Aug 25

Today’s News 25th August 2020

  • 1 In 3 Cars Worldwide Is Produced In China
    1 In 3 Cars Worldwide Is Produced In China

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 08/25/2020 – 02:45

    Almost one in three – or 32 percent – of all cars produced worldwide in 2019 came out of China.

    As shown in numbers by the automobile manufacturers’ association OICA, the world manufactures less cars than it did in 2014, but, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes, several Asian markets actually were able to grow their production volumes.

    Infographic: One in Three Cars Worldwide Is Produced in China | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    India exhibited one of the biggest increases – almost 15 percent in five years to 3.6 million cars annually.

    The biggest decrease in production hit the ailing U.S. car industry, which lost 40 percent of its domestic production between 2014 and 2019.

    Germany also make less cars at home, but German manufacturers like Volkswagen are a part of the rising Chinese production. In 2019, the Chinese market accounted for around 39 percent of Volkswagen’s total sales. Shifting production sites are only one aspect of the internationalization of the car industry.

    Know-how also migrates with production, with established manufacturers entering into joint ventures with Chinese or other Asian companies, which usually include technology transfer.

  • "This Is Insane": Kenosha Melts Down As Cars Smashed, Buildings Torched And Looters Run Wild In Second Night Of Unrest
    “This Is Insane”: Kenosha Melts Down As Cars Smashed, Buildings Torched And Looters Run Wild In Second Night Of Unrest

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 08/25/2020 – 02:30

    Anarchy broke out on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin Monday as protesters squared off with National Guardsman in the second night of unrest over the shooting of a reportedly unarmed black man by police on Sunday.

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    Two protesters stand with raised fists as a garbage truck burns behind them (via the Daily Mail)

    The night was documented by journalist Brendan Gutenschwager (@BGOnTheScene) with photos via the Daily Mail (EPA).

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    Tear gas was deployed in an attempt to clear protesters who had gathered in front of the Kenosha County courthouse, while Gov. Tony Evers deployed 125 members of the National Guard to assist local law enforcement.

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    A woman taunts law enforcement in front of the Kenosha County courthouse (via the Daily Mail)

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    Massive fires were set throughout the city, including car dealerships, a Department of Corrections administrative building, and an office furniture company.

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    A city garbage truck burns

    In a now-viral video, 29-year-old Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back while attempting to enter his car during an altercation with police. He is currently in serious condition in a Milwaukee hospital, according to the Daily Mail – which notes that in Blake was charged with resisting arrest and carrying a concealed weapon in 2015 after he pulled a gun at a local bar in Racine.

    Meanwhile, details have emerged about Blake’s criminal past, including a recent arrest for sexual assault.

    According to online records, Kenosha County prosecutors charged Blake with third-degree sexual assault, trespassing, and disorderly conduct in connection with domestic abuse. –Daily Mail

    In addition to the fire and destruction, mass looting ensued – including a Mattress store which was then burned to the ground.

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    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsMeanwhile, armed private citizens stood guard outside a local gas station to protect it from looters.

    On Monday, tensions flared after a Monday press conference with Mayor John Antarmian was moved from a park to inside the city’s public safety building, according to Fox News, which notes that “Hundreds of protesters rushed to the building and a door was snapped off its hinges before police in riot gear pepper-sprayed the crowd, which included a photographer from The Associated Press.”

    Evers and a number of other Democrats condemned the shooting. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden called for “an immediate, full and transparent investigation” and said the officers “must be held accountable.”

    “This morning, the nation wakes up yet again with grief and outrage that yet another Black American is a victim of excessive force,” he said, just over two months before Election Day in a country already roiled by the recent deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. “Those shots pierce the soul of our nation.”

    Republicans and the police union accused the politicians of rushing to judgment, reflecting the deep partisan divide in Wisconsin, a key presidential battleground state. Wisconsin GOP members also decried the violent protests, echoing the law-and-order theme that President Trump has projected during his campaign. –Fox News

    For more on-scene coverage, we highly recommend giving Gutenschwager a follow.

  • Belarus 'Apocalypse Now': Gun-Toting Lukashenko Goes Full Colonel Kurtz As Protests Grow
    Belarus ‘Apocalypse Now’: Gun-Toting Lukashenko Goes Full Colonel Kurtz As Protests Grow

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 08/25/2020 – 02:00

    Via Southfront.org,

    On August 23rd, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko began presumably cosplaying Colonel Walter E. Kurtz from Apocalypse Now (or presumably Kurtz from the novel Heart of Darkness, depending on preference). With protesters in front of the presidential palace and calling for him to give up power and organize new elections, he arrived with the presidential helicopter.

    Notably, the embattled president was wearing a bulletproof vest and had an automatic rifle in his arms. This can be seen on the footage below:

    He could have also had no shirt on and only worn a bulletproof vest, but it appears that he has overlooked that detail.

    There are several other videos of Lukashenko in the airplane, getting off it. Also of Lukashenko’s son – Nikolai, who is 15 years old.

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    He was also given an assault rifle by his father and was wearing a bulletproof vest. There are also security guards and soldiers protecting him.

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    “Col. Kurtz” from Apocalypse Now

    Later on, a photograph was released of the crisis center showing Lukashenko, his son, and presumably a presidential press secretary. Those are all of the members in the crisis center present at the event, as can be seen on the photograph below.

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    The Independence Palace in Minsk was closed off with a cordon of security personnel. Lukashenko went to the barricades to thank the troops for protecting him.

    He thanked the security officials:

    “Thank you, you are handsome!,” he said

    “We are with you until the end!,” they replied, in a ridiculous exchange.

    And it would appear that not all of this is without reason. Reportedly, the Ministry of Defense of Belarus recorded an attempt to violate Belarusian airspace from Lithuania. This was reported in the department’s Telegram channel.

    According to the ministry, the “provocation” took place on 23rd August at 19:30 in the village of Volkovschina, Oshmyany region, which borders Lithuania.

    “A probe of eight balloons with anti-state symbols was launched from the adjacent territory,” the message said.

    As such, it appears that the Baltic states believe that Belarus under Lukashenko is so far ‘lost’ that it is like North Korea and needs opposition leaflets dropped from across the border.

    The flight of balloons was suppressed without the use of weapons thanks to the crews of MI-24 helicopters from the air defense forces on duty, the Defense Ministry said.

    And to reinforce the notion that no external pressure is being exerted on Lukashenko and his aides, approximately 50,000 people formed a human chain from Vilnius to the Belarusian border to express solidarity with protests in the neighboring country.

    The president of the “Baltic superpower” was present to support the expression of solidarity to the Belarusian opposition.

    This also took place on August 23rd, which is the anniversary of when in 1989 over a million people formed a human chain spanning Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia to demand an end to the Soviet occupation.

    An air balloon took off from Cathedral Square and take a 15-metre long Belarusian flag into the sky. It is also not the actual Belarusian flag, but the white-red-white flag used by opposition.

    The Freedom Way was followed by a concert and TV marathon in the courtyard of Medininkai Castle. A fundraiser collected money for the BY Help organisation that “has been helping injured, detained and persecuted Belarusians and their families since 2017.”

    “Freedom is not only a fundamental human right but also a nation’s fundamental right. It’s also a daily commitment to defend it from any attempt on it by those who would replace freedom with darkness, oppression ands fear,” said Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda.

    “Thirty years ago Lithuania broke its shackles of oppression by forming the Baltic Way with its Latvian and Estonian brothers and showing the world that we are free and, first of all, free in our spirit,” he said.

    “Today, time has come for our Belarusian brothers to say the dear word ‘Freedom’.”

    No foreign meddling at all…

    Lukashenko and his government clearly demonstrate that they are not going to submit to the foreign pressure and surrender the power to the pro-Western opposition. Meanwhile, the political and security situation in the country has been deteriorating.

  • Women Beaten By Spanish Cops For Not Properly Wearing Face Masks
    Women Beaten By Spanish Cops For Not Properly Wearing Face Masks

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 08/25/2020 – 01:00

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    A video clip out of Spain shows a police officer beating two woman with a truncheon because they are not properly wearing their face masks.

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    The footage shows two women involved in a confrontation with the female officer, who beats them across the arms and upper body.

    One of the women appears to have suffered a serious injury to her arm as a result of the blows.

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    Although the women are wearing face masks, they appears to have committed the sin of letting them slip from fully covering their faces.

    The police officer does not appear to be wearing a mask at all.

    Spain has been one of the most draconian countries in Europe when it comes to the enforcement of coronavirus rules.

    Numerous beaches across the country are being patrolled by police surveillance drones to enforce mask wearing and social distancing

    During the actual lockdown, Spanish police were handing out €2,000 euro fines for “disrespecting a police officer” and people were also arrested for going “too frequently” to the grocery shop.

    However, there still appears to be more resistance to a second lockdown in Spain compared to other European countries, largely because the country’s economy is extremely dependent on tourism.

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  • The Quiet American Reset
    The Quiet American Reset

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 08/25/2020 – 00:05

    Authored by Alastair Crooke via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    The great de-coupling is here. The U.S. now has plan a to purge Chinese tech companies fully from America’s internet, creating what the Trump administration has dubbed the Clean Network. It mirrors the White House’s existing 5G Clean Path initiative to remove all Chinese components from systems ‘everywhere’, and which now extends it to everything tech on the ‘net.

    China fears a financial ‘Iron Curtain’ is about to fall – a complete expulsion from the dollar sphere. In fact, soft capital control is already birthing, with Bloomberg reporting that the U.S. is now asking colleges and universities to divest from Chinese holdings in their endowments, “warning schools in a letter this last week, to get ahead of potentially more onerous measures [coming] on those holding the shares”.

    Reportedly, the Chinese leadership annual August Beidaihe retreat, agreed (should the recommendations be subsequently endorsed at the Central Committee plenum in October) that China should prepare for war; build food and energy reserves; establish the Eurasian continental economic system, recover its overseas gold and broaden the global RMB settlement system (including its digital Yuan) – and prepare for the complete interruption of relations with the U.S.

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    Yet, whilst the media focus is all on this ‘tech’ and ‘sphere’ de-coupling, something profound – and quite separate – is already shaping the global monetary order (quite apart from likely Chinese exclusion).

    It is set, in the longer term, to be more revolutionary – and contentious – than even ‘de-coupling’. It is getting sparse attention.

    However, as it becomes ever more evident that no ‘V’ shaped economic rebound will be arriving soon – as the U.S. ‘house’ catches fire again with Coronavirus over the autumn and winter, presaging a further economic closedown – the chances are that this bombshell will indeed ignite.

    First, a little background:

    Earlier this month, Zero Hedge published a remarkable interview with two former Fed economists – Simon Potter (who was also the former head of the Fed’s Plunge Protection Team for many years) and Julia Coronado – both of whom have tremendous impact on thinking at the Fed.

    They hinted at the Fed’s ‘last ditch’ stimulus and bailout strategy (i.e. should the U.S. economy be further stalled by Coronavirus): It is ‘to wire’ digital money directly into Americans’ smartphone financial apps, bypassing the banking system entirely.

    “The two propose creating a monetary tool that they call ‘recession insurance bonds’, which draw on some of the advances in digital payments and ‘wired’ instantly to Americans”:

    “As Coronado explains the details, Congress would grant the Federal Reserve an additional tool for providing support — say, a percent of GDP [in a lump sum that would be divided equally and distributed] to households in a recession. Recession insurance bonds would be zero-coupon securities, a contingent asset of households that would basically lie in wait. The trigger could be reaching the zero lower bound on interest rates or, as economist Claudia Sahm has proposed, a 0.5 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate. The Fed would then activate the securities and deposit the funds digitally in households’ apps.

    “As Potter then elucidates: “it took Congress too long to get money to people, and it’s too clunky. We need a separate infrastructure. The Fed could buy the bonds quickly without going to the private market. On March 15 they could have said interest rates are now at zero, we’re activating X amount of the bonds, and we’ll be tracking the unemployment rate—if it increases above this level, we’ll buy more. The bonds will be on the asset side of the Fed’s balance sheet; the digital dollars in people’s accounts will be on the liability side.””

    Then, just days later, Federal Reserve Governor, Lael Brainard, hinted once again at the coming monetary revolution:

    “To enhance understanding of digital currencies, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is collaborating with researchers at MIT, in a multi-year effort to build and test a hypothetical digital currency oriented to central bank uses … It is important to understand how the existing provisions of the Federal Reserve Act with regard to currency issuance apply to a CBDC and whether a CBDC would have legal tender status, depending on the design”.

    So what would prompt the Fed to pursue “this significant policy process”? Why – another leg down, resulting from an upsurge in Covid-19, of course. The last bailout was not just “clunky”, it sent stocks and bonds soaring skyward. And has severed asset prices from any connection to metrics of value, from fundamentals, and from analysis (and did do not much either for ordinary Americans). What we now have, therefore, is a market focussed only on narratives, and not on reality. This has implications, too.

    The prospect of the Fed ‘printing’ digital dollars, wired to peoples’ cash-pay apps, as a new stimulus mechanism – replete with the overtones of a ‘Davos Reset’ formula for moving toward a digital, global Universal Basic Income model is obvious – as is the political temptation for politicos to pay for all sorts of political ‘projects’ in this way.

    Yet this is only a half of the ‘Revolution’ – two other components are already ‘done’.

    Two tipping-points have been passed.

    • Firstly, people can see (with Boomer entitlement spending about to soar into the Trillions), that the U.S. government cannot support the debt burden without having the central bank simply ‘print’ more money. Many on Wall Street will see this as the solution: Putting digital money directly onto apps must be inflationary, they believe. And inflation can melt away America’s debt-load through de-basing the currency.

    • Secondly, in April, the Fed already changed the Supplementary Leverage Ratios (SLR) to exempt U.S. Treasuries from capital-ratio requirements. In simple English, this means that commercial banks can buy any amount of U.S. government debt instruments, without putting aside capital on their balance sheet, to support such purchases. So that (as long as rates are even marginally positive) they can buy and enjoy a nominal income. In June, U.S. banks increased their U.S. Treasuries by 48%. Effectively, the Fed facilitates the credit creation; the banks use it to buy Treasuries; and the government then spends the money.

    Magic. Like the Mad Hatter’s tea-party – out of thin air, things appear. Not once, but twice: as a similar trick was done by the Fed via multiplying the value of Treasury bails out – by providing credit on a 10:1 basis to the Treasury’s special purpose vehicle. (The Fed says this is not direct spending, which would be illegal).

    So, let’s try putting all this into some sort of order:

    Firstly, America has already started down the path towards a nationalised (centrally-managed) economy – rather like China’s. The Treasury and Blackrock Hedge Fund, (who manage the Congressional bails out distribution on behalf of the Treasury), now make the (economic) life-or-death decisions for U.S. businesses – from the very big, down to the very small.

    This is a ‘great reset’. And like most temporary measures, it is likely here to stay. What’s not to like from the U.S. President’s point of view? He controls ‘money’ issuance now that the Treasury and Fed effectively are fused together, and can ‘steer’ the U.S. economy in a ‘national-interest’ direction during its tech war with China (and Europe). Free markets? They do not exist in America at this point.

    Secondly, this financial war is already underway, and China will likely use its CIPS (financial clearing system) and its Central Bank initiated digital yuan (already in use) to circumvent SWIFT and the USD. Except this will mean others being paid in a non-fungible digital currency that can only be recirculated back to China for its goods. Or, maybe not? Like China’s Shanghai oil futures market, foreign sellers may be given the option to hold their sale proceeds either in Chinese debt instruments, or, to exit their Yuan via the physical gold market.

    But, apart from U.S. and China, Russia, Italy, Iran and UK are, amongst others, planning their own CBDCs. Are we moving then – in an era of enhanced financial war – towards multiple, non or quasi, fungible digitalised of means of payment, as the new normal?

    Third, the world again is demanding gold in exchange for U.S. dollars. And the Fed’s primary dealers – some of which operate as bullion banks — seem unable to comply. But with the advent of the Coronavirus, the U.S. financial system has been forced to lower real interest rates down into negative territory, causing gold to look more attractive than holding devaluing U.S. Treasuries.

    Traditionally, the Fed controls the gold market to prevent gold from effectively competing with, or displacing, the U.S. dollar as the primordial monetary instrument. But someone, or some entity somewhere, is now battling the U.S. central bank for that control. In short, the Fed’s manipulation process presently is failing. And unless the Fed can suppress the price of gold, and regain control, we may see an escalating, downward spiral in the value of the dollar vis à vis gold.

    Here – finally – we come to the crux. In outlining the monetary ‘revolution’ taking place in the U.S., there is much in it for the Wall Street ‘Davos’ contingent to like: the move from traditional money into digital; Central Banks issuing digital money (though the ‘Davos’ crowd would prefer that to be done by a global authority); the end of cash; and the system-control and transparency that digitisation would allow. Some of this – such as the political instrumentalisation of smartphone apps – have been given a push by the Coronavirus.

    But the U.S. Establishment is deeply split: Yes, there is a powerful, Wall Street, globalist component who support Davos, but others in the Deep State, including some amongst the neo-cons, would rather die-in-a-ditch than see U.S. dollar hegemony lost – amidst the undoubted exigencies of the present economic recession. These tend to be Trump supporters.

    So let us put the final pieces into place: U.S. asset markets are presently unhinged from all fundamentals, and ruled by a ‘don’t fight the narrative’, and existential fear of potentially ‘missing out’. In other words, the un-anchored stock market highs – on which Trump’s re-election hopes are pinned – are highly vulnerable. Sentiment can shift in the flash of an eyelid from an adrenalin-fuelled ‘fight’ mode, to ‘flight’. All that is needed is a changed narrative.

    And what narrative might that be? Well, the ‘Sage’ of Omaha, Warren Buffet, this week dropped a very unexpected narrative: Not known as a ‘gold bug’, he was shown to have dumped stocks and bought gold, and gold-miners.

    So, who next for sparking the October market sell off, as the dollar continues to spiral downwards, and interest rates edge upwards?

    Mr Soros may be smiling?

  • "Capable Of Hitting Targets In Space": Russia Kicks Off Final Testing Of S-500 'Prometheus' System
    “Capable Of Hitting Targets In Space”: Russia Kicks Off Final Testing Of S-500 ‘Prometheus’ System

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 08/24/2020 – 23:45

    The Pentagon and US intelligence community will be closely observing Russia’s most advanced anti-air missile system as it enters state trials before eventually being delivered to Russia’s military.

    The cutting edge system, nicknamed Prometheus (and formally known as 55R6M “Triumfator-M”), is a mobile, surface-to-air missile system (SAM) and will undergo the final stages of field testing. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov announced the commencement of the state trials at the Army-2020 forum at Patriot Park near Moscow on Monday.

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    Image source: Sputnik 

    “Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu earlier said that the deliveries of the latest S-500 surface-to-air missile systems to the troops would begin in 2020,” according to TASS. “Russia has been training specialists to learn to operate the new system at the Military Academy of the Aerospace Force in Tver since 2017.”

    It is designed to supplement the current S-400 system, intercepting medium-range ballistic missiles as well as intercontinental ballistic missiles that enter close proximity to Russian airspace.

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    The deputy prime minister indicated in his latest remarks to the major multi-day defense technology forum outside Moscow: “The fact is that state trials have begun and today the S-500 configuration, its simplified configuration is already available and work is underway to purchase parts for its serial production.”

    Last year when news of the S-500 was picked up more and more in international press, Russian defense officials made the claim that ‘Prometheus’ is capable of reaching targets in space.

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    Image source: TASS

    It’s developer, the VKO Almaz-Antey, or “Air and Space Defense Corporation” – which is a Russian state-owned company and the country’s largest defense tech contractor – had touted that the S-500 can successfully take out “ballistic missiles of all types” and crucially that it’s missiles are capable of “working outside the atmosphere where aerodynamic control is impossible.”

  • Send In The Clowns For The Circus Is In Town
    Send In The Clowns For The Circus Is In Town

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 08/24/2020 – 23:25

    Authored by Edward Curtin via Off-Guardian.org,

    Don’t bother, they’re here, already performing in the center ring under the big top owned and operated by The Umbrella People…

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    Trump, Biden, Pence, Harris, and their clownish sidekicks, Pompeo, Michelle Obama, et al., are performing daily under the umbrella’s shadowy protection. For The Umbrella People run a three-ring circus, and although their clowns pop out of separate tiny cars and, acting like enemies, squirt each other with water hoses to the audience’s delight, raucous laughter, and serious attentiveness, they are all part of the same show, working for the same bosses.

    Sadly, many people think this circus is the real world and that the clowns are not allied pimps serving the interests of their masters, but are real enemies.

    The Umbrella People are the moguls who own the showtime studios – some call them the secret government, the deep-state, or the power elite. They run a protection racket, so I like to use a term that emphasizes their method of making sure the sunlight of truth never gets to those huddled under their umbrella.

    They produce and direct the daily circus that is the American Spectacle, the movie that is meant to entertain and distract the audience from the side show that continues outside the big top, the place where millions of vulnerable people are abused and killed. And although the sideshow is the real main event, few pay attention since their eyes are fixed on the center ring were the spotlight directs their focus.

    The French writer Guy Debord called this The Society of the Spectacle.

    For many months now, all eyes have been directed to the Covid-19 propaganda show with Fauci and Gates, and their mainstream corporate media mouthpieces, striking thunderbolts in the storm to scare the unknowing audience into submission so the transformation of the Great Global Reset, led by the World Economic Forum and the International Monetary Fund, can proceed smoothly.

    Now hearts are aflutter with excitement to see the war-loving Joe Biden boldly coming forth like Lazarus from the grave to announce his choice of a masked vice-presidential running mate who will echo his pronouncements.

    And the star of the big top, the softly coiffured reality television emcee Trump, around whom the spectacle swirls, elicits outraged responses as he plays the part of the comical bad guy.

    Punch and Judy indeed.

    All the while the corporate mainstream media warn of grim viral milestones, election warnings, storms ahead! The world as you know it is coming to an end, they remind us daily.

    The latter meme contains a hint of truth since not just the world as we know it may be coming to an end, but the world itself, including human life, as the clowns initiate a nuclear holocaust while everyone is being entertained.

    Meanwhile, as the circus rolls along, far away and out of mind, shit happens:

    With more than 400 military bases equipped with nuclear weapons surrounding China, the United States military continues its encirclement of China and China enters a “state of siege.”

    The US conducts military exercises with the Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group in the contested South China Sea. These US “maritime Air defense operation[s]” close to the Chinese mainland are a part of significantly increased US military exercises in the area.

    The US Defense Secretary Esper announces that the US is withdrawing troops from Germany but moving them closer to the Russian border to serve as a more effective deterrent against Russia.

    Russia says it will regard any ballistic missile aimed at its territory as a nuclear attack and will respond in kind with nuclear weapons.

    Although the US is formally not at war with any African country, a new report reveals that the United States has special forces operating in 22 African countries with 29 bases and 6,000 troops, with a huge drone hub in Niger that cost 100 + million to build and is expected to have operating costs of more than $280 billion by 2024.

    The US continues its assault on Syria, aside from direct military operations, by building up Kurdish proxies in northeastern Syria to protect the oil fields that they are stealing from the Syrian government, a plan hatched long ago. The US says their strategy is to deny ISIS a valuable revenue stream. The same ISIS they used to attack the Syrian government in a war of aggression.

    A new document exposes the US plan to overthrow the socialist government of Nicaragua through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a traditional US regime change and CIA front organization.

    Meanwhile, in Belarus, a place most Americans can’t find on a map, there is another color “revolution” underway.

    Continuing its war against Iran and Venezuela by other means, the Trump administration seizes Iranian tankers carrying fuel to Venezuela. “Something will happen with Venezuela. That’s all I can tell you. Something will be happening with Venezuela,” said Trump in a July interview with Noticias Telemundo.

    And of course the Palestinians are left to suffer and die as Israel is supported in its despotic policies in the Middle East.

    The list goes on and on as the US under Trump continues to wage war by multiple means around the world. But his followers see him as peaceful president because these wars are waged through sanctions, special operations, drones, third parties, etc.

    But back in the center ring, the two presidential clown candidates keep the audience entertained, as they shoot water at each other. Trump, who now presides over all the events just listed, and Biden, who enthusiastically supported the American wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, etc.

    But then the followers of Obama/Biden also see their champions as peaceful leaders. This is even more absurd.

    Don’t you like farce?

    Besides being a rabid advocate for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 as a senator, Biden, as Vice-President under Obama for eight years, seconded and promoted all of Obama’s wars that were wrapped in “humanitarian” propaganda to evade international law and keep his liberal supporters quiet.

    From Bush II, an outright cowboy war-wager who used America’s large military forces to invade Afghanistan and Iraq under false pretensions – i.e. lies, Obama and his sidekick Biden learned to arm and finance thousands of Islamic jihadists, run by the CIA and US special forces, to do the job in more circumspect ways.

    They expanded and grew The United States Africa Command (US AFRICOM) throughout Africa. They agreed to a $1 trillion upgrade of US nuclear weapons (that continues under Trump). They disarmed their followers, who, in any case, wished to look the other way.

    Out of sight and out of mind, Obama/Biden continued the “war on terror” with drones, private militias, color revolutions, etc. They waged war on six-seven – who knows how many – countries.

    An exception to the more secretive wars was the Obama administration’s openly savage assault on Libya in 2011 under the lies of an imperial moral legitimacy. In order to save you, we will destroy you, which is what they did to Libya, a country still in ruins and chaos.

    Their equally blood-thirsty Secretary of State Hillary Clinton let the cat out of the bag when she laughed and gleefully applauded the brutal murder of Libya’s leader Moammar Gaddafi with the words: “We came, we saw, he died.” Yippee!

    After Libya was destroyed and so many killed in an illegal and immoral war financed with $2 billion dollars from the America treasury, Joseph Biden bragged that the US didn’t lose a single life and such a war was a “prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward.”

    Biden was Obama’s front man on Iraq, the war he voted for in 2003, and wrote an op ed article in 2006 calling for the breakup of the country into three parts, Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish.

    When Obama launched 48 cruise missiles and more than ten thousand tons of bombs on Syria in 2016, killing over a hundred civilians, a third of them children, V.P. Biden stood proud and strong in support of the action.

    When the US launched the bloody coup in Ukraine in 2014, Biden was of course in agreement.

    But we are told that Trump and Biden are arch-enemies. One of them wants war and the other wants peace.

    How many Americans will vote for these clowns this year? They are really front men for The Umbrella People, the money people who use the CIA and other undercover forces to carry out their organized crime activities.

    As CS Lewis said in his preface to The Screwtape Letters:

    The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint […] But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.

    In the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump received 129 million votes out of 157 million registered American voters eager to believe that this system is not built on imperial war-making by both parties.

    Perhaps that’s a generous assessment. Maybe many of those voters believe in the USA’s “manifest destiny” to rule the world and wage war in God’s name. I hope not. But if so, you can expect a big turnout on November 3, 2020.

    In any case, it’s quite a circus, but these clowns aren’t funny. They are dangerous.

    “But where are the clowns?
    Quick, send in the clowns
    Don’t bother they’re here”

    Don’t you like farce?

  • Taiwan's "Bandit Phone King" Becomes An Unintended Casualty Of Trump's War On Huawei
    Taiwan’s “Bandit Phone King” Becomes An Unintended Casualty Of Trump’s War On Huawei

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 08/24/2020 – 23:05

    Lofty expectations for 5G-driven sales have finally started to offer the shares of global chipmkers some respite from the doldrums, as their shares have lagged the Nasdaq’s ‘Big Tech’-driven rally, with companies based in Taiwan and mainland China particularly hurt by President Trump’s crackdown on Huawei, as well s the simmering trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies.

    Recently, the US has moved to close loopholes allowing Huawei to use chips made with American technology, even if they are produced abroad, by foreign companies. The latest step in Washington’s crackdown is creating serious logistical pressures for Huawei at a critical time: around the world, the rollout of 5G technology is nigh, with the upcoming generation of smartphones all expected to be 5G enabled.

    While Huawei has been smart at adapting to each new round of Trump Administration sanctions, the latest round of sanctions are leaving it with fewer and fewer options. A few weeks ago, we reported how Taiwan’s largest contract chipmaker has had to terminate Huawei’s business because of the US sanctions, a major blow to both companies.

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    Now it appears even more rival chipmakers that were supposed to benefit from Huawei’s misfortune will instead find themselves unable to continue doing business with Huawei, cutting them off from a critical and extremely lucrative customer for a new set of 5G enabled chips that the company had just released. 

    MediaTek is one of Taiwan’s most successful companies, and its founder, Tsai Ming-kai, the Taiwanese billionaire once known as China’s “bandit phone king”, has been on a roll as of late. But unfortunately, what looked like impeccable timing for the rollout of its new “Dimensity” chipset has been rendered moot, since – in addition to being unable to produce its own chips – MediaTek could face Treasury Department sanctions that would cripple its business if it sells any of these chips to Huawei, according to Trump Administration sanctions rolled out last Monday.

    Here’s more from the FT:

    The founder and chairman of chip design house MediaTek had already seen his personal wealth jump by 80 per cent last year. The launch of the company’s “Dimensity” chipset for 5G smartphones and Washington’s blacklisting of Chinese technology group Huawei from buying from US chipmakers had sent MediaTek’s shares soaring. This year, things looked even brighter.

    The US in May barred chip manufacturers from selling to Huawei any custom-made semiconductors produced with US equipment. For Huawei, the most obvious solution was MediaTek’s off-the-shelf smartphone chipsets, a development that would have boosted the Taiwanese company’s fortunes immensely.

    But that dream was shattered last week when the US Department of Commerce closed the loopholes in its May sanctions against Huawei by prohibiting the sale without a licence of chips made using US software or equipment to the Chinese company. Given the prevalence of US technology in the semiconductor industry, this would include chipsets sold by MediaTek. “If the May rules had played out, MediaTek would have been the beneficiary, at least in the short run,” said Phelix Lee, an analyst at Morningstar in Hong Kong.

    Analysts quoted in the FT report explained that, if Huawei is unable to secure new supplies of microchips for its phones and 5G networking equipment, it could delay the rollout of 5G worldwide, destroying what is perhaps the only conceivable tailwind for MediaTek’s business.

    Spun off from Taiwanese chipmaker United Microelectronics Corporation in 1997, MediaTek has climbed the supply chain ladder, moving from CD drives and DVD drives to TV sets and finally smartphones. Now, it’s Taiwan’s largest, and the world’s fourth-largest, chip design company.

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    MediaTek has more at stake than many other Huawei suppliers, mostly due to its heavy reliance on mainland China. The company broke into handset chip design when it designed chips allowing producers of “knock-off” smartphones in Shenzen to create more sophisticated products. These “bandit” phones are how MediaTek’s founder got his nickname, the “Bandit Phone King”.

    Its biggest break came after it started offering a turnkey solution for mobile phones in 2004 that enabled scores of no-name workshops manufacturing knock-off handsets — “bandit phones” — in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen to produce more sophisticated products. The platform, which included a chipset and reference designs for phone features that the small factories would not have been able to develop themselves, earned Mr Tsai the nickname of the “bandit phone king”.

    It also helped create a breed of Chinese companies that would later morph into formidable rivals for multinational brands such as Apple and Samsung in China and other emerging markets. Adapting its turnkey chipset business model to the smartphone era was difficult but MediaTek again managed to build a strong emerging-markets position on the back of China’s rising handset brands.

    In 4G, MediaTek was weaker than it had been in the previous generation of mobile services technology. But it promised a comeback in 5G. The Dimensity’s price tag is expected to be significantly lower than that of Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon chip, with long battery power and high energy efficiency.

    It’s just the latest reminder of how the Trump Administration’s crackdown on Huawei will impact more than just Huawei. And for investors in American chip companies, that’s definitely not a bad thing.

  • Meet "Prosthesis" – The 9,000-lb All-Terrain, Exo-Bionic Mech-Suit You Can Pilot
    Meet “Prosthesis” – The 9,000-lb All-Terrain, Exo-Bionic Mech-Suit You Can Pilot

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 08/24/2020 – 22:45

    Authored by Elias Marat via TheMindUnleashed.com,

    Massive, hulking exoskeleton or mech suits are usually the type of thing one would encounter in a science fiction movie, whether it’s the low-budget classic Robot Jox or the American kaiju blockbuster Pacific Rim.

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    However, engineering firm Furrion Exo-Bionics has unleashed a colossal, four-legged, 9,000-pound powered exoskeleton dubbed Prosthesis – and anyone interested will be able to take up the controls and pilot the beast.

    The company recently launched a wildly popular Kickstarter campaign laying out its mission, which is to start a “global racing league that would pit multiple world-class athletes in head-to-head competitions, through complex technical obstacle courses, wearing giant powered mech suits.”

    And while the vision may seem larger-than-life, Furrion and its Prosthesis: Mech Racing research and development team are confident that they can unleash this new class of “large scale exo-bionic technology” and use it to power its global mech racing league.

    Backers of the Kickstarter campaign will be eligible to receive “one-on-one mech pilot training” or kick back and watch the mechs kick each other’s butts at live events.

    The company’s flagship mech, dubbed Prosthesis: the Anti-Robot, took over three years of field trials – including engineering and pilot training – to create this all-terrain mech suit that has four massive legs and the power to lift cars, run through the snow, and climb boulders.

    “We ended up with four legs because the pilot has four limbs, and the machine has the wide stable form factor that it has so that it’s easy to balance,” chief test pilot and project co-founder Jonathan Tippett told CNET.

    In a video kicking off the successful crowdfunding campaign, Tippett notes that the mech is “basically a cross between a trophy truck, an excavator, and a dinosaur.”

    However, the idea behind Prosthesis isn’t simply passive entertainment – instead, this will require athleticism on the part of mech pilots who will be moving their arms and legs to get these massive machines going, making this a true sport rather than a simple robot exhibition.

    “Prosthesis has no joysticks, no steering wheel, no foot pedals – just 100 percent limb-for-limb pilot control,” Furrion explained. “Prosthesis has no automation, no giros, no ability to walk or balance by itself, it relies entirely on the pilot inside for all its movement. Your arm and leg movements are amplified to control its four, giant steel legs, move for move. That’s what makes it a sport.”

    Cassie Hawrysh, an accomplished headfirst ice sledding champion from Canada, is the first professional “mech sports” athlete to control the hulking quadrupedal beast. According to Furrion, she was just as surprised as the engineers when she felt a sense of familiarity between her 60-pound skeleton sled and the interface of this 9,000-pound mech suit.

    “With the relentless and unchecked automation of everything we do, Prosthesis reminds us that some of the most rewarding things in life are those that require effort, focus and training,” the Kickstarter page said.

     “This is the very essence of sport. Prosthesis, and mech sports, are a celebration of the age old pursuit of physical mastery and human skill, now brought to a new level through advanced technology.”

  • China Arms Pakistan With 'Advanced Warships' As Threats Of Nuclear War With India Escalate
    China Arms Pakistan With ‘Advanced Warships’ As Threats Of Nuclear War With India Escalate

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 08/24/2020 – 22:25

    When the Trump administration withheld billions of dollars in security aid to Pakistan in 2018, the logic then was that the Pakistani military would be forced to form greater ties with the US and surrounding allies to reclaim lost aid. 

    Fast forward today, the new reality, Pakistan abandoned the West and its allies for China. 

    Pakistan quickly bolstered ties with China via billions of dollars in Belt and Road projects over the last two years. China has also provided the Pakistani military with aircraft, weaponry, and other advanced hardware. The cooperation between both countries has taken another giant leap as China just delivered the first of four “most advanced” warships to the Pakistani Navy, a move that will clearly upset India and the US. 

    VOA News reports the first advanced warship was officially launched on Sunday as border tensions with India continue to remain elevated (see: Pakistani Minister Threatens India With Nuclear Attack “To Save Muslim Lives” On National TV). 

    The Pakistani Navy released a statement Sunday confirming Chinese state-owned Hudong Zhonghua Shipyard in Shanghai officially launched the Type-054A/P frigate. 

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    Type-054 frigate built for Pakistan Navy is seen at Hudong Zhonghua Shipyard, Shanghai, China. h/t VOA News, Pakistan Navy

    Top Pakistani officials were in attendance at the ship launch.

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    The launching ceremony of Type-054 frigate built for Pakistan Navy was held at Hudong Zhonghua Shipyard, Shanghai, China. h/t VOA News, Pakistan Navy

    The statement said the vessel (first of four) has advanced electronics, including surface and subsurface weaponry, anti-air weapons, and high-tech sensors.

    “These ships will significantly contribute in maintaining peace and security in our area of responsibility,” it added.

    VOA estimates each of the vessels come at the cost of around $350 million. The other three vessels are expected to be delivered to the Pakistani Navy sometime in 2021. 

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    h/t Insider Paper 

    Quoting Chinese state media, VOA said the four military vessels could “double the combat power” of the country’s naval fleet.

    China has also delivered CAC/PAC JF-17 Thunder multi-role combat aircraft and other state-of-the-art defense items such as medium-altitude long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicle combat drones. 

    Much of the new firepower has been a modernization effort by Pakistan to overhaul its armed forces as tensions with India over the last couple of years have increased along the Line of Control in Jammu & Kashmir.

    So while China arms Pakistan, the same is happening with the US arming India. What could possibly go wrong? 

  • Let's Follow The History Of Science Instead
    Let’s Follow The History Of Science Instead

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 08/24/2020 – 22:05

    Authored by Robert Wright via The American Institute for Economic Research,

    Democratic Presidential hopeful Joe Biden is only the most high-profile politician to promise voters that he will “listen to the scientists,” mandate masks, and shut down the economy again if they so advise.

    Even the humble members of the city council of Milledgeville, Georgia invoke “science” in four pages of “whereas-es” designed to justify a largely toothless mask mandate that directly contradicts a Georgia law against wearing masks in public (except for certain holidays, presumably to deter real crime) and the enforcement of which in some places in the city of 50,000 apparently hinges on the font size of a door notice.

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    Strange times indeed, these. One wonders why we need to elect politicians at all if they will simply defer to “the” scientists. Ah, but there be the rub. Which scientists? They don’t agree on much, especially when it comes to the novel coronavirus and masks and such. (Just look at the litany of articles on the AIER website chronicling the dissents!) 

    Should we listen only to “the” scientists on the government payroll? But then wouldn’t they essentially be unelected, unaccountable dictators? That sounds vaguely undemocratic.

    Sticky, this wicket!

    Plus, last time I checked, “the” scientists have no policy expertise in economics. Perhaps that does not matter as many economists also have no policy expertise in economics. Is that the role of politicians, then? To decide which type of scientists get to dictate in different policy areas? Perhaps Biden will listen to “the” economists on spaceship design or military tactics? I would pay good money to see that! (Seriously, it would be a horribly expensive boondoggle certain to raise my taxes.)

    Why is it so important to “listen to the scientists” anyway? Are they suddenly less fallible than previously? Is there any science to support that belief? Because let’s face it, “the” scientists have a pretty poor track record overall.

    Did you know that “the” scientists once believed:

    1. That the earth is a flat disk, not a sphere, and that it resides at the center of the solar system and even the entire universe.

    2. Said earth was created like 6,000 years ago.

    3. Complex life forms spontaneously arise from inanimate matter.

    4. Species evolve by inheriting acquired characteristics.

    5. That sickness arises from an imbalance of the bodily humors or bad air (miasma!) and in either case is best restored by draining the afflicted person of blood and/or applying massive doses of mercury.

    6. Maternal thoughts cause birth defects.

    7. Human beings are not all equal but rather composed of races, some of which are superior to others. Just measure their skulls for proof!

    8. Phlogiston and caloric exist and explain combustion.

    9. If you cultivate an area, rainfall in that area will increase. “Rain follows the plow.”

    10. Another ice age was upon us in the 1970s.

    And that is just a small sample of the silly and outrageous ideas once held by “the” scientists. (For some more recent whoppers, read this.) All those ideas have been dispelled by the functioning of science itself, so please do not mistake my point. The scientific method is one of the few rational methods of thought (some) humans employ and it does help to refine our understanding of important phenomena over time. 

    The point is that “the” scientists are often wrong, very wrong, especially early on in the study of some aspect of the real world. But the realization that “the” scientists’ understanding improves over time rather than springing from their heads fully formed like Jove gives birth to a paradox: 

    The more “novel” the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the less accurate “the” scientists can be about it, and hence the less reliable their policy prescriptions.

    (Think how our descendants will mock us for believing masks slowed viral transmission.) 

    Conversely, the less novel the virus is, the weightier “the” scientific evidence is against lockdowns, mask mandates, and other novel policy prescriptions.

    Remember, widespread lockdowns/shelter-in-place orders are entirely new policies thought impolitic, impractical, and mercury purge-like until the current crisis. They are nothing like the quarantines of old, which cloistered away only the sick, or cordons, which were of limited geographical and temporal extent and constitutionality. And outside of clinical settings the efficacy of masks depends on the type of mask, how it is worn, and what the wearer is, or isn’t, doing at the time.

    So what Joe Biden and other politicians invoking “the” scientists may really mean is “I don’t care enough about you to make difficult decisions so I am going to delegate to a group that I think you are dumb enough to defer to without question.”

    They would never admit that, of course, so it must remain speculative, but it fully accords with Public Choice Theory. 

    A politician who really had the public’s interest at heart would, instead, say:

    “Times are tough. Some Americans have died from a natural cause and more are likely to. Unfortunately, there is not much we can do because viruses live by their own rules, not ours.” Executive orders and metaphorical wars can’t stop them. Obviously, it is unconstitutional, and deeply immoral, to order the death of some people (via suicide, murder, deferred healthcare, reduced income, and the myriad other costs of lockdown) in order to save others. And we can’t do the obvious and offer a live vaccine to volunteers to quickly and constitutionally build community immunity because there isn’t sufficient profit in that. So we have to wait until an expensive, modern vaccine becomes available in the next X months to Y decades. Until then, try to protect the most vulnerable people in your lives and remember, masks and social distancing are not panaceas.”

    Of course those would not be the words of a mere politician, they would be the words of a true statesman.

  • Visualizing How Much Revenue Automakers Generate Every Second (Don't Show TSLA Bulls)
    Visualizing How Much Revenue Automakers Generate Every Second (Don’t Show TSLA Bulls)

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 08/24/2020 – 21:45

    Since their invention, automobiles have been a driving force of the global economy.

    Used by millions of people to get to work, transport goods, and travel, the modern automobile has become ubiquitous in our daily lives. So much so, that, as Visual Capitalist’s Marcu Lu details below, a whopping 92 million cars were produced in just 2019.

    To help us understand the might of the auto industry, this infographic from Parts Geek breaks down the earnings of 19 major car companies by an interesting metric—revenue per second.

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    The Full List of Automakers

    Below are the earnings of the 19 automakers featured in the infographic.

    The Volkswagen Group claims the top spot with $290.2B in gross revenue, translating to $9,202.88 per second. Capping off the list is the world’s most valuable automaker, Tesla, which generated a relatively smaller $24.6B in gross revenue, or $780.06 per second.

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    A clear takeaway from this data is that Volkswagen and Toyota have a sizable lead over the rest of their peers. Let’s take a closer look at how these two companies operate.

    The Volkswagen Group

    The Volkswagen Group holds a comprehensive portfolio of brands and services, and has been the world’s largest automaker, by sales, for the past three years.

    Beginning with passenger cars and motorcycles, its numerous brands reported the following results for 2019.

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    Other sources of revenue were Volkswagen’s $44.5B commercial vehicle business, its $4.7B power engineering business, and lastly its $44.4B financial services division.

    In total, the Volkswagen Group delivered just short of 11 million vehicles in 2019, besting its 2018 deliveries by 1.3% and setting a new record for the group. While a majority of these vehicles were produced in Europe, the group operates a global production network with a significant presence in Asia.

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    The German automaker has invested billions in China, the world’s largest car market, to scale its electric vehicle (EV) production capabilities.

    Toyota Motor Corporation

    Toyota Motor Corporation operates a much more concentrated brand portfolio, with Toyota and Lexus being its two most prominent names. This strategy seems to be working well, as Toyota was ranked the ninth most valuable brand in 2019, and was the only automaker to crack the top ten.

    A testament to Toyota’s global influence is its relatively balanced breakdown of 2019 revenues by regional market:

    • North America: 30%

    • Japan: 25%

    • Asia: 18%

    • Europe: 11.5%

    • Other: 15.3%

    For comparison, here is Volkswagen’s 2019 revenues by region, which leans heavily towards Europe:

    • Europe (excl. Germany): 42%

    • Germany: 19%

    • North America: 17%

    • South America: 4%

    • Asia-Pacific: 17%

    The Japanese automaker’s popularity in foreign regions is likely the result of its reputation for reliability and affordability. It may also explain why Toyota’s trucks are a common sight in tough environments such as conflict zones of the developing world.

    Altogether, Toyota and its subsidiaries sold nearly 9 million vehicles in 2019, setting a new record for the company but just 0.1% higher than its 2018 figure. Similar to Volkswagen, a majority of Toyota’s vehicles are produced in its home region, with the remainder being built around the world.

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    Outside of Japan, Toyota has significant production capabilities in the U.S., where it makes everything from pickup trucks to sedans. In 2016, the Toyota Camry made headlines after being ranked the most American-made car—over 75% of its parts were sourced domestically.

    Alternative Revenue Sources

    While automobiles represent the core business for these companies, many of them have alternative revenue sources. Honda, for example, produces motorcycles, boat engines, lawn mowers, and even personal jets.

    Porsche takes a slightly different approach with its accessories and licensing subsidiary, Porsche Design. Since 2003, a variety of lifestyle goods including eyewear, smartphones, and watches have been sold under the Porsche name. Its most noteworthy project is the Porsche Design Tower Miami, a residential skyscraper which features a robotic car elevator.

    Finally, electric vehicle (EV) maker Tesla earns additional revenues by selling carbon credits to other automakers that fail to meet government-imposed quotas on EV sales. Since Tesla only produces EVs, it has no need for its credits and is free to sell them. In the second quarter of 2020, Tesla earned $428 million from selling carbon credits, representing 7% of its total revenues for the period.

    The Road Ahead

    Additional revenue streams are continuing to open up as automakers integrate new technologies into their cars.

    Cadillac and Tesla, two American brands, have both announced that their self-driving capabilities will eventually become a paid subscription service. Meanwhile, Germany’s premium automakers are expanding into wireless services. BMW claims it will become the first automaker to offer 5G connectivity in its cars, while Mercedes now sells downloadable software packages to enhance a driver’s experience.

    While it’s too early to say whether or not these services will have a significant impact on an automaker’s bottom line, forecasts claim this so-called “connected car market” will be worth $166 billion by 2025. To put that into perspective, that’s more than half of Volkswagen’s gross revenue in 2019, or $5,264 per second.

  • Ferguson: Joe Biden Could End Up Being A Wartime President
    Ferguson: Joe Biden Could End Up Being A Wartime President

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 08/24/2020 – 21:25

    Authored by Niall Ferguson, op-ed via Bloomberg.com,

    Successful Democratic candidates for the presidency of the United States invariably campaign with promises of domestic largesse and moral uplift. They nearly always end up taking their country to war.

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    Can Joe Biden be a rare exception to that rule, if he succeeds in defeating Donald Trump on November 3? That will depend not just on how well he and his national security team conduct U.S. foreign policy. It will also depend on how stable the world around them is.

    The bad news is that post-pandemic peace is another historical rarity.

    First, the Democratic Party’s amazing century-plus track record of running on progressive policies and then going to war. Consider Woodrow Wilson, reviled by today’s progressives for his racist views, but nominated and elected in 1912 as a progressive.

    Wilson’s acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in Baltimore was a classic in the genre of American uplift. “We must speak,” he told the delegates, “not to catch votes, but to satisfy the thought and conscience of a people deeply stirred by the conviction that they have come to a critical turning point in their moral and political development. We stand in the presence of an awakening Nation, impatient of partisan make-believe. … Nor was the country ever more susceptible to unselfish appeals to the high arguments of sincere justice.”

    “The Nation has been unnecessarily, unreasonably, at war within itself,” declared Wilson. But now “the forces of the Nation are asserting themselves against every form of special privilege and private control, and are seeking bigger things than they have ever heretofore achieved. They are sweeping away what is unrighteous in order to vindicate once more the essential rights of human life.”

    In office, Wilson offered progressive policy as well. His “New Freedom” agenda cut protectionist tariffs, introduced the first federal income tax, passed the Clayton Antitrust Act and created the Federal Trade Commission, not to mention the Federal Reserve. Reelected partly on a pledge to keep the United States out of World War I, however, he did just the opposite in April 1917.

    The pattern repeated itself for the next hundred years. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was swept to power amid the Great Depression with the promise of a New Deal.

    “Let us now and here highly resolve,” FDR told his fellow Democrats at their 1932 convention in Chicago, “to resume the country’s interrupted march along the path of real progress and of real justice and of real equality for all our citizens, great or small.”

    Uplift was duly followed by a raft of legislation designed to reduce poverty and inequality by increasing the power of the federal government. Despite even stronger anti-war sentiment than Wilson had faced, Roosevelt led the United States into World War II in 1941.

    Harry Truman’s acceptance speech at Philadelphia in July 1948 continued the tradition:

    “The Democratic Party is the people’s party, and the Republican party is the party of special interest, and it always has been and always will be. … In 1932 we were attacking the citadel of special privilege and greed. We were fighting to drive the money changers from the temple. Today, in 1948, we are now the defenders of the stronghold of democracy and of equal opportunity, the haven of the ordinary people of this land and not of the favored classes or the powerful few.” 

    Having won a famous surprise victory over Thomas E. Dewey, Truman unveiled his domestic “Fair Deal” early in 1949. Less than 18 months later, North Korea invaded South Korea and America was back at war.

    John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson between them set new standards for both rhetorical uplift (Kennedy) and progressive legislation (Johnson). Yet by 1968 neither his civil rights legislation nor the Great Society could salvage Johnson’s presidency from the wreckage of the war in Vietnam.

    Subsequent Democratic presidents strove mightily to avoid LBJ’s fate. Yet the world would not leave Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in peace to pursue their domestic agendas. Carter’s presidency was dealt fatal blows by the hostage crisis after the Iran Revolution of February 1979 and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan ten months later. Clinton spent years trying to avoid foreign entanglements, in Somalia, in Rwanda and in Bosnia, until the last of these forced him into military intervention. Obama may still believe his decision not to intervene in the Syrian Civil War was one of his best, but the red line on the use of chemical weapons — which turned out to be a pink dotted line — was in truth the most ignominious chapter of his presidency.

    Joe Biden’s speech on Thursday night was the continuation of a very long tradition in lofty Democratic rhetoric, traceable all the way back to Thomas Jefferson.

    “If you entrust me with the presidency,” declared Biden, “I will draw on the best of us not the worst. I will be an ally of the light not of the darkness. It’s time for us, for We the People, to come together. For make no mistake. United we can, and will, overcome this season of darkness in America. We will choose hope over fear, facts over fiction, fairness over privilege.”

    Whoever wrote that speech had done their homework.  At times I wondered if an algorithm had mashed it up on the basis of all previous Democratic acceptance speeches.

    The common feature of all but one Democratic acceptance speeches since 1912 is the tiny proportion devoted to foreign policy. The exception is John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” speech in Los Angeles in 1960, which was roughly half Cold War rhetoric designed to outflank Richard Nixon on national security. Biden didn’t go there. Less than 3% of his acceptance speech was on foreign policy, and it was bromidic as well as brief.

    Biden pledged to “stand with our allies and friends,” to desist from “cozying up to dictators” (mentioning no names), and not to “turn a blind eye to Russian bounties on the heads of American soldiers” or “foreign interference” in U.S. elections.

    That was it. The only mention of China was apropos of the need to make America less dependent on Chinese-made medical supplies and protective equipment. To listen to Biden’s speech, you would not know that the United States is already up to its neck in Cold War II, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out here and elsewhere.

    No doubt a majority of people who tuned in to Biden’s speech share his unspoken wish that this Second Cold War will simply go away the moment he is sworn in.

    Biden it was who launched his bid for the Democratic nomination with the observation that the Chinese were “not bad folks, folks” and were “not competition for us” — and who earlier this month seemed ready to promise an end to U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports.

    I have bad news. It wasn’t Donald Trump who started Cold War II; it was Xi Jinping. And, as I pointed out two weeks ago, his vision of a resurgent China challenging the United States not merely economically but ideologically and geopolitically is widely shared by Chinese intellectuals and (though it is hard to be sure) many ordinary Chinese people. Notice, too, that anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States has increased almost as much among Democrats as among Republicans in the past few years.

    How likely is the world to be a peaceful place between 2021 and 2024, the putative first and likely only term of a Biden presidency? Not unreasonably, Biden’s speech last Thursday focused on the adverse impact the Covid-19 pandemic has had on the United States. Yet the key question for an incoming Biden administration will not be what to do about the pandemic, as I suspect — one cannot be certain — it will largely be over by January next year. The key question will not be — as many Democrats think — how best to spend all the money the United States can possibly borrow, now that all fiscal and monetary restraint has been cast aside. The key questions will be how generally unstable the post-pandemic world will be and how specifically toxic the Sino-American relationship will get.

    History does not give much ground for optimism on these scores. More often than not, as in 1918–19, times of war have been followed by times of plague, but the direction of causation has also run the other way. The great plagues of the ancient world — smallpox in the Athens of Pericles (429–426 BC) or the Antonine and Justinianic plagues that struck the Roman Empire —did not usher in periods of peace. To give just one example, not long after bubonic plague swept through his empire, beginning in 541 AD, the Emperor Justinian waged a successful campaign to reclaim Italy from the Ostrogoths, as well as resuming his war with the Sassanid (Persian) Empire.

    The Black Death of the 1340s was among the most disastrous pandemics in history, killing between one-third and three-fifths of the population of Europe. Yet it did not prevent one of history’s most protracted conflicts from getting underway. The Hundred Years’ War between England and France began on June 24, 1340, with the destruction of the French fleet at the Battle of Sluys by Edward III’s naval expedition. Six years later, despite the ravages of the plague, Edward launched a cross-Channel invasion, capturing Caen and marching to Flanders, inflicting a heavy defeat on Philip VI’s army at Crécy, and proceeding to conquer Calais. The French king’s ally, David II of Scotland, then invaded England, only to be defeated. In 1355, Edward III’s son, the “Black Prince,” led another force into France, winning a major victory at Poitiers. A third English invasion went less well, leading to a temporary peace in 1360, but the war resumed in 1369 and continued intermittently until 1453.

    At the time, nobody knew that the two countries were embarking on a “Hundred Years War.” That phrase was not coined by historians until 1823. But such is history. Most people still do not grasp that Cold War II has begun. Cold War I was a forty-year affair. But who is to say that the U.S.-China conflict will not be another hundred years’ war?

    One disaster begets another. A pandemic creates a cascade of economic, social and political problems, which in turn can often precipitate cross-border conflicts. Watch, for instance, as COVID-19’s disruption of food production all over the developing world, but especially in Africa, leads not just to hunger but to population displacements and political frictions.

    For that matter, look around at what’s already happening. Since the outbreak of Covid-19, Russia and Turkey have effectively partitioned Libya, Chinese and Indian soldiers have skirmished hand-to-hand on their border, the port of Beirut has blown up, toppling the Lebanese government, revolution has broken out in Belarus and there has been a military coup in Mali. Is peace at hand? Well, there has been an unexpected breakthrough in the Middle East, with the normalizing of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (a deal for which Jared Kushner deserves more credit than he is receiving). But anyone who thinks Iran is going to suspend its nefarious activities in the region just because Joe Biden is in the White House doesn’t understand the regime in Tehran.

    The central issue at stake between the United States and China is not Trumps’ tariffs, nor his attempt to have a U.S. tech company take over TikTok, nor Xi’s suppression of pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, nor his genocidal policies against the Uighurs in Xinjiang — nor even the extent of China’s culpability for the Covid-19 pandemic. The central issue is Taiwan and it is due to blow up in a few weeks’ time, when new U.S. regulations come into force that will cut off Huawei from all imported semiconductors made with either American technology or software.

    As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Tim Culpan argued last week, this really is the “nuclear option,” because it “threatens to kill the company, which invites retaliation from Beijing.”

    Ever wondered why it was that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941?

    As Harvard’s Graham Allison recently reminded us, it was because of intolerable economic sanctions imposed by the United States. Yes, that’s right: under the Democratic President Joe Biden most wants to be associated with.

    Last week’s virtual convention was a great opportunity to hate on Republicans, and especially on Donald Trump. But for all his many flaws, Trump has upheld a great GOP tradition — of not starting foreign wars. The exception to the rule of Republican dovishness over the past century was of course George W. Bush, who got America into two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq. (George H. W. Bush’s war to liberate Kuwait was Bismarckian in its short duration and low cost in life.) The rest — Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan — were notable for the small number of young Americans they sent into battle: vastly fewer than their Democratic counterparts.

    “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes” is a line from Virgil, usually translated as “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”

    I feel the same way about Democrats when they make uplifting speeches full of promises about billions (sorry, make that trillions) of dollars to be spent on public health, education, health care and infrastructure.

    If there is one man I can readily imagine – inadvertently, of course, and with the best of intentions and the most uplifting of rhetoric – turning Cold War II into World War III, it is the self-anointed heir of FDR, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.

  • Beijing Slams 'Evidence-Free' Charge Of Using Vaccine To Pressure Neighbors Over South China Sea Claims
    Beijing Slams ‘Evidence-Free’ Charge Of Using Vaccine To Pressure Neighbors Over South China Sea Claims

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 08/24/2020 – 21:05

    China has rejected last week’s accusations that’s it’s pursuing an aggressive “vaccine nationalism” campaign wherein it hopes to use its COVID-19 vaccine as a tool of influence and diplomacy.

    Russia was also named in an explosive Wall Street Journal piece last week as among countries on the cusp of rolling out with an early, effective vaccine, but who will use it as leverage against both Washington interests and that of US allies. Currently no less than three of six global vaccine candidates which are in final clinical trials are being developed in China. 

    Days following the WSJ report, which alleged that state and private drug makers “have begun promising early access to countries of strategic interest as it seeks to shore up its global standing after a pandemic that has strained geopolitical ties,” China’s CGTN slammed the charges as baseless and without evidence.

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    Vietnam post overlooking South China Sea, image via Asia Times

    “Well, we’ve seen this before, like when China was accused of using face mask diplomacy when it supplied countries with personal protective equipment (PPE),” CGTN wrote, dismissing the accusations. “So it should come as no surprise that China will be accused of using the vaccine to seek geopolitical leverage too.”

    Amid agreements with some east Asian regional powers like the Philippines and Malaysia for priority access to a Chinese vaccine, the WSJ included perhaps the most specific and explosive charge against Beijing as follows:

    Still, official Chinese statements suggest a willingness by China to blur humanitarian and foreign-policy objectives that include garnering support from countries on Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea.

    In some countries, accepting a vaccine from a Chinese drugmaker could help deepen diplomatic ties with Beijing at Washington’s expense.

    State-run mouthpiece CGTN admitted that “a lot of things are possible” but ripped the speculative nature of the charges. Indeed the South China Sea reference constituted a huge claim but was mentioned in WSJ in passing, without further details or exploration offered, but just merely hinting at the possibility.

    CGTN quipped: “if you’re going to make a speculative statement, please back it up with something more concrete.”

    More broadly when it comes to the ongoing global race to produce an effective coronavirus vaccine, it’s perhaps only inevitable that there will be geopolitical consequences and some backdoor leveraging happening among the multiple developed nations on the brink of a breakthrough.

  • 2 Men Charged With Attempted Murder In "Ambush-Style Assault" On Group Of Officers
    2 Men Charged With Attempted Murder In “Ambush-Style Assault” On Group Of Officers

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 08/24/2020 – 20:45

    In the latest example of domestic terrorism targeting police officers that was simply brushed aside by the national press, ABC 2, the station covering Baltimore, reports that two men have been charged with attempted murder for their role in an “ambush-style” attack on a group of Prince George’s County Police Officers.

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    The two men abruptly opened fire on the group of officers, hitting and wounding three of them. Video from an officer’s dash cam showed that it was an unprovoked attack.

    Here’s more from ABC 2:

    The patrol officers were attacked while responding to a call for a residential robbery in progress at a home in the 1300 block of Capital View Terrace in Landover on Sunday.

    Police say the suspects are 45-year-old Andre Larnell Smith and 27-year-old Steven Maurice Warren.

    Both Smith and Warren face multiple charges to include first and second degree attempted murder, assault and gun charges.

    Police say the first arriving officer’s dashcam recorded the start of the unprovoked attack.

    Then the suspects hopped in a car and sped off, before crashing into a tree. They were apprehended without being shot.

    The suspects opened fire as soon as that first officer stopped his cruiser. The officer was shot multiple times but was still able to return fire and make an emergency radio dispatch for help.

    The suspects got into their car and sped down the street before making a U-turn and headed back toward the officers.

    According to police, the suspects continued to fire on the officers while trying to flee the area but crashed into a tree on Capital View Terrace. Both suspects suffered injuries related to the crash, but neither suspect was shot.

    Making the situation even more Kafka-esque, even though two of the officers are still hospitalized, all four officers who discharged their weapons are the scene are now facing a “routine” investigation, and are on administrative leave pending the outcome – something that is protocol in pretty much every police department in America.

     

     

  • US Sees "Progress" After Call With China Discussing Phase 1 Deal; Yuan Jumps
    US Sees “Progress” After Call With China Discussing Phase 1 Deal; Yuan Jumps

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 08/24/2020 – 20:44

    Well, that on again, off again between the US and China to discuss the “progress” on the Phase 1 of the trade deal finally took place tonight, with the US Trade Representative office announcing tonight that Ambassador Lighthizer and Secretary Mnuchin participated in “a regularly scheduled call this evening” with China’s Vice Premier Liu Hu to discuss implementation of the historic Phase One Agreement between the United States and China.

    According to the USTR, the parties addressed steps that China has taken to effectuate structural changes called for by the Agreement that will ensure greater protection for intellectual property rights, remove impediments to American companies in the areas of financial services and agriculture, and eliminate forced technology transfer.

    Considering that China has done virtually nothing so far, we can only imagine that this was the shortly US-China call in history.

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    Yet none of that matters, with algos only focusing on the last sentence of the statement according to which “the parties also discussed the significant increases in purchases of U.S. products by China as well as future actions needed to implement the agreement. Both sides see progress and are committed to taking the steps necessary to ensure the success of the agreement.“

    And while equity futures remain relatively muted, the yuan rose on the news of “progress” even as US and China sink ever deeper into Cold War 2.

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  • Watch Live: RNC Day 1 "Land Of Promise" – Trump Jr., Tim Scott, & The McCloskeys
    Watch Live: RNC Day 1 “Land Of Promise” – Trump Jr., Tim Scott, & The McCloskeys

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 08/24/2020 – 20:25

    The 2020 Republican National convention kicked off earlier today with President Trump and Vice President Pence officially securing their re-nomination earlier in the day

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    The GOP says the convention will contrast with the Democrats’ largely taped gathering last week by featuring more live events with audiences from Washington and around the country. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said it would feature “people whose lives have been impacted and measurably and consequently changed due to the efforts and policies of President Trump.”

    The theme of tonight is “Land of Promise”:

    Today our delegates have gathered in Charlotte, North Carolina for the 2020 Republican National Convention to formally re-nominate President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Michael R. Pence. This convention amplifies President Trump’s promises and the unbreakable hope of the American people. Together, we are upholding the longstanding American tradition of a party convention with the promise of making history.

    As Americans have for every challenge in our 244-year history, when struck by the heartbreak of this pandemic, countless patriots answered the call and promised to protect and serve their fellowman.

    Our health care professionals and first responders have been miracle workers through their unyielding resolve and selfless compassion. Our essential workers — grocers, farmers, teachers, transportation workers and countless others — are courageously keeping this country running. Our American business owners have innovatively made PPE, taken drastic steps to stay or re-open and have taken care of their employees in unprecedented ways. Our families have navigated unchartered territory as working parents have sought creative solutions for childcare and alternative schedules that prioritize the safety of their loved ones. Our local law enforcement and American soldiers have continued putting their lives on the line to protect us.

    The men and women of our nation are standing in the gap for their brothers and sisters as they lift up the hurting and care for their neighbors, and they deserve a leader who will promise to stand in the gap with them over the next four years.

    President Trump has never wavered in his promise to stand with the American people. He has championed the American worker through the Paycheck Protection Program and continues to fulfill his promise to keep America First. He acted early and decisively to mitigate potential harm and has continued proactive steps to protect and equip the American people during this pandemic.

    Today, we celebrate the re-nomination of an American President who will be remembered in history as the one who kept his promises and paved a way forward even in the most challenging of times. The land of promise remains the United States of America, and with President Trump leading her people, we always will be.

    Donald Trump Jr. and Sen. Tim Scott headline the first night of the Republican National Convention, which kicks off at 8:30 ET p.m. tonight.

    Also slated to speak Monday are House Minority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, RNC Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel, , Kimberly Guilfoyle, national chairwoman for the Trump Victory Finance Committee; Georgia State Representative Vernon Jones, a Democrat, and Natalie Harp, an advisory board member for Trump’s re-election campaign.

    Additional speakers include:

    • Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the Missouri couple who brandished guns at Black Lives Matter protesters in their neighborhood last month;

    • Maryland congressional candidate Kim Klacik;

    • Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA;

    • Sean Parnell, a Pennsylvania congressional candidate;

    • Andrew Pollack, the father of a victim of the Parkland shooting, and

    • Tanya Weinreis, whose coffee shop was the first small business in Montana to qualify for a PPP loan.

    And President Trump reportedly plans to speak every night.

    Watch Live:

    *  *  *

    The Trump Campaign released its 49-point wishlist for the president’s second term late last night:

    Building on the incredible achievements of President Donald J. Trump’s first term in office, the President’s re-election campaign today released a set of core priorities for a second term under the banner of “Fighting for You!” President Trump’s boundless optimism and certainty in America’s greatness is reflected in his second-term goals and stands in stark contrast to the gloomy vision of America projected by Joe Biden and Democrats.  

    President Trump will further illuminate these plans during his acceptance speech Thursday at the Republican National Convention. Over the coming weeks, the President will be sharing additional details about his plans through policy-focused speeches on the campaign trail.

    President Trump: Fighting for You!

    JOBS

    • Create 10 Million New Jobs in 10 Months
    • Create 1 Million New Small Businesses
    • Cut Taxes to Boost Take-Home Pay and Keep Jobs in America
    • Enact Fair Trade Deals that Protect American Jobs
    • “Made in America” Tax Credits
    • Expand Opportunity Zones
    • Continue Deregulatory Agenda for Energy Independence

    ERADICATE COVID-19

    • Develop a Vaccine by The End Of 2020
    • Return to Normal in 2021
    • Make All Critical Medicines and Supplies for Healthcare Workers in The United States
    • Refill Stockpiles and Prepare for Future Pandemics

    END OUR RELIANCE ON CHINA

    • Bring Back 1 Million Manufacturing Jobs from China
    • Tax Credits for Companies that Bring Back Jobs from China
    • Allow 100% Expensing Deductions for Essential Industries like Pharmaceuticals and Robotics who Bring Back their Manufacturing to the United States
    • No Federal Contracts for Companies who Outsource to China
    • Hold China Fully Accountable for Allowing the Virus to Spread around the World

    HEALTHCARE

    • Cut Prescription Drug Prices
    • Put Patients and Doctors Back in Charge of our Healthcare System
    • Lower Healthcare Insurance Premiums
    • End Surprise Billing
    • Cover All Pre-Existing Conditions
    • Protect Social Security and Medicare
    • Protect Our Veterans and Provide World-Class Healthcare and Services

    EDUCATION

    • Provide School Choice to Every Child in America
    • Teach American Exceptionalism

    DRAIN THE SWAMP

    • Pass Congressional Term Limits
    • End Bureaucratic Government Bullying of U.S. Citizens and Small Businesses
    • Expose Washington’s Money Trail and Delegate Powers Back to People and States
    • Drain the Globalist Swamp by Taking on International Organizations That Hurt American Citizens

    DEFEND OUR POLICE

    • Fully Fund and Hire More Police and Law Enforcement Officers
    • Increase Criminal Penalties for Assaults on Law Enforcement Officers
    • Prosecute Drive-By Shootings as Acts of Domestic Terrorism
    • Bring Violent Extremist Groups Like ANTIFA to Justice
    • End Cashless Bail and Keep Dangerous Criminals Locked Up until Trial

    END ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION AND PROTECT AMERICAN WORKERS

    • Block Illegal Immigrants from Becoming Eligible for Taxpayer-Funded Welfare, Healthcare, and Free College Tuition
    • Mandatory Deportation for Non-Citizen Gang Members
    • Dismantle Human Trafficking Networks
    • End Sanctuary Cities to Restore our Neighborhoods and Protect our Families
    • Prohibit American Companies from Replacing United States Citizens with Lower-Cost Foreign Workers
    • Require New Immigrants to Be Able to Support Themselves Financially

    INNOVATE FOR THE FUTURE

    • Launch Space Force, Establish Permanent Manned Presence on The Moon and Send the First Manned Mission to Mars
    • Build the World’s Greatest Infrastructure SystemWin the Race to 5G and Establish a National High-Speed Wireless Internet Network
    • Continue to Lead the World in Access to the Cleanest Drinking Water and Cleanest Air
    • Partner with Other Nations to Clean Up our Planet’s Oceans

    AMERICA FIRST FOREIGN POLICY

    • Stop Endless Wars and Bring Our Troops Home
    • Get Allies to Pay their Fair Share
    • Maintain and Expand America’s Unrivaled Military Strength
    • Wipe Out Global Terrorists Who Threaten to Harm Americans
    • Build a Great Cybersecurity Defense System and Missile Defense System

  • NY Subway Windows Being Smashed At Such Rate The MTA Can't Get Glass Fast Enough To Replace Them
    NY Subway Windows Being Smashed At Such Rate The MTA Can’t Get Glass Fast Enough To Replace Them

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 08/24/2020 – 20:05

    In more signs of the times, and perhaps further evidence the city has reached its “expiration date” amid both the Covid-induced economic slowdown and exploding crime, the New York City subway has seen windows smashed by the hundreds in recent weeks and months.

    The MTA has counted more than 400 smashed and destroyed windows over the course of the summer and has documented at least 63 train cars which were attacked with a bat, hammer, pole, or pipe by one or more serial vandals. It’s to the point that service itself on some lines are now under threat.

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    MTA photo of smashed windows on 7 train.

    The financially strapped MTA doesn’t appear to have an answer either, other than to observe the past trend that suggests economic decay above often results in an uptick in both vandalism and graffiti on the trains below.

    “Vandalized subway trains have in the past been associated with a period of financial hardship in New York City that was marked by increased violence and crime,” The New York Times notes, as the MTA now has to deal with $300,000 in repairs at a moment it’s facing a $16 billion deficit, partly brought on by the pandemic crisis.

    “We’re not exactly flush with cash right now,” Metropolitan Transportation Authority official Patrick Warren said. “Every dollar matters.”

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    MTA photo via NYT: About 60 subway car windows on 7 trains were found damaged this week.

    The trend of smashed windows appeared to rise alongside the tidal wave of unemployment during the pandemic shutdowns.

    The NYT details:

    Transportation officials in New York City first began seeing broken windows on subway cars, mostly on the 2, 3 and 7 lines, in April. On one day in mid-July, nearly 50 windows across three 7 trains were smashed. Then this week, the problem seemed to have intensified again: about 60 windows on several 7 trains were found shattered with what officials said was a “blunt instrument.”

    And authorities are still unclear on if it’s one vandal, a group of people, or various random incidents; however, there’s video footage of at least one prime suspect.

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

    The MTA says it’s literally running out of window replacements, and has had to temporarily decommission dozens of subway cars, while police are searching for a man considered mainly responsible for the 3-month long spree, given he’s been witnessed carrying a hammer.

  • Save Yourself: Stop Believing In Lockdown
    Save Yourself: Stop Believing In Lockdown

    Tyler Durden

    Mon, 08/24/2020 – 19:45

    Authored by Stacey Rudin via The American Institute for Economic Research,

    Storied minds have argued that a failure to critically examine our beliefs makes us culpable for adverse outcomes. Beliefs lead to actions, which impact other people. 

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    As Voltaire wrote during the Enlightenment – when society still had time away from the screen to reflect on philosophy, morality, and fundamental truth – “those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

    This has never been more true than in the age of social media, when information and opinions constantly bombard us from all sides, isolating us from our own thoughts and values. We have a moral duty to critically examine our beliefs — especially our belief in “lockdown,” the most oppressive and universally destructive public policy implemented in our lifetimes. 

    Is it the least-restrictive means available to minimize casualties in this pandemic? 

    Our belief in it was formed when we felt legitimate fear — this can lead to irrationality — so we really cannot answer this question in good conscience unless and until we take the time to conduct a proper, honest examination with the benefit of hindsight.

    Any number of atrocities can occur when human beings act on unfounded, unexamined beliefs. 

    Consider the example of the shipowner in William Kingdon Clifford’s 1876 essay, “The Ethics of Belief.” Troubled by the condition of his aging ship, which others have suggested is not well-built and is in need of repairs, he eventually pacifies himself with these comforting thoughts:

    “She had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come home from this trip also.

    The shipowner develops a sincere conviction that she will not sink, and acts on his belief.

    “He watched [the ship’s] departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.

    What shall we say of him? Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those men. It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in nowise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts.”

    The shipowner’s belief was built on sand — he knew he had questions to answer, but instead he took the comfortable path, and other people had to pay with their lives for it.

    While it may appear that he personally got off easy, his reputation, confidence and conscience surely suffered. 

    People who harbor false beliefs and ignore warning signs routinely end up grievously harmed: consider the investors in Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos scam, or Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, or the parents of Larry Nassar’s little-girl gymnasts. These examples prove just how easily the trust and credulity of very intelligent people is easily exploited. It happens like magic, in broad daylight — millions are lost or gained, irreparable actions are taken — with the victim all the while believing he or she is choosing to participate in a beneficial relationship or situation.

    The passengers trusted the shipowner. The investors trusted the entrepreneurs. The parents trusted the doctor. Should WE be trusting the government?

    Perhaps, instead of taking the easy path of blind faith, we should challenge our government’s assertions about COVID-19 and how to deal with it. After all, governments have already admitted to manipulating us in writing:

    Perceived threat: A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened; it could be that they are reassured by the low death rate in their demographic group . . . The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.

    I respectfully submit to you: anyone willing to adopt this shady tactic is not worthy of your blind trust. Governments know that emotional people are easy to manipulate. As Robert Greene wrote in the authoritative tome on human nature, “You like to imagine yourself in control of your fate, consciously planning the course of your life…[b]ut you are largely unaware of how deeply your emotions dominate you. They make you veer toward ideas that soothe your ego. They make you look for evidence that confirms what you already want to believe…” 

    Logically, terrified people want to believe in the existence of a sturdy lifeline. They like that lifeline even more if grasping onto it makes them “good people,” and turns those who prefer to swim with the tide into “killers.” Knowing what it knows about human nature, we can be certain our government knew that proposing lockdown to us at this particular moment was pretty much guaranteed to succeed. 

    It would be wise to take the government to task now that we’ve calmed down.

    What have they asked us to believe, why have they asked us to believe it, and what are the grounds for doubt?

    Belief #1: “Lockdown saves lives.”

    Blind faith in lockdown rapidly took hold in March 2020 like a fire in a haystack. The spark that ignited it was terror, lit by the media’s sensationalist reporting of the “disaster” in Northern Italy, shortly followed by the doomsday predictions from fancy-sounding (“Imperial College! London!”) modelers. Those same modelers offered a lifeline: — lockdown, the long awaited real-life opportunity to test a pet theory. Too bad we never stopped to question their credibility (“they sound so fancy!”) and motives (“we’ve been waiting for this moment!”) before taking any action — particularly drastic, life-altering action.

    “Every man who has accepted the statement from somebody else, without himself testing and verifying it, is out of court; his word is worth nothing at all. Two serious questions must be asked in regard to him who first made it: was he mistaken in thinking that he knew about this matter, or was he lying?”

    ~ William Kingdon Clifford

    A second, even bigger credibility issue is found when we consider the first lesson we ever learned about “lockdown.” That lesson came from China. None of us — or even our parents — had ever heard of a population-wide quarantine until the Chinese government planted the idea with a highly-publicized “lockdown” of its own. 

    This normalized the concept, preparing our minds to accept it as a scientifically-supported measure to manage infectious diseases. Then, after bombarding us with images of its citizens’ sacrifices, China predictably declared, “It worked! We defeated the virus! Disease is gone!”

    The lifeline. The island of escape. Thank you, China — because of you, we will not die.

    Little did we know that decades of public health work unequivocally established the opposite: “There is no basis [in science] for recommending quarantine either of groups or individuals.” 

    From the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention:

    “It is hard to imagine that measures like those within the category of social distancing would not have some positive impact by reducing transmission of a human respiratory infection spreading from human to human via droplets and indirect contact. However, the evidence base supporting each individual measure is often weak.”

    From the United States Center for Disease Control’s 2007 Interim Pandemic Planning Guidelines (p.25):

    “[M]athematical models that explored potential source mitigation strategies that make use of . . . infection control and social distancing measures for use in an influenza outbreak identified critical time thresholds for success. . . the effectiveness of pandemic mitigation strategies will erode rapidly as the cumulative illness rate prior to implementation climbs above 1 percent of the population in an affected area.”

    Even the Washington Post, in late January 2020, published an article soundly condemning the Chinese lockdown:

    “This is just mind-boggling: This is the mother of all quarantines. I could never have imagined it.”

    ~ Howard Markel, University of Michigan medical historian

    “The truth is those kinds of lockdowns are very rare and never effective . . . They’re doing it because people who are in political leadership always think that if you do something dramatic and visible that you’ll gain popular support. They couldn’t have any sound public health advice.”

    ~ Lawrence O. Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown University

    We can now confirm the accuracy of these statements with live data from our lockdown experiment. We even have the scientific gold standard — a control group — Sweden. Swedish mortality data proves that not only does lockdown not “save lives,” it leads to increased mortality. Sweden has far less “excess” (above-average) all-cause mortality in 2020 than heavily locked-down areas such as New Jersey, Michigan, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and the U.K. Sweden’s all-cause mortality this year is similar to that of its Scandinavian neighbors: they each have moderate excess mortality, in line with historical averages.

    Sweden also proves that COVID’s true mortality impact — when additional lives are not lost due to terrifying propaganda and draconian government actions leading to fear, despair, and the destruction of medical and social systems — is that of a severe flu. For weeks 1–32 of 2018, Sweden had 56,770 deaths. For the same weeks of 2020, it has 59,346 deaths — a difference of 2,576 or ~4%, and going down from there since mortality is now running below average. 

    In short, many of the weakest citizens in Sweden sadly died a few months early. While all lost time is regrettable, it is unlikely that any dying 86-year-old, in order to extend his own life by 5–9 months (the average remaining life expectancy of 70% of Swedish COVID deaths), would propose that a 30-year-old father be sentenced to lose his business and hang himself.

    Yet that’s exactly what happened in countries that did lock down. The elderly we were supposed to be “saving” didn’t get to speak on the matter— instead, they got COVID secretly sent straight into their places of residence, like a fox to the henhouse. According to the government officials who issued these orders and their ideologically-aligned media, Sweden is the bad guy. We accept this perverse, overtly-biased claim and resulting atrocity only because we firmly believe in the effectiveness of lockdowns. Otherwise, we would be rioting in the streets, recognizing that the same people who created the problem sold us the remedy. Their remedy.

    “We all suffer severely from the maintenance and support of false beliefs and the fatally wrong actions which they lead to, and the evil born when one such belief is entertained is great and wide.”

    ~ William Kingdon Clifford

    Belief #2: It is imperative FOR EVERYONE to avoid COVID-19 infection.

    Some people, particularly the very elderly with serious comorbidities, should indeed try to avoid infection. But for the millions of people at low risk, COVID should be treated the same as the flu. They should circulate normally, serving humanity by exposing themselves to the virus without hysteria, as the Swedes did. This will minimize overall mortality by reducing the duration of the epidemic, freeing the high-risk elderly from confinement earlier, and avoiding all of the lockdown deaths and other traumas. It is a scientific fact that every epidemic ends at the threshold of “herd immunity” — not before.

    The alternative we have chosen — an epidemic identical in size, but longer in duration, with people at statistically zero risk hiding inside their homes getting more stressed, fatter, and sicker — is utter madness. The most tragic part is Imperial explained this to us on March 16, and posted it online for everyone to see:

    “Once interventions are relaxed . . . infections begin to rise, resulting in a predicted peak epidemic later in the year. The more successful a strategy is at temporary suppression, the larger the later epidemic is predicted to be in the absence of vaccination, due to lesser build-up of herd immunity.”

    While Imperial designed lockdown as an ICU-capacity management strategy, it apparently did not foresee the difficulty in persuading people terrified by lockdown to go right back out and live two weeks later. “All clear! We have thousands of ICU beds staffed and ready for you! Good luck!”

    Good luck indeed.

    Thankfully, now we know that COVID is much less deadly than Imperial, WHO, and mainstream media led us to believe. Most of us know no one who has died — only .05% of the population has, after all. We do indeed have the all-clear, and we should feel perfectly fine conducting ourselves exactly like a Swede — and thanking others for doing just that, instead of bullying them with life-defeating, authoritarian mandates.

    Belief #3: If she doesn’t wear a mask, I won’t be safe.

    See above. If she acquires the infection and recovers, you will be safer than you were before. Unless you are routinely pounced on by sneezing strangers, you can wear your own mask and maintain your distance. You don’t need any help from anyone else. Established science says that masks and distancing don’t work, anyway — COVID-19 spontaneously shows up on naval ships 49 days into isolation, and similar viruses have appeared during the 17th week of perfect Antarctic quarantines. But at least you will feel like you’re doing something.

    Belief #4: If I was wrong about lockdown, that makes me gullible and unintelligent.

    No, it makes you human. To err is human. Admitting this is noble and altruistic, while persisting on course despite red flags is pathological and damaging. We should all aspire to be like Socrates, who understood his human fallibilities:

    “I know that I am intelligent because I know that I know nothing.” 

    There is no shame in falling for such a sophisticated propaganda scheme. Most people did. A few shining stars have since emerged to admit their mistake, quietly adopting the Swedish approach. You would be wise to join them, avoiding the fate of Don Quixote: 

    “As long as he fought imaginary giants, Don Quixote was just play-acting. However once he actually kills someone, he will cling to his fantasies for all he is worth, because only they give meaning to his tragic misdeed. Paradoxically, the more sacrifices we make for an imaginary story, the more tenaciously we hold on to it, because we desperately want to give meaning to those sacrifices and to the suffering we have caused.”

    ~ Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

    Belief #5: COVID-19 is much more dangerous than the flu.

    Nope. As stated above, in terms of mortality impact, Sweden already proved that COVID-19 is indeed similar to the flu. The diseases are similar in other respects — both can have long-term health effects, both kill random outliers (the flu even kills young teachers), and both can cause hospitals to overflow, as influenza did as recently as two years ago. They have similar survival rates: ~997 out of 1,000 for COVID, ~999 out of 1,000 for flu. Over fifty percent of Americans don’t even get the flu shot, yet we have destroyed the planet to “stop” COVID-19.

    Why did it happen? Because the media chose to depict this virus as Black Plague — and we believed it. Now that we know that the media can do this, we can understand why the U.K. Prime Minister — and others in his position — was afraid of its powers. He reportedly imposed lockdown because he was threatened as follows:

    “If he didn’t lock down, journalists will ask him on national television to accept responsibility and apologise to the families of those who have died as a result of Covid-19, because the rhetoric would have been that it was his fault for not locking down.”

    In other words, the media had a three-step plan:

    (1) convince us that politicians have the power to stop death,

    (2) put the politicians in the position of needing to do what the media suggests will “save our lives,”

    (3) watch as we drive ourselves over a cliff.

    The media cannot do this without our participation. We can stop them immediately by refusing to believe their superstitious, pseudo-scientific proposition that this is the only disease in history that needed a politician-imposed lockdown to abate. They cannot trick us into burning down our own houses once we simply stop believing that politicians have the power to stop death. Standing firmly on this foundation of scientific truth, we will finally be at peace, realizing that COVID-19, like every disease in history, will infect a certain number of people, kill a minute percentage of them, and then move along, lockdown or no lockdown. 

    We really must stop believing otherwise. Our credulity is destroying us. So long as we do believe the myth, we are avoiding the responsibility to manage this virus the way intelligent societies always have, by permitting medical professionals to treat sick people as individuals, one ailment at a time. One cannot merely unleash a total state on the whole of society–even on nearly the entire planet–in a futile effort to scare the virus into going away. 

    That’s completely mystical thinking that unleashes the very catastrophe that smallpox eradicator Donald A. Henderson predicted in his 2006 plea never to lock down. 

    “The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.”

    ~ William Kingdon Clifford

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