- Chinese Authorities Scramble To Suppress Biggest COVID-19 Outbreak In Months
Chinese Authorities Scramble To Suppress Biggest COVID-19 Outbreak In Months
Tyler Durden
Mon, 10/26/2020 – 02:45Chinese authorities are scrambling to suppress yet another outbreak in far-flung Xinjiang after a 17-year-old garment factory worker tested positive.
Health authorities reported 137 new cases on Sunday, all of which were confirmed in Xinjiang Province, making this by far the largest new outbreak since the Spring. In keeping with Beijing’s prescribed “wartime posture” approach, authorities last night launched a mass-testing campaign to try and test all 4.75 million residents in and around the city of Kashgar. A couple of weeks ago, authorities pulled off a similarly massive testing drive in Qingdao, a city in the eastern Shangdong Province.
Thanks to sweeping smartphone-based mass surveillance/case-tracking, scapegoating and outright suppression of case numbers and deaths, China has managed to drive COVID-19 case numbers to almost zero. In Wuhan, locals travel to bars and concerts, sometimes, taking rapid COVID-19 tests, with their infection status logged on their smartphones in a way that can be examined by bouncers at the door.
To further confuse the international community, along with the Chinese public, China’s national health authorities have divided case classifications into imported vs. domestic and asymptomatic vs symptomatic.
Here’s how the ‘official’ tally of cases has evolved in recent weeks.
The new cases, all classified as asymptomatic, were linked to a factory in Shufu county where the 17-year-old girl and her parents worked, according to the Xinjiang health commission, which held a press briefing on Sunday following an exhaustive investigation of the source of the outbreak by Beijing’s NHC.
As of Sunday afternoon more than 2.8 million samples had been collected in the area and the rest would be completed within two days, the city government said in a statement.
Kashgar, near the country’s borders with Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, is the cultural home of China’s Turkic Muslim ethnic Uighurs, a group that the CCP has relentlessly pressed into reeducation camps and concentration camps to force them to accept the country’s governing Communist ideology.
The crackdown as provoked international outbreak, and a barrage of sanctions imposed by the US on officials and companies involved with the mass-detention program.
- The Cult Of The Brave New Normal
The Cult Of The Brave New Normal
Tyler Durden
Mon, 10/26/2020 – 02:00Authored by Dr. Bruce Scott via Off-Guardian.org,
In March, it was just a three-week lockdown, to flatten the curve so as not to overwhelm the NHS. The narrative has quickly evolved. It has progressed from what seemed a reasonable idea of keeping NHS bed space free based on the completely false Neil Fergusson prediction that hospitals would be overwhelmed by patients suffering from COVID19.
This never happened. Many weeks passed where face masks were not needed and then suddenly in July, long after the majority of supposed COVID19 deaths had occurred, face masks were made compulsory.
Indeed, the UK government advice from the likes of Chris Whitty and the World Health Organisation was that face masks were not effective in stopping the spread of COVID19 or in contracting it; science does not change that quick – anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar.
The result is that we have now fallen deep into a Covidian Cult, a totalitarian psychotic narrative that has little connection to reality or to the facts.
The opposition to official government narratives regarding Covid19 are well known. I will not bother again telling you what is already known or can be readily ascertained.
Suffice to say, one just needs to type into Google “The Great Barrington Declaration” or ACU2020, where one can read about the doctors, scientists and lawyers who are opposing multi-governmental COVID19 restrictions and laws of social distancing, lockdown, mandatory/coerced consent to vaccines, and mandatory face masks, amongst other things.
Their essential argument, contra the multi-government policy on COVID19, is that virus is not the danger we are being told it is; the data on COVID19 is clear: we do not need to lockdown society, wreck the economy, or frighten people into death as they are scared to leave home for fear of catching COVID19 or seek medical treatment for non-COVID19 illness, which has happened.
Specifically, many doctors and scientists argue that face masks are not protective and could be very harmful. Dr Jay Bhattacharya, a signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration, which 40,000 medical, public health scientists and medical practitioners have signed, said that the use of face masks are not supported in the scientific literature. There is no randomised data to indicate if they are effective in reducing the spread of COVID19.
Indeed, face masks have no effectiveness in the spread of influenza. This is backed up by the fact that social distancing and face masks have not made a difference on yearly rate of influenza deaths in the UK.
On the 15th October 2020 the stark reality that we are being led by a psychotic Covidian cult narrative became even more evident; Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, announced with great glee that couples marrying would no longer have to wear face masks when tying the knot. Of course, the Priest, Vicar, or Registrar etc conducting the ceremonies never had to wear a mask to conduct the marriage ceremony. What kind of political leader would impose on couples, who for all intent and purposes will be living together and spending the night together after the wedding, have to wear a mask during their wedding ceremony? Would a mask be required for the happy couple to consummate their marriage on their wedding night?
This ridiculous face mask rule imposed by Nicola Sturgeon shows quite clearly the dark side of Scottish politics. It is ridiculous because Nicola Sturgeon (as well as all the other MSP’s and Holyrood staff) has met many people from other households indoors in parliament (before and after face masks were imposed), whilst at the same time continually telling the masses that they cannot meet people from other households indoors. One rule for me, one for thee.
The paranoid fuelled COVID19 rules delivered by Sturgeon on a daily basis during the week and even reiterated on her twitter account on a frequent basis, and the blatant inconsistent and illogical nature of these rules, are not meant to console or comfort the masses. No, they are a deliberate attempt to disorientate and control the minds of the masses.
Cult leaders do this to their followers to short circuit their critical thinking. Cult leaders will also change the rules or the narrative at a whim for no apparent reason. Hence the change of now being able to get married without a face mask, even though the COVID19 restrictions are being tightened again all over the UK; it makes no sense, its not meant to, and the masses are meant to follow, not question and obey.
Cult leaders want to make the masses follow chaos.
This kind behaviour is equally applicable to the realm of BDSM (bondage, domination, sado-masochism) or the Master-Slave dialectic. In the world of BDSM, a master or mistress will impose illogical rules, but demand to be obeyed. As a slave in BDSM scenario might say, “Mistress is correct even when Mistress is wrong”.
This forms the basis for a human subject becoming an object, of becoming alienated from themselves. This logical structure underpins the dictates from politicians in relation to COVID19 restrictions. The blatant flaunting of the dictates by the likes of Catherine Calderwood, Neil Fergusson, Dominic Cummings, Margaret Ferrier (and the many more we have not heard about yet) is testament to the fact that they don’t really take this COVID19 restrictions all that seriously.
This abusive objectification and alienation are what totalitarians and cult leaders want to achieve and impose on their followers. Initiation rituals like mask wearing (especially when getting married) and social distancing, attack a person with terror, pain, humiliation and subjugation. Of course, anyone who has been in an abusive relationship will tell you that pointless rituals or behaviours are demanded by the abusive and sadistic abusive partner to wear the other person down.
As is so often found in cults and individuals in abusive relationships, the cult members or abused partner will even go to great lengths to defend the cult leader’s demands or the person who abuses them. In our current predicament, this is highly ironic as the Scottish government have recently introduced psychological abuse as a crime.
This abusive dialectic that is playing out between the UK government/Scottish government/devolved assemblies and the masses might explain why so many people cannot perceive the totalitarianism that is being inflicted upon them right in front of them, or right on their faces in the guise of masks and up till recently masked up in front of the alter getting married.
The problem we have is this: people generally find it very difficult to recognise the delusional nature of a totalitarian master narrative. One case in point was Nazi Germany; cognitive dissonance was a prevalent characteristic of people during these times. People who cannot see the totalitarian moves made upon them are not ignorant or unintelligent; they have been initiated into a cult through the methods of initiation, chaos, confusion and the short circuiting of critical thinking.
We are being initiated and conditioned for a future way of life where there will be no return to normality, and it has nothing to do with a virus. This is why children are being socially distanced in schools, are made to wear masks in certain contexts, are treated like bio-hazards by their teachers and are frightened half to death by being made to obsessively wash their hands multiple times a day with an abrasive hand sanitiser.
Drawing on psychoanalytic thought, such directives pushed onto children will ensure that many children will grow up to be socially anxious and fearful of social interaction. It begs belief that the Adverse Childhood Experiences “movement” (ACEs) in Scotland are utterly silent about the harms being committed upon children as a result of these scientifically challengeable COVID19 restrictions and rules.
As the Centre for Disease Control state, the survival rate estimates for people aged 0-19 years for COVID19 is 99.997%, 20-49 years is 99.98%, 50-69 years 99.5%, and 70 years+ 94.6% respectively. And now we have a casedemic where the rates of false positives (89%-94% of positives potentially false) and the PCR test does not even test for COVID19 (See ACU, 2020). Of course, the politicians ignore the fact that the PCR test was never intended to be a diagnostic instrument to be used to inform public health policy, never mind mandate it.
The culture of deindividuation that the totalitarian abusive cult-like rituals of social distancing, mask wearing and not being able to meet people freely is also primed to be ramped up even further; Nicola Sturgeon has stated that she is considering face masks to be compulsory even in outside spaces-seven months into this COVID19 nightmare-another illogical and ridiculous idea with no basis in science.
We are now entering a precarious tipping point; not from the virus, but from deindividuated members of the cult slavishly following these new rules and not challenging the wearing of masks outside. No doubt the “nudging” from the Government will work a treat on the masses
This is because the UK and Scottish governments are manipulating, coercing and frightening us into following the rules and shaming us when we don’t. The UK and Scottish Governments are using applied behavioural psychology, breaking the ethical guidelines for psychologists, to deliberately ramp up fear in the population. A group of psychologists called Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) of SAGE have been tasked with advising the UK and Scottish Governments how to get people to adhere to COVID 19 restrictions.
From their document which is freely available on the UK Government website, it is written:
A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened.”
And:
The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.”
The psychologists of SPI-B and the UK government knew fear alone would not be enough. Therefore, SPI-B suggested to government to use and promote social approval for desired behaviours, to consider enacting legislation to compel required behaviours, and to consider the use of social disapproval for failure to comply.
They have used the Mainstream Media and Social media, along with false fact-checking and censorship to get their message across and it has been working.
The tactics of the SPI-B psychologists informing UK and Scottish Governments’ policies on the COVID19 response are in my opinion contrary to the ethical and practice guidelines of The British Psychological Society (BPS); the psychology equivalent of the Hippocratic oath for medicine.
The mainstream media are silent on these unethical practices of deliberately ramping up people’s sense of personal threat, creating a culture of feeling shame to follow COVID19 regulations and encouraging people to shame others for not following regulations. From the reports of several mental health charities, UK and Scottish Government reports, mental ill-health is in a crisis because of the COVID19 response/measures.
Suicide risk factors have undoubtedly been hugely multiplied (house repossessions, unemployment, poverty and stress etc); when the official figures are completed, I have no doubt that there will have been, and there will be to come, many suicides because of the COVID19 lockdown and associated measures.
Our political leaders, despite their lip service to mental health, are aware of the mental health and suicide crisis that now engulfs us, yet they proceed onwards with the COVID19 agenda regardless complicit in more psychological abuse being foisted upon people, knowing full well that this will cause untold misery.
Vladimir Bukovsky, a Soviet dissident who was imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital (enforced incarceration for political dissidents) described well our current predicament:
The peculiar features of the Soviet political system, the Communist ideology, the uncertainties and difficulties of the science of psychiatry, the labyrinths of the human conscience-all these have weirdly woven themselves together to create a monstrous phenomenon, the use of medicine against man.”
Forward from Russia’s political hospitals, 1977 (S. Bloch and P. Reddaway) by Vladimir Bukovsky.Like the Soviet Union today the monstrous phenomenon is again the use of science and medicine against the masses by many Governments in the battle against COVID19. Not only do our political leaders want to “keep us safe until a vaccine” but they seem to want to destroy the economy, create huge unemployment and destroy businesses. They also want to monitor our every move and impose restrictions on work, travel and social and family life.
There will be no end to this nightmare; there never is an end when one is in an abusive relationship. The goalposts always keep moving. The victim is broken down until they can offer no resistance.
Indeed, Bill Gates recently indicated that even if we get a vaccine for COVID19, there will be no return to normal as it will probably take a second or third generation vaccine to get us back to normal. Of course, we know full well, when we get that second or third generation vaccine, it will not herald a return to the old normal.
Unfortunately, at the moment there is not enough people (especially politicians and mainstream media journalists) with the necessary courage to call out the tyranny and call out the abuser. Historically this has also been a problem; politically and within an abusive context (e.g., the victim finds great difficulty calling out their abuser). In a critical remark and warning to the West, Alexander Solzhenitsyn said in his Harvard address in 1973:
A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations…..Should one (have to) point out that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?”
Is this Scotland’s beginning of the end? Will the masses start to wake up to the dictatorial and totalitarian measures? Only time will tell. It might be too late. If it is the end, just don’t say you didn’t see it coming or nobody told you.
There is hope. We can learn from history and enact that famous dictum after World War II; it should never happen again. Perhaps our politicians should mediate upon the Nuremberg Code of guidelines for determining what constitutes a war crime and UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights Article 6.
Nuremberg Code:
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The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.
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The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature.
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The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment.
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The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.
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No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.
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The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.
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Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.
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The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment.
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During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible.
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During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.
UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights: Article 6 – Consent
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Any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information. The consent should, where appropriate, be express and may be withdrawn by the person concerned at any time and for any reason without disadvantage or prejudice.
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Scientific research should only be carried out with the prior, free, express and informed consent of the person concerned. The information should be adequate, provided in a comprehensible form and should include modalities for withdrawal of consent. Consent may be withdrawn by the person concerned at any time and for any reason without any disadvantage or prejudice. Exceptions to this principle should be made only in accordance with ethical and legal standards adopted by States, consistent with the principles and provisions set out in this Declaration, in particular in Article 27, and international human rights law.
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In appropriate cases of research carried out on a group of persons or a community, additional agreement of the legal representatives of the group or community concerned may be sought. In no case should a collective community agreement or the consent of a community leader or other authority substitute for an individual’s informed consent.
The Nuremberg Code and UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights Article 6 make for sobering reading when it comes to governmental mandates or ideas in the pipeline regarding COVID19.
Just think of face masks (especially for children), social distancing, travel restrictions, work restrictions, immunity passports and ideas about giving people a rushed out unlicensed vaccine for COVID19 (which will be indemnified) which has not been assessed for the long-term side effects.
The cult-like nature of the Brave New Normal that is COVID19 is insidiously pervading more and more aspects of our lives, with seemingly less and less science to back it up, and curiously being seen by those in power as an opportunity to reshape our society, not for our good, but for the good of those in power.
Perhaps we should all think about what all this means for us, our children, our grandchildren and democracy in the UK and wider world.
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- 'Renminbi Diplomacy': How China Bought The US Government?
‘Renminbi Diplomacy’: How China Bought The US Government?
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/25/2020 – 23:30Submitted by Nauman Sadiq,
In an explosive scoop, alternative news outlet Zero Hedge has laid bare how China’s state apparatchik clandestinely baited the family members of the Obama-era vice president and secretary of state into joint business ventures in order to surreptitiously influence the trade and economic policies of the US government favoring China’s geo-economic interests spanning the globe.
Here are a few relevant excerpts from the investigative report authored by Christopher Balding, Associate Professor at Peking University HSBC School of Business Shenzhen, China, and also a Bloomberg contributor:
“Hunter Biden partnered with the Chinese state. Entire investment partnership is Chinese state money from social security fund to China Development Bank. It is actually a subsidiary of the Bank of China. This is not remotely anything less than a Chinese state-funded play.
“Though the entire size of the fund cannot be reconstructed, the Taiwanese cofounder who is now detained in China, reports it to be NOT $1-1.5 billion but $6.5 billion. This would make Hunters stake worth at a minimum at least $50 million if he was to sell it.
“The believed Godfather arranging Hunter’s business ventures is a gentleman named Yang Jiechi. He is currently the CCP Director of Foreign Affairs leading strategist for America, Politburo member, one of the most powerful men in China, and Chinese President Xi Jingpin’s confidant.
“He met regularly with Joe Biden during his stint as Chinese ambassador the US when Biden chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Later he was Minister of Foreign Affairs when the investment partnership was made official in 2013.
“Hunter Biden’s 2013 Bohai Harvest Rosemont investment partnership was set-up by Ministry of Foreign Affairs institutions which are tasked with garnering influence with foreign leaders during Yang’s tenure as Foreign Minister.
“Hunter’s BHR stake (purchased for $400,000) is now likely be worth approx. $50 million (fees and capital appreciation based on BHR’s $6.5 billion AUM as stated by Michael Lin).
“Joe Biden’s foreign policy stance towards China (formerly hawkish), turned positive despite China’s country’s rising geopolitical assertiveness.”
China is known to follow the economic model of “state capitalism,” in which although small and medium enterprises are permitted to operate freely by common citizens, large industrial and extraction companies, especially multi-billion dollar corporations doing business with foreign clients, are run by the Communist Party stalwarts masquerading as business executives.
In addition, China is alleged to practice “debt-trap diplomacy” for buying entire governments through extending financial grants and loans, and what better way to buy the rival government of the United States than by financing the Biden campaign through bestowing financial largesse on the Biden and John Kerry families and other prominent former officials of the Obama-Biden administration.
In an exclusive report for the Breitbart New on October 16, Peter Schweizer and Seamus Bruner allege that newly obtained emails from a former business associate of Hunter Biden’s inner-circle reveal that Hunter and his colleagues used their access to the Obama-Biden administration to peddle influence to potential Chinese clients and investors—including securing a private, off-the-books meeting with the former vice president.
The never-before-revealed emails, unconnected to the Hunter Biden emails being released by the New York Post, were provided to Schweizer by Bevan Cooney, a one-time Hunter Biden and Devon Archer business associate. Cooney is currently in prison serving a sentence for his involvement in a 2016 bond fraud investment scheme. The report notes:
“On November 5, 2011, one of Archer’s business contacts forwarded him an email teasing an opportunity to gain ‘potentially outstanding new clients’ by helping to arrange White House meetings for a group of Chinese executives and government officials.
“The group was the China Entrepreneur Club (CEC) and the delegation included Chinese billionaires, Chinese Communist Party loyalists, and at least one ‘respected diplomat’ from Beijing. Despite its benign name, CEC has been called ‘a second foreign ministry’ for the People’s Republic of China—a communist government that closely controls most businesses in its country. CEC was established in 2006 by a group of businessmen and Chinese government diplomats.
“CEC’s leadership boasts numerous senior members of the Chinese Communist Party, including Wang Zhongyu (vice chairman of the 10th CPPCC National Committee and deputy secretary of the Party group), Ma Weihua (director of multiple Chinese Communist Party offices), and Jiang Xipei (member of the Chinese Communist Party and representative of the 16th National Congress), among others.
“‘I know it is political season and people are hesitant but a group like this does not come along every day,’ an intermediary named Mohamed A. Khashoggi wrote on behalf of the CEC to an associate of Hunter Biden and Devon Archer. ‘A tour of the white house and a meeting with a member of the chief of staff’s office and John Kerry would be great.’
“The gross income of the CEC members’ companies allegedly ‘totaled more than renminbi 1.5 trillion, together accounting for roughly 4% of China’s GDP.’ The overture to Hunter Biden’s associates described the Chinese CEC members variously as ‘industrial elites,’ ‘highly influential,’ and among ‘the most important private sector individuals in China today,’ dubbed as the China Inc.
“Hunter Biden and Devon Archer apparently delivered for the Chinese Communist Party-connected industrial elites within ten days … The Obama-Biden administration archives reveal that this Chinese delegation did indeed visit the White House on November 14, 2011, and enjoyed high-level access.
“The visitor logs list Jeff Zients, the deputy director of Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), as the host of the CEC delegation. Obama had tasked Zients with restructuring and ultimately consolidating the various export-import agencies under the Commerce Department—an effort in which the Chinese delegation would have a keen interest.”
Schweizer suggests that the meeting may have opened the door for Hunter and Devon Archer down the road—as just two years later they formed the Chinese government-funded Bohai Harvest RST (BHR) investment fund which saw Chinese money pour into it for investments in CEC-linked businesses.
According to the report, “One of BHR’s first major portfolio investments was a ride-sharing company like Uber called Didi Dache—now called Didi Chuxing Technology Co. That company is closely connected to Liu Chuanzhi, the chairman of the China Entrepreneur Club (CEC) and the founder of Legend Holdings—the parent company of Lenovo, one of the world’s largest computer companies. Liu is a former Chinese Communist Party delegate and was a leader of the 2011 CEC delegation to the White House. His daughter was the President of Didi.”
After reading the names of these high-profile Chinese business and political elites visiting the White House and cultivating personal friendships and business relationships in the highest echelons of the Obama-Biden administration, one wonders whether the latter formulated trade and economic policies serving the interests of the American masses or took care of financial stakes of global power elites.
During the last decade, all the manufacturing has outsourced to China, Chinese entrepreneurs are stealing American jobs and the American working classes are finding it hard to make ends meet, yet neoliberal Democrats are dogmatically sticking with market fundamentalism of globalization and free trade.
In order to understand the real and perceived grievances of Donald Trump’s “alt-right” electoral base, we need to understand the prevailing global economic order and its prognosis. The predictions of pragmatic economists about free market capitalism have turned out to be true. A kind of global economic entropy has set into motion, and money is flowing from the area of high monetary density to the area of low monetary density.
The rise of BRICS countries in the 21st century is the proof of this tendency. BRICS are growing economically because the labor in developing economies is cheap; labor laws and rights are virtually nonexistent; expenses on creating a safe and healthy work environment are minimal; regulatory framework is lax; expenses on environmental protection are negligible; taxes are low; and, in the nutshell, windfalls for multinational corporations are massive.
Thus, BRICS are threatening the global economic monopoly of the Western capitalist bloc: North America and Western Europe. Here we need to understand the difference between manufacturing sector and services sector. Manufacturing sector is the backbone of economy; one cannot create a manufacturing base overnight.
It is based on hard assets: the national economies need raw materials; production equipment; transport and power infrastructure; and, last but not the least, a technically educated labor force. It takes decades to build and sustain a manufacturing base. But the services sector, like the Western financial institutions, can be built and dismantled in a relatively short period of time.
If we take a cursory look at the economy of the Western capitalist bloc, it has still retained some of its high-tech manufacturing base, but it is losing fast to the cheaper and equally robust manufacturing base of the developing BRICS nations. Everything is made in China these days, except for high-tech microprocessors, software, several internet giants, some pharmaceutical products, the Big Oil and the military hardware and defense production industry.
Apart from that, the entire economy of the Western capitalist bloc is based on financial institutions: the behemoth investment banks that dominate and control the global economy, like JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs in the US; BNP Paribas and Axa Group in France; Deutsche Bank and Allianz Group in Germany; and Barclays and HSBC in the UK.
After establishing the fact that the Western economy is mostly based on its financial services sector, we need to understand its implications. Like I have contended earlier that it takes time to build a manufacturing base, but it is relatively easy to build and dismantle an economy based on financial services.
Moreover, the manufacturing sector is labor-intensive whereas the financial services sector is capital-intensive, therefore the latter does not create as much job opportunities to keep the workforce of a nation gainfully employed and sufficiently remunerated as the industrial sector does.
Although the bankers and corporate executives of the Western economies are the beneficiaries of such exploitative practices, the middle and working classes are suffering. Besides the Trump supporters in the United States, the far-right populist leaders in Europe are also exploiting popular resentment against free trade and globalization.
The Brexiteers in the United Kingdom, the Yellow Vest protesters in France and the far-right movements in Germany and across Europe are a manifestation of a paradigm shift in the global economic order in which nationalist and protectionist slogans have replaced the free trade and globalization mantra of the nineties.
Though the “alt-right agenda” of the Trump presidency has been scuttled by the political establishment and the deep state, Trump’s views regarding global politics and economics are starkly different from the establishment Democrats and Republicans pursuing neoliberal economics masqueraded as globalization and free trade.
With his anti-globalist and protectionist agenda, Trump represents a paradigm shift in the global economic order. Trump withdrawing the United States from multilateral treaties, restructuring trade agreements, bringing investments and employments back to the US and initiating a trade war against China are a silent revolution against neoliberal ideals of globalization and free trade of which China is the new beneficiary with its strong manufacturing base and massive export potential.
Thus, it’s only natural for the Chinese government to try to oust Trump from the presidency with all available means, including providing financial support to his neoliberal Democratic rivals, favoring globalization and free trade, in the upcoming US presidential elections slated for November 3.
- Air Force Selects BAE Systems To Design Combat Drone For Skyborg Program
Air Force Selects BAE Systems To Design Combat Drone For Skyborg Program
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/25/2020 – 23:00The Air Force, under the Skyborg program, has awarded defense firm BAE Systems with a contract of up to $400 million to develop a “digital design” for a fully autonomous drone that will fly with the service’s stealth fighters.
The aim is for BAE to produce a low-cost autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle that will fly with manned stealth fighters to increase air combat power.
Ehtisham Siddiqui, vice president and general manager of Controls and Avionics Solutions at BAE Systems, said the “need to generate combat power faster than our adversaries is critical to address near-peer threats.”
Siddiqui said, “this award will accelerate the development and deployment of manned-unmanned teaming technologies to give the U.S. Air Force a decisive edge in the battlespace.”
The robotic wingmen for manned aircraft will be designed with BAE Systems’ autonomous systems. The drone will be outfitted with advanced sensors and other high-tech, likely classified, payloads. Paternering, an autonomous combat drone with a manned stealth fighter jet, could be game-changing on the modern battlefield to defend against emerging threats.
Currently, the Air Force has awarded nine defense firms for competing in the service’s autonomous Skyborg drone wingman program. Flushed with cash, the service is purchasing as many prototypes as possible, with testing currently underway.
Air Force envisions the winning defense firm to produce a drone that can conduct at least 15 different mission sets. We noted not too long ago that an operational capability timeline for the drone could be around 2023.
In August, a Boeing-made wingman drone was spotted in Australia.
And maybe the 2005 American military science fiction action film “Stealth” accurately predicted combat drones were to become human pilots new “wingman.”
- One Man's (Data-Driven) Journey From Zombie Apocalypse To Lockdown-Skeptic
One Man’s (Data-Driven) Journey From Zombie Apocalypse To Lockdown-Skeptic
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/25/2020 – 22:30Authored by Mark Jeftovic via OutOfTheCave.io,
A couple of recurring conspiracy theory themes keep being circulated to me, they are specific to Canada but I’m sure these are typical across all locations. I find these maddening because there is plenty of factual, well sourced and scientifically verified counterfactuals to draw from when being critical of the near universal mishandling of pandemic response by national governments worldwide.
For lockdown skeptics, embracing or amplifying fact-free hysterical conspiracy theories makes them look like lunatics, so they should stop doing that.
Allow me to dispense with the two big Canuck-themed conspiracy theories and then inject some much needed sanity into the conversation via a recent Triggernometry podcast with guest Ivor Cummins.
These conspiracies are:
#1) The Federal Government RFP to build “internment camps”
Sent to be multiple times privately. “Have you heard about the interment camps?”. Etc. They all refer to this actual, Canadian federal tender #6D112-202772/A “Service Provider(s) for Federal Quarantine / Isolation sites” which really does exist.
It sounds bad, doesn’t it. “Federal Quarantine / Isolation Sites” you mean like this kind of thing, nationally?
That’s actually a screen grab from Amazon’s Utopia series, which is a reboot of an earlier BBC series by the same name. I haven’t finished watching the Amazon version, but the BBC was originally about an elite cabal’s conspiracy to depopulate the planet by creating a false pandemic and then releasing a vaccine that would make people who took it, sterile. Pretty far out, huh?
Anyhoo, back to reality and the Canadian RFP for “The Interment Camps”. If you actually read the tender, you would see that the specification calls for bids to provide “Lodging for up to 1600 people spread across Canada”.
1600 people. Nationwide. And mostly in hotel rooms. You can argue whether or not the government has the right to detain people in the midst of a public health crisis. You can even debate if COVID-19 really would be a public health crisis if cooler heads prevailed (more on that below).
What you can’t argue, is that lodging for 1600 people, nationwide, are “internment camps”, because they’re not.
Apparently MPP Randy Hillier asked about this in Parliament “and was kicked out of the caucus for asking about them”. Nice try, Hillier did bring it up in provincial session. But he had already been kicked out of the PC’s in 2019 for mocking autistic children. He now sits as an independent (as a friend of mine far more plugged into Conservative politics once remarked to me “I often wonder myself where do we actually get these clowns from?” He was referring to career politicians in general).
#2) Liberal Party Whistleblower leaks “Great Reset” plan to end private property globally
I see this one more on social media, it purports to be a leak from a Liberal Party whistleblower which was posted to an indie website nobody had ever heard of before this, and a lot more people have heard of since. I won’t link to it here.
It outlines a plan from within the PMO (Prime Minister’s Office) “Strategic Planning Committee” to begin introducing more lockdowns this fall, and then faced with the emergence of with a new strain of COVID in 2021 (“COVID-21”) engineer, in concert with national governments worldwide, a global economic collapse. The collapse would be followed by a debt jubilee and the implementation of UBI, with recipients of debt relief and UBI renouncing their claim on private property for the remainder of their lives.
All of this based on an anonymous email (purportedly) sent from a throw-away protonmail account. As I pointed out to the first few people who sent me this, it is so absent of corroboration or attribution that believing it is entirely, 100% faith based. It is totally devoid of evidence.
I can tell you that the only references to the PMOs “Strategic Planning Committee” seem to be in connection with this purported leak. It’s almost as if it doesn’t really exist and it’s not a thing. In Canada, committees are convened by the House of Commons, not the PMO (although it’s possible they informally call their groupings “committees”). The list of House of Commons Committees is here, and there is no Strategic Planning Committee in the list.
I can also tell you that wiping out everybody’s debt also wipes out a lot of other people’s assets, and most of those people whose assets are other people’s debts are: banks, pension funds, endowments and other forms of Big Money. And I don’t think they would sit still for a political drive to wipe out gigantic chunks of their assets. I’ve said it before, and plan to expand on it in the future: “Thank God for Big Money”. Because if you can count on at least one class of participants to act semi-rationally when faced with uncertain outcomes and trade-offs, it’s that.
Now it’s understandable that these kinds of rumours would run rampant, with the likes of the Davos crew in The World Economic Forum calling for using the COVID-19 pandemic as a type of “Great Reset”
…as I remarked on Facebook, it is hard not to imagine Herr Von Schwab delivering this speech wearing a monocle and a red armband.
Yet all this posturing is endemic to the type of catabolic collapse the existing power and institutional structures are facing today. As Jesse and Charles and myself frequently observe in our Axis Of Easy podcasts, we are transitioning from the Age of Nation States into an era of Network States and while it is too early to tell what this going to look like, today’s political class and plutocrats are trying hard to make sure they’re still the ones in charge after this huge tectonic phase shift.
Usually however, that doesn’t happen. When societies transition from one form of organizational structure to another, leadership changes as well. That could be why there is such a push to the hoop to keep a lid on things “as they are” over these past few years and the polarization and disarray is simply the old order turning into dust in the wind…
Enough conspiracy, let’s stick to data and science to end the lockdowns…
There is no shortage of science and data to challenge the flawed policies of the nation states whose basic playbook has been: lockdown, close economy, print money, ignore data, and double down.
This may be a good time to quickly outline my arc of how my views on the pandemic shifted over time.
My journey from Zombie Apocalypse to lockdown skeptic
I began monitoring the reports of a new virus emerging out of China in January. On January 23rd I emailed a friend advising him to go out tomorrow and pick up some N95 masks, and by the first week of February I was stocking up food, medical supplies, cash, and weapons. I was expecting a full breakdown of the global supply chain and a collapse of the global economy.
Based on early reported numbers of an R0 around 3.1 with an IFR of 5%, it looked like we’d see doubling times of 15 days. By March all three levels of government, city, province and national were reporting case rates and fatalities daily. I put together a spreadsheet and using those numbers as a model I forecasted Toronto to have 1.7M cases by the end of June. If the IFR really was 5%, or even 3%, it would mean between 51,000 and 136,000 fatalities.
This was terrifying, so as the world started locking down, it seemed to make sense. In fact I was wondering why we were still allowing inbound flights from hotspots like China? There were rumblings from The Clerisy like the New York Times that blocking flights from China would be racist. This was the early innings of the politicization that was to follow.
But then, a curious thing happened. The rate of change in infections and fatalities started coming down, drastically.
By June it was clear to anybody following the data that this was, at least for now, largely in the rearview mirror. I had been in touch with an old friend who now ran IT for several hospitals. In January he was trying to get administrators to take COVID seriously. By May, they had built 4 additional ICUs across the hospitals and they were sitting empty. Worse, resources were being denied to other medical uses. He was beginning to wonder if maybe this wasn’t going to be as bad as we both originally thought.
Then, over the summer despite the clear slowdown in the severity of the pandemic, the policy response to it intensified. And then it all became political. Questioning the efficacy of continuing the lockdowns became associated with being alt-right. Pro-Trump. Or worse. A Narrative War ensued. If you questioned official policy, you got deplatformed. I documented numerous instances of this over on AxisOfEasy.
Now we’re in the fall and the case counts are back up and Second Wave Hysteria is in full effect. The only problem is, the fatality rate is on the floor. Another problem is this shouldn’t be a problem. It should be good news!
The fatalities are up slightly with the season, but nowhere close to tracking the case counts as they did in wave 1. This could be for a number of reasons (more testing, the most vulnerable were hit in wave 1, etc) but no matter how you slice it, the graphs pretty well everywhere look like this:
That spike on the deaths chart in early October was from a data adjustment from the previous 75 days. Source here.
In this case, we’re talking about the Province of Ontario, which has to date nearly 70,000 cases total and slightly over 3,000 deaths. Nothing like the 1.7M cases and 50K to 136K fatalities my original model predicted.
What does that mean?
It means my model was wrong!
Which is ok, and fortunate, in fact. Now I’m not an epidemiologist, so I’m allowed to get my models wrong. But what I did do, that policy makers and experts are not doing, is re-examining the premises in the face of new data.
The Imperial College / Neal Ferguson model that inspired much of the global lockdowns is an extreme example of this. It turned out to be total shitcode, but it hasn’t impacted the policy response. Not one bit.
There is no justification for more lockdowns
Which brings us to the Triggernometry podcast I mentioned above, which I never did get around to adequately explaining. It’s a great conversation with those merry comics Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster and their guest this episode: biological engineer Ivor Cummins.
When you challenge the prevailing orthodoxy around anything COVID, it’s not uncommon for people to hysterically shriek at you that have to follow science and look at the data! Well, that’s what Cumins has done and here’s the upshot of what he (and many others) have found:
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We should not have locked down over the summer. With cases and fatalities down it was the ideal time to let the virus spread amongst the low risk population to get further toward herd immunity.
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Forcing mask wearing at the nadir of the pandemic (the summer) was a flawed policy that leaves no exit strategy. We’re basically in masks forever now.
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40 years of published science indicates that masks (especially surgical and cloth masks, as opposed to N95) don’t make much of a difference when it comes to these types of pathogens, but four or five hastily rushed papers from over the summer of this year say otherwise.
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The argument against pursuing a herd immunity strategy because of the so-called “long timers”, people who get COVID, and experience ongoing, long term and possibly life long effects is not a compelling argument. Statistically these cases are low, but more importantly they are not unique to COVID-19. We always have these edge cases with long term effects in seasonal flus and other diseases.
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The fatality curve is playing out along established patterns regardless of whether their were lockdowns or not.
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The first lockdown was understandable. A second one is completely unjustified.
Unfortunately what has happened is this has become about politics and ideology instead of public health. The real world, long term health effects of lockdowns and a crashed economy, the mental health issues, suicide, domestic violence and substance abuse are very real, and have now surpassed the damage being caused by the virus itself. I seem to remember two doctors in California who warned this would happen who were deplatformed and vilified for saying it.
The science and the data are out there, but those who push it forward are frequently accused of “reading what they want to see in the data”. If you revisit the two charts I posted above, that clearly show how case counts have diverged from fatalities, which are flat, I was told exactly that by people when I posted those charts a month ago.
Them: You’re just seeing what you want in that data.
Me: Aren’t these two curves clearly diverging, and one is flat?
Them: Just wait two weeks.
Me: Aren’t you literally extrapolating what you want to see in the data by saying that?
Them: These alt-right denialists are too much.
Well the two weeks, four weeks, six weeks everybody keeps telling me to wait for their extrapolation to kick in have come and gone and we can clearly see that the worst of the COVID-19 induced destruction is in the rear-view mirror. If the numbers change and new data emerges that changes things, I will modify my opinion accordingly. That’s the way it’s supposed work.
But we live in an age where policy makers working off of hypothetical models and career politicians with zero real world experience no economic skin in the game are egged on by billionaire
monopolistsphilanthropists and their pet projects innarcissismre-imagining society. They don’t know how to do anything other than double-down on failure while everybody else bears the consequences.We need to reopen the economy and start picking up the pieces from all the other collateral damage we’ve caused.
Here is the entire Triggernometry video, I highly recommend watching it and circulating it among your colleagues.
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- Hunter Biden Ex-Biz Associate Was Livid Over $5MM Side-Deal With Chinese: Texts
Hunter Biden Ex-Biz Associate Was Livid Over $5MM Side-Deal With Chinese: Texts
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/25/2020 – 22:00Former Biden business associate-turned-whistleblower, Tony Bobulinski, was absolutely livid after learning that the Bidens received an alleged $5 million interest-free loan from a now-bankrupt Chinese energy company following the release of a damning Senate report.
“You can imagine my shock when reading the report yesterday put out by the Senate committee. The fact that you and HB were lying to Rob, James and I while accepting $5 MM from Cefc is infuriating,” wrote Bobulinski to Jim Biden. (Via the Daily Caller‘s Chuck Ross):
Tony Bobulinski found out through the Senate report a few weeks ago that Hunter and Jim Biden had a side deal with CEFC China Energy.
Here’s Bobulinski’s message to Jim Biden about that.
“The fact that you and [Hunter Biden] were lying…” https://t.co/wn47I87tID pic.twitter.com/C79mXN4GXP
— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) October 25, 2020
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On Aug. 8, 2017, per Senate report, CEFC began a series of wire transfers to a pass through to Biden’s law firm that totaled $4.7 million over the next year.
Bobulinski says he had no idea that CEFC struck deal with Hunter and Jim.
— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) October 25, 2020
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CEFC refers to CEFC China Energy, a PLA-linked company which was paying Hunter $850,00 per year according to an email from Biden business associate James Gilliar to Bobulinksi – which is also the source of the “10 held by H for the big guy” email.
Emails obtained by the New York Post show that Hunter “pursued lucrative deals involving China’s largest private energy company — including one that he said would be “interesting for me and my family.”” according to the report.
You can read more on Hunter and the CEFC here. As an aside, but of course not coincidental we’re sure, the Clinton Foundation accepted a donation between $50,001 and $100,000 from CEFC.
And as the National Pulse notes, the Bidens weren’t the only members of the DC political establishment that the CEFC tried to ‘purchase.’
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A New York Times article, “A Chinese Tycoon Sought Power and Influence. Washington Responded.”, outlined how Ye sought influence in D.C., attempting to connect with powerful individuals like those from the Biden family.
“Ye Jianming, a fast-rising Chinese oil tycoon, ventured to places only the most politically connected Chinese companies dared to go. But what he wanted was access to the corridors of power in Washington — and he set out to get it. Soon, he was meeting with the family of Joseph R. Biden Jr., who was then the vice president,” the article noted.
However, members of D.C.’s political class didn’t always accept Ye’s overtures:
“Ye Jianming’s early efforts to break into the Washington power broker scene didn’t always pan out. Five years ago, CEFC approached Bobby Ray Inman, a retired admiral and national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, about setting up a joint venture, Mr. Inman said in an interview. The company promised it would pay him $1 million a year, without specifying what business they would go into. He turned down the offer. Later, Mr. Inman said, CEFC officials called him and said they were considering acquiring oil fields in Syria. Could he help them persuade the American military not to bomb them? Again, he said no.”
The Clintons, however, had no qualms about accepting money from Ye, a Chinese Communist Party member with ties to the People’s Liberation Army. The New York Times noted:
“Mr. Ye also further loosened CEFC’s purse strings, donating as much as $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation.”
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Meanwhile, Hunter Biden sought to avoid registering as a foreign agent in doing business with CEFC, suggesting that he and his prospective partners set up a shell company to be able to bid on contracts with the US government, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller.
A day after sending the message, Biden arranged a meeting between his father, Joe Biden, and Tony Bobulinski, one of the prospective partners in a deal with CEFC China Energy, a Chinese conglomerate whose chairman had links to the communist regime in Beijing.
“We don’t want to have to register as foreign agents under the FCPA which is much more expansive than people who should know choose not to know,” Hunter Biden wrote to Bobulinski on May 1, 2017, according to a message obtained by the DCNF.
“No matter what it will need to be a US company at some level in order for us to make bids on federal and state funded projects.” –Daily Caller
And according to Bobulinski, Joe Biden was in on the whole thing.
- Why Equality Of Outcome Can Never, Ever Work
Why Equality Of Outcome Can Never, Ever Work
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/25/2020 – 21:30Authored by Troy Smith via AmericanThinker.com,
A sharp, divisive cultural debate in the United States is that of equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome.
In the early 20th century, in support of equality of outcome, Soviet communist dictator Vladimir Lenin coined the phrase, “Who, Whom.” The concept was simple.
In a socialist society, where equality of outcome takes precedence over equality of opportunity, a critical question arises: who plans, directs, and redistributes the resources of a society, and to who is the beneficiary, or victim — the object, the “whom” — of said redistribution?
Politically speaking, the central maxim is to represent “disenfranchised” groups, provide them with monetary resources and government or state positions, and reshape any imbalances of power that have come to exist. The catch is that once power is given to central planners to initiate such action, “there will be no economic or social questions that would not be political questions in the sense that their solution will depend exclusive on who wields the coercive power” (Hayek, p. 138). In other words, the question of Who, Whom is what equality of outcome hinges upon. All internal struggles are squashed.
In a society structured to foster equality of opportunity, three things tend to determine how successful someone is or isn’t: intelligence (or skill), industriousness, and luck. On the surface, these things may seem unfair. For example, someone born into a family that promotes and develops education, who was taught about the value of hard work and had resources and connections on hand, would clearly have an enormous advantage over someone born into a split or uninterested family, enduring a failing public school system, with few or no mentors. Despite this, the equality of opportunity has two overwhelming advantages:
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first, success, or the lack thereof, is not predetermined by any bureaucracy or person in charge but instead by one’s own ability and fortune.
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Second, it is the only guarantee that we have freedom to own property and control our own lives, whereas with equality of outcome, all properties and liberties must be tightly regulated by the bureaucrat.
As Hayek notes,
“In a planned society we shall all know that we are better or worse off than others, not because of circumstances which nobody controls, and which it is impossible to foresee with certainty, but because some authority wills it” (p, 138).
Who would these bureaucrats then be in a landscape that promotes equality of outcome? One thing is for certain: it can never be the most qualified, honest candidates, as they would always promote meritocracy and the ability to achieve positive results as a primary criterion for redistributing resources. Instead, tribes must be used or created to “be able to obtain the support of the docile and the gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own but are prepared to accept a ready made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently” (p. 160). The bureaucrat must then be a person who collectivizes individuals based upon skin color, sex, orientation, or other superficial traits. The bureaucrat must then create and enforce policy that is based solely on a) those superficial traits as a lowest common denominator to b) be able to rally behind the political establishment in sufficient to secure elections and power. Equality of outcome, then, seeks not equality at all, but special privileges.
Professor Jordan Peterson notes that the confusion of how to properly seek and apply equality lies in a philosophical disagreement between individualists and postmodernists. Peterson claims that individualists seek to create hierarchies of competence — to produce the best brain surgeons, plumbers, carpenters, etc. — and to reward them based upon that competence. Conversely, a postmodernist believes that hierarchies can exist only via power and is thus willing to use pure political power to seek his objectives (Peterson, 2017).
If true, this is a dilemma that can be addressed not just politically, but philosophically. Politically speaking, it’s worth noting that an emphasis on utilizing the 10th Amendment of the Bill of Rights, giving states powers not specifically given to the federal government, can act as a bulwark to protect citizens from the equality of outcome mindset with the totalitarian consequences that come with it. Philosophically, it’s critical to educate and continually reinforce the notion that, in fact, the smallest minority is the individual himself. Protect the individual, and one comes closer and closer to achieving equality of opportunity while preserving the liberties of U.S. citizens. Failure to do so results in the ever increasing power and scope of the federal government.
In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek laments that “twenty-five years ago there was perhaps still some excuse for the naive belief that ‘a planned society can be a far more free society than the competitive laissez faire order it has come to replace’. But to find it once more held after twenty five years of experience and the reexamination of the old beliefs to which this experience has led, and at a time when we are fighting the results of those very doctrines, is tragic beyond words” (p. 209). The fact that this fight has become existential over a half-century since that statement was made, in the most free, prosperous nation ever to exist to boot, adds a whole new dimension to the word “tragic.”
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- Tropical Storm Zeta To Intensify Into Hurricane Leading To More Gulf Coast Chaos
Tropical Storm Zeta To Intensify Into Hurricane Leading To More Gulf Coast Chaos
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/25/2020 – 21:00Tropical Storm Zeta formed in the Caribbean Sunday morning, with the National Hurricane Center (NHC) forecasting the storm could strengthen into a hurricane Tuesday as a midweek landfall is expected on the US Gulf Coast. Zeta could strike the northern Gulf Coast on Wednesday. More specifically, hurricane models, as of Sunday afternoon, predict storm surge, rainfall, and hurricane wind impacts could be seen from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle.
To remind readers, on June 1, day one of hurricane season, we said this season “could be above average, with 13 to 19 named storms.” And to our surprise, Zeta is the 27th named storm, tying 2005 as the most active hurricane season on record.
In early August, one month before La Nina was declared, we said the hurricane season is about to go “from bad to worse with La Nina odds up.” By Sept. 10, the Climate Prediction Center confirmed La Nina, a weather pattern in the Northern Hemisphere that fuels more tropical activity.
On Sunday afternoon, Zeta was located a few hundred miles southeast of Cozumel, Mexico, and had maximum sustained winds of up to 40 mph. Here’s NHC’s 1700 ET Tropical Storm Zeta Outlook:
In early October, Hurricane Delta forced offshore oil and gas production on the Gulf Coast to reduce output by nearly two-thirds. Now Zeta is headed for the same region.
Ahead of potential landfall on the northern Gulf Coast next week, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards tweeted Sunday that “it’s unfortunate we face another tropical threat this late in a very active season.”
Edwards said, “We must roll up our sleeves, like we always do, and prepare for a potential impact to Louisiana.”
If Zeta makes landfall in Louisiana, it would be the fifth named storm this season, with the previous landfalls made by Cristobal, Laura, Marco, and Delta.
- Big Profits Are No Longer The Top Priority For Oil Investors
Big Profits Are No Longer The Top Priority For Oil Investors
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/25/2020 – 20:30By Irina Slav of OilPrice.com
For years, the oil industry drew in investors with sizable—and regular—returns. Even when oil prices fell, Big Oil found ways to keep paying dividends, even if it had to cut them, which happened only in extreme cases. Now, it is becoming increasingly clear that dividends—and profits—are no longer king. Today’s investors want other things from their oil investments.
Returns are not what they used to be
To be perfectly fair, returns are still important. They are just not the only reason for an investor to buy into or stay with an oil company. The sustainability of an oil company is garnering growing attention, too. But more on that later. Even if returns were the one and only priority of investors today, they would be unhappy.
Back in 2006, the average return on capital employed in upstream activities among Big Oil majors stood at more than 27 percent, a recent study by Boston Capital Group revealed. In 2019, that average was no more than 3.5 percent. That’s before the pandemic pummeled oil prices and forced severe spending cuts. The oil industry’s returns, the study showed, had become much less resilient to price movements.
The difference is too stark to be brushed off as coincidental. Indeed, the authors of the study note that one marked change in the industry during the period between 2006 and 2019 was a shift in companies’ upstream asset portfolios.
The myths about shale and deepwater
Until about 2006, BCG noted in its report, up to 80 percent of Big Oil’s portfolio was made up of conventional oil and gas assets. Since then, they have gone into things such as deepwater and shale. And while investors have been hearing for years how production costs in both deepwater and shale are going down, this has not been the case for all deepwater fields or all shale plays.
Unconventional and deepwater exploration and production continue, overall, to be a lot costlier than shallow water and conventional oil wells. For deepwater, this is because of purely physical challenges such as, as the name suggests, depth. For shale, it is because of the capital intensity of fracking.
A focus has been put on the quick turnaround time of fracked wells: they take a lot less than conventional wells to start bringing in returns on the investment employed. But unlike conventional wells, they have much shorter life spans. In short, the promise of unconventional and deepwater oil has, based on the rates of investment return, fallen well short of promises.
The ESG path
Oil investors have been growing unhappy with Big Oil for a while now, ever since the environmental, sustainable, and social governance trend gathered speed. A growing number of people looking for a company to buy into now want to know that this company’s business is environmentally responsible. That’s not just out of altruistic motives. Investors are being told that climate change constitutes an existential threat for many companies, and the more environmentally responsible a company is, the greater chance of survival it has.
Obviously, oil companies are in a delicate place, to put it mildly, when it comes to environmental responsibility. But it is not as delicate a spot as many may imagine. Global demand for energy is growing, and it will continue growing for the observable future despite the pandemic. And this means that oil and gas will continue to be needed.
“On one hand, the energy transition is real and here to stay,” Bob Maguire, managing director of Carlyle Group, told the Energy Intelligence Forum as quoted by Argus Media. “On the other hand, there are 280mn cars on the road in the US today, 279mn of them running on oil, and the average lifespan of a vehicle is 12 years.”
Oil and gas will continue to be needed, but they would need to be produced differently to satisfy investors’ changing sentiment towards the industry. According to Boston Capital Group’s study, 65 percent of oil investors want companies to prioritize ESG factors over profits, even if this has a negative on said profits.
As much as 83 percent say Big Oil should invest in low-carbon alternatives to their core business. An even greater majority of 86 percent believe investments by oil companies in clean energy technology would make them more attractive for investors. That should provide a pretty clear picture of where Big Oil needs to go.
The way forward is not all green
Some would argue that Big Oil is already going in that direction, with the European supermajors leading the way with renewable energy investment commitments worth tens of billions. Others would counter that they are still only making promises but little actual work on changing their business.
Indeed, whatever Big Oil’s green ambitions, they would need to stick with their core business of extracting fossil fuels, too. They need the revenues from this core business to fund their renewable energy ambitions. But they could do this differently, too. The BCG study suggests reinforcing their focus on lower-cost production, taking steps to reduce the capital intensity, and pay more attention to risk mitigation. All that in addition to the clearly unavoidable diversification into alternative energy that should make them more resilient to oil price shocks in the future.
- Putin Defends Bidens, Becomes 'Visibly Irritated' When Asked About $3.5 Million Moscow Payment To Hunter
Putin Defends Bidens, Becomes ‘Visibly Irritated’ When Asked About $3.5 Million Moscow Payment To Hunter
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/25/2020 – 20:00Russian President Vladimir Putin defended Hunter Biden on Sunday, saying the saw ‘nothing criminal’ regarding his past business ties with Ukraine or Russia, according to Reuters.
Putin’s statement would seem to fly in the face of the MSM’s latest conspiracy theory that he’s somehow behind the release of Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop contents, and you should believe that ‘whether or not it’s true.’ It would also suggest that Putin never possessed, or hasn’t read the New York Post‘s undisputed evidence that Hunter introduced a Burisma adviser to his father eight months before Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire their Prosecutor General, who was investigating Burisma at the time.
Putin appeared less friendly towards Trump in remarks broadcast by Russian state TV on Sunday. In what may be seen by some analysts as an attempt to try to curry favour with the Biden camp, he took the time to knock down what he made clear he regarded as false allegations from Trump about the Bidens.
“Yes, in Ukraine he (Hunter Biden) had or maybe still has a business, I don’t know. It doesn’t concern us. It concerns the Americans and the Ukrainians,” said Putin. –Reuters
“But well yes he had at least one company, which he practically headed up, and judging from everything he made good money. I don’t see anything criminal about this, at least we don’t know anything about this (being criminal),” said the Russian leader – who leftists in America have spent four years insisting is extremely corrupt, and will now lionize as a paragon of truth.
According to the report, Putin “reacted with visible irritation” over question regarding an alleged $3.5 million payment made to Hunter Biden the ex-Moscow Mayor’s widow – responding that he knew nothing about a commercial relationship between Hunter and the woman who President Trump said was tied to Putin during last week’s debate.
Lol again. I’d be more likely to see it as Putin defending the honor of a onetime director of a Yanukovich-aligned enterprise, but sure, it works the other way if you like. https://t.co/hNl8Z3sTSF
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) October 25, 2020
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In September, top Republicans called for the FBI and DOJ to investigate a series of wire transfers from Russian and Chinese businesspeople to Hunter Biden, after Senate Republicans released a report detailing the suspicious transactions – including a $3.5 million wire from a Russian billionaire whose late husband was the mayor of Moscow.
Russian Billionaire wired Hunter Biden 3 1/2 Million Dollars. This on top of all of the other money he received while Joe was V.P. Crooked as can be, but Fake Mainstream Media wants it to just go away!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 24, 2020
Coincidentally, the same Senate report infuriated ex-Biden business partner Tony Boboulinski after he learned that the Bidens received an alleged $5 million interest-free loan from a now-bankrupt Chinese energy company following the release of a damning Senate report.
Bobulinski emailed CEFC executives on Aug. 3, 2017 regarding the joint venture he thought he had with the Bidens and CEFC.
The next day, unknown to Bobulinski, CEFC wired $100k to Hunter.
That wire was flagged for possible criminal activity.
— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) October 25, 2020
In any event, looks like Putin backs Biden.
$3.5 million wire transfer to Hunter Biden from former Mayor of Moscow’s wife, that nobody knows what it was for, is apparently not “improper.” According to Rand Paul it’s criminal! – Supercut: Biden Insists There’s ‘Not One Single Scintilla of Evidence’ of Hunter Improprieties pic.twitter.com/a7f6sqlLzj
— Alexandra Datig | Front Page Index (@alexdatig) September 24, 2020
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- JPMorgan Sees Bitcoin Rising Up To Ten-Fold As Millennials Flood Into The "Alternative" Currency
JPMorgan Sees Bitcoin Rising Up To Ten-Fold As Millennials Flood Into The “Alternative” Currency
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/25/2020 – 19:35Nearly a year ago we highlighted a schism in generational views toward “fiat alternatives”: whereas older Americans would buy physical gold and precious metals, younger generations, including Millennials and Gen-Zers would primarily purchase cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. To this point, Charles Schwab showed that the Grayscale Bitcoin Trusts is the 5th largest holding in Millennials retirement accounts (including 401(k)s) with almost 2% of their assets tied to the success (or failure) of the largest cryptocurrency.
And now that Bitcoin is back over $13,000 for the first time since the infamous “spike” of Dec 2017, breaching the previous high of June 2019, following this week’s endorsement by Paypal – which in turn followed corporate support from Square and MicroStrategy – none other than JPMorgan’s quant Nick Panigirtzoglou writes in his closely followed Flows and Liquidity that all of this “is another big step toward corporate support for bitcoin, which in our opinion would facilitate and enhance over time Millennials’ usage of bitcoin as an “alternative” currency.”
Which brings us to the focus of the JPM quant’s note, which is rather familiar as it is precisely what we discussed back in 2019: namely the divergence between the behavior of the older vs. younger cohorts of the retail investors’ universe in their preference for “alternative” currencies.
As the JPMorgan strategist writes, echoing was we said last December, “the older cohorts prefer gold, while the younger cohorts prefer bitcoin as an “alternative” currency. Both gold and bitcoin ETFs have been experiencing strong inflows this year, as both cohorts see the case for an “alternative” currency.”
Panigirtzoglou then notes several correlation shifts as a result of this concurrent inflow:
- it has caused a change in the correlation pattern between bitcoin and other asset classes, with a more positive correlation between bitcoin and gold but also between bitcoin and the dollar (Figure 2).
- In addition, the simultaneous buying of US equities and Bitcoin by Millennials has increased the correlation between bitcoin and S&P500 since March, so it is more appropriate to characterise bitcoin as a “risk” asset rather than “safe” asset also, given its still very high 50%-60% volatility.
It’s not just bitcoin though: gold’s correlation with the S&P500 has been predominantly positive this year and its volatility at 20% is more similar to that of equities than currencies or bonds (Figure 3).
In other words, according to JPM, both bitcoin and gold could be increasingly characterized as “risk” rather than “safe” assets based on their behavior this year and (mostly young) investors’ preference for them is likely more of a reflection of a need for an “alternative” currency rather than a need for a “safe” asset or “hedge”.
This means that when it comes to millennials, there is an entirely “untapped” market from the perspective of utility, and as the JPM strategist predicts, bitcoin could compete more intensely with gold as an “alternative” currency over the coming years given that millennials will become over time a more important component of investors universe .
Whether or not that would result in weakness for gold is a different matter, but given how big the financial investment into gold is at the moment, a crowding out of gold as an “alternative” currency implies big upside for bitcoin over the long term.
Here, Panigirtzoglou calculates the total market capitalization for bitcoin is $240bn. While superficially this makes it comparable to the total size of gold ETFs at $210BN, this is erroneous since the bulk of gold as an investment is not in the widely derided “paper gold” class but physical. And indeed, as JPM notes, gold ETFs is not the main way wealth is stored via gold; instead wealth is mostly stored via gold bars and coins the stock of which, excluding those held by central banks, amounts to 42600 tonnes or $2.6tr including gold ETFs.
This means that mechanically “the market cap of bitcoin would have to rise 10 times from here to match the total private sector investment to gold via ETFs or bars and coins“, and while that may be optimistic (it would send the price of bitcoin to $130,000), even a modest crowding out of gold as an “alternative” currency over the longer term would, according to JPMorgan, imply “doubling or tripling of the bitcoin price from here.”
In other words, as Panagirtozglou summarizes, “the potential long-term upside for bitcoin is considerable as it competes more intensely with gold as an “alternative” currency we believe, given that Millennials would become over time a more important component of investors’ universe.”
Furthermore, as recent corporate forays into the cryptcurrency demonstrate, the market value of cryptocurrencies could eventually rise beyond what could be justified by only valuing them as a store of wealth; as JPMorgan explains, unlike gold cryptocurrencies derive value not only because they serve as stores of wealth but also due to their utility as means of payment: “The more economic agents accept cryptocurrencies as a means of payment in the future, the higher their utility and value.”
Contrary to Bloomberg’s traditionally myopic take on cryptos (which just today was out with the amusing “Bitcoin Resurgence Leaves Institutional Acceptance Unanswered“), the JPM quant then writes that Millennials and corporates endorsement of bitcoin have also induced greater interest by institutional investors as evidenced by the spike in activity across both bitcoin futures and options at CME, and that was before Paypal’s announcement this week.
JPM calculates that CME bitcoin futures open interest averaged a record of 10.5K contracts per day in Q3, up 32% compared
with Q2 and up 127% vs. Q3 2019. Institutional flow in particular saw strong growth, with 692 new accounts added. The number of large open interest holders averaged 79 in Q3, up 64% compared to Q3 2019.Meanwhile, JPM’s proxy for CME futures contacts is shown in the next chart. This position proxy spiked to a new high for the year as the bitcoin price breached $13k following Paypal’s announcement. In other words, JPM warns that for the near term, bitcoin looks “rather overbought and vulnerable to profit taking.”
Of course, the near-term selling would be only temporary, because as JPM concludes “the potential long-term upside for bitcoin is considerable we think as it competes more intensely with gold as an “alternative” currency given that Millennials would become over time a more important component of investors’ universe.”
And the punchline: “Mechanically, the market cap of bitcoin would have to rise 10 times from here to match the total private sector investment to gold via ETFs or bars and coins.”
- Rickards: Here's The Gold Price In 2026
Rickards: Here’s The Gold Price In 2026
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/25/2020 – 19:30Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,
The first two major gold bull markets were 1971–80 and 1999–2011. Today, gold is in the early stages of its third bull market in 50 years.
How far can gold go during this bull run?
If we simply average the performance of the past two bull markets and extend the new bull market on that basis, we would expect to see prices peak at $14,000 per ounce by 2026.
What specifically is driving the new gold bull market?
From both long-term and short-term perspectives, there are three principal drivers: geopolitics, supply and demand and Fed interest rate policy (the dollar price of gold is just the inverse of dollar strength. A strong dollar equals a lower dollar price of gold, and a weak dollar equals a higher dollar price of gold. Fed rate policy determines if the dollar is strong or weak).
The first two factors have been driving the price of gold higher since 2015 and will continue to do so.
Geopolitical hotspots like Iran, Korea, Crimea, Venezuela, China and Syria remain unresolved. Some are getting worse. Now we have armed conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia in the Caucasus.
Turkey, a NATO member, backs Azerbaijan, while Russia backs Armenia. While direct conflict between Turkey and Russia is remote, it cannot be ruled out.
Each flare-up drives a flight to safety that boosts gold along with Treasury notes.
The second factor driving gold prices is supply.
Gold’s supply/demand situation remains favorable with Russia and China steadily building up their reserves while global mining output has been flat for at least five years.
The third factor, Fed policy, is the most powerful on a day-to-day basis.
Rates are at zero after the Fed reacted aggressively in response to the COVID-19 crisis. But there’s little chance that the Fed will be raising rates anytime soon, which the Fed itself has admitted.
Meanwhile, debt levels are exploding. Debt was already growing faster than the economy before the lockdowns. Now it’s skyrocketing.
Debt is now at the highest levels since World War II. We’re nearly in the same position on a relative basis as we were in 1945.
Because of the natural deflationary state of the world and the high debt-to-GDP ratio, growth has been snuffed out.
And based on Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections — which I think are conservative — the debt-to-GDP ratio is going to keep going up.
Last year’s budget deficit was $984 billion. But the 2020 deficit is projected at $3.3 trillion, mostly because of the response to the pandemic. And federal debt is almost 100% of GDP.
Looking further ahead, annual deficits are projected to increase from 5% of GDP in 2030 to nearly 13% in 2050, when federal debt is projected to be an astonishing 195% of GDP.
There is no way out except inflation.
Add it all up and the environment is highly favorable for gold. But if you want evidence that owning gold is probably the best way to guard your wealth, just look at the “smart money.”
I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of billionaire hedge fund managers on business TV or streaming live from Davos. They like to discuss their investments in Apple, Amazon, Treasury notes and other stocks and bonds.
They love to “talk their book” in the hope that other investors will piggyback on their trades, run up the price and produce more profits for them.
What they almost never discuss in public is gold. After all, why have gold when stocks and bonds are so wonderful?
Well, I worked on Wall Street and in the hedge fund industry for decades. I also lived among the players in New York and Greenwich, Connecticut, at the same time. I’ve met the top hedge fund gurus in private settings. And here’s the thing:
I’ve never met one of them who does not have a large hoard of physical gold stored safely in a nonbank vault. Not one.
Of course, they won’t say so on TV because they don’t want to spook retail investors into dumping stocks and bonds. But watch what they do, not what they say.
If gold bullion is the go-to asset for billionaires, why don’t small investors have at least a 10% allocation to gold and silver bullion?
Some do, but most don’t. They’ll find out the hard way what individuals have learned over centuries and millennia:
Gold preserves wealth; paper assets do not.
The world is obviously not on a gold standard.
- Odds Of A "Blue Wave" Tumble, Hammering Risk
Odds Of A “Blue Wave” Tumble, Hammering Risk
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/25/2020 – 19:08Futures were hammered right off the start on Sunday evening amid what Bloomberg describes as “pessimism that a U.S. stimulus deal can be reached before the Nov. 3 election.” Which is great, only it’s dead wrong as the ridiculous “deal or no deal” narrative has been meaningless for weeks now and only 5-year-old Robinhooders still pretend it is a catalyst to asset prices.
What has, however, changed is a dramatic shift in online polling sentiment regarding what until just days ago was a certainty that a “Blue Sweep” would take place.
As a reminder, it is a Blue Sweep – not just a Biden victory – that is instrumental for the reflation trade, or what BofA called the “Bullish Elevation” scenario, as only unified governance will enable the continued CARES Act-style economic support that can return the US economy to the levels achieved at the end of 2019 (“a step-change to 3%+ GDP & higher productivity requires major new investments in R&D, capex, and a broader base of household demand; such policy shifts “require bold leadership and a governing majority, not tepid incrementalism”).
Well, for whatever reason – perhaps it just the latest newsflow, or that Trump gaining on Biden in key Battleground states to within a margin of error, various analyses from Marko Kolanovic, or just plain “optimism fatigue” – the Predictit odds of a Democratic Sweep have slumped from 62 cents two weeks ago to just 51 cents currently…
… and at one point in the past 24 hours, even dipping below 50, before recovering modestly, although a sweep is as of this moment a coin flip.
And since online odds still have a Biden victory as virtually assured, the reason for the slide in the chart above is the sudden surge in doubt that Democrats will wrest control of the Senate. Only without the Senate, the key anchor of the “stimulus” and “reflation” trades is gone.
In fact, according to BofA the only scenario worse than a Trump presidency and a Democratic Congress (which results in Stagnation), is a Biden presidency and a GOP Senate, which would lead to Deflation. This is how the bank described this particular scenario:
President Biden + Republican Senate = Bearish Gridlock
If Republicans retains the Senate they are very likely to block further stimulus under a Democratic President, which BofA says would be bearish for economic growth, corporate profits and financial markets (but it would be bullish for more stimulus from the Fed). In any case, as BofA sarcastically puts it, “after $21tn of monetary & fiscal stimulus in 2020, $0 of follow-on support would be deflationary.”
Indeed, political parties historically have used obstructionist tactics when out of power to thwart key legislation, most often through the “rediscovery” of commitments to “fiscal discipline”. As an example, BofA cites the budget austerity during 2012-2015 as a major reason for the slow economic recovery.
Such a scenario would mean a deflationary reset, as “investors should prepare for lower returns and higher volatility. Raise cash and buy Treasuries, munis, and high-quality corporate bonds.”
Meanwhile, as we discussed last week when we observed the latest record net short in 30Y futures across leveraged funds and speculators – which in the week ending Oct 20 turned even more record short – all that is needed for the mother of all bond short squeezes is a “deflationary” catalyst.
Republicans holdings on to the Senate would be just that catalyst, and with online odds suddenly suggesting that there are even odds that Democrats can not take the Senate going long the 30Y here could not only be the best hedge to a “shock” outcome on Nov 3, but make some trader’s career if on election night we learn that the GOP has held on to the senate.
Incidentally, the unwind of the consensus trade would “work” even if there is no clarity on the presidency for weeks, as the GOP has no chance of retaking the House, and so the real trigger that would crush consensus is not what happens to the presidency but the Senate, and by implication to the Blue Wave. As of right now, the odds of such a Wave happening are no better than a coin toss.
- Trump To 'Immediately Fire' FBI, CIA Directors If Reelected
Trump To ‘Immediately Fire’ FBI, CIA Directors If Reelected
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/25/2020 – 19:00President Trump will ‘immediately’ move to fire FBI Director Christopher Christopher Wray and CIA Director Gina Haspel, along with Defense Secretary Mark Esper, according to Axios – which spoke to “people who’ve discussed these officials’ fates with the president.”
And while the list of pink slips is allegedly much longer, Trump’s top priority is getting rid of Wray – whose FBI sat on alleged evidence of Biden corruption in Ukraine contained on Hunter Biden’s laptop (along with alleged child porn), while Trump was impeached for asking the Ukrainians to investigate exactly that.
According to Axios:
- Wray and Haspel are despised and distrusted almost universally in Trump’s inner circle. He would have fired both already, one official said, if not for the political headaches of acting before Nov. 3.
Recall that Haspel served as station chief for the CIA’s London branch, and was – in Senator Rand Paul’s words, “a close acolyte of John Brennan” (who, as CIA chief, couldn’t legally spy on Americans on domestic soil). And what took place in London? For starters, the FBI’s spy operation spy operation on Trump campaign aides conducted by US intelligence operative Stephan Halper. Most notably, the UK-based Cambridge professor (and longtime US intelligence asset whose father-in-law was former director of the CIA, and who allegedly spied on the Carter administration), lured Trump aide George Papadopoulos into an espionage operation aimed at the Trump campaign – predicated on ‘Russian dirt’ rumors allegedly fed to him by a Clinton ally, Joseph Mifsud.
London was also the venue for a summer, 2016 meeting between former FBI agent Peter Strzok and Australian Diplomat Alexander Downer – another Clinton ally who claimed that Papadopoulos drunkenly admitted to knowledge that the Russians had Hillary Clinton’s emails.
More recently, Haspel was accused of personally blocking the release of documents exposing the Russiagate hoax. “This isn’t just a scandal about Democrat projection, this is a scandal about what was a coup planned against the incoming administration at the highest levels and I can report here tonight that these declassifications that have come out,” The Federalist‘s Sean Davis told FOX News host Tucker Carlson last month. “Those weren’t easy to get out and there are far more waiting to get out.”
Downer and Halper, meanwhile, are linked through UK-based Haklyut & Co. an opposition research and intelligence firm – founded by three former British intelligence operatives in 1995 to provide the kind of otherwise inaccessible research for select governments and Fortune 500 corporations.
Downer – a good friend of the Clintons, had been on Haklyut’s advisory board for a decade, while Halper is connected to the research firm through Director of U.S. operations Jonathan Clarke, with whom he has co-authored two books (h/t themarketswork.com). Also interesting via Lifezette – “Downer is not the only Clinton fan in Hakluyt. Federal contribution records show several of the firm’s U.S. representatives made large contributions to two of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign organizations.”
Back the the point – much of the Obama DOJ’s operation against the Trump administration occurred on UK soil when Haspel, a Brennan acolyte, was CIA station chief.
Accrording to Axios, “The view of Haspel in the West Wing is that she still sees her job as manipulating people and outcomes, the way she must have when she was working assets in the field.“
- The Elephant In The Room: Florida School Revokes Parking Privileges Of Student With Trump Display On Truck
The Elephant In The Room: Florida School Revokes Parking Privileges Of Student With Trump Display On Truck
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/25/2020 – 18:40We recently discussed the case of a Louisiana high school senior who had his parking space mural to President Donald Trump painted over by his school.
Now a Florida senior has an equally troubling free speech case involving the Volusia County School District. Tyler Maxwell is suing the District after it barred him from parking his pickup truck with a large elephant in the back featuring Trump’s name.
The District declared that such “political statements” are now banned.
The school district’s position is at odds with cases protecting non-disruptive political statements or symbols. Many of us in the free speech community have long complained that the 1969 case of Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District is often dismissed in cases addressing the free speech rights of students. The famous decision declared that students “do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Yet, school officials routinely try to regulate speech. Indeed, we just saw a Vermont district fire a principal for questioning the BLM movement on Facebook.
The controversy is a classic example of how school officials have become emboldened in acts of censorship and speech regulation. We have been discussing the alarming rise of speech limitations and sanctions imposed by school officials. We have seen a steady erosion of the free speech rights of students in the last decade. The Supreme Court accelerated that trend in its Morse decision. Former JDHS Principal Deb Morse suspended a student in 2002 during the Olympic Torch Relay for holding up a 14-foot banner across from the high school that read “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.” The case ultimately led to the Supreme Court which ruled in Morse v. Frederick ruling in 2007 for the Board — a decision that I strongly disagreed with and one that has encouraged over-reaching by school officials into protected areas. Cheerleaders are expected to conform their free speech to accept positions or risk removal from their teams and even liking images on social media can get students suspended.
We have seen school officials even crackdown on bumper stickers on cars.
Maxwell not only was barred from showing his elephant but he was barred from parking on school grounds.
A judge has imposed a temporary restraining order against the District to allow Maxwell (and his elephant) to return to the parking lot pending consideration of his case.
Nancy Wait of Volusia County Schools declared:
“The school board has an obligation to provide politically neutral campuses for all students,” Wait wrote. “We allow political expression by students in the form of a t-shirt or bumper sticker. But large signage is a different situation. A passerby could interpret a large sign in a school parking lot to be an endorsement by the school district. We don’t allow our parking lot to be used for political statements.”
I do not see why this elephant is disruptive. Indeed, I find it quite impressive. This is an 18-year-old senior who will be voting for the first time this year. He is showing an excitement and engagement that we should be fostering. Why is that a bad thing? Instead, the District is teaching students to live with censorship and speech controls.
It is time we have a discussion of the elephant in the room in education from K-12 to colleges. We are embracing censorship as a value while increasingly treating free speech as inherently dangerous or destabilizing. That is one lesson we should not be teaching to a new generation of citizens.
- California Begins Cutting Power To 361,000 Customers As Fire Risk Surges
California Begins Cutting Power To 361,000 Customers As Fire Risk Surges
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/25/2020 – 18:20Facing bone-crushing dryness and the strongest winds of the wildfire season, California’s largest utility company, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) which filed for historic bankruptcy due to its role in previous infernos sweeping across the state has “de-energized certain electrical lines” in Northern California, which may result in what could be the largest mass blackout of the year.
PG&E released a statement Sunday morning, informing customers that 361,000 homes and or businesses were part of the blackout, affecting 36 counties, mainly in Northern California, starting at 10:00 PST. Listed below are the counties affected by the planned blackouts:
PG&E’s initial projection of homes and businesses that would lose power on Sunday is down 105k from Friday’s 466k estimate. The power company’s primary reason to de-energize some of its power lines is that high winds are expected on Sunday, increasing the risk for trees and or limbs to fly into powerlines and potentially ignite fires in regions of low humidity and dry vegetation.
“This event looks particularly dangerous due to a combination of factors that we continue to track,” said Scott Strenfel, PG&E’s head of meteorology and fire science, who was quoted by Bloomberg. Strong winds and low humidity were expected throughout the day on Sunday, he said.
The next round of blackouts, expected imminently, will be a devastating blow for the state, already battered by extreme weather this fire season, scorching more than 4 million acres so far. PG&E has preemptively cut power four times this season.
High wind gusts are expected for some regions in Northern California through Monday, tweeted The National Weather Service (NWS) Sacramento.
Here is a timing loop of the forecast wind gusts over Norcal from 11 am Sunday to 5 pm Monday, Oct 25-26, 2020. #sacwx pic.twitter.com/bdRdKm5JgU
— NWS Sacramento (@NWSSacramento) October 25, 2020
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NWS Sacramento outlines a “dangerous” fire risk for Northern California through Sunday.
“Dangerous Critical to Extremely Critical fire weather conditions are expected across portions of northern California today, as strong offshore winds occur over critically dry fuels. Strongest winds are expected tonight into early Monday morning.”
A red flag warning was posted for much of Northern California today. What this means is that fire weather conditions are ripe for wildfires.
More on the red flag warning.
New wildfires are already starting to emerge.
New incident: #PointFire off Gas Point Rd and Libby Ln, Cottonwood in Shasta county is 50 acres. @CALFIRESHU https://t.co/O4qj6z3Q5l pic.twitter.com/WvywUB5VWB
— CAL FIRE (@CAL_FIRE) October 25, 2020
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#PopeFire off Lower Chiles Valley Rd and Chiles Pope Valley Rd in Napa County remains 61 acres and 80% contained. @CALFIRELNUhttps://t.co/8eonzAbfk3 pic.twitter.com/jaDiOLCjKi
— CAL FIRE (@CAL_FIRE) October 25, 2020
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Here are the current wildfires burning in California:
As rolling blackouts begin, Californians are frantically searching on the internet to see if their homes will be in the affected areas.
California’s fire season generally lasts through October but given La Nina conditions, it could extend into November.
- Morgan Stanley: There Is More Downside Than Upside From Current S&P500 Levels
Morgan Stanley: There Is More Downside Than Upside From Current S&P500 Levels
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/25/2020 – 18:00From Michael Wilson, Morgan Stanley chief US equity strategist
With just one week to go until the US elections, the outcome remains uncertain. It’s also holding up the next round of fiscal stimulus. This political uncertainty along with the arrival of the second wave of COVID-19 has pushed equity volatility higher and the S&P 500 hasn’t been able to make a new closing high in eight weeks, the longest period since the new bull market began in March.
From a technical perspective, I have been watching a key resistance area for the S&P 500 since early September that comes in around 3550.
Two weeks ago, the index failed to break through that level for the second time. This technical failure is not the end of the bull market, but it does suggest that this level of resistance is formidable and will be difficult to surmount in the near term. On the downside, I continue to like the 200-day moving average, which comes in around 3125. Bottom line, from a technical perspective I stick with our call from early September that the S&P 500 will be range-bound between 3100 and 3550 into November.
From a valuation perspective, the S&P 500 is trading at an equity risk premium of 380bp. That’s a fair but full level based on the current realized equity volatility.
However, with so much uncertainty surrounding the outcome of the US elections, the second wave of COVID-19, and the upward pressure on long-term interest rates and volatility, the equity risk premium should be about 10% higher, in my view. In short, we like our 3100-3550 range on the S&P 500 as a good guide for US equity risk-taking from both a technical and valuation perspective.
Beyond this simple trading range view for the S&P 500, there is a more important opportunity for investors to consider. With the re-valuation of equities largely over at this point, we believe that investors should favor companies that can deliver higher earnings growth than what’s already priced. While many seem to favor companies that have been able to operate normally during this pandemic and take share, this may not be the best investment strategy from here. Essential businesses/services or digital transformation enablers have been spectacular performers this year, but this just means that expectations are high and comparisons difficult. Furthermore, there is likely to be some payback on demand and loss of wallet share next year for such companies. In contrast, businesses and services that have not been able to operate normally may provide better investments at this time primarily because expectations remain low and wallet share gains are likely.
Investors need to be selective of course because many of these companies that are not able to operate normally today may never recover, at least not fully. One thing that is certain about this pandemic is that many things we used to take for granted are likely to be different going forward. However, many things will return to exactly the way they were before and experience pent-up demand next year. Secondarily, there are changes afoot that will require significant investment as the world demands better and safer ways of doing things. One such area is infrastructure, where the world has underinvested for years, especially in the United States. With central banks willing and able to finance such a popular endeavor, we think that this is one very attractive investment opportunity today.
This would favor companies in the industrial and materials sectors, particularly base metals like copper. We also think that there could be pockets of acute inflation next year as demand comes roaring back to the parts of the economy where supply has been destroyed. This means higher long-term interest rates even if the Fed remains on hold with overnight rates. While that is a headwind for fixed income investments and stocks levered to lower interest rates, it’s also a tailwind for stocks levered to higher rates, which includes those same infrastructure beneficiaries as well as financials and other cyclicals.
Bottom line, we expect the S&P index to remain range-bound in the near term, with more downside than upside from current levels. We recommend taking advantage of any near-term correction in the headline index to add to investments in areas that are likely to be the biggest beneficiaries of the economy reopening further next year. In short, the bull market is intact as it broadens out to smaller, more cyclical parts of the market – a strategy we’ve advocated since April but one that is still underappreciated and in its early days in terms of its upside potential.
- Outrage After WaPo Says To 'Treat Biden Leaks As Foreign Intel Operation – Even If They Probably Aren't'
Outrage After WaPo Says To ‘Treat Biden Leaks As Foreign Intel Operation – Even If They Probably Aren’t’
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/25/2020 – 17:50As MSM outlets twist in the wind waiting for anyone to deny the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop contents (while blurry images of M&M’s spanning Hunter’s penis and crack-smoking footjob videos permeate dark corners of the web), the Washington Post is advising people to just assume that it’s a foreign intelligence operation, and ignore Occam’s razor, or two former Biden business associates who have gone on record and provided direct evidence.
Theory 1: Hunter Biden, an admitted drug abuser, took a damaged laptop full of incriminating evidence to a repair shop less than 5 miles from his father’s house and forgot about it
Theory 2: Putin did it https://t.co/EVnPtWDZ85
— Relax, I didn’t vote for the guy you hate (@jtLOL) October 23, 2020
Holding the Post accountable for their literal propaganda is journalist Glenn Greenwald, who not only shreds WaPo‘s farcical attempts at journalism – but the rest of the MSM’s as well.
This is absolutely how mainstream US outlets think: exactly what is said there by Rid (one of those centrist Professor outlets use to elevate their unhinged conspiracy theories with a facade of expertise):
*We have no idea if this conspiracy is true, but we will say it anyway.* pic.twitter.com/9upWmi5BtP
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 25, 2020
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US media outlets outside of right-wing sites were desperate not to report the Hunter emails and to block their reporters from doing so. So they just started printing that it was “Russian disinformation,” knowing there was no basis for that, until they could figure out what to do.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 25, 2020
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Independent journalists like Taibbi, and platforms and outlets that won’t censor, are more rare than ever, especially now when most national journalists are in full-on Elect Biden mode at the expense of everything else. Support them:https://t.co/SdO96ulLhr
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 25, 2020
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No purported news outlet has worth if it constrains or censors writers and reporters and forces them to advance the partisan preferences of editors or to flatter the ideological presuppositions of their audience. Support independent journalism: only those outlets that are free.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 25, 2020
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Oddly, we don’t recall the Post‘s kneejerk over an unverified anti-Trump dossier created by a British spook, which the FBI referred to as “Crown material,” being that it was part of a ‘foreign intelligence operation’ prior to its investigation and subsequent debunking.
Of course, in the fullness of time it turned out to be a domestic hit-job with significant foreign assistance.
Meanwhile…
Joe Biden & surrogates are lying. On 2/2/16, Ukrainian prosecutor seizes property of Burisma owner, so he’s clearly under investigation. For next two weeks, Biden repeatedly calls Ukrainian president, who eventually fires prosecutor. Check link for more: https://t.co/NLy80G66xj https://t.co/U7txnAFo2d
— Lee Smith (@LeeSmithDC) October 24, 2020
And of course, social media platforms’ masks are all the way off in terms of suppressing a story which would damage their favored candidate.
So @MCM_ct was locked out of Twitter for 12 hours because he pointed out censorship and showing a link that showed an error message. Wild days. pic.twitter.com/hURWdd8xgQ
— Ed ☯️ (@DowdEdward) October 25, 2020
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RT! Ali Alexander (@ALI) has been locked out of his Twitter account for sharing evidence that Hunter Biden had sex and smoked crack with a Chinese agent of compromise. pic.twitter.com/4Q9oyKE9g0
— alialexander.org (@alialexanderorg) October 24, 2020
- In Bizarre Freudian Slip, Biden Brags About Assembling "Most Extensive Voter Fraud Organization In History"
In Bizarre Freudian Slip, Biden Brags About Assembling “Most Extensive Voter Fraud Organization In History”
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/25/2020 – 17:44Former Vice President Joe Biden suffered from either a senior moment or a Freudian slip on Saturday, when he told Pod Save America host Dan Pfeiffer – a longtime Obama aide – that his campaign has assembled the “most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.”
“What’s your message to the folks who have not yet voted or do not yet have a plan to vote. And part two, for the 50 million Americans who’ve already voted, what can they do over the last ten days to help make sure that you’re the next President of the United States?” Pfeiffer asked Biden.
Biden returned word salad at first, saying “Well, first of all, you know, uh, what really rankles, uh, my opponent is I say that, uh, the thing that bothers him most is he’s not a patch on Barack’s jeans. I mean, you know Barack was one hell of a president, and I tell you what, man, what an honor it was — I think you guys believe it, too — to serve with him. I mean, incredible honor. And, uh, I’m not being solicitous. I really mean that. Um, he had more integrity in his little finger than most people have in their whole body and he had a backbone like a ramrod. Has one.”
Then Biden touted his ‘voter fraud’ organization:
“Secondly, we’re in a situation where we have put together — and you’d [sic] guys, did it for our, the president Obama’s administration, before this — we have put together, I think, the most extensive and and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics. What the president is trying to do is discourage people from voting by implying their vote won’t be counted, it can’t be counted, we’re gonna challenge it, and all these things. If enough people vote, it’s gonna overwhelm the system. You see what’s happening now. You guys know it as well as I do. You see the long, long lines in early voting. You see the millions of people who have already cast a ballot.”
Watch:
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