In Prison”

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/24/2020 – 02:00

    Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

    A disturbing testimony from a psychiatrist outlines that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is in such a bad state in prison that he should be considered at ‘high risk’ of suicide.

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    The Daily Mail reports that Professor Michael Kopelman testified during an extradition hearing in London that Assange has “begun making preparations to end his own life including confessing to a Catholic priest, drafting farewell letters to his family and drafting a will.”

    Kopelman, emeritus professor of neuropsychiatry at King’s College London, also said that Assange told him he experienced hearing voices in his head saying “we’re coming to get you.”

    “He reported auditory hallucinations, which were voices either inside or outside his head, somatic hallucinations, funny bodily experiences, these have now disappeared,” Kopelman said.

    “He also has a long history of musical hallucinations, which is maybe a separate phenomenon, that got worse when he was in prison,” the psychiatrist added.

    “The voices are things like, “you are dust, you are dead, we are coming to get you”. They are derogatory and persecutory,” he continued, adding “They seem to have diminished. Subsequently the musical hallucinations have also reduced, and the somatic hallucinations have disappeared.”

    Kopelman even noted that Assange “reported a near-death experience and wondered if the CIA would find a way to get him or mess with his head” noting that this “may or may not” be paranoia.

    Kopelman warned that “The risk of suicide arises out of clinical factors…but it is the imminence of extradition and or an actual extradition that would trigger the attempt, in my opinion.”

    Assange is languishing in Belmarsh, a notoriously horrid maximum security prison housing murderers and terrorists. For much of the time since being arrested on leaving the Ecuadorian embassy, Assange has been kept in solitary confinement. He is also heavily medicated.

    The wikileaks founder faces extradition to the US, where he would be charged with an 18-count indictment related to hacking computers and conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information.

    Professor Kopelman also noted during the hearing that Assange has been depressed “certainly throughout the time I’ve been seeing him.”

    “It’s fluctuated a bit, his appetite has fluctuated, he’s had persistent problems with sleep and his mood state is worst in the early hours of the morning and that’s stayed consistent,” Kopelman added.

    “Mr Assange was very reluctant to talk about his suicidal ideas and plans because he feared he would be put on constant watch or isolation,” the psychiatrist further explained.

    The report notes that the QC for the US government argued that Assange is ‘exaggerating’ his psychiatric symptoms and ‘self reporting’ suicidal ideas, and that Kopelman is an ‘advocate’.

    “I’m a psychiatrist, you’re a lawyer. I make my diagnoses on my criteria,” the professor is said to have replied.

    Assange’s QC reportedly read out a list of multiple times, at least ten, that Assange had requested the Samaritans suicide prevention helpline number between August and November 2019.

    Assange has been in the prison since April of last year:

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  • COVID World… Resist!
    COVID World… Resist!

    Tyler Durden

    Thu, 09/24/2020 – 00:00

    Authored by Iain Davis via Off-Guardian.org,

    COVID 19 is being used to create a global fascist dictatorship. From New Zealand to the the U.S, so called western democracies have adopted and developed the Chinese model of technocracy to create a single biosecurity State. This globalist corporate State is to be centrally controlled and administered by a distant global governance cartel of appointed bureaucrats. Tasked only to serve the interests of a tiny, disproportionately wealthy group we can call the parasite class.

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    Every aspect of your life will be monitored and controlled, as we move towards the ultimate surveillance State. Your ability to work, to socialise, to travel, conduct business, access public services and to purchase essential goods and services will be dictated to you, and restricted, by the State, based upon your biosecurity or immunity status.

    This transformation process is well underway. You are no longer a human being, you are a biosecurity risk. As such you may be removed to a military controlled quarantine camp as and when the State sees fit. Detention without trial will be the norm. All protest will be outlawed unless the protest suits the agenda of the parasite class.

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    You will not leave home without it.

    Your children will no longer be your own. They will belong to the State. Parental consent for medical procedures will be presumed or, in the case of mandatory procedures, not required. Once the biosecurity State is firmly established consent will be a distant memory.

    We have a diminishing window of opportunity to stop this global fascist dictatorship. Violent protest will not work. Not only are they morally indefensible, they are tactically naive.

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    Keeping you safe?

    Violence is the language of the oppressor. The global State holds total dominion over instigation of the use of force. To crack down, in response to a violent uprising, is the fervent hope of the oppressor. It allows the State to exercise more, not less, authoritarian control.

    In reality, to stop it, all we need to do is refuse, en masse, to comply. We must do this with our eyes open. It won’t be easy and many of us will face harsh punishment from a desperate tyrant. However, if we don’t stand up now, we are condemning future generations to unimaginable levels of slavery and misery.

    In order to foist this upon us, the apparatus behind it has invested billions in propaganda. The fascist technocracy, presently being being constructed at an alarming pace, requires our cooperation. Without it, the biosecurity dictatorship cannot gain its desired authority.

    Our representative democratic systems are not what our forebears gave everything to build. The parasite class have hollowed them out, replacing the organs of State with their own, leaving only the shell as a chimera to maintain our delusions and keep us believing that we have a semblance of control.

    It is a fools errand to attempt to use their system to win our freedom. It is designed to control us. Appeals to their courts will never deliver justice to us. Temporary, small victories will always be overturned. Nor can we vote harder expecting yet another of their puppets to save us.

    The purpose of the representative democratic apparition is to centralise all global power in the hands of the parasite class. This course is inexorable and, while we persist in our electoral folly, we will not alter it.

    We must build something new to replace it. The obvious solution is the decentralisation of all power to the individual. We must construct a voluntary society.

    Without us, without our obedience, the parasite class is currently nothing but a group of ineffectual, wannabe plutocrats, sat on piles of paper, created from nothing and worth nothing. If we don’t obey, there are no rulers.

    Should we refuse to use their monetary system, their usury will be fruitless; if we decide not to pay their taxes, we cut will off their economic exploitation and if we never vote for their bureaucrats we won’t consent to their nominated, elected aristocracy.

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    We just don’t know that we have all the power.

    We are the scientists and the engineers, the doctors and the nurses; we are the builders and the architects, the mechanics and the farmers; we are the soldiers who kill and die for their enrichment, we are the police officers who enforce their unlawful rules; we are the people who build and work in their factories, we are the office workers and bank clerks who administer their system, the shop workers, the programmers, the writers, the artists, the teachers and we are the people who, through our belief in their mythical authority, allow the parasite class to control us.

    We are the meek, we are the receivers of all knowledge and all wisdom. We possess all the technology we need and we are the experts. It is our world, leased from our future generations, not theirs. Without us the parasite class are utterly incapable of controlling anyone or anything.

    We must create, not destroy. We must liberate science, technology, art and knowledge itself from their occult control. We must build alternative decentralised systems, enabling humanity to live as a coexistence of free, sovereign beings. We must focus upon self sufficiency, we must support each other, turn our backs on the control systems of the parasitic State and build our own autonomous communities.

    We must refuse to comply with any and all attempts to centralise power. We can do this by rejecting, outright, the concept of authority.

    No one ever has any right to tell anyone else what to do. But nor does anyone ever have the right to cause any harm or loss to another human being. We can live in harmony because we are capable of respecting each other equally, without reservation. We know this.

    Not a single human being on this Earth has the right to order any other to obey their authority. None of us possess this power. Therefore, this power can never be derived from us. We do not have it to give. The State’s claim of authority, gleaned from their electoral anointment ceremony, is a charade. Their authority does not exist in reality, only in our imaginations.

    We don’t need anyone to tell us how to live. Nor how to deal with the tiny minority incapable of taking responsibility for their own actions. A voluntary society would be a society without rulers, not a society without rules.

    We don’t need their systems of authority to live in relative peace and harmony and we never have. Spontaneous order is all around us. We already live the overwhelming majority of our lives free from State control and without the need for anyone to impose any rulers upon us.

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    A disease, or a control mechanism?

    With a few exceptions, no State compels the farmer to grow crops, no State coerces labourers to pick the harvest or engineers to design and operate packing plants and no State forces anyone to transport the produce to market nor any consumer to buy it.

    This system isn’t controlled by any single authority. It is an intricate, often global, network of free individuals, each acting in their own best interests, creating a harmonious social order way beyond the operational control of any State. The State has no part in this social order of immeasurable complexity.

    This ordered social construct, bringing food to the family table, is entirely voluntary. Our society is built from millions of such systems and trillions of voluntary actions and exchanges that happen every day. The voluntary society already exists. All we need do is recognise it, and then seize it. The State is, and always has been, entirely unnecessary. It is a hindrance, not a utility.

    What benefit does the State and its regulation bring to our food supply chains? It claims to protect it. Protect for whom?

    It removes the free market to protect the profits of multinational corporations. It imposes taxes, raising everyone’s costs, to pay for its wars of neocolonialist exploitation. It forces wages down, it cuts the margins for everyone from growers to retailers, pushing some into poverty to be preyed upon by the same corporate State.

    Its food standard regulations, supposedly designed to keep us safe, effectively reduce food quality, creates massive waste, reduces nutrition, causes more sickness and lengthens the queues at the pharmacy. Again for the benefit of the parasite class and their pharmaceutical corporations.

    In a truly voluntary, free market what would a supplier gain from providing low quality, expensive produce to consumers? They would quickly go out of business.

    Only State regulations can possibly facilitate lowering quality, while raising prices, without anyone in the supply chain, other than the oligarchs at the top, profiting from it. Corporate profit is the bottom line and the State’s sole purpose is to protect it.

    Yet, somehow, we remain convinced that society could not possibly order itself spontaneously, without the forced coercion of the State. Despite the fact that, in great measure, it already does. We neither lack the ability nor the knowledge to build a voluntary society. We lack the confidence, because this pernicious system is purpose built to rob us of it.

    We are taught, practically from birth, that respecting authority is a virtue. To obey is to be good, disobedience is punished. What could we be if instead we taught our children to think critically, that all of us have equal, inalienable rights, never to cause harm or loss and to take responsibility for themselves because there is no claimed protection from any authority?

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    Respect their authority?

    Unfortunately, once we enter the education system the doctrine of authority is vigorously reinforced through perpetual repetition and the systemic application of reward and punishment. We are taught what we are allowed to know. This prepares us to be productive workers and responsible members of the State.

    We are then permitted to work until we are no longer productive, with every last ounce of profit milked from us, as we shuffle off to our graves on pharmaceutical life support, before the State swoops in to hoover up the remnants of our lives.

    This is not done for our benefit. We are programmed to believe in the farcical notion of a benevolent State. A State which exclusively serves the parasite class and one in which our lives are the real commodity.

    COVID 19 is not a high impact infectious disease, it has low mortality rates and is absolutely comparable to influenza. It isn’t even clear that is can be identified as a disease at all. Sadly, it seems the vast majority of us are so adapted to our authoritarian environment that we are incapable of ever questioning anything we are told by our superiors.

    COVID 19 is nothing more than a casus belli for the Third World War. As the representatives of the State openly admit, that war is a hybrid war. Just as there is no such thing as a healthy human being, nor is there any distinction between war and peace.

    All is war and we are the enemy. The military objective is to grind us into docile and compliant slaves, serving the new normal State.

    We must face reality. In the new normal, driven by the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” our labour is no longer required. We are destined only to consume, and that consumption is to be ruthlessly controlled. As are we.

    There is no black and no white, no right wing nor any leftists, there is no gay and no straight, no Republicans nor Democrats, no Conservatives nor Labour supporters. These are just some of the divisions forced upon us by the parasite class, and its compliant lapdog the mainstream media, to keep us divided and to stop us realising the truth.

    We are in this together. All of us. No matter where we live or what we believe. We are all part of a single, inviolable truth.

    Call it God, Allah, Yahweh, the Divine Spirit, the Universe, Mother Earth or Natural Law, there is one truth and we all understand it. Cause no harm, cause no loss, take responsibility for our actions and treat all with compassion and respect.

    We are not merely a random cluster of atoms. We are sovereign spiritual beings. We have purpose and every life has inestimable value. We stand together or divided we fall.

    You have a choice. Choose wisely.

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    Resist!

  • San Francisco Residents On Alert As Home Invasions Spike 42%
    San Francisco Residents On Alert As Home Invasions Spike 42%

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 23:40

    San Francisco residents are on edge and sounding the alarm amid a spate of brazen break-ins throughout the city, according to KPIX5, which notes that burglaries in the city were up 42% in the first nine months of the year vs. the same period in 2019.

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    “In the Northern District, which includes Pacific Heights, the Marina, North Beach, and Cow Hollow, it’s up 59%. In the Mission, 79% and in the Richmond up 50%,” according to the report.

    A recent example is a video posted on Nextdoor and given to KPIX 5 from one homeowner in the Cow Hollow neighborhood that shows a man trying to break into a house at 1:52 a.m. on August 22. It’s an image that’s creepy, disturbing and has shaken a sense of safety.

    The homeowner didn’t want his identity revealed, but others say these attempted burglaries have been rampant. –KPIX5

    “Our next-door neighbor got broken into and they had already experienced another break-in a month prior to that,” said resident Ginny Fang, who lives in the city’s North Beach neighborhood. Thieves stole four of her family’s bicycles several weeks ago in a breaking and entry.

    “You take a walk down the neighborhood and you see so many holes just punched into garages and wires, the same wire that was used to hook ours, you see them, laying around on the street,” she said.

    According to San Francisco Police, the department is getting more reports of garage break-ins recently.

    “We’re doing all we can to step up patrols and to ultimately arrest those who are committing these crimes,” said offcier Robert Rueca.

    “It’s so hard, the destabilizing feeling, and there’s already so much happening in the world and even the basic sanctity of your home,” said Fang.

  • The Great Conservative Migration And What It Means For The Future
    The Great Conservative Migration And What It Means For The Future

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 23:20

    Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

    The signs really began to become visible at the end of January, 2020; there was an exodus of people brewing, and it was galvanizing fears on both sides of the political spectrum. The pandemic situation is cited by the mainstream media as the primary cause, but in reality the migration had started at least 3 years earlier. Americans were leaving certain states and cities behind by the tens of thousands, and these places were predominantly leftist in their policies and population. California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, etc.; all of these progressive states were bleeding residents since 2017, the pandemic just accelerated the situation.

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    There are a number of reasons given for the dramatic shift in population, but two specific reasons stand above the rest: Economy and political ideals. The pandemic itself is only a minor motivator. Consider the fact that residents of California left the state in droves for Texas over the summer DESPITE the problem of Covid infection spikes in major metropolitan areas of the Lone Star State. People didn’t care, they just wanted to get the hell out of California as quickly as possible.

    Again, a main reason given by former Californians was politics. They are conservatives or moderates that felt isolated or trapped in a far-left cesspool and they realized their future life prospects depended on them transplanting to a more free and less bureaucratic place.

    The fear among conservatives was that the pandemic would smoke leftists out of their hives and that they would spread to more conservative areas and “take over”. This does not seem to be the case. In fact, it appears that most leftists are stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that their states are dying and are actively defending state policies on the web. Check out the angry and delusional comments from California progressives on this opinion article in Arizona telling them to leave their failed policies behind if they move to the state.

    These people are suffering from some serious saltiness, and the fact they they are still trying to claim that states like California are economically stable shows how truly delusional they are. Conservative states have nothing to worry about – The lefties are too dumb to relocate. They’re going to sit within the rotting corpses of the states they killed and pretend it smells like roses. This is what they do; when they are wrong or when they have failed they double and triple down. It’s their defining characteristic.

    In my state of Montana real estate purchases have surged over the past year. Recent data on school enrollment numbers are up 15% – 20% in cities like Missoula. This includes new students in public schools as well as those registered for homeschooling, and it’s a massive spike for the region. The majority of new students are recent transplants from other states. I have spoken with hundreds of these people personally and ALL of them said they were moving to Montana because they were conservative, many of them were preppers and many of them wanted to be around other conservatives in the event that the world continues on its current downward spiral.

    They do sometimes mention the coronavirus situation, but they generally are not worried about the virus itself. Rather, they are concerned about the virus RESPONSE. Meaning, they want to retain their freedoms, they do not like the draconian restrictions put in place in their former states and they are trying to escape the business lockdowns that are killing local economies.

    Some states like California have responded as leftists typically do, by seeking to punish people for walking away from the collective. This includes a new Wealth Tax law in the works that would require people with high incomes such as business owners leaving California to continue to pay taxes to the state for 10 years, even though they no longer live there. In other words, successful business owners who leave California will have to pay taxes to two separate state governments at the same time.

    California Assemblyman Rob Bonta, one of the people supporting the Wealth Tax proposal, asserts that the pandemic is the cause of California’s economic troubles including a huge surge in the homeless population. However, the spike in poverty and homelessness was escalating well before the coronavirus ever appeared. It was the hard-left policies of the state government that caused this mess; they can’t blame everything on Covid, though conmen like Bonta will certainly try.

    The fact that leftist states are poised to institute punishments or disincentives for leaving (which is unconstitutional, by the way), shows just how bad the migration has become for them. Frankly, these state governments need to be taught a lesson, and one of the only lessons they understand is the loss of tax revenues.

    It should not be surprising at all that conservatives are rushing for the exits, these places are on fire and progressive legislators are throwing Molotov cocktails for good measure. I’m only surprised by the speed and scale of the migration, the whole thing is happening so fast it makes your head spin.

    My point is, the migration is very real. No one can deny anymore that it is happening. But what does it mean for the future of America?

    As I have noted in previous articles, in my view the BEST case scenario we can possibly hope for as conservatives is a balkanization of the US based on ideals and principles. According to the economic data and social upheaval I am seeing, I think there is little chance we can save the whole country in the short term. Instead, conservatives organizing together regionally is the best bet in stopping widespread unconstitutional changes to our laws and usurpation of our culture.

    In rural areas in particular we enjoy far more freedom and the majority of people have no interest in abiding by lockdown restrictions. We ignore them. A friend of mine recently had family visit from California and they were astonished at how ‘normal’ daily life was in Montana. They said just being able to go to a restaurant and eat there, or walk into a store without being forced to wear a mask was a strange feeling, as if they were visiting a foreign nation.

    This is saddening to me. The coronavirus is certainly not worth this loss of liberty.

    I suspect that the conservative migration will lead to some interesting side-effects. First and foremost there will be continued attempts to stop it. Eventually, states like California will try to implement measures beyond tax punishment. They may even try to exploit the pandemic as a rationale for locking down state borders in the name of “protecting citizen health”. I would not be surprised if hard-left states actively try to physically stop residents from moving away.

    As the economy continues to decline and stagflation strikes, likely very hard in 2021 regardless of who is in the White House (you can thank the Federal Reserve for that), price increases will eventually prevent Americans from being able to relocate anyway. But, for the next six months at least I think the migration will continue to grow.

    The congregation of conservatives today is perhaps the first time in a long time that we have sought to build a unified front for preserving the American way of life, free from big government, free from bureaucracy and free from socialist subversion. Without the migration, we have zero chance of achieving this, but there are some who will argue against it.

    I have noticed that certain conservatives and moderates are claiming that by leaving places like California or New York the movement is “abandoning the fight” and exposing those regions to complete takeover. News Flash for these folks: You already lost those states. You lost that fight. They have been taken over. And, if you understand strategy in the slightest, you will wrap your heads around the need for a strategic withdrawal so that you can live to fight more winnable battles another day.

    This mentality reminds me of the people that were arguing that conservatives should not start their own social media platforms “because the real fight is on Twitter and Facebook”. This is naive thinking. Those platforms are OWNED by the extreme left, and there is no one on these websites that will be convinced by your arguments no matter how reasonable or factual. It’s time to build alternatives that are more free and stop wasting our energies on lemmings that cannot be saved.

    What I find most fascinating about the current migration is that it’s bringing together conservatives and moderates or “classical liberals” that have been alienated by modern social justice movements. In my opinion most moderate liberals are actually conservatives or libertarians and they’re just not ready to admit it yet, but I’m glad to see these people working together.

    The fight that is coming will require us to ally with people that do not necessarily share ALL our views, and that’s okay. The goal is to get to the truth, and to use what works best and to maintain a set of shared cultural principles that value freedom. Americans aren’t relocating anymore out of convenience or economic incentives – it’s actually rather inconvenient and expensive to relocate these days. They aren’t moving due to climate or job availability or wages. They are moving because they have a shared desire to be free. It’s really that simple.

    And, the sooner free peoples band together, the safer we will be from the statists and tyrants of the world. If that means the US is broken apart for a time in the process, then so be it. It’s better than having the entire country fall because rational people were isolated from each other.

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  • IRGC Taunts US With Spy Drone Close-Ups Of Nimitz Carrier In Strait Of Hormuz
    IRGC Taunts US With Spy Drone Close-Ups Of Nimitz Carrier In Strait Of Hormuz

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 23:00

    Iranian state media on Wednesday published a photo set showing the US carrier group led by USS Nimitz transiting the Strait of Hormuz which Tehran says was gained after domestic-build spy drones “intercepted” the carrier.

    State-run Tasnim reports: “In remarks on Wednesday, IRGC Navy Commander Rear Admiral Ali Reza Tangsiri said the homegrown drone has detected the US carrier strike group before the flotilla cruised through the Strait of Hormuz and into the waters of the Persian Gulf.”

    The Nimitz along with battleship escorts sailed through the area last Friday, according to separate reports.

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    Newly published Iranian military photos, via Tasnim News

    Tunsgiri made the remarks upon the occasion of a military ceremony marking the IRGC’s naval force receiving nearly 200 domestic produced drones and helicopters. 

    The IRGC Rear admiral described, “Monitoring and tracking all maritime movements in the Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz and the Sea of ​​Oman will be made possible by these drones that will greatly increase our capabilities in this area.”

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    The US sail through appears to have occurred without incident despite the Iranian drone mission.

    The drone photo set had already been circulating among Middle East analysts and think tanks in the West, which confirmed their authenticity. 

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    Iranian media and officials are now hailing the domestic-produced drone spy mission as a success, and no doubt the reason the photo set has been released alongside English-language state media headlines is to display the IRGC’s advancing capabilities in “securing” Hormuz.

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    The Associated Press also confirmed the US carrier is in the Persian Gulf :

    The Nimitz, and several other warships, passed last Friday through the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important chokepoint for oil shipments, the U.S. Navy had said in what was described as a “scheduled manoeuvr.”

    The US Navy’s Bahrain-based 5th Fleet, however, has yet to comment on the Iranian drone monitoring mission or whether it observed the drone’s flight path last week.

    Should Iran continue with such provocative drone missions so near US ships in the vital gulf waterway, it’s only a matter of time before there’s escalation based on an incident, likely in the form of the US blasting Iran’s UAVs out of the sky. 

  • The Great Unbanking: How DeFi Is Completing The Job Bitcoin Started
    The Great Unbanking: How DeFi Is Completing The Job Bitcoin Started

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 22:40

    Authored by Paul De Havilland via CoinTelegraph.com,

    While most of us will prefer to forget the horrors of 2020, DeFi may well prove to be the guarantee of a better, more liberated future…

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    image courtesy of CoinTelegraph

    In a broad sense, 2020 has been the year of the COVID-19 pandemic. As it charges toward 1 million deaths and over 30 million infections, governments have been found wanting. Our institutions have crumbled, leaders reacted too slowly, and all of the systems both in place and newly created to protect us — healthcare, aged care, testing, protective equipment supply chains, contact tracing, etc. — have collapsed. But 2020 has also very much been the year of decentralized finance, which has come to be known as DeFi.

    DeFi is crypto

    To understand why DeFi has captured the imagination of the entire crypto landscape is to understand that it is less about the outrageous returns offered to yield farmers and more about the future possibilities it presents.

    Cryptocurrency, and the technology behind it, has always been about future possibilities.

    When Bitcoin (BTC) was born to little fanfare in 2009, it was quickly recognized by those familiar with it as having the potential to be the future of money. 11 years on, Bitcoin, with its decentralized global system of nodes and miners keeping the network operational and secure, has met its promise and more.

    Not only is it a reliable and fast way for people to permissionlessly send money to each other, it has also become a genuine enterprise-grade investment vehicle, and its investment worthiness appears to be growing. Large and enterprise owners are holding onto it in anticipation of capital growth.

    “Bitcoin as an investment vehicle” aside, it remains, in essence, money — a new currency for a new, hyper-connected world.

    Bitcoin and/or DeFi

    “Bitcoin as money” still works like money insofar as it still relies on a financial ecosystem around it to keep it alive. But that ecosystem is somewhat limited; it consists of those that secure the network on which transactions are transmitted (miners and node operators), wallets, and exchanges where it can be exchanged for other digital and, increasingly, fiat assets.

    But a financial services architecture as we know it incorporates a whole lot more in terms of functionality: lending, borrowing, earning interest, paying interest, investing, etc. Bitcoin was never intended to cater to all those mechanisms — but DeFi is.

    The next logical step in the evolution of crypto’s gradual assumption of the roles played by traditional finance is being taken by the growing Ethereum-based decentralized finance ecosystem.

    DeFi, in many ways, is Bitcoin 2.0. And for that reason, DeFi — although based on Ethereum’s composability and smart contract functionality — furthers the Bitcoin narrative into the future that Bitcoin first allowed us to believe in. With each new DeFi protocol, that future is closing in on us: a world without banks as we have come to know them.

    DeFi demonstrates the complementary nature of Ethereum to Bitcoin. By recreating the financial system not from within but from the outside, Ethereum is hosting a movement that completes the circle Bitcoin started.

    The vampires aren’t even that bad

    Our banking system is as broken as our COVID-19 response was, but can DeFi actually replace it? The DeFi subsector’s most vocal critics would point to the emergence of food-meme protocols SushiSwap, Cream and Yam, along with many others, to suggest the movement resembles more of a circus than a legitimate threat to a giant financial services sector.

    Those protocols are considered vampire forks, which are forks of existing protocols, designed to suck liquidity from them. If vampire forks are destructive — and there is no certainty they are — a seminal Rolling Stone article helps put them into perspective. When running through the central role Goldman Sachs played in virtually every financial collapse of the last century, Matt Taibbi called the behemoth:

    “The great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

    DeFi’s vampires probably serve to further the ecosystem by stress-testing it. Legacy finance’s vampires have had only one function: to take money from everyone else to strengthen themselves.

    From the Great Depression, to the dot-com bubble and burst, to the housing crisis, the “great vampire squid” had self-serving financial destruction in mind and its tentacles on virtually every lever that produced those catastrophic episodes in our recent economic histories.

    The sector as a whole has long since stopped serving most of our needs. Checking accounts no longer pay interest, accessing money costs money, and large enterprises find financing easy, while small and medium enterprises are left floundering. Try getting a mortgage as an independent contractor without benefits or job security.

    Bitcoin democratized money by freeing us from it in its legacy form. Now, DeFi has captured the imagination of the crypto world as its natural extension — not just the democratization of money but the democratization of finance, promising a seismic shift in the way people bank in the future.

    That seismic shift will confer benefits on society we could only have dreamed of a decade ago.

    Enter the great unbanking.

     

  • China Pork Reserves At Risk Of 'Running Out In Months' As Prices Soar 
    China Pork Reserves At Risk Of ‘Running Out In Months’ As Prices Soar 

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 22:20

    China could be on the brink of exhausting its massive frozen pork reserves as the country’s pig herd is wiped out by African swine fever. 

    Declining reserves are particularly bad news for the Communist Party of China, which is worried that it might not be able to prevent another destabilizing surge in prices.

    For more color on China’s strategic pork reserves, Enodo Economics, a London-based consultancy firm, quoted by the Financial Times, said reserves fell by 452,000 tons from Sept. 2019 to Aug. 2020. This means the country’s pork reserves are at dangerously low levels.

    It’s unclear how much of China’s latest pork imports have been diverted to state stockpiles – but Diana Choyleva, Enodo’s chief economist, said China has about 100,000 tons of frozen pork left in reserves, and “at this rate, within two to three months they’ll be out.” 

    FT notes the reserve numbers provided by Enodo are in-line with a recent livestock report via US agricultural attaché in Beijing that said, “pork reserves appear to have been mostly depleted by the third quarter of 2020.”  

    China’s pork reserves have been CPC’s primary weapon against soaring wholesale pork prices this year – preventing prices from breaching Rmb 50. 

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    As prices continue to climb amid dwindling reserves, the CPC will need to increase imports of frozen pork from the US or Latin America, limiting supplies of fresh pork even further (Chinese consumers typically prefer fresh to frozen, and have been known to be suspicious of China’s frozen reserves). As tensions continue to complicate the trading relationship between China and the US, the pork shortage could become one of the most pressing domestic issues facing the world’s second-largest economy. 

  • What's With The Rich-Kid Revolutionaries?
    What’s With The Rich-Kid Revolutionaries?

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 22:00

    Authored by Zachary Yost via The Mises Institute,

    By now, readers are no doubt familiar with the sight of angry mobs smashing windows, looting stores, and harassing pedestrians and street diners around the country, supposedly in the name of advocating for the rights of black Americans. Around the country, these mobs are diverse and have diverse motives, ranging from simply wanting to loot and get free stuff to being driven by deeply held ideological beliefs. However, one can’t help but notice that in many places a significant number of those causing disturbances are not the subjects of the state oppression in question, but are often white and sometimes even affluent, and as a result are almost completely isolated from the consequences of their destructive sprees.

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    Portland, site of over a hundred straight days of protests and often violent rioting, seems like the poster child for this phenomenon. Portland is, in fact, the whitest big city in the US.

    In New York City, the Daily Mail reported on the recent arrest of seven members of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party, a revolutionary Maoist group, after a rioting spree that caused at least $100,000 in damages. Every one of them appears to be white from their mugshots, and among them are an art director who has done work for Pepsi and Samsung, a model and actress, and the son of famous comic book writers. The New York Post profiled one rioter, twenty-year-old Clara Kraebber, and discovered that her mother runs her own architecture firm and her father is a psychiatrist who teaches at Columbia University. The family paid $1.8 million in 2016 for their New York City apartment and also own a home in Connecticut with four fireplaces.

    Or consider Vicky Osterweil, the white author of the much-discussed book In Defense of Looting, who is also the daughter of a college professor. As Matt Taibbi reports in his review of the book, “there’s little evidence the author of In Defense of Looting has ever been outside” and “she confesses to a ‘personal aversion to violence,’ lamenting a ‘refusal to attack property’ that ‘does not lessen the degree to which I benefit from systems of domination.’” In Taibbi’s words “this is a 288-page book written by a Very Online Person in support of the idea that other people should loot, riot, and burn things in the real world.”

    Rioting by the affluent is not limited to white people either. Consider the case of the two nonwhite attorneys, one of whom received his law degree at Princeton, whose arrest for throwing a molotov cocktail at a riot in New York City made the headlines precisely because of their high-status, well-paying jobs.

    What all of these examples have in common is that the rioting and destruction, or advocacy for the same, is being perpetrated by people who have no skin in the game and will not be exposed to the long-term consequences for the people and communities that they are ostensibly trying to help. Neighborhoods that suffer through riots often end up economically depressed for decades to come, but people like Clara Kraebber will not have to worry about such things.

    In the last century, there has been a great deal of scholarship attempting to discover the roots of these kinds of widespread revolutionary movements. In Liberalism, Mises discusses the idea of a Fourier complex, where antiliberal revolutionary ideas are adopted by people as a means of dealing with their own inadequacy in the face of reality. Political theorist Eric Voegelin (who attended Mises’s Vienna seminars) also posits a similar, though more complex, explanation with his theory of gnosticism.

    The classically liberal sociologist Helmut Schoeck also makes a similar argument in his book Envy. Envy, Schoeck argues, stems from an individual’s reaction to a personal inadequacy and a desire to find a way to shift the blame to anyone or anything other than himself. Like Mises and Voegelin, Schoeck explores the ways in which this attitude is detrimental to society, but he also explores why some people engaged in revolutionary movements are themselves well off and not members of the toiling masses they seek to “liberate.”

    In these cases Schoeck argues that such people are not afflicted with envy, but rather with a fear of envy or the guilt of being unequal. He argues that “the guilt-tinged fear of being thought unequal is very deeply ingrained in the human psyche,” and that it can be observed everywhere from offices to schools in the way in which people who excel at something will consciously or unconsciously lower their performance. This phenomenon is unfortunate enough when it comes to the workplace, but when it comes to politics the consequences can be much more serious.

    Schoeck argues that such guilt may lead a person to forgo their old life in order to serve the less fortunate but that many times such a person does not seek to extirpate their guilt by leaving their own comfortable station, but rather by insisting that the entire world must join them in eradicating inequality. In his words “I have no doubt that one of the most important motives for joining an egalitarian political movement is this anxious sense of guilt: ‘Let us set up a society where no one is envious.’”

    No doubt even Schoeck would be impressed by the degree to which our current upheavals are driven by those wracked with the guilt of being unequal rather than those filled with envy itself. To be sure, there is no shortage of such envious people running around these days, but there can be no doubt about which group is the driving force.

    Hopefully, as social life slowly returns to normal and as the weather gets colder, the guilt-ridden rich kids will tire out from playacting as revolutionaries and return home. But until then, it seems that the rest of us will be forced to suffer as they work out their psychological problems through some window-smashing therapy.

  • "Kind Of Like QVC" – Mall Of America Embraces Live Real-Time Shopping
    “Kind Of Like QVC” – Mall Of America Embraces Live Real-Time Shopping

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 21:40

    Since the virus pandemic began, consumers have stayed away from shopping malls, including Mall of America (MoA), the largest shopping mall in the US, with more than 500 stores, located in Bloomington, Minnesota. Already, MoA’s owner, Triple Five, has missed mortgage payments this year. There is a push among MoA’s marketing department to revive the dying mall via a new “live stream shopping” experience. 

    Jill Renslow, the Senior VP of Business Development & Marketing at MoA, told KARE 11 that MoA has just partnered with Popshop Live.

    Renslow explained the app is “live real-time shopping through a digital channel. It’s kind of the new version of QVC.” 

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    She said it’s different than ordering from online retailers, as there is a digital shopping experience that is attached to it – something Amazon customers don’t experience.

    “You can interact with that host, learn about the products, and even ask questions and have them navigate through the store for you,” Renslow said. 

    She said app users can search stores and buy products, all from within the app; adding another feature of the app is whenever a mall’s shop goes live, consumers can watch a live show about the products.

    “It can be something for everyone. One day we might be able to sell toys to a certain customer, then we might be able to do apparel for women. It might be beauty products; the options are endless,” described Renslow.

    Here are several examples of Popshop Live broadcasts from retailers within MoA.

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    Cosmetic retailer Morphe is set to debut a live broadcast on Monday (Sept. 21).

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    The app could be a short-term solution to keep business flowing at MoA as many retailers are experiencing sluggish in-store sales with depressed foot traffic due to strict social distancing measures, a consumer not convinced brick-and-mortar stores are safe, and a timeline on vaccine commercialization for the masses that might not be until the second half of 2021.  

     “We really feel like this compliments brick and mortar really well, because not only can you continue to come and shop with us in person at MOA, but this is another way to engage with us in a really fun and dynamic way,” said Renslow.

    She said all purchases on the app would be mailed to the customer or available for curbside side pickup at MoA.

    The introduction of the online shopping app comes as owner Triple Five Group has fallen behind on at least three of MoA’s mortgage payments. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune recently said the mall is reportedly laying off 200 employees and could furlough up to 178 more. 

    Bloomberg said Triple Five missed a $7 million payment for June on a $1.4 billion mortgage.

    As readers may recall, the ongoing crisis in structured debt backed by commercial real estate has pushed Starwood Retail Property Trust 2014-STAR, a portfolio which is backed by an almost $700 million loan which is collateralized by several malls – including The Mall at Wellington Green in Florida – owned by Barry Sternlich’s Starwood Capital, and whose investors are beginning to take losses, to the verge of default. 

    MoA’s shift to move hundreds of its retailers to a live real-time shopping app might be too late as retail bankruptcies continue to surge.

    Could all of this suggest MoA’s days are limited? 

  • Colleges Nationwide Enforce Strict COVID Rules… Except During BLM Protests
    Colleges Nationwide Enforce Strict COVID Rules… Except During BLM Protests

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 21:20

    Authored by Robert Schmad via Campus Reform,

    Despite imposing bans on almost all other forms of large gatherings, and applying harsh punishments to those who disobey such bans, colleges and universities appear reluctant to call out student protesters for violating their COVID-19 safety policies.

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    Common trends among university coronavirus guidelines include mandates to remain at least six feet away from others whenever possible and restrictions on the number of people who can be in a given space at a given time. But recent Black Lives Matter protests on college campuses, inspired by a larger national movement aimed at combating perceived racial injustices, seldom comply with these requirements.

    Many schools, such as Ohio State University and the University of Vermont, have gone as far as to suspend students who violate such rules. 

    Such punishments, 330 at the University of Missouri alone, are often handed down after students are found guilty of doing things like ignoring mask mandates, attending parties, or bringing guests into residence halls. Though they appear to also violate university policy, there has been no such equivalent crackdown on student protests.

    In some cases, university officials have even voiced support for student demonstrations. 

    Following a racial incident that occurred during a Zoom event at Simpson College in Iowa, more than 350 students, faculty and staff spent all day protesting near the college’s Kent Campus Center. The event greatly exceeded the 10 person maximum allowed by Simpson’s COVID health guidelines and students can be seen ignoring social distancing in images of the protest.

    Campus Reform reached out to Simpson College to see if it considered the protest to be in violation of its policy as well as to ask how it rationalizes prohibiting other large gatherings but not the aforementioned demonstration.

    Cathay Cole, a spokeswoman for the college, told Campus Reform “Simpson College places the health and safety of our students, faculty and staff as a top priority” and that the school “firmly believe[s] the rally that took place Sept. 2 was in the best interests of the mental health and safety of our campus community.”

    Cole also stated, “those in attendance were masked and actively practiced social distancing throughout.”

    She went on to say “the rally allowed students of color to highlight their struggles with racism — on- and off-campus — and enabled the entire campus community to gather in support.” Cole concluded the college’s statement by asserting that the protest represented “a pivotal day in the history of our College, and one that did much to begin a healing process of another kind.”

    Though the University of Alabama has imposed even more stringent restrictions on students, protests at the university have also received a degree of institutional support. A recent protest led by Alabama’s head football coach Nick Saban attracted both a very large crowd and the support of other campus officials, including the university’s president who spoke at the event. 

    Though the protest violated the university’s ongoing moratorium on in-person events and images suggested a lack of social distancing, it still drew the support of the institution’s top administrator.

    The University of Alabama has struggled to contain the spread of COVID-19 with more than 800 students reported infected. To combat this, the university temporarily banned Greek life events, prohibited visitors to residential buildings, closed common areas, and extended a two-week moratorium on all in-person events, among other things.

    The University of Utah, Georgia Southern University, and the University of Chicago have all recently seen student protests that have ignored social distancing guidelines set out by their respective institutions and, at times, broken other rules. 

    There are no public reports of any of these schools disciplining the organizers of these events.

    When asked if the restrictions on in-person meetings apply to student protesters, the University of Chicago told Campus Reform “all members of our campus community must comply with the University’s health and safety precautions, including the restrictions on social gatherings noted in a recent message to all students.”

    A spokesperson for Georgia Southern University told Campus Reform that the student-athletes involved in the protest on its campus “are tested regularly and monitored closely” and explained that “the event was outside, attendees wore face coverings and were reminded about public health guidelines.”

    According to the statement made to Campus Reform, the protest was not in violation of the University’s health guidelines and organizers were not reprimanded, the spokesperson claimed. 

    “Students were exercising their First Amendment rights,” the spokesperson said. 

    The University of Utah was asked by Campus Reform whether it believes that protests should be subject to the rules set for students but did not receive a response in time for publication. 

    *  *  *

    ZH: COVID College Box Score: 48,299 Cases… 2 Hospitalization… 0 Deaths!

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    And as cases rise (cough colleges cough)… deaths tumble…

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    Source: Bloomberg

  • Pentagon Informs Congress It's Preparing To Have "Zero" US Troops In Afghanistan By Spring
    Pentagon Informs Congress It’s Preparing To Have “Zero” US Troops In Afghanistan By Spring

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 21:00

    With the Pentagon expected to reduce troops levels in Afghanistan down to 4,500 by the November elections, and with the still negotiated US-Taliban peace deal facilitating this, on Tuesday a Pentagon official told Congress it can expect American presence there to be completely ended by May 2021.

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    Acting assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs David Helvey issued the ambitious timetable during a Congressional hearing:

    “I’d like to make it clear that [Secretary of Defense Mark Esper] has not issued orders to reduce military personnel below this 4,000 to 5,000 level in Afghanistan, although we are conducting prudent planning to withdraw to zero service members by May 2021 if conditions warrant, per the US-Taliban agreement.”

    In August Esper vowed “We are going down to a number less than 5,000 before the end of November,” in accord with President Trump’s wishes, who has ahead of the election talked up “brining our troops home” in various statements and on Twitter.

    Currently there are an estimated close to 9,000 US troops there, after in recent years as many as 14,000 had been deployed in America’s longest running war. 

    Critics have said that Trump’s vows and commitment to ending US “forever wars” have oscillated and have only ramped up again ahead of the election, given it’s a talking point popular with his base.

    Trump recently referenced the Middle East as “the bloodiest sand anywhere in the world” and reiterated that going to war there was the “single worst decision our country ever made.”

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    Iraq is also to slated for rapid and significant US pullout, however, neighboring Syria has just this past week seen more mechanized infantry units enter amid ongoing tensions with Russian patrols in northern Syria.

    Bradley Fighting Vehicles are now patrolling northeast Deir Ezzor region with greater frequency, an escalation in US posture compared to the lighter armored convoys previously seen “protecting the oil” – as Trump has put it.

  • An Open Letter To Stressed-Out Preppers Who Are Tired Of This Apocalypse
    An Open Letter To Stressed-Out Preppers Who Are Tired Of This Apocalypse

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 20:40

    Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

    Dear Friends:

    2020 has certainly been quite a year so far, and a defining one for the preparedness movement. No longer are our stockpiles of rice, beans, and hand sanitizer objects that make us strange. Our stashes of TP would make us the envy of the neighborhood if, of course, anybody knew we had it.

    So many of the things and beliefs that made us figures of mockery in the past are now proving their value. We’re learning, with a mixture of relief and perhaps dismay, that we weren’t so crazy after all.

    When the first lockdown began, we weren’t out there emptying the shelves in the frenzied throng (even though we’re the ones who got blamed for it.) We were watchful but for the most part, comfortable with our preparations. We understood before things went sideways that extended events can result in civil unrest, crime sprees, and chaos. We realized that we could be facing shortages.

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    And then time went on.

    And on.

    And on.

    This has been a year in which so many things have occurred that proved preppers have things right that it’s positively exhausting. We’ve had a pandemic, civil unrest, food shortages, increases in crime, exorbitant unemployment, and we’re facing an economic collapse, or at the very least, an economic crisis.

    And we’re tired.

    Maybe everyone doesn’t feel this way. Maybe you’re perfectly fine and you live on your back 40 and have been completely untouched by any of the above-mentioned crises. Maybe your finances are just fine, you never got out much anyway, and you’ve still got 8 years’ worth of food socked away to supplement the things you grow. Maybe you’re reading this as you spin goat hair into yarn from which you’ll make this year’s mittens. Maybe you have no relatives, friends, or loved ones in the path of danger. Maybe your area isn’t prone to a single natural disaster.

    If this is the case, I salute you. I really do. Good for you.

    But for most of us, this is not the case. A lot of us are tired.

    And I mean tired.

    I’m sure there will be plenty of folks in the comments who say, “Daisy Luther is such a whiner” but whatever. I’m just going to come right out and tell you how I feel about this.

    This year has been difficult.

    My life changed completely. The lives of people I love changed completely. I lost some people I cared for deeply to the virus. I watched people in my family frolic around blithely ignoring the virus for which they’re in a peak risk group for death. I watched my country get torn asunder by everything from the pandemic response to racial injustice to perceived insults or losses of rights. I have a family member who lives in a riot zone but due to work and finances, can’t just relocate. (Although those folks on the internet always make it sound so damned easy to just quit your job then up and move to the boondocks to raise sheep.)

    I have friends who have developed such extreme political views on either side that I don’t even know what to say to them anymore. I still love them. I still know they’re good people or we wouldn’t have been friends in the first place. But what the heck, y’all?

    Then we’ve got hurricanes and the worst wildfires ever in history and floods and droughts and snow in September and murder hornets and the Olympics got canceled and there was some radiation leak in Russia and police brutality, which you will say is alleged or real, depending on your personal perspective. Oh yeah, and the US Postal Service has gone to heck, a lot of kids can’t go back to school so they’re surfing the net while they’re supposed to be “distance learning” online, and Netflix is playing a child porn movie to prove that kids are getting sexually exploited. Our system is going downhill on a greasy slide.

    Our presidential candidates are (in my humble opinion) like a choice between your favorite sexually transmitted infection, syphillis or gonhorrhea. And regardless of whether syphilis or gonorrhea wins, all hell’s going to break loose (or break looser because it’s already pretty freakin’ bad in a lot of places) before and after the election that may not even happen the regular way because of the pandemic.

    And we preppers who were ready for an emergency are sitting here scratching our heads thinking, “Heck fire, I wasn’t actually prepared for ALL OF THE EMERGENCIES AT ONCE.”

    And it’s going on and on and on.

    And that’s the other thing.

    This stuff is going on and on and on forever. Ad infinitum. We are still in the middle of a global viral outbreak that we don’t completely understand and lots of places are still under major restrictions. A lot of folks don’t have their jobs back and a lot never will. We have been dealing with this particular disaster since at least February and the mental toll of dealing with the restrictions, the loss of income, the isolation, and the loss of freedom has been harsh for many people. There are folks who are just plain mad that they didn’t get the apocalypse they signed up for and they haven’t gotten to shoot any marauders and quite frankly, lockdown is boring as heck.

    Lots of us have family members and people in our inner circles who are chomping at the bit to get back to “normal” when things simply are not normal. We’ve got loved ones who want to head out to parties and who want to throw caution to the wind and who flat don’t give a hoot what they bring home to Grandma. We’ve got loved ones who are using this entire scenario to say how we’ve overreacted. We’ve got loved ones who still get aggravated when we bring home more toilet paper.

    When we were prepping for all this stuff most of us never expected that our families who were also prepping for this stuff might not be on board with this specific scenario. We never thought we’d have to argue with children and spouses and friends and lovers about things like quarantines and masks and not eating all five years’ worth of the good snacks like Oreos in the first 6 months. We didn’t consider that we might not be able to replace our Bluetooth headsets or that we’d need them for work or that we’d have to have our offices in our homes or that our kids’ teachers might see their BB guns in their bedrooms and send the SWAT teams after us.

    We can’t go to church but we can go to riots. We aren’t supposed to travel yet mysterious busloads full of “protesters” show up in other states and that’s just hunky-dory. The borders are closed except they’re not really and the restaurants can’t serve you except they can sort of and we can’t go to the beach but we can line up for a vaccine once the promised injection, untested for long-term side effects, is ready.

    This is the worst apocalypse ever because it’s so dad-gum boring and it’s going on for-freaking-ever. That’s the thing that nobody warned us about. This monotony just goes on and on and on. It would be one thing if we were out there fighting for resources but in reality, we’re all just standin’ in line at Wal-Mart with our masks on waiting for our turn to get zapped with a thermometer to see if we are allowed to go inside. If it weren’t for wifi we’d all be crazy by now. Or – let’s be real for a moment – maybe it’s because of wifi so many people are crazy right now. Social media is a jungle – an outright vicious and bloody jungle – and may the most audacious mofo win because those of us who still retain our human decency are not going to be able to hang with the people out there flinging wild ungrounded insults like poop in the monkey cages at the zoo.

    And folks – I hate to say it but we’re still on Round One.

    We’re going to be dealing with this bizarre altered reality for quite some time. This virus ain’t over yet or if you don’t believe in the virus, then consider that this government response isn’t over yet. We’re never “getting back to normal” and we’re going to have to adapt. We’re going to have to hope our children who are going to school in personal bubbles aren’t going to have OCD and chronic anxiety for the rest of their lives. We’re going to have to learn to make do without all the imports that no longer seem to be populating stores.

    We never really expected that a huge part of survival would just be waiting and adapting to the new world around us. Not this new world anyway. This isn’t one we can shoot our way out of or buy our way out of or wait our way out of.  We have to adapt to the new economy, the new precautions, and the new suspicions. We have to adapt to a different type of supply chain.  We have to move into survival mode as we watch civil unrest and riots break out in the most unlikely places, although it’s not really the survival mode we ever expected. We have to adjust to the nearly constant state of offense and unrest. We’re going to have to teach our children to be bold and fearless despite a system that wants them to be afraid. We’re going to have to forge a path through a labyrinth that is nothing like the one we expected when we began prepping for serious events because this event was so wildly unpredictable that nobody could have seen it happening the way it did.

    But this is what we do.

    We’re preppers. Preparing for the unexpected is our thing. Even when the unexpected is long-lasting, monotonous, boring, and stifling. Even when our family thinks we’re overreacting. Even when everything changes and things don’t get back to “normal.” Even when we’re just sitting there right on the edge of chaos wondering if today is the day that things will erupt in our neck of the woods.

    Every.

    Single.

    Day.

    For.

    Months.

    The way this unfolded isn’t the disaster any of us expected but it’s the hand we’ve been dealt. How well we’re able to handle it will tell us a lot about how mentally prepared we actually are. How we manage our friends, families, and expectations will help us determine how things might go in a future, more Mad-Max variety of apocalypse.

    Take this as the learning experience that it is. And don’t be lulled by the boredom into a false sense of security.

    Because this is not over. Not by a long shot.

    Hang in there, my friends. Whether we have to pull our loved ones along by their collars, whether we have to buy our supplies and stash them away on the sly, whether we have to prepare all on our own, we have to deal with the apocalypse we’ve been given, emotionally and physically.

    It’s going to be a long haul, but we’ve got this. I don’t know if you’re feeling the same way that I am, but just in case you are, I wanted you to know – you’re not alone.

  • Possible Ballistic Missile Launcher Vehicle Spotted At North Korea Parade Practice
    Possible Ballistic Missile Launcher Vehicle Spotted At North Korea Parade Practice

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 20:20

    Weeks ago, in early September, we noted how North Korea was preparing for an “October Surprise,” one where the rogue nation could launch a ballistic missile(s) ahead of the U.S. presidential elections. 

    New commercial satellite imagery from Sept. 22 of North Korea’s Mirim Parade Training Ground, “reveals a probable missile-related vehicle at the secure storage compound,” according to a report by the website 38 North.

    “While imagery resolution is insufficient to determine exactly what the vehicle is, relative size and shape suggest that it may be a transporter-erector-launcher (TEL) for a large missile,” the think-tank said.

    The size of TEL suggests the vehicle is sufficient enough to carry a Hwasong intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). 

    The change in coloring going toward the cab suggests that there may be a missile on the transporter, and the light color may represent the missile or a light-color tarp draped over the missile airframe. However, again, the imagery resolution precludes a clear determination on this matter.

    A dark, irregular line perpendicular to the possible missile transporter is likely an assembly of equipment and/or troops.

    Beyond that activity, approximately 50 large troop formations can be seen around the parade ground, similar, but larger in number to those reported from the previous analysis. There is also another large, casual grouping of personnel, located at the plaza at the far west side of the complex. – 38 North 

    Figure 1. Possible TEL At Mirim Parade Training Ground

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    2020 Planet Labs, Inc. cc-by-nc-sa 4.0. h/t 38 North

    At the end of the report, 38 North acknowledged there “may be other possibilities about what this large vehicle is, such as a low-bed trailer with a Maz-like tractor, they seem unlikely in this particular location and circumstance.” 

    An October Surprise could be the launch of ballistic missile(s), either by land or by sea, ahead or during the Oct. 10 holiday, marking the 75th anniversary of the Workers’ Party of Korea. 

    The launch of missiles would signal the lack of progress between the Trump administration and North Korea in the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. 

  • Trump Strikes A Second Major Blow Against 'Critical Race Theory'
    Trump Strikes A Second Major Blow Against ‘Critical Race Theory’

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 20:00

    Authored by Mimi Nguyen Ly via The Epoch Times,

    President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday to stop funding to federal government contractors who hold critical race theory training sessions.

    “The President signed an Executive Order to end training sessions based on race and sex stereotyping and scapegoating in the Federal workforce, the Uniformed Services, and among Federal contractors,” the White House said in an announcement.

    “This order will prohibit Federal agencies and Federal contractors from conducting training that promotes race stereotyping, for example, by portraying certain races as oppressors by virtue of their birth.”

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    In the executive order, titled “Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping,” Trump wrote that many people are pushing an ideology that is a “different vision of America that is grounded in hierarchies based on collective social and political identities rather than in the inherent and equal dignity of every person as an individual.”

    “This ideology is rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country; that some people, simply on account of their race or sex, are oppressors; and that racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as human beings and Americans,” Trump wrote, later calling the ideology “divisive.”

    The president provided a number of examples of such critical race theory trainings, which included a seminar recently held by the Treasury Department that promoted the message that “virtually all White people, regardless of how ‘woke’ they are, contribute to racism.” The same seminar was found to have told small group leaders to encourage employees to avoid the idea that Americans should be “more color-blind” or “let people’s skills and personalities be what differentiates them.”

    In another example, the Sandia National Laboratories, a research lab and a federal entity, was found to have stated in training materials for non-minority males that an emphasis on “rationality over emotionality” was a characteristic of “white male[s].” The training materials also asked the trainees to “acknowledge” their “privilege” to each other.

    The Argonne National Laboratories, a research center under the U.S. Department of Energy, was found to have stated in its training materials that racism “is interwoven into every fabric of America.” It also characterized statements like “color blindness” and “meritocracy” as “action of bias.”

    The executive order also pointed to the Smithsonian Institution in another example, where one of the museum’s graphics asserted that concepts such as “objective, rational linear thinking,” “hard work” being “the key to success,” the “nuclear family,” and belief in a single god are “aspects and assumptions of whiteness” and not values that would unite Americans. The museum also stated that “[f]acing your whiteness is hard and can result in feelings of guilt, sadness, confusion, defensiveness, or fear,” according to the order.

    “All of this is contrary to the fundamental premises underpinning our Republic: that all individuals are created equal and should be allowed an equal opportunity under the law to pursue happiness and prosper based on individual merit,” Trump wrote in the order.

    Trump said in the order that such trainings “[perpetuate] racial stereotypes and division and can use subtle coercive pressure to ensure conformity of viewpoint.”

    “Such ideas may be fashionable in the academy, but they have no place in programs and activities supported by Federal taxpayer dollars,” the president wrote. “Research also suggests that blame-focused diversity training reinforces biases and decreases opportunities for minorities.”

    Trump’s latest action comes after the White House announced an order earlier this month to stop taxpayer-funded critical race theory training sessions to government workers in various U.S. executive branch agencies.

    In a statement on Twitter, the president announced late Tuesday: “A few weeks ago, I BANNED efforts to indoctrinate government employees with divisive and harmful sex and race-based ideologies.

    “Today, I’ve expanded that ban to people and companies that do business with our Country, the United States Military, Government Contractors, and Grantees. Americans should be taught to take PRIDE in our Great Country, and if you don’t, there’s nothing in it for you!”

    Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought said on Twitter: “This is another important step that builds off his directive to agencies to stop trainings that push a radical anti-American agenda.”

    “In the face of lies meant to divide us, demoralize us, and diminish us, we will show that the story of America unites us, inspires us, includes us all, and makes everyone free,” Trump said in a statement.

  • JPMorgan Traders Complain Bank Didn't Warn Them About Recent COVID-19 Outbreak
    JPMorgan Traders Complain Bank Didn’t Warn Them About Recent COVID-19 Outbreak

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 19:40

    While the world’s biggest tech firms have come out in favor of working from home in perpetuity (or at least until next summer), JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs were among the earliest major American companies to start pushing employees to get back to the office. And already, both have endured trading floor outbreaks (albeit smaller than outbreaks they experienced back in March).

    But while JP Morgan’s ‘research’ showing young employees lose ‘creative intelligence’ when confined to their homes – denied the collaborative experience of working from a cubicle in Midtown – is certainly compelling, it looks like the bank’s employees have some trepidation about the push back to the office.

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    Specifically, they’re concerned about the bank’s policy of only informing employees who came into close, direct contact with anybody who tests positive of the virus. According to CNBC, an employee asked Troy Rohrbaugh, JPM’s global markets head, about the policy during a recent virtual town hall.

    The executive explained the bank’s policy is to inform only those who had been working on the same floor, or who may have had contact with the sick individual.

    But JPM isn’t alone in that: Goldman only discloses infection to workers who had meetings, or worked on the same floor, as somebody who got sick.

    Traders are reportedly angry that when there was a trading floor outbreak earlier this month, they only learned about it when they saw the story on their Bloomberg terminals.

    “Why did I have to read about this in Bloomberg?” said one trader who declined to be identified criticizing his or her employer, referring to an article on the matter.

    Looking to the CDC guidelines, the source of the conflict is clear. Guidelines clearly state that “employers should inform fellow employees of their possible exposure to COVID-19 in the workplace but maintain confidentiality as required by the Americans with Disabilities Act.” “Exposure” is defined as “being within 6 feet of someone with the virus for 15 minutes or more”.

    That’s a change from the early days of the outbreak, when information about infections was more widely shared by both banks. Meanwhile, JPM said in an official statement that its protocols “go beyond just notifying those who are in close contact”…with the bank adding that “we notify a wide group of employees out of precaution.”

    CEO Jamie Dimon might want to give the issue a rethink if the bank still prioritizes recruiting the ‘top talent’ out of America’s rapidly emptying colleges. While big tech firms are known for their office ‘perks’, in the future, the most desirable ‘perk’ of all might be the ability to work from anywhere.

  • Germany Adds 11 Regions To "Coronavirus Watch List", France Closes Bars, Restaurants In Marseilles: Live Updates
    Germany Adds 11 Regions To “Coronavirus Watch List”, France Closes Bars, Restaurants In Marseilles: Live Updates

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 19:28

    Summary:

    • Germany adds 11 regions to travel warning list
    • France orders bars and restaurants shut in Marseilles, Paris on “high alert”
    • Head of FDA advisory committee recuses herself from COVID vaccine review
    • Irish outbreak worsens
    • Eiffel Tower reopens, Met Opera scraps season
    • CDC director hints at new guidance on aerosols
    • US nears 7 million cases
    • Post-LBW spike continues
    • Trump moves more money to ‘Operation Warp Speed’
    • NYC warns of new hotspots that require “urgent action”
    • Mayor de BLasio furloughs 9k workers
    • France to announce new COVID restrictions
    • Japan on track to approve new COVID drug
    • Indonesia reports another daily record
    • China, Japan to ease travel restrictions on foreigners

    * * *

    Update (1920ET): Germany on Wednsday evening announced it would add 11 regions across Europe to its list of “coronavirus risk zones”, according to a statement from Germany’s Robert Koch Institute, the agency in charge of Germany’s COVID-19 response.

    The list includes several popular tourist destinations across Europe, according to Reuters.

    Germany added regions in 11 European countries to the list of destinations it classifies as coronavirus risk zones, dealing a further blow to hopes for a revival of tourism as many countries brace for a possible second wave of the pandemic.

    Regions newly listed by the Robert Koch Institute health agency included major tourist destinations such as the French regions of Centre-Val de Loire, Brittany and Normandy, as well as the coastal region Lika-Senj in Croatia and the upland Primorsko-notranjska region in Slovenia.

    The Irish, Portuguese and Danish capitals, the Dutch province of Utrecht, Austria’s state of Vorarlberg, most of the Czech Republic, Gyor county in Western Hungary and Romania’s Covasna county were also listed.

    Listing as a risk area is typically followed by the Foreign Ministry advising against non-essential travel to the region in question.

    Germany warns against travel to regions within the European Union where the rate of COVID-19 infections exceeds the level of 50 per 100,000 population in a week.

    Adding regions to the list typically comes before an official travel advisory is issued.

    In other European news, French President Emmanuel Macron announced Wednesday in a much overhyped announcement that the French government would shut down bars and restaurants in Marseilles, the hardest hit city in the country. Meanwhile, the Paris region, which is also seeing a spike, even as tourist spots like the Eiffel Tower prepare to reopen, is on high alert.

    * * *

    Update (1750ET): Both the Trump Administration and the career scientists are working diligently to protect the ‘credbility’ of the FDA long enough to convince people to take a COVID-19 vaccine after an expedited review process. But conflicts like this don’t help.

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    And with that, the head of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee won’t have a say in approving any of the most important vaccine to be developed in decades.

    * * *

    Update (1340ET): Barely a day goes by, it seems, without Dr. Fauci, Dr. Redfield and other top officials from DHHS/the former White House coronavirus task force, testifying before Congress. Wednesday was no different, with both men testifying before the Senate. Redfield started off by blaming young people between the ages of 18 and 25 for the resurgence in cases over the summer, calling them “major contributors” to the spread of COVID-19.

    Later, Redfield was asked by one senator to offer some clarity on the CDC’s abrupt decision to retract recently changed guidance regarding aerosol transmission. He said the document that was posted was a “non-scientifically cleared” document.

    However, he’s readying another document that will be scientifically cleared, though Redfield didn’t offer any more insight on that.

    With vaccines again the big story of the day after the JNJ news, Dr. Fauci once again told lawmakers that a vaccine will likely be approved by the end of the year.

    Circling back the CDC guidance, scientists are battling over whether aerosol transmission – ie spread via tiny particles than can travel over 30 feet from a sneeze or a cough – is the primary cause of COVID-19’s spread. A growing group of scientists are pointing to super spreader events linked to choirs and concerts etc to argue the virus does primarily spread in this way, while surface contact and spread from close interaction are also important vectors, according to the Washington Post.

    Some scientists argued that the resistance toward officially classifying the virus as “airborne” is due to “historical bias”.

    Some other news from Wednesday: the Eiffel Tower will soon reopen to tourists for the first time since the start of the pandemic.

    Finally, an outbreak in Ireland has continued to worsen: The number of new coronavirus cases in the country will double every 12 to 14 days at the current rate, the nation’s health ministry warned on Wednesday, after the country reported 234 more cases on Wednesday, along with two new deaths.

    “We are unfortunately seeing continuing increases in all metrics of the disease,” Health Ministry advisor Philip Nolan told reporters in Dublin, adding it was too early to see the impact of new restrictions imposed on the country last week.

    Finally, here’s some more information on the NYC clusters noted earlier: Since the first week of August, the city has seen a 4.71% increase in Midwood, Borough Park and Bensonhurst, 3.69% in Edgemere-Far Rockaway, 2.24% in Kew Gardens and 2% in Williamsburg.

    * * *

    The number of new COVID-19 cases reported in the US on Tuesday accelerated to 39,345 (compared with +37,417 the prior day), as the post-Labor Day Weekend surge (something that BofA analysts insist is being driven almost entirely by increases in testing) continues. Mirroring the increase in cases, deaths increased by 438, compared with just 270 the day before. California saw cases climb 2,630 yesterday (compared with +3,294 for the prior day), while deaths increased by 53, vs. 31 a day ago.

    Meanwhile, the US death toll topped 200,000, a level that was once “unfathomable”, according to the AP.

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    “It’s completely unfathomable that we reached this point,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a JHU researcher. The AP also noted that 200,000 deaths from the virus is roughly equivalent to one “9/11” per day for 67 days.

    The newswire also noted that the milestone comes “six weeks before an election that is certain to be a referendum in part on President Donald Trump’s handling of the crisis.”

    Speaking on CNN, Dr. Fauci said “the idea of 200,000 deaths is really very sobering, in some respects stunning.”  President Trump, meanwhile, said last night that “if we didn’t do it properly and do it right, you’d have 2.5 million deaths”, while Democratic candidate Joe Biden took to twitter to proclaim “it didn’t have to be this bad” (then again, Biden also apparently believes the death toll is 200 million, several orders of magnitude higher than reality). Brazil, which essentially did let its outbreak run wild, is in second place with 137,000 deaths, though some critics believe that number underestimates the true death toll.

    Looking ahead, the US is roughly 2 days away from becoming the first country to top 7 million confirmed cases: As of Wednesday morning, the US had 6,897,756 cases, and 200,818 confirmed deaths.

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    In terms of the big US news on Wednesday, NYC’s health department identified a new cluster of cases yesterday in Brooklyn which it warned could be cause for “significant concern”. the hot spots have been traced to four areas in Queens and Brooklyn.

    Speaking Wednesday morning, Mayor de Blasio warned these new ‘hot spots’ require “urgent action” and that NYC will increase enforcement of social distancing rules and also bolster its testing efforts to try and stave off the new outbreak. The mayor also annonced a five-day furlough impacting 9,000 employees – a measure that will reportedly save the city $21 million.

    And as we noted earlier, JNJ announced its vaccine candidate would be starting Phase 3 trials, making it the fourth candidate to cross that threshold. Yesterday, UK PM Boris Johnson unveiled new measures to slow a resurgence in the UK’s outbreak. The PM also warned that if the measures aren’t effective, that the UK may return to lockdown, even as a team of BofA analysts warned that tighter COVID restrictions will “scar the UK economy further”.

    Wisconsin Gov Tony Evers announced new measures late Tuesday declared a public health emergency and extended an order to wear face masks into November.

    Finally, the Trump Administration according to Bloomberg is shifting billions of dollars to ‘Operation Warp Speed’, its vaccine effort which relies on throwing money at vaccine projects, and away from testing and masks. The shift shows the administration’s “increasing focus on a medical solution to ease the pandemic,” Bloomberg said. The new money will swell the program to $18 billion from $10 billion.

    “Escalating lockdown measures, fading stimulus measures and Brexit uncertainty will push the economy into contraction over the next two quarters,” said BofA’s Robert Wood, chief UK economist.

    Here’s a roundup of other important COVID news from Wednesday:

    Global cases have hit 31,615,836, while deaths have reached 971,116 (Source: JHU).

    Indonesia sets new daily record: The country reported 4,465 new cases, and another 140 deaths. This is only the fourth time Indonesia has topped 4k daily cases, and each instance has come during the last week (Source: Nikkei).

    Tokyo reports 59 cases, marking the lowest daily figure in nearly three months. The number was down from 88 on Tuesday and 98 on Monday, and the lowest since June 30, when 54 cases were reported (Source: Nikkei).

    Fujifilm announced that its Avigan drug reduced viral loads and symptoms of COVID-19 patients, clearing the last hurdle to emergency approval in Japan, following months of delays. The Phase 3 clinical study of 156 patients showed that those treated with Avigan improved after 11.9 days, versus 14.7 days for a placebo group (Source: Nikkei).

    Japan is finally planning to ease access for foreigners in October, though its restrictions will remain pretty stringent: Only 1,000 visitors will be allowed into Japan per day, and initially only those staying for more than 3 months will be allowed in (and they must quarantine for 2 weeks upon arrival) (Source: Nikkei).

    India reported 83,347 cases Wednesday, up from 75,083 on Tuesday, bringing its total to nearly 5.65 million. The death toll has jumped by 1,085 to 90,020. The country’s testing capacity now exceeds 1.2 million per day, by far the highest in the world, and more than 66 million tests have been conducted in total (Source: Nikkei).

    China reported 10 cases for Sept. 22, up from just six a day earlier. China is also planning to ease entry rules for foreigners starting Sept. 28 (Source: Nikkei).

    Australia sees just 15 new cases in its COVID-19 “hot spot” of Victoria, the country’s second-largest state, and home to its second city, Melbourne. Reporting just 15 cases and five deaths, compared with 28 cases and 3 deaths yesterday (Source: Nikkei).

    Goldman Sachs, HSBC and others have paused plans to return workers in London after PM Johnson appealed to Britons to work from home (Source: Bloomberg).

    Argentina reported a record 470 COVID-19 daily deaths, pushing its total to 13,952, according to the government’s evening report. It’s the second day in a row Argentina has reported a record rise in fatalities. Officials also confirmed 12,027 new cases, bringing the total to 652,174 (Source: Bloomberg).

    Finally, Goldman Sachs analysts have come up with the following chart to measure the level of COVID-19 restrictions in place in the US. Right now, it’s swinging back toward more restrictions as states move to curb an expected “fall surge” as college students return home.

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  • Military Generals Are Just Another Group Of Self-Interested Technocrats
    Military Generals Are Just Another Group Of Self-Interested Technocrats

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 19:20

    Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

    The United States has always had a love affair with certain generals. George Washington, of course, was immensely popular, and thirteen US presidents were generals before they were president.

    But prior to the Second World War, generals as a group were not revered or treated with any particular veneration or respect. In fact, in the nineteenth century, full-time US military officers were often treated with suspicion and contempt. While state militia officers were regarded as indispensable night watchmen who preserved order, the full-time government employees who served in the federal military were often derided as lazy and otherwise unemployable.

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    But now those days are long gone.

    In recent decades, active generals and retired generals have grown into a group of politically influential technocrats who can be regularly seen on evening news programs and are habitually feted and promoted as incorruptible patriots. They are fawned over by media organizations while being paid enormous pensions. Moreover, upon retirement they are able to turn their former government employment into lucrative positions on corporate boards and throughout the private sector.

    The immense deference and trust placed in the opinions and alleged expertise of these men is far beyond what is warranted.  Like all technocrats—whether we’re talking Supreme Court justices or public health bureaucrats—the generals have their own interests and their own agendas.

    This was recently highlighted by the president’s new public feud with some generals.

    At a Labor Day press conference Trump averred:

    “The top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t, because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.”

    It’s always difficult to guess Trump’s motivations and earnestness when he makes statements such as this, but the statement itself isn’t wrong. The generals—retired and not— are often deeply enmeshed with weapons manufacturers and tech firms that rely on Pentagon spending.

    The Generals’ Unimpressive Record

    It’s difficult to see why the nation’s generals enjoy such a stellar reputation.  The US military establishment has lost every major military endeavor since 1945 and has been shown to be fiscally inept at a level that could only be described as criminal indifference. The Pentagon has repeatedly failed audits and has “misplaced” trillions of taxpayer dollars.

    Yet in spite of this impressive record of failure and incompetence, generals continue to be held up by pundits and media organizations as the men who somehow care more about America than anyone else. Moreover, as is typical for technocrats, the generals are used by the establishment to provide intellectual and ideological cover to those who wish to forever expand US military adventurism and intervention. The alleged expertise of the generals—although apparently insufficient to actually win any wars—is said to offer us great insight into how American foreign policy ought to be conducted today.

    The Generals Are Hardly Objective, Unbiased Observers

    Needless to say, this view of the generals veers far from the reality. Moreover, the generals may now be morally and ideologically compromised by their deep ties to weapons manufacturers and the corporate boards on which many generals serve.

    In a blistering article published at the American Conservative last week, Hunter Derensis explains how the image of American generals as selfless public servants is long past its expiration date:

    Perhaps Trump learned the hard way that the generals of the forever wars don’t measure up to the twentieth-century soldiers he adulated growing up.

    For instance, when George Marshall oversaw the deployment of 8.3 million GIs across four continents in World War II, he did so with the assistance of only three other four-star generals. In retirement, Marshall refused to sit on any corporate boards, and passed on multiple lucrative book deals, lest he give the impression that he was profiting from his military record. As he told one publisher, “he had not spent his life serving the government in order to sell his life story to the Saturday Evening Post.”

    Contrast that to the bloated, top-heavy military establishment of today, where an unprecedented forty-one four-star generals oversee only 1.3 million men[-] and women-at-arms. These men, selected and groomed because of their safe habits, spend years patting themselves on the back for managing wars-not-won, awaiting the day they can cash in. According to an analysis by The Boston Globe, in the mid-1990s nearly 50% of three- and four-star generals went on to work as consultants or executives for the arms industry. In 2006, at the height of the Iraq War, that number swelled to over 80% of retirees.

    The examples are as endless as America’s foreign occupations: former Director of Naval Intelligence Jack Dorsett joined the board of Northrop-Grumman; he was later followed by former Air Force Chief of Staff Mark Welsh; meanwhile, former Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James Cartwright went to Raytheon; former Chairs of the Joint Chiefs—the highest ranking position in the military—William J. Crowe, John Shalikashvili, Richard Myers, and Joseph Dunford went on to work for General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, and Lockheed-Martin, respectively.

    Just as former presidents are able to turn their fame into multimillion dollar fortunes (as the Obamas and Clintons have done) generals are able to engage in very similar activities. Derensis continues:

    General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, in between his forced retirement from the Marine Corps and appointment as Secretary of Defense, joined the board of General Dynamics where he was paid over a million dollars in salary and benefits. Returning to public life, Mattis then spent two years cajoling President Trump into keeping the U.S. military engaged in places as disparate as Afghanistan, Syria, and Africa. “Sir, we’re doing it to prevent a bomb from going off in Times Square,” Mattis told his commander-in-chief.

    Left unsaid was that a strategic withdrawal would also lead to a precipitous decline in Mattis’ future stock options, which he regained after he rejoined General Dynamics following his December 2018 resignation.

    None of this proves generals are all amoral cynics, of course. It is quite possible to want a safe and prosperous America while also being an opportunist who’s always on the lookout for new ways to turn one’s life of living off the sweat of the taxpayer into some additional easy cash.

    But what this all shows us is that it’s time to start viewing the generals for what they are: lifelong bureaucrats who upon retirement are more than happy to use their easy and vaunted experience in government as a means to fame, adulation, and easy money. After all, in the modern world, generals don’t become generals through courage on the battlefield, or even through any particularly insightful thinking or expertise. It’s not 1944, and these guys aren’t exactly George S. Patton.

    Today’s generals are politicos, bureaucrats, and Washington insiders whose primary skill set lies in gaining influence in the halls of Congress and on cable TV shows. It’s very easy and rewarding work. If you can get it.

  • Tesla Sues In US Court Of International Trade To Block Trump's Tariffs On China
    Tesla Sues In US Court Of International Trade To Block Trump’s Tariffs On China

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 09/23/2020 – 19:00

    Tesla, which we have long suspected to be getting awfully comfortable with China (see this piece and this one), isn’t exactly going out of its way to prove us wrong.

    Instead, in what appears to be a move putting Elon Musk’s interests and China’s interests ahead of that of the United States, Tesla has sued in the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York, seeking an order that declares President Trump’s tariffs against China unlawful.

    The company is also seeking a refund, with interest, of tariffs it has already paid, according to Bloomberg.

    U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has been named as a defendant in the case. Recall, his office denied Tesla’s bid to avoid the 25% tariffs last year. The tariffs affect Chinese-made computer and display screens that are used for Tesla’s Model 3 electric vehicle. 

    Recall, we wrote at the beginning of August that Elon Musk’s distaste for the U.S. was starting to become palpable.

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    The Tesla CEO – who has made himself billions off the back of U.S. government subsidies and the U.S. taxpayer – took to the “Daily Drive” podcast earlier this summer and called the people of China “smart” and “hard working” while at the same time calling U.S. citizens “entitled” and “complacent”.

    He specifically called out both New York and California, states whose taxpayers have literally funded Tesla’s business with massive tax breaks amounting to billions. 

    When asked about China as an EV strategy leader worldwide, Musk responded:  “China rocks in my opinion. The energy in China is great. People there – there’s like a lot of smart, hard working people. And they’re really — they’re not entitled, they’re not complacent, whereas I see in the United States increasingly much more complacency and entitlement especially in places like the Bay Area, and L.A. and New York.”

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