Today’s News 28th August 2024

• Recent Events Prove Western Nations Are Highly Vulnerable To Cyber Calamity
  Recent Events Prove Western Nations Are Highly Vulnerable To Cyber Calamity

  Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

  As most people are aware, this month there was a sweeping internet outage across the US which led to a failure in roughly 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices. Disruptions included banks, airline networks, emergency call centers, online retailers and numerous corporate networks. The outage is estimated to have caused at least $5.4 billion in profit losses and it only lasted about a day.

  

  The alleged cause of the breakdown was Crowdstrike, a cyber-security company that uses large scale data updates to Microsoft Windows networks to counter cyber threats. Instead, the company uploaded bugged code and caused a cascading outage. Mac and Linux machines were not affected.

  The scale of the shutdown was immense – Over 25% of Fortune 500 companies were frozen. Travel essentially stopped. Business transactions for many companies ceased. Some banks including Bank of America, Capital One, Chase, TD Bank and Wells Fargo could not function and customers could not access their accounts.

  The event reminded me of the panic surrounding the Y2K scare 25 years ago. Of course, that was all nonsense; US systems were definitely not digitized to an extent great enough to cause a disaster should there be an internet crash or a software crash. But today things are very different. Nearly every sector of the American (and European) economy and many utilities are directly dependent on a functioning internet.

  The fear that prevailed during Y2K was unrealistic in 1999. Now, it makes perfect sense.

  I often hear preppers talk about the impending danger of an EMP leading to a grid down scenario. However, this kind of attack is highly overblown. Even major solar storms have not caused the kind of electrical breakdown that theorists suggest might happen. Instead, I would recommend worrying a lot more about cyber threats. I believe these events will become far more common in the next few years for a number of reasons.

  First and foremost, there is the potential for random error like the Crowdstrike incident. Then there’s the potential for a foreign attack on US and European digital infrastructure. Then, there’s the potential for a false flag event BLAMED on random error or a foreign government in order to foment war or economic collapse.

  In 2021 in my article ‘Cyber Polygon: Will The Next Globalist War Game Lead To Another Convenient Catastrophe?’ I warned that if the pandemic crisis failed to achieve the centralization goals of the World Economic Forum and other globalist institutions, they may use a cyber crisis instead. WEF head Klaus Schwab incessantly compared the idea of a “Cyber Pandemic” to the covid pandemic. He suggested that governments would have to respond to both in a similar fashion (i.e. lockdowns and extensive controls on individual freedoms).

  In the past I have mentioned a very interesting event that was barely covered by the corporate media called the “Fastly Outage.” I examined the implications of this and more in my article ‘Obama’s Weird New Movie And America’s Extreme Vulnerability To Cyber Attack’.

  In June of 2021 there was an internet outage that led to large swaths of the web going completely dark, including a number of mainstream news sites, Amazon, eBay, Twitch, Reddit, etc. A host of government websites also went down. All this happened when content delivery network (CDN) company Fastly experienced a “bug.” Although Amazon had its website back online within 20 minutes, the brief outage cost the company over $5.5 million in sales.

  A content delivery network is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. They make up what is known as the “backbone” of the internet. Only a handful of these company’s support a vast majority of internet activity. All it would take is for a few to go down, and the internet goes down, taking our economy with it.

  The recent Crowdstrike situation is perhaps the worst web disruption of all time, and that was just a bug in a software update. Imagine if someone wanted to deliberately damage internet functions for an extended period of time? The results would be catastrophic.

  With supply chains completely dependent on “just-in-time” freight deliveries and those deliveries dependent on efficient digital communications and payments between retailers and manufacturers, a web-down scenario for more than a few days would cause an immediate loss of consumer goods. Stores would empty within hours should the public realize that new shipments might not arrive for a long time.

  Keep in mind, I’m not even accounting for payment processing between customers and retailers. If that shuts down, then ALL sales shut down. Then, whatever food you have left in your pantry or in storage is what you will have to live on until the problem is fixed. If it is ever fixed…

  Network attacks are difficult to independently trace, which means anyone can initiate them and anyone can be blamed afterwards. With the increasing tensions between western and eastern nations the chances of an attack are high. And corrupt government officials could also trigger an internet crisis and blame it on foreign enemies – Either to convince the public to go to war, or to convince the public to accept greater authoritarianism.

  I believe a cyber attack is the next most likely global disaster. We weathered covid and defeated the draconian mandates. The economy is in the midst of a stagflation crisis but the system is still operating. But what if the next ploy is a complete shutdown of the web and a fast moving financial collapse?

  Figuring out who triggered the breakdown would be nearly impossible. We could suspect, but proving who did it is another matter. In the meantime, western officials controlled by globalist interests could lock down internet traffic and eliminate alternative media platforms they don’t like, giving the public access to corporate news sources only.

  There are millions of Americans out there ready for a systemic collapse. According to surveys around 30% of adult Americans now consider themselves preppers. But that leaves 70% of the population in a daze, unaware and panicking should the supply chain break. Will they care who was behind the attack? Probably not. They’ll be far more concerned with simple survival.

  What are the most practical solutions to this? As always we can store necessities to protect our families and friends. To protect data, I recommend shutting OFF Windows Updates to prevent something like a Crowdstrike error from affecting your devices. You can also set up a Linux-based device with all your important data storage secured.

  You can purchase an exterior hard drive and clone your computer data, then throw it in a closet or a waterproof case. Then there is the option of building a completely offline device (a computer that has never and will never connect to the internet).

  These options protect you and your valuable files, but there’s not much that can be done to prevent a national scale cyber attack and the damage that one could cause. Organizing for inevitable chaos and violence is all you can do.

  With a cyber-event there is the distinct danger of communications disruptions – No cell phones, no email, no social media, nothing. So, having knowledge in ham radio and radio communications is a must. I’m a general class ham and I’m still finding there’s more to learn, but a basic knowledge of radios, frequency bands and repeaters will help you to at least listen in on chatter and get important information outside of controlled news networks.

  The people who used to claim it’s “doom mongering” to examine the threat of cyber attacks have been proven utterly wrong this past month. We just witnessed one of the worst internet implosions of all time and more are on the way. Prepare accordingly and remember that technological dependency is a double-edged sword. Use your tech wisely and don’t let it run your life.

  *  * *

  One survival food company, Prepper All-Naturals, has proactively dropped prices to allow Americans to stock up ahead of projected hikes in beef prices. Their 25-year shelf life steaks currently come at a 25% discount with promo code “invest25”.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/27/2024 – 23:25

• Top Defense Firms Set For Another Record Cash Flow Year As Wars Rage In Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon
  Top Defense Firms Set For Another Record Cash Flow Year As Wars Rage In Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon

  Authored by Kyle Anzalone via The Libertarian Institute,

  As wars in Ukraine and the Middle East continue to rage, Vertical Research Partners forecasts top weapon manufacturers will experience record cash flow during the coming years.

  The analysis, which was commissioned by the Financial Times, reports, “The leading 15 defense contractors are forecast to log free cash flow of $52 billion in 2026,” with the “Five top US defense contractors are forecast to generate cash flow of $26 billion.”

  

  The cash flow in 2026 will be double the 2021 numbers. The record numbers are part of an upward trend for weapons makers already benefiting from a surge in global military spending and conflict.

  This had led to some controversial policies among these firms at home:

  Companies had already directed billions of dollars into share buybacks before the recent flood of new orders; some took on extra leverage to do so. Last year was the strongest for buybacks by aerospace and defence companies in both the US and Europe for the past five years, according to data from the Bank of America, although levels remain far below those of other sectors.

  …The large repurchases using taxpayers’ money by US contractors have prompted criticism among some lawmakers who have questioned whether companies are investing enough in new facilities and production. Executives have insisted they are boosting capital spending even as they return money to investors.

  Washington is driving the worldwide arms race. The US military budget is about the same as the next ten countries combined. Additionally, under President Joe Biden, Washington funneled billions in weapons to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.

  The policy has led to massive wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Lebanon. Additionally, tensions in the South China Sea are boiling as Israel and Iran are on the brink of a potential direct war. 

  The White House is well positioned to deescalate many of the world’s conflicts. The US could push Israel and Ukraine to negotiate by leveraging Washington’s military aid to Tel Aviv and Kiev. 

  

  In the South China Sea, potential conflicts between China and Taiwan or the Philippines have been partially driven by Washington’s pledge to go to war against Beijing for Manila and Taipei.

  The US has also given the Philippines and Taiwan hundreds of millions in weapons, further provoking China. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/27/2024 – 22:35

• Americans Are Least Loyal To Their Carmakers
  Americans Are Least Loyal To Their Carmakers

  In a recent survey by Statista Consumer Insights, almost half of Americans said that they were likely or very likely to change their car make on the next possible occasion. Consumers appeared more loyal to their primary bank, smartphone brand, mobile carrier, home and car insurance as well as internet provider, with only around 30 percent saying they were likely to make a switch when it was next possible. At 27 percent, the internet provider was the least likely to be changed.

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  As part of the same survey, 86 percent said they were actually satisfied or very satisfied with their car make, showing that switching up carmakers has less to do with dissatisfaction and more with trying new types of cars. 80 percent also said they were satisfied with their internet provider. Almost half of respondents said they wanted to purchase a new or used car in the 12 months after the survey. The most commonly owned brands in the United States were Chevrolet and Ford, followed by Toyota, BMW and Honda, according to the survey.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/27/2024 – 22:10

• This Is Not Capitalism
  This Is Not Capitalism

  Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

  The word capitalism has no stable definition and should probably be permanently retired. That won’t happen, however, because too many people are invested in its use and abuse. 

  

  I’m long over trying to push my definition over someone else’s understanding, generally viewing disputes about vocabulary and dictionary definitions as a distraction against the real debate over concepts and ideals. 

  The point of what follows is not to define precisely what capitalism is (my friend CJ Hopkins is hardly alone in describing it as once emancipatory but now rapacious) but rather to highlight the many ways in which economic systems of the industrialized world have made a hard turn against the whole ethos of voluntarism in the commercial sector. 

  Still, let’s pretend we can agree on a stable description of a capitalist economy. Let’s call it the system of voluntary and contractual exchange of otherwise contestable and privately owned property titles that permits capital accumulation, eschews top-down planning, and defers to social processes over state planning.

  It is, ideally, the economic system of a society of consent. 

  This is obviously an ideal type. So described, it is inseparable from freedom as such and forbids state planning, expropriation, and legal privileges for some over others. How does the status quo match up against that? In uncountable ways, our economic systems utterly fail the test, with all the results that one would expect. 

  What follows is a short list of all the ways in which the US system does not comport with some ideal type of capitalistic marketplace. 

  1. Governments have become a main customer of tech and media platforms, instilling an ethos of political deference and cooperation, resulting in surveillance, propaganda, and censorship. This happened gradually enough so that many observers simply did not notice the turn. They held onto their reputation as go-getting capitalist companies even as one platform after another fell to become minions of state power. It began with Microsoft, extended to Google, came to Amazon with its web service in particular, and made its way to Facebook and Twitter, even as taxes, regulations, and intense enforcement of intellectual property consolidated the entire digital-tech industry. 

  In the course of the change, these companies somehow still held onto their reputations as disruptors with a libertarian ethos, even as they were ever more deployed in service of regime priorities. When Trump took office in 2016, and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and UK’s Boris Johnson seemed to be forming a populist resistance force, the crackdown began. With Covid lockdowns, all these platforms swung into action to feed public panic, silence dissent, and propagandize for untested and unnecessary shots of an experimental technology. The deed was done: all these institutions became faithful servants of an emergent corporatist empire. 

  Now they are full cooperators with the censorship-industrial complex, while the few outliers like Elon Musk’s X and Rumble are facing enormous pressure to conform and get on board. The CEO of Telegram has been arrested simply for not providing a backdoor to Five-Eyes governments, while NATO nations are investigating and arresting for the act of posting disrespectful memes. Digital tech is the most notable and thrilling innovation of our times and yet it has been browbeaten and distorted into a main tool of state power. 

  2. The US has a medical cartel that works with regulatory agencies and official institutions to impose poisons on the public, charge outrageous prices, cooperate with business cartels to block alternatives, and promote addiction and ill health. The interventions in the sector are legion, from licensing to employer mandates to mandated benefits packages to government funding to financial support from patent-protected and indemnified pharmaceutical companies that fund and control the very agencies that are supposed to regulate them. 

  The signs and symbols of market economics still exist but in a highly distorted way that makes independent medical practice nearly impossible. It’s not socialism and it’s not capitalism but something else, like a privately-owned medical cartel that works hand in glove with coercive power at public expense. And the coercion is not about promoting health but promoting subscription-based dependency on pharmaceuticals, which have evaded normal liabilities that would otherwise pertain in a genuine marketplace. 

  3. The US has an educational system that is mostly government-funded, blocks competition, forces participation, wastes students’ time, and pushes a political agenda of compliance and indoctrination. Public schooling in the US has late-19th century origins but the compulsory features came many decades later, alongside bans on teen work, and this later mutated into state-funded universities that enlisted ever larger shares of the population into the system, eventually saddling several generations into vast debt that cannot be paid. The families seeking alternatives end up paying many times over: through taxes, tuition, and lost income. State intervention into educational services is massive and comprehensive, blotting out all normal capitalistic forces and leaving comprehensive state planning. 

  The whole system is so bad that when the Covid lockdowns took place, teachers, administrators, and many students too welcomed the chance to give it all a rest. Many teachers have not come back and the system as a whole is now worse than ever, with private alternatives popping up everywhere and homeschooling now more common than ever. But even so, regulations and mandates prevent the full flowering of a market-based system, even though no sector is more obviously governed by markets as they were in most of human history. 

  4. Agricultural subsidies that build vast industries that crush smaller farming and capture the regulatory apparatus and foist bad food on the public. Anyone in farming knows this. The system has gone the way of these other sectors like tech and medicine to become heavily cartelized and working hand-in-glove with government regulators. Daily small farms are being driven out of business with compliance costs and investigations, to the point that even sellers of raw milk fear the knock at the door. In the name of disease mitigation, millions of chickens are being slaughtered and ranchers fear so much as one positive test of some infectious disease. This of course has further consolidated the industry which is ever more dependent on patented pharmaceuticals, insecticides, and fertilizers, the producers of which also get rich at public expense. When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, and so many others, speak about a public health crisis in the US, the food system from production to distribution plays a large role, which in turns feeds the medical cartel mentioned above. 

  5. A wildly complicated and confiscatory system of taxation that punishes wealth accumulation and blocks social mobility in all directions. The federal government alone has seven to ten major forms of federal taxation in main categories like income tax, payroll tax, corporate tax, excise taxes, estate and gift taxes, customs duties, and various fees. Depending on how you count them, there are 20 or more. This is remarkable given that only 115 years ago, there was only one source of federal financing: the tariff. Once the government got its fingers into incomes with the 16th Amendment – before that, you kept every penny you earned – the rest followed. And that doesn’t count state and local financing. They are deployed as methods of planning and control, with no industry immune from the need to bow and scrape before their taxing masters to grant abatements or breaks of any sort. The net result is a form of commercial and industrial servitude. 

  6. Fiat paper money floating exchange rates (born 1971) give the government unlimited funds, create inflation and currencies that never rise in value, and provide foreign central banks investment capital to make sure international accounts never settle. This new system has blown up government power, which expands without limit, and disrupted the normal functioning of international trade. Treasury debt floated by governments with central banks evades all normal market forces and risk premiums, simply because they are guaranteed by the power to inflate a public expense. This gives the politicians, warmongers, and totalitarians among us a blank check to do their dirty work. 

  It is precisely this regime change, together with the manipulation of interest rates, that has given rise to what is called financialization, such that big finance has eaten so much of what was once a healthy industrial sector in the US in which people actual made things for sale in the consumer marketplace. In the old days, the price-specie flow mechanism (described by every free trader from David Hume to Gottfried Haberler) balanced out accounts to ensure that trade would result in mutual benefit. But under the dollar-dominated fiat money system, US debt has come to serve as an infinite source of financing for international industrial buildup that has wrecked countless US industries that once thrived. 

  This is not free trade but paper imperialism and it ends in producing a backlash like we see in the US. The solution being offered is, of course, tariffs, which turn into another form of taxation. The real solution is a fully balanced budget and a shutdown of the Federal Reserve’s money spigot but that is not even part of the public conversation. 

  7. The court system invites extortionist litigation and can only be fought with deep pockets. Litigation these days is merely about playing the long game in a wicked match that can be over absolutely anything, real or imagined, that any would-be plaintiff can assemble into a court case. Business people, especially small ones, live in daily fear of this constant threat. And this has become the means by which DEI hiring standards have become normalized; they are instituted by risk-averse managers in fear of bankruptcy by litigation. The irony is that the real wrongdoers, such as pharmaceutical makers, are indemnified against legal action, leaving the courts as playthings for the rapacious. 

  8. A patent system that grants private industry production cartels and stops competition for everything from pharmaceuticals to software to industrial processes. This is a subject too big for this essay but know that there is a long history of free market thinkers who regarded the patent power as nothing but a tool of industrial cartelization, wholly unjustified by any standard of commercial freedom. “Intellectual property” is not property as such but the creation of fake scarcity by regulation.

  One needs only read Fritz Machlup’s 1958 study to understand the fullness of the fakery here, or read what Thomas Jefferson said about the commodification of ideas: “That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”

  The corruptions that have resulted from the legislative manufacture of property in ideas cannot be overstated. In industry after industry, they have restricted competition, conferred privilege on would-be monopolists, hindered innovation, and truncated learning and innovation. This is obviously a hard subject but one impossible to avoid. In this connection, I highly recommend the sleeper of a monumental treatise by N. Stephan Kinsella: Legal Foundations of a Free Society. The capture of pro-capitalist thinkers by patent theory represents a serious breach in history and in the current day. 

  9. As for authentic property rights, they are weaker than ever and can be overridden or even abolished with the stroke of a pen, such that not even landlords can evict tenants or small business can be open for business. Such was common in poorer countries with despotic governments but such a system is now common in the industrialized West such that no business owner can be certain of his rights to his own enterprise. This is the devastating consequence of Covid lockdowns. It is so serious that the various indexes of economic freedom have yet even to adapt their metrics to the new reality. Obviously there is no capitalism as such if millions of businesses can be shut on the whim of public-health authorities. 

  10. A bloated federal budget supports 420+ agencies that lord it over the whole of commercial society, ballooning up compliance costs for entrepreneurs and creating vast uncertainty about the rules of the game. Slight attempts at “deregulation” cannot begin to fix the core problem. There is no product or service made in the US that is not subject to some form of regulatory diktat. If one happens to come along, such as cryptocurrency, it is beaten to pieces until only the most compliant firms survive the market competition. This has been going on in the crypto space since 2013 at least, and the result has been to convert a disruptive and stateless tool into a compliance-obsessed industry that serves mainly the incumbent financial industry. 

  Please consider all these factors the next time someone denounces the US system as the best example of the depredations of capitalism. It might just be marketing that is on the hot seat. Marketing to the consumer was a revolution in the use of resources but it too has been corrupted to serve the interests of power. Just because something is available in the consumer marketplace does not necessarily mean that it is a product of the voluntary matrix of exchange that would otherwise profit in a genuinely free market. 

  Again, I’m not here to argue about the meaning of a word but rather to draw attention to what everyone can surely agree is a hegemonic imposition on commercial freedom by state power, sometimes and even often with the willing cooperation of the dominant players in every industry. 

  I’m not sure that such a system has a precise name in the 21st century unless we want to go back to the interwar period and label it corporatism or just plain-old fascism. But not even those terms fully fit with this new mode of surveillance-based and digitized despotism that has descended on the US and the world, one that provides healthy rewards for private enterprise that links up with state power and brutal punishments for those enterprises which do not. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/27/2024 – 21:45

• Series Of US-China 'Cloak & Dagger' Summits Led To This Week's Sullivan Trip To Beijing
  Series Of US-China ‘Cloak & Dagger’ Summits Led To This Week’s Sullivan Trip To Beijing

  Despite the Biden administration’s recent attempts to talk tough on China, calling it a ‘strategic competitor’, both sides have been talking behind the scenes with an aim toward balancing relations, to ensure recent years of antagonism doesn’t veer into conflict.

  US national security adviser Jake Sullivan starting Tuesday is meeting over a period of two days with his Chinese counterpart, senior foreign policy official Wang Yi in the Chinese capital. “President Biden has been very clear in his conversations with President Xi that he is committed to managing this important relationship responsibly,” Sullivan told Wang just ahead of the rare talks. Crucially this is the first trip by a sitting US national security advisor to China in eight years (since 2016).

  

  Sullivan’s visit to the outskirts of Beijing where the meetings are being held will last until Thursday, and little is expected to be published or revealed in the aftermath. The immediate goal is the restoration of positive and more frequent communications, which broke down for most of 2022-2023.

  “The key is to keep to the overall direction of mutual respect, peaceful co-existence, and win-win cooperation,” Wang has said. He called recent China-US ties “critical” but admitted the relationship has of late taken “twists and turns”.

  China’s foreign affairs ministry in a separate statement said, “China will focus on expressing serious concerns, clarifying its solemn position and making serious demands on the Taiwan issue, the right to development and China’s strategic security.”

  Also on the agenda is the expansion and normalization of military-to-military talks in order to avoid confrontation in places like the South China Sea, as well as efforts at de-confliction in the Taiwan Strait, along with discussion of Washington’s desire for China to crackdown on the development and distribution of chemicals that can be made into fentanyl.

  High on Beijing’s agenda will be US tariffs, particularly those targeting Chinese chip makers. “The United States has continuously taken unreasonable measures against China in terms of tariffs, export controls, investment reviews and unilateral sanctions, which have seriously undermined China’s legitimate rights and interests,” the Chinese foreign ministry statement laid out.

  Extensive piece in FT about the back channel discourse between the US and China lead by Sullivan and Wang Yi. The various relatively low-profile meetings set the stage for containing some of the tension in the Sino-American relationship creating some predictability.

  There are,… pic.twitter.com/dbQ0J5F7VS

  — Ali Ahmadi (@AliR_Ahmadi) August 27, 2024

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

  Meanwhile, Financial Times in a fresh investigative report issued this week has described that leading up to this historic meeting, both Sullivan and Wang had met quietly to stabilize relations in ‘cloak and dagger’ summits around the world. This had reportedly gone on since 2023 in the aftermath of the Chinese spy balloon fiasco over the American east coast.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/27/2024 – 21:20

• Celsius Distributes $2.5 Billion To 251,000 Creditors Amid Bankruptcy Proceedings
  Celsius Distributes $2.5 Billion To 251,000 Creditors Amid Bankruptcy Proceedings

  By Zoltan Vardai of CoinTelegraph

  Celsius has repaid two-thirds of its eligible customers as part of its long-awaited bankruptcy proceedings. According to an Aug. 26 court filing, the bankrupt crypto lender has repaid approximately $2.53 billion to 251,000 creditors.

  The amount represents approximately 84% of the $3 billion worth of assets owed by the defunct crypto lender to over 375,000 creditors.

  The bankruptcy payments are a positive development for the expanding crypto industry. They coincide with the bankruptcy proceedings of the Mt. Gox exchange, which owed over $9.4 billion in crypto to 127,000 creditors. After 10 years, these creditors are finally beginning to recover their assets.

  Not all creditors are actively looking to claim their cryptocurrency due to the small amount they are owed.

  This is because of the remaining 121,000 creditors who have yet to claim their funds, around 64,000 have less than $100 worth of crypto, while 41,000 creditors are owed between $100 to $1,000, according to the filing:

  “Given the small amounts at issue for many of these creditors, they may not be incentivized to take the steps needed to successfully claim a distribution.”

  The bankruptcy administrator will retry distributing to these creditors via Coinbase every two weeks, while PayPal claim codes remain redeemable for credits at all times.

  The administrator said it “attempted more than 2.7 million distributions in total for the approximately 372,000 currently eligible creditors.”

  Celsius filed for bankruptcy in July 2022, a month after it paused user withdrawals.

  The company claimed that the pause was necessary to put it in a “better position to honor, over time, its withdrawal obligations” after the price of its native token, Celsius (CEL) plummeted in 2022.

  Its bankruptcy saw Celisus settle $4.7 billion in fines with the United States Federal Trade Commission alongside settlements with the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

  Its former CEO, Alex Mashinsky, was arrested and charged by federal prosecutors with various financial fraud, manipulating CEL’s price and misleading Celsius customers. Mashinsky has pleaded not guilty and is out on a $40 million bond pending trial in September.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/27/2024 – 20:55

• New York State Anesthesiologist Pleads Guilty To Chloroforming, Assaulting Kid's Nanny While She Slept
  New York State Anesthesiologist Pleads Guilty To Chloroforming, Assaulting Kid’s Nanny While She Slept

  A New York State anesthesiologist has pleaded guilty to drugging and sexually abusing his family’s nanny while she was sleeping in his home.

  60 year old Paul Giacopelli was indicted in March, and pleaded guilty last Wednesday, according to the NY Post. His lawyer commented that he has “assumed responsibility for his crimes, and now is focused on tending to his family.”

  The Post report says that the victim would sometimes stay overnight at his house when watching his children so he could work at the hospital. She said there were four times in 2023 where she fell asleep, “woke up to a rag being held over her face, smelled chemicals and blacked out”, the Post writes.

  

  After setting up a hidden camera, she caught Giacopelli assaulting her. She then brought the video to local police and he was questioned. 

  Giacopelli confessed to filling a rag with Sevoflurane, an anesthetic agent, according to the Post report. He also said he had a “chloroform fetish” and confessed to sexually assaulting the victim. 

  He said she was an easy target because she was a “heavy sleeper”. 

  Giacopelli also admitted to taking drugs, including fentanyl, from the hospital to his home, testimony revealed.

  The state Board for Professional Medical Conduct has since barred him from practicing medicine. Giacopelli is set to be sentenced on November 20 and is expected to receive four years in state prison.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/27/2024 – 20:30

• Abbott Says Texas Has Purged Over A Million Ineligible Voters
  Abbott Says Texas Has Purged Over A Million Ineligible Voters

  Authored by Rick Moran via PJMedia.com,

  Purging voter registration rolls should not be controversial.

  The process is part of ensuring the integrity of the vote, making sure that ineligible voters are not allowed a ballot.

  

  But for some Democrats looking to make an issue of purging people from the voter rolls, it’s a racist attempt to deny people of color the right to vote.

  Do states purge some eligible voters from the rolls inadvertently or by mistake? No doubt the answer to that question is yes. Perhaps someone who moved forgot to change their address. Perhaps they didn’t notice the postcard that came in the mail reminding them to register with their new address.

  The fact is that the overwhelming number of people who are purged from voter rolls were either dead or moved without telling the local registrar. 

  Stupidity and laziness are colorblind.

  Gov. Greg Abbot (R-Texas) announced yesterday that Texas had purged more than one million voters from the registration rolls.

  “The Secretary of State and county voter registrars have an ongoing legal requirement to review the voter rolls, remove ineligible voters, and refer any potential illegal voting to the attorney general’s office and local authorities for investigation and prosecution,” Abbott said in a press release.

  “Illegal voting in Texas will never be tolerated. We will continue to actively safeguard Texans’ sacred right to vote while also aggressively protecting our elections from illegal voting.”

  Since Senate Bill 1 passed in 2021, 1.1 million people have had their names purged from voter registration rolls. “Among the 1.1 million removed from Texas’s voter rolls are over 457,000 people who died and over 463,000 people on the state’s suspense list, the governor said Monday” reports the Washington Examiner.

  Abbott also noted how over 6,500 of these voters removed from Texas’s voter rolls were noncitizens, 1,930 of whom have a voting history. The Texas Secretary of State’s office is working on sending all 1,930 of these records to Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Office for investigation and any legal action.

  The Texas governor’s news comes shortly after Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) issued an executive order to “protect legal voters and accurate counts,” which included “stringent ballot security, complete and thorough counting machine testing,” and “best-in-the-nation voter list maintenance.” The order also revealed that between January 2022 and July 2024, 6,303 noncitizens were removed from the state’s voter rolls.

  On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled on Arizona’s proof of citizenship law, allowing the state to require those registering to vote to present proof of citizenship. Republican National Committee Chairman Lara Trump called the decision “a huge win” for the RNC. She also said the decision “sets a precedent across the country” for other states to take similar action.

  “Voting is a sacred right that must be preserved for citizens who qualify under our elections laws,” Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson said.

  “My responsibility is to ensure free and fair elections and that only qualified voters participate.”

  New York Post:

  As part of the SOS voter roll oversight process, records of potential non-citizens are sent to counties, and voter registrars are required by law to investigate and remove all ineligible voters. The SOS is also by law required to “withhold election funds from a county voter registrar for failure to approve, change, or cancel a voter’s registration in a timely manner,” according to a new law that went into effect in 2021.

  Her office “monitors each voter registrar’s list maintenance activity on an ongoing basis for compliance with their voter registration cancellation duties,” Nelson said.

  Nelson also reminded registrars that they have the right to initiate their own investigations, as do Texas voters.

  In Texas, it’s going to be extremely difficult for an illegal alien to vote, just as it is in every other state. But both Democrats and Republicans should welcome measures that either party takes to prevent election skullduggery.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/27/2024 – 20:05

• Baltimore Schools CEO Discusses Why Her Husband Has Not "Punched Out" Fox Reporter
  Baltimore Schools CEO Discusses Why Her Husband Has Not “Punched Out” Fox Reporter

  Investigative journalist Chris Papst of Fox45 News’ Project Baltimore has spent years exposing grade scandals and corruption within Baltimore City Schools. His reporting has undoubtedly drawn the ire of the head of the school system, who, in a recent interview, jokingly said her husband hasn’t “punched out” the reporter. 

  

  “Baltimore City has been good to me – it has been good to my family – um you know my husband has not punched out Chris Papst, which is great because I don’t want him going to jail, um when we have college tuitions to pay,” Baltimore City Schools CEO Dr. Sonja Santelises discussed in an interview with Fox45 News and its media partner The Baltimore Sun. 

  Santelises has been at the top of the school system for years, embroiled in several grade-changing scandals. Since she took charge in the 2016/17 school year—the same time Papst’s team began its investigations—district enrollment has declined by 6,500 students, or about 8%. Despite this slide in students, the school system’s budget has swelled by $400 million. Yet, as more taxpayers’ monies are spent, grade scores are going in the wrong direction.

  Over the last eight years, the school system’s graduation rate has declined, while the dropout and chronic absenteeism rates have been rising. 

  In 2023, only 26% of students across the school system scored proficient on the state English test, up from 22.4% one year earlier. This places city schools last in Maryland, behind Somerset County at 31.4%. Math in city schools is also the lowest in the state. Last year, only 8.8% of students tested proficient in math. 

  Meanwhile, under Papst’s leadership, Project Baltimore has uncovered massive grade-changing scandals that have gained national attention:

  • “Educational Homicide”: 13 Baltimore City High Schools Have Zero Students Proficient On State Math Exam

  • Education Shock: 200 Maryland Public Schools Have <5% Students Proficient In Math

  • After Grade-Rigging Scandal, Baltimore City Schools No Longer Holding Back Failing Students

  Project Baltimore reached out to the school system, replying with this statement:

  “The comment about Mr. Papst was clearly made in jest, even eliciting laughs from WBFF’s photographers.”

  Where else does incompetence and failure result in the head of a school system being paid nearly half a million dollars per year with total compensation? 

  Well, only in Baltimore, of course. 

  Furthermore, the big question is: How can a school system spend taxpayer money like a drunken sailor while grade scores decline?

  Maybe this is because the school system is in cahoots with teacher unions that see students as commodities that scheme off taxpayers. After all, unions fund the Democratic Party’s political machine…

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/27/2024 – 19:40

• New Management Won't Fix A Broken Ivy League Business Model
  New Management Won’t Fix A Broken Ivy League Business Model

  Authored by Lexi Boccuzzi via RealClearPolitics,

  We should all stop celebrating Ivy League presidents resigning.

  Last December, Liz Magill, then president of my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, resigned. This was the result of a public relations nightmare for the school, brought on by a rise in antisemitism on campus, widespread protests, and, of course, her disastrous performance in front of the House Education and Workforce Committee. While the right celebrated, I wrote a cautionary tale about their excitement. Now, as Ivy League presidents keep dropping like flies, the latest victim being Columbia’s chief administrator, Minouche Shafik, we should all remember that new management doesn’t fix a broken business model.

  

  As was evident by Liz Magill and Claudine Gay’s viral appearances in front of Congress, the Ivies are plagued by a vacuous type of moral relativism. For decades, failing to prioritize intellectual diversity in the hiring of faculty and admission of students has led to declining quality in curriculum and campus discourse. Choosing to ignore warnings of long-time heterodox academics, the administrators hid behind lengthy “statements of open expression,” as ours was called at Penn. These sent free speech monitors to right-wing events where locations were decided based on the safety considerations of expected protestors and looked the other way as action was taken against faculty and students accused of “hate speech.” What they lacked was any real commitment to First Amendment principles.

  One should certainly acknowledge these presidents have failed to do their jobs of maintaining their university’s image and securing donations, thus making a strong argument that they should be pushed out. Nevertheless, despite “three presidents down,” we have seen little to no substantive change at these universities. Less controversial interim presidents have followed, and with them fruitless committees investigating “hate” on campus like the task forces at Penn.

  In the case of Columbia, the anti-Israel left celebrated Shafik’s resignation, citing her use of administrative power to punish (a small number) of Columbia students involved in the protests. Many on the right have suggested that “this is just the beginning,” and these resignations represent a reckoning against the powers that be in academia. In reality, all they do is take the heat off the universities, a heat which is absolutely vital to the type of change conservatives want and these schools need. In some instances, as has been evident in the response to the Columbia president’s resignation, this strategy of pushing out presidents seems to have emboldened left-wing actors who have substantial influence in university spaces to engage in a similar “naming and shaming.”

  Fiery admissions of concern from well-known alumni at Harvard and Penn were crucial to the resignations of Magill and Gay. In their public statements against the universities, Marc Rowan and Bill Ackman cited a litany of concerns they had about the state of their alma maters, chiefly that they had become harbors of antisemitism. This problem was not solved by Magill and Gay’s absence, with the universities taking very little action against encampments this spring.

  It makes perfect sense, of course, that the protests still occurred with new leadership because the problem is, in fact, much deeper. Most of these universities cost upwards of $80,000 a year, a burden that has strapped roughly 43 million Americans with student loan debt. Many of these individuals majored in social sciences and humanities, and they simply could not get a return on their education investment sufficient to pay back their debt. 

  While these students leave universities unable to find well-paying jobs in the careers they have pursued, they also leave unprepared for citizenship. Where liberal and civic education used to be at the center of advanced learning, creating individuals who were empathetic, in pursuit of the truth, and literate in history and government, today’s college graduates lack anything remotely resembling those qualities. A recent survey conducted by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) showed a stunning lack of knowledge about the United States and its past, with just 28% knowing that the 13th Amendment freed the slaves.

  None of this is particularly surprising, especially to those of us following the situation at America’s premier universities this last year. What is shocking, however, is how, in a country that prides itself on its free markets, an entire industry has been running for decades on a failing business model that delivers its consumers such a lackluster product.

  By ridding ourselves of these university presidents, we only succeeded in removing an easy target of public criticism, a fact that allows the schools to deflect accountability. The focus of our ills now must be some obscure bureaucratic structure hiding behind veils of “academic freedom.” If concerned actors, alumni, and members of Congress alike are serious about seeing reform in higher education, they need to target the business model of higher education and not just keep looking for new management.

  Our students and our country deserve better.

  Lexi Boccuzzi is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute. She is also a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania where she founded a new heterodox student publication, The Pennsylvania Post. She often writes about culture, conservatism, electoral politics, and higher education as it pertains to Gen Z. Her work can also be found in City Journal and National Review. Follow her on X @lexiboccuzzi.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/27/2024 – 19:15

• Special Counsel Smith Files Superseding Indictment In Trump Federal Election Case
  Special Counsel Smith Files Superseding Indictment In Trump Federal Election Case

  Authored by Sam Dorman via The Epoch Times,

  Special counsel Jack Smith filed an updated indictment against former President Donald Trump in Washington on Aug. 27 following the Supreme Court’s ruling that he enjoyed some presidential immunity from criminal prosecution.

  “Today, a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia returned a superseding indictment, charging the defendant with the same criminal offenses that were charged in the original indictment,” an Aug. 27 filing from the special counsel’s office reads.

  “The superseding indictment, which was presented to a new grand jury that had not previously heard evidence in this case, reflects the government’s efforts to respect and implement the Supreme Court’s holdings and remand instructions in Trump v. United States.”

  The new indictment narrows the allegations against the former president by removing allegations involving his interactions with the Justice Department.

  

  It no longer lists as a co-conspirator former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark.  Trump’s co-conspirators were not named in either indictment, but they have been identified through public records and other means.

  Smith’s superseding indictment still contains four charges against the former president, including those from the financial reform law the Supreme Court addressed in Fischer v. United States.

  Presidential Immunity

  In Trump v. United States, a majority of the Supreme Court held that presidents enjoyed several tiers of immunity from prosecution: absolute immunity for acts that fall within their “conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority,” a presumption of immunity for their official acts, and no immunity for unofficial acts.

  Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion grouped the allegations into three categories: those surrounding Trump’s work with the Department of Justice (DOJ); those involving his communication with state electors and his communications on Jan. 6, 2021; and his urging Vice President Mike Pence to not certify the election results in the Senate.

  Trump received absolute immunity from prosecution of the first category. For the second, the Court remanded the issue to the district court to determine whether his actions were official. His communications with Pence are “presumptively immune,” but the DOJ can rebut that presumption in court.

  It’s unclear how much of the superseding indictment will survive. D.C. Judge Tanya Chutkan will likely receive briefings from both the special counsel and former Trump’s legal team advocating their view of which charges should be dropped or maintained in the indictment.

  The Supreme Court has left her with the task of parsing former Trump’s actions and determining which were official and which were unofficial.

  Judge Chutkan has scheduled a status conference for Sept. 5.

  Experts have told The Epoch Times that the prosecution will extend past the election. If Trump wins the presidency, he’s expected to withdraw the case. Even if he loses, however, the case could face additional appeal and potentially make its way back to the Supreme Court.

  Last year, Trump’s legal team filed a motion to dismiss on statutory grounds and alleging that the initial indictment failed to “state an offense.” More specifically, it alleged the indictment failed to allege the type of deceit or trickery needed for the first count, which focused in both indictments on an alleged conspiracy to defraud the United States.

  On Aug. 3, Judge Chutkan denied the motion without prejudice and stated that Trump “may file a renewed motion once all issues of immunity have been resolved.”

  The superseding indictment came just a day after Smith asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit to affirm the legitimacy of his office. Florida Judge Aileen Cannon had dismissed his classified documents case against Trump on the grounds that Smith’s appointment violated the constitution.

  That case too could reach the Supreme Court where at least one justice — Justice Clarence Thomas — expressed concern about Smith’s office. That came in his concurrence for Trump v. United States. None of the other justices joined that opinion, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh expressed concern about the special counsel’s power during oral argument on April 25.

  Cannon limited her decision to the documents case, although it raised questions about the legitimacy of his other prosecutions.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/27/2024 – 18:50

• Quinn: Countdown To Crisis, Catastrophe, & Collapse
  Quinn: Countdown To Crisis, Catastrophe, & Collapse

  Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

  “All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed, they must rely exclusively on force.” – George Orwell

  

  “The future’s becoming muddled. The lines of vision are narrowing. But now they’re desperate. All paths lead into darkness.” – Frank Herbert – Dune

  Trying to decipher the path ahead becomes more difficult by the day. We are purposefully bombarded with misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda by the ruling class, designed to distract us from their real purpose, real agenda, and real plans to imprison us in their techno-gulag, eating zee bugs in our container sized hovels, using our government issued CBDCs to subsist, unless we dared to question the approved narrative – resulting in our social credit rating dropping into the domestic terrorist zone – getting us banned and shunned from society. This is the New World Order the Davos crowd has designed and will implement as a Great Reset, if they succeed in retaining and increasing control over the U.S. and the rest of the Western World in the next six months.

  I know many bloggers/analysts depend on clicks, likes, and subscriptions to their websites/social media to make a living, so they constantly predict Armageddon within the next week, and it never happens. This “little boy who cried wolf” routine has resulted in even the critical thinking among us becoming complacent and unconcerned as we accelerate towards our dire rendezvous with destiny. We shrug off Ukraine invading Russia and bombing a nuclear power plant, while Belarus moves troops towards the Ukraine border, Putin bombs Kiev, and U.S. military equipment is employed by U.S. military personnel against Russia.

  We discount the possibility of Iran actually mounting a devastating response against Israel, prompting an even larger response by Israel, and the U.S. getting drawn into the conflict with Iran, because we’ve been here before and nothing happened. And nothing may happen again in the next week, but Fourth Turnings NEVER de-intensify. There will be blood, death, and war on an enormous scale before this Crisis is resolved.

  

  Personally, I believe the next six months will determine the course of humanity for the next century and beyond. I don’t think that is hyperbole when you step back and observe the big picture. It is so easy to get lost in the inconsequential minutia, because they want you lost in the inconsequential minutia, while the consequential decision-making is being done by the billionaire puppet-masters behind closed doors. This Fourth Turning is slated to reach its bloody denouement in or around 2032, based upon historical precedent. Of course, with nuclear arms, it could all end in the blink of an eye.

  We are in an existential battle between good and evil, and unlike the movies there is no guarantee the good guys will win in the end. We are lost in a blizzard of lies, with super-elite factions vying for power and control over our lives. People who just want to be left alone to live their lives in peace, with the freedom to say and do what they want, are being bullied, tyrannized, surveilled, censored, taxed, and pushed to their limit by those pulling the levers of this society.

  Most people are unwilling or unable to confront the brutal facts of our current reality. They cling to their normalcy bias, disbelieving and minimizing the unmistakable catastrophic threats staring them right in the face. As James Stockdale stated many decades ago, you can’t confuse faith we will overcome the evil forces we are confronting, with the discipline and tremendous sacrifices we will have to make in order to achieve victory over those evil forces. The normalcy bias crowd, with their heads planted firmly in the sand, will not be able to sit out this chaotic, violent, bloody installment of this Fourth Turning Crisis. Sides must be taken. Choices must be made. Engaging in distressing behavior will be required. The 2nd Amendment will need to be used in order to retain the 1st Amendment.

  

  If ever Lenin’s quote, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”, applied, it has been the six weeks since the Deep State/Invisible Government attempted to assassinate Trump in Butler, PA. Events have been happening at a breakneck pace and it is difficult to determine which incidents are being engineered and which are occurring naturally. As a died in wool conspiracy theorist, who needs new conspiracy theories because all of mine have come true, I believe most of what we have witnessed over the last several weeks has been engineered by competing super-elite factions vying for control over our government in a life-or-death struggle to rule over our demise as an empire in the throes of its death rattle.

  As Dylan noted in the 1960s, times are a-changin. The waters of debt have grown, and we are sinking like a stone.

  Come gather ’round people
  Wherever you roam
  And admit that the waters
  Around you have grown
  And accept it that soon
  You’ll be drenched to the bone
  If your time to you is worth savin’
  Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
  For the times they are a-changin’

  Bob Dylan – The Times they are a-changin

  

  With the national debt already above $35 trillion, generating $1.1 trillion of interest expense per year, our leaders continue to heap $6 billion of debt per day ($4.2 million per minute) upon our backs, destroy our standard of living through relentless Fed created inflation, wage undeclared wars across the globe, unblinkingly report provably fake economic data to maintain their Potemkin empire façade, conspire with the Fed and their Wall Street owners to push the stock market to all-time highs, before they pull the rug out at a time of their choosing. They know the ignorant masses are disinterested and/or incapable of understanding the machinations they use to keep the sheep calm, as they lead them to slaughter.

  

  Last week they quietly reported that 818,000 jobs they reported as existing were entirely fake. They knew they were fake when they reported them, but you gotta do what you gotta do to maintain your wealth, control and power. A good rule of thumb is whatever the government reports as the unemployment rate or inflation rate, double it to get close to the real number. Using real numbers would reveal the country is in a recession and has been for over a year. You should always watch what they do, rather than what they say, to understand the truth.

  Powell told the world this week he is going to cut rates in September and keep cutting. Why would he do such a thing when the stock market is at an all-time high, home prices are at all-time highs (75% higher than the 2006 peak), employment is at all-time highs, GDP is growing strongly, and inflation is still 50% higher than the Fed’s target? Because he knows the reported numbers are a lie and his bosses know reigniting inflation will drive their stocks higher and make their debt burden less burdensome. A catastrophic debt and asset collapse beckons. But the music is still playing, so everyone keeps on dancing.

  

  Maybe they want the collapse to occur on Trump’s watch to put a final nail in his coffin, convincing the ignorant masses it was his fault, allowing them to overthrow his regime and introduce their new world order of CBDCs, social credit scores, 15-minute cities, bugs for you and caviar for them, Big Brother surveillance, and war with Russia and China. When they pull the plug on this shitshow of debt, the Great Taking will commence, and they expect the masses to beg to be saved. The Covid plandemic was the test run and the vast majority bowed down to fear propaganda and authoritarian measures in order to be “saved” by their all-powerful overlords. They will use the same game plan again.

  Their diabolical plans are there for all to see, but most continue to stare at their iGadgets, conduct their fantasy football drafts, go further into debt buying shit they don’t need, gulping down the toxic chemicals marketed to them as food, believing voting for one of the two selected Uniparty options will change our course, and are all in on war against those evil dictators Putin and Xi. Is there a rhyme or reason to the events that have taken place over the last several weeks, and is the next three months already orchestrated with a pre-determined outcome? And, if so, is that outcome designed to generate a response from the various competing factions, which allows the true ruling elite to roll-out additional aspects of their totalitarian Great Reset agenda?

  

  I’ve been trying to decipher what the hell is going on since the dementia dummy pretend president was purposely sacrificed on the debate altar on June 27 by his puppet-masters because they knew his pants shitting, child sniffing, and ice cream eating antics weren’t going to cut it this time around. They need the polls to be close enough that they can activate their cheating machine to steal the election again. Those fake mail-in ballots aren’t going to fill themselves in and be dumped into the collection bins at 3:00 am. It was clear Biden was going to lose in a landslide, so they needed to adjust their plans.

  Plan A, the assassination of Trump before the RNC convention, failed by a half inch. There is no doubt in my mind the CIA/Secret Service/Deep State colluded to eliminate Trump, because they perceive his election threatens their continued control over the levers of power in this country and our European puppet regimes. They tried to replay the Oswald “lone gunman/patsy killed playbook”, and failed, but their regime media mouthpieces have buried the story, and no one seems to give a shit anymore, just like the Deep State likes it. You’re a conspiracy nutjob if you don’t buy their ridiculous narrative of feigned incompetence.

  

  It became readily apparent their pretend game of Biden running again was a joke when their lackey co-conspirators in the media all turned on Slow Joe at the exact same moment. They were all given the memo to suddenly realize his mental capacities were non-existent after actively suppressing the fact he was a dementia ridden cadaver his entire time in office. Plan B has now been activated. The selection of the diverse, vacuous, cackler commie by the Deep State puppeteers, as the savior for the Republic, even though she is a truly dumb human being who has never had an original thought in her life, can only mean one of two things.

  They are either so confident in their cheating operations in swing states they believe they can produce a redo of 2020 or they don’t want to win. The selection of tampon Tim over Josh Shapiro as VP points towards them not wanting to win. With Shapiro they would have had a much better shot at winning Pennsylvania, which they must win. There has been a monumental effort by the regime media to produce fake polls showing kackling Kamala ahead or even with Trump. This is an essential ingredient to stealing the election with fake and illegal immigrant mail-in ballots stuffed into ballot boxes by Soros paid flunkies.

  

  Based on the amount of money they are spending here in Pennsylvania, with Kamala ads every three minutes, it appears the powers that be do want to install another dimwit puppet, who will do as they are told and say whatever the teleprompter tells them to say. With Kamala they can continue the destruction of the nation, pillaging the wealth, keeping the border wide open, promoting deviancy, shredding the Constitution, and instigating the onset of WW3 to keep the military industrial complex satiated.

  They may be able to neutralize Trump, as they did during his first term with Russiagate, impeachments, and a scamdemic, but he isn’t nearly as controllable as the dimwitted cackler. They fear his potential retribution and unleashing of someone like RFK Jr. in a role as Attorney General or CIA Director. That would be too dangerous for the Deep State psychopaths. That is why they will try to assassinate Trump again if his lead seems insurmountable.

  

  The other major development over the last several weeks is the fact we are actively fighting a war with Russia. Everyone knows we’ve provided a couple hundred billion in “military aid” to Zelensky, which is essentially funneled to U.S. arms dealers, after Zelensky and his nazi apparatchiks take their slice. But the invasion of Russia and the pinpoint drone attacks on bridges, oil refineries, nuclear power plants, and other civilian targets have been conducted with U.S. hardware, U.S. logistical planning, and U.S. drone operators.

  The depleted Ukraine military is incapable of conducting operations on this scale and do not have the technological acumen to utilize the American technology. Therefore, U.S. personnel are conducting military operations against Russia, meaning we are conducting an undeclared war against Putin, and he knows it.

  

  This has been the neocon plan since 2014. Lure Russia into military operations in Ukraine in order to deplete their military and their treasury. After two years of sanctions and $200 billion into the Zelensky black hole, Russia is winning, Ukraine has been bled dry by the U.S. and their puppet Zelensky, and the sanctions have crushed the EU economies. The U.S. blew up the Nordstream pipeline and continues to peddle utterly ridiculous tripe about some drunken Ukrainians blowing it up from their dinghy.

  Putin has shown tremendous restraint in not annihilating Kiev and inflicting real pain on Ukrainian citizens. But I get the feeling his patience is wearing thin. The neocons, like Graham, Nuland, and the majority of corrupt psychopaths in Congress believe starting WW3 will somehow restore the glory of an empire accelerating towards full-fledged collapse. This belief is utter madness, from those who never fought in war and do not know the horrors of combat. They will gladly sacrifice our children to retain and expand their wealth, power and glory.

  It seems like years of historic events have occurred in the last two months, and I fear the next three months will be wrought with events which will be discussed in history books decades from now, as we read about the Great Crash, Great Depression, and World War II today. Those constituting the invisible government (aka Deep State, Oligarchs, Ruling Elite), manipulating and molding the minds of the masses, continue to use all means at their disposal to suppress free speech and retain their control by: arresting the CEO of Telegram, threatening Musk, extraditing Kim Dotcom, torturing Assange for years, forcing Snowden into Russian exile, censoring dissenters, and throwing people into prison for peaceful protests and exercising their right to free speech.

  The basement dummy strategy they used to keep the public ignorant of Biden’s dementia in 2020 is being attempted again with Willie Brown’s whore, as they keep her hidden from journalists asking questions which would reveal her immense stupidity and inability to think on her feet. She was always much better on her knees.

  

  Based on the Kamala’s record over the last four years regarding the BLM riots, support of Covid lockdowns and forced vaccinations, her Border Czar performance, her coverup of Joe’s declining mental faculties, association with the economic policies which have created massive inflation and ruined the lives of millions and picking a far-left lying looney toon as her VP, she should have zero chance of becoming president. But we know presidents are selected, not elected. And we know those counting the votes are all that matter in the end.

  I know everyone wants their team to win and it does matter in the short-term whether Harris or Trump is in the White House for the next four years. But neither will keep the country from its ruinous destiny with history. All empires die, it’s just a matter of whether they collapse violently or just fade into the sunset. The American empire will go out with a bang, as it is run by narcissistic psychopaths bent on the destruction of mankind if it can’t rule the world.

  Electing Trump may allow the catastrophic collapse to be paused for a moment, but there is nothing substantive he can do to reverse decades of poor decisions, and a teetering tower of debt poised to come crashing down at any moment, as the world loses faith in the USD. If the powers that be choose so, Trump may be the sucker holding the bag when they pull it. There really is no escape, as described by Ludwig von Mises many decades ago. With debt of $35 trillion and rising by a trillion every few months, our credit expansion has reached its limit. Collapse is inevitable.

  “There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”

  

  The selection of Harris would continue the tragic course we have been on for the last four years, with her handlers completing their destruction of our society, culture and economic system. The next three months could see the onset of WW3, the latest heavily marketed plandemic (monkeypox, bird flu, covid variant 9.0, West Nile or some Gates mosquito virus), more assassination attempts, false flag terrorist incidents to create civil chaos, and if Trump wins – cities burning as the BLM and ANTIFA terrorists are activated by Soros and Obama.

  I don’t know what will happen in the coming months, but I do know it will not be uneventful. Fourth Turnings always intensify towards violent upheaval, death, destruction, and clear winners and losers. No matter the outcome of this election, violence will follow as the losing side will not accept defeat. I expect civil war to be coupled with global conflict as we travel towards some type of climax and resolution by 2032, twenty-four years after this crisis was triggered in 2008 by the Fed and their Wall Street owners.

  

  No matter how prepared you think you are for the dreadful challenges ahead, the level of violence likely to overwhelm the world will be shocking and disconcerting to even the most hardened and toughest individuals. Is anyone really prepared for their bank accounts to be drained by shadowy entities; empty grocery shelves; the power grid being down, attacks from within and from without; and hordes of armed gangs roaming the streets and countryside?

  Chaos is going to reign, especially if Trump manages to defy the odds and be elected. Those who conspired against him are willing to destroy the world rather than face the consequences of their traitorous schemes. The end of an empire, which refuses to accept its pre-ordained fate, will not be pretty. The facts are unequivocally bad, and feelings, gender gibberish, diversity and inclusion bullshit, and what you are told to believe by the regime media and your glorious leaders, won’t matter when every day becomes a matter of life or death.

  

  I stumbled across a Bob Dylan song from 62 years ago called Let Me Die in My Footsteps, which was inspired by the Cold War and the building of bomb shelters in the late 1950s to survive a nuclear attack. The lyrics are haunting and probably more applicable today than they were in 1962. My interpretation is that we have to keep living our lives to the fullest, speaking truth to power, understanding the propaganda spewed by our supposed leaders are nothing but lies, fear is their tactic to control us and push us towards war, and we might need to make a stand against tyranny and die where we stand.

  Cowering in a bunker while the Deep State pillages our nation is not the choice of people who care about the future and are willing to fight for future unborn generations. Everyone is going to need to ask themselves whether they are willing to die in their footsteps for a greater cause. The answers will determine the future course of history. What kind of American are you?

  

  I will not go down under the ground
  ’Cause somebody tells me that death’s comin’ ’round
  An’ I will not carry myself down to die
  When I go to my grave my head will be high
  Let me die in my footsteps
  Before I go down under the ground

  There’s been rumors of war and wars that have been
  The meaning of life has been lost in the wind
  And some people thinkin’ that the end is close by
  ’Stead of learnin’ to live they are learnin’ to die
  Let me die in my footsteps
  Before I go down under the ground

  Let Me Die in My Footsteps – Dylan

  

  I don’t know if I’m smart but I think I can see
  When someone is pullin’ the wool over me
  And if this war comes and death’s all around
  Let me die on this land ’fore I die underground
  Let me die in my footsteps
  Before I go down under the ground

  There’s always been people that have to cause fear
  They’ve been talking of the war now for many long years
  I have read all their statements and I’ve not said a word
  But now Lawd God, let my poor voice be heard
  Let me die in my footsteps
  Before I go down under the ground

  Let Me Die in My Footsteps – Dylan

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/27/2024 – 18:25

• Parents Fight Back With Rising Use Of Religious Vaccine Exemptions For Their Children
  Parents Fight Back With Rising Use Of Religious Vaccine Exemptions For Their Children

  Summer has officially come to a close. Families wrapped up beach and/or mountain vacations last weekend as kids now sit in the classroom, hopefully learning non-woke math and critical reading skills. A notable trend this school year is the increasing number of parents choosing to circumvent government-enforced vaccine requirements for their children through non-medical religious exemptions. 

  Local non-profit media outlet Maryland Matters cited new data showing an increasing number of parents have opted their children out of vaccination requirements through non-medical religious exemption. The trend surged after draconian requirements pushed by an overreaching government during the Covid era. 

  Here’s more on the data from Maryland Matters: 

  The number rarely rises above a percent or two of an incoming kindergarten class, typically accounting for no more than a couple hundred children per year. But that means that in the years since 2002, a total of more than 10,000 kindergartners have attended public and private schools without vaccination records, according to historical data from the Maryland Department of Health.

  The rising percent of religious exemptions in recent years may point to increasing rates of vaccine hesitancy among families, said Daniel Salmon, a professor and director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

  “We’ve seen a post-COVID increase,” Salmon said. “With COVID … things got really polarized with more misinformation and disinformation. Vaccinations became a very political topic. And that’s not helpful.”

  Maryland law requires doctors to inject children with several big pharma vaccines before they enter kindergarten (and many more after) to protect themselves and their classmates from transmissible diseases, such as polio, measles, and chickenpox, among many others.

  Tracking vaccine hesitancy through the Maryland health data suggests parents are becoming increasingly aware of the potential concerns surrounding increasing government-mandated vaccinations for their children. 

  Here’s a straightforward breakdown of the vaccine hesitancy rise of Maryland parents via the media outlet:

  • The earliest data readily available from the state is from the 2002-2003 school year, in which 0.2% of kindergartners got a religious exemption, or about 126 kids out of roughly 63,000 entering kindergarten that year.

  • The rate increased steadily over the years: Ten years later, for example, about 0.6% of kids had religious exemptions, resulting in about 419 kids not receiving vaccinations in 2012-2013.

  • Religious exemptions spiked in 2019-2020 when 2.7% of kindergartners, or 1,641 kids, opted out of vaccination requirements. The COVID-19 pandemic went into full swing in the spring of 2020, so those families would have opted out prior to the the rise in cases in the United States.

  • Since the 2021-2022 school year, at least 1 percent of kindergartners in Maryland had a medical exemption – a couple hundred a year.

  

  Perhaps the expanding vaccine schedule for kids over the last three decades has something to do with the vaccine hesitancy among millennial parents. 

  

  Axios shared a nationwide breakdown of where parents have used non-medical exemptions for their children the most.

  

  Meanwhile, President Donald Trump criticized the number of childhood vaccines in a video with Robert F. Kennedy Jr in mid-July. 

  Whoops. Seems like RFK Jr.’s son posted and has since deleted video of a call between RFK Jr. and Trump after the shooting. In the video Trump repeats his old (false) claims about childhood vaccines, suggesting the vaccine schedule causes injuries in babies. https://t.co/K4RWXfoudS pic.twitter.com/KZcSBVtxWE

  — Brandy Zadrozny (@BrandyZadrozny) July 16, 2024

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

  Hmm… 

  But, they do cause illness and injuries in babies and children. Why do you support harming kids? pic.twitter.com/D3mjtRClEM

  — Chris Martenson, PhD (@chrismartenson) July 16, 2024

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

  Nothing to see here. It’s not illegal to ask questions. 

  

  The prevailing trend is that an increasing number of parents are opting their children out of government-mandated big-pharma vaccines. We wonder why… And maybe Trump is right. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/27/2024 – 18:00

• California Votes To Approve $150K In Taxpayer-Funded Home Loans For Illegal Aliens
  California Votes To Approve $150K In Taxpayer-Funded Home Loans For Illegal Aliens

  Update: Big surprise!! They passed it!!

  BREAKING: The California State Senate just voted overwhelmingly to pass AB 1840, which allows illegal aliens to apply for taxpayer funded down payments on homes up to $150,000.

  An unbelievable betrayal of the citizens of their state. pic.twitter.com/WX3i4F1imM

  — Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 27, 2024

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

  As a reminder, US median home prices are already at record highs… so what exactly do they think this free-money will do?

  * * *

  As Eric Lundrum detailed earlier, via American Greatness,

  The state of California could soon pass a law that will make illegal aliens eligible to receive as much as $150,000 in taxpayer-funded loans to purchase new homes.

  

  According to Fox News, the “California Dream for All” act is likely to pass through the overwhelmingly Democrat-controlled state legislature.

  The bill would implement a statewide program that provides 20% in down payment assistance, as high as $150,000, for illegals who seek to buy homes in the state.

  The only requirements to apply are that one must be a first-time homebuyer and a first-generation homebuyer; the program will also require income levels to be below a certain limit relevant to the county where the applicant lives.

  Governor Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) has not yet said whether or not he will sign the bill into law.

  A spokesman for his office said that the governor “doesn’t typically comment on pending legislation,” but that “if the bill reaches his desk, the Governor will evaluate it on its merits.”

  Democrats in the state have defended the bill, claiming that it simply promotes equality and gives the same opportunities to illegals that American citizens would have.

  Assemblyman Joaquin Arambula (D-Calif.), the author of the bill, has claimed that the legislation would still require applicants to meet federal requirements, which includes providing either taxpayer identification or a Social Security number, both of which are things that illegals are generally not supposed to have.

  “We simply wanted to be as inclusive as possible within our policies so that all who are paying taxes here in our state were able to qualify,” said Arambula.

  “Without the intentional law that we are introducing, we felt that there were complexities and questions that many in the immigrant community would have.”

  A similar effort is ongoing in the state of Oregon, being carried out by a taxpayer-funded organization called Hacienda CDC, which is offering handouts of up to $30,000 exclusively to illegal aliens as down payment assistance in buying new homes.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/27/2024 – 17:40

• Millennials Begin Influencing Classic Car Auctions As Baby Boomers Take Hit On Old Packards 
  Millennials Begin Influencing Classic Car Auctions As Baby Boomers Take Hit On Old Packards 

  Baby boomers are holding the bag in the classic car market. These folks first began retiring in the early 2000s—right before the GFC—and some were on buying sprees for classic automobiles, such as Packard Roadsters and Ford Thunderbirds. Fast-forward to 2024, and the classic car choices of baby boomers did not rub off on GenXers and millennials, as youngsters overwhelmingly prefer cars from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, such as 911 Turbos.

  

  “Millennials shun many of these vehicles (pre-1960s) that were popular with boomers. Some of these vehicles may have peaked for good as the younger generations want no parts of these cars,” we noted last October after multiple well-known car auctions.

  At the time, we first recognized the changing of the guard as GenXers and millennials were not showing up on the buy-side to purchase classics from the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. We must note many of these classics have fueled the historic car bubble for decades.

  

  These classics are becoming increasingly difficult to sell at some of the country’s most popular auctions. The latest comes after Monterey Car Week, where sales were down 3% from last year, and unsold classics from the pre-1960s piled up. 

  

  Here’s a terrific summary of the auction’s highlights from auto news website Hagerty:

  Car Week 2024 and the Monterey auctions are now in the books. While the Sunday concours in Pebble Beach is all about elegance, the auctions are best described with numbers. In four days, more than 1100 vehicles were offered, and 73 percent of them sold. Of those offered, 163 were potentially worth $1M or more. Total sales for the five auctions was just under $392M. Despite all those big numbers, fewer lots were offered this year, total sales were down by three percent, and the average price fell, too. Why?

  Starting with those 163 examples of $1M-plus cars offered, the market appears to have a growing preference for more modern vehicles. When “modern” is defined as anything built since 1981, it leaves nearly 100 years of vintage vehicles and just over 40 years of modern. The amount of cars—140 vintage and 23 modern—could reflect the broader time period considered for vintage cars, or that imbalance could merely reflect an oversupply of vintage $1M-plus vehicles. Since 2021 in Monterey, modern vehicles in that seven-figure range have achieved a higher sell-through rate than vintage vehicles, partly due to being offered in smaller numbers.

  

  It could also be that the appeal of vintage seven-figure cars like 1930s coachbuilt French cars is diminishing. Both the 1937 Bugatti Type 57 Atalante at Gooding (low est. $9M) and the 1938 Talbot-Lago T10C Teardrop Coupe at Broad Arrow (low est. $6.5M) were no sales. Conversely, both auction companies sold modern track-only sports racing cars, with Gooding selling a 1995 Ferrari 333 SP Evoluzione for $5,120,000 and Broad Arrow selling a 1997 Porsche 911 GT1 for $7,045,000.

  Of course, seven-figure Ferraris and Monterey auctions go very well together, too. In the past 36 years, the top auction sale of the entire year occurred in Monterey 19 times, and 11 of those times, the car was a Ferrari. This year, six of the top 10 were Ferraris. However, like the broader $1M-plus market, there’s a split between vintage Enzo-era Ferraris (pre-1974) and modern Ferraris. Vintage cars are more numerous at this price level, and the sell-through rate has been falling, while modern cars are relatively rarer and have been selling better. While changing tastes could account for that difference, supply differences could also affect the sell-through rate.

  

  What stood out to us was the sell-through rate of 52% for pre-1981 cars priced at $1 million or more at Monterey. For newer vehicles, the sell-through rate came in at 73%—yet more evidence that Gen Xers and millennials prefer cars from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.

  

  Data from Hagerty’s Supercar Index, which tracks sports cars from the 1980s through the 2000s, shows a surge of over 60% since 2019. In contrast, the Blue Chip Index, which includes classic Corvettes, Ferraris, Jaguars, and other cars from the 1950s and 1960s, has fallen by 3%.

  Millennials have dominated the labor market for the last five or so years. Their shift in taste has dictated economic trends this decade; many have been crushed by debt and inflation, and many cannot afford homes and/or start families.

  And the baby boomers (or their estates) who are loaded up with classics from the pre-1960s better start to understand that these car prices will only slide more as millennials don’t want Packards and T-Birds. They want the 1980s 911 Turbos. Also, high interest rates under failed Bidenomics have dampened activity in the classic car market.  

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/27/2024 – 17:20

• Trump Lawyers Urge Appeals Court To Disqualify District Attorney Over Speech At Atlanta Church
  Trump Lawyers Urge Appeals Court To Disqualify District Attorney Over Speech At Atlanta Church

  Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Former President Donald Trump’s lawyers on Monday submitted a court filing against Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in the Georgia Court of Appeals, arguing that she should be removed from the case for committing a “severe violation” of the state’s legal guidelines.

  

  In a reply brief, the former president’s team wrote that Trump was “aggrieved by Willis’ church speech,” referring to comments she made in January that suggested there was a racial animus at play when a co-defendant filed a motion to have her disqualified over a relationship she had with her then-special prosecutor.

  The legal team said that her speech was “a severe violation of the Georgia Rules of Professional Conduct,” claiming that her comments at the church were allegedly designed to increase public condemnation of Trump and the other co-defendants in the eyes of potential jurors. On those grounds, according to the lawyers, Willis should be removed from the case.

  “Pretermitting fairness, President Trump was injured by Willis’ … speech because national and local media outlets broadcast and reported Willis’ claim as an attack against the defense,” the filing said. Willis, it added, also asserted that “allegations against her stemmed from racism,” which his legal team said were unfounded.

  The Georgia appeals court will hear an appeal by Trump and several co-defendants on Dec. 5, it previously ruled, over whether Willis should be disqualified from the case due to her relationship with former special prosecutor Nathan Wade.

  Earlier this year, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee ruled that either Wade or Willis must leave the case, prompting Wade to leave and allowing Willis to stay on board. Trump and the other defendants quickly sought to appeal the case.

  In his March ruling, McAfee chided Willis for her church speech but said it is not grounds for her disqualification. He also said there wasn’t enough evidence to remove her based on the Wade relationship, although he signaled that an “odor of mendacity” was permeating the case.

  Fulton County prosecutors had said that her speech at the church was vague, and she was not speaking about anyone in particular.

  “Isn’t it them who’s playing the race card when they only question one?” Willis said during her speech, in part. “Isn’t it them playing the race card when they constantly think I need someone from some other jurisdiction in some other state to tell me how to do a job I’ve been doing almost 30 years?”

  Her office filed a motion to dismiss the appeal in August, arguing there wasn’t enough evidence to back up their claims that she had a conflict of interest due to her prior relationship with Wade.

  “Unsatisfied, the Appellants now seize upon the trial court’s criticisms of the District Attorney to distort its actual findings and overstate their case,” the district attorney’s office wrote. “They ask this Court to second guess the trial court’s factual conclusions and apply standards of disqualification that no Georgia court has ever authorized or employed.”

  The conflict started in January when co-defendant Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign aide, alleged in court papers that the pair were in a relationship, a claim that the two later confirmed during a contentious hearing before McAfee in February.

  However, they disputed key allegations made by lawyers for Roman and his co-defendants, including that they improperly benefitted financially from their arrangement. They also refuted claims made by a witness that their relationship started much earlier than they had said.

  The case was brought by Willis against Trump and more than a dozen other co-defendants, accusing them of conspiring to overturn the election results in the county after the 2020 election. In part, her office’s indictment focused on a Trump phone call in January 2021 with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which the president asked him about votes and ballots.

  Trump and the majority of the other co-defendants, including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, have pleaded not guilty, although several have entered guilty pleas as part of deals with the prosecution.

  Due to the appeals process, the case likely will not proceed to trial before the November election.

  The Fulton County District Attorney’s office did not immediately respond to an Epoch Times request for comment.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/27/2024 – 17:00

• Robby Starbuck Wins Again: Lowe's Scraps Some DEI Policies
  Robby Starbuck Wins Again: Lowe’s Scraps Some DEI Policies

  Anti-woke crusader Robby Starbuck is making headlines again, this time taking credit for Lowe’s scaling back its diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Starbuck, known for his relentless campaign against far-left white-collar activists infiltration of corporate America’s management teams and corporate boardrooms, argues that companies like Lowe’s should focus on selling products instead of being woke activists. 

  “Big news: I messaged @Lowes executives last week to let them know that I planned to expose their woke policies. This morning I woke up to an email where they preemptively made big changes,” Starbuck revealed on X on Monday. 

  The full email sent out by @Lowes executive leadership team this morning. Lowe’s press office confirmed it was real when I contacted them and a source at Lowe’s told me the changes are a direct response to our work. 🔥 pic.twitter.com/u4dTuaK1aw

  — Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) August 26, 2024

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

  Starbuck listed Lowe’s big changes that include winding down some DEI initiatives:

  • Ending participation in the @HRC’s woke Corporate Equality Index social credit system

  • No more donations to pride events or other divisive events.

  • Ending ERG groups in favor of one large unifying ERG group for all employees, no longer designed to focus on race or sexual orientation.

  He continued:

  They also hint at more future changes. We’re now forcing multi-billion dollar organizations to change their policies without even posting just from fear they have of being the next company that we expose.

  Big news: I messaged @Lowes executives last week to let them know that I planned to expose their woke policies. This morning I woke up to an email where they preemptively made big changes.

  Here are the changes:

  • Ending participation in the @HRC’s woke Corporate Equality Index… pic.twitter.com/qOUr2JLGV7

  — Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) August 26, 2024

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

  Starbuck’s anti-woke crusade against corporate America has led Tractor Supply, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, and Jack Daniel to either nuke or wind down DEI activism. 

  

  He might need more doors. 

  

  “If Elon had not bought Twitter this account [Robby Starbuck] would have been banned. Thus, these companies would continue DEI since they would not have any feedback from the millions of people that don’t agree. The #1 amendment is critical. We the people are sick of being censored.  I bite my tongue on every FaceBook post because I will get banned,” one X user wrote. 

  If Elon had not bought Twitter this account would have been banned. Thus, these companies would continue DEI since they would not have any feedback from the millions of people that don’t agree.

  The #1 amendment is critical. We the people are sick of being censored. I bite my… https://t.co/DFLhrbMXg0

  — FastFred68 (@RealFastFred68) August 26, 2024

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

  Last Friday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said mass censorship was one of the “principles that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent, and now to throw my support to President Trump.” 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/27/2024 – 16:40

• Dear Democrats, Things Are Not Looking Good…
  Dear Democrats, Things Are Not Looking Good…

  Authored by Jenna McCarthy via Jenna’s Side Rocks blog,

  Dear Democrats,

  I hope you’ve got your organic, ethically-sourced stress balls and fair trade lavender calming spray handy, because I think you’re going to need them. The anti-vax black sheep of Camelot has thrown his support behind the felonious, mean-tweeting Cheeto, and despite laughable heroic MSM attempts to convince the masses otherwise, the unlikely duo appears to be unbeatable. Even if you cheat harder than you did in the last election—and let’s be real, you set the bar pretty high for yourselves there—it’s looking like you might have to make good on that threat to move to Canada come November.

  I can only imagine how that makes you feel. Probably like someone decided to mix peanut butter and ketchup and everyone else is like holy crap you have to try this it’s actually delicious but you’re allergic to peanut butter and ketchup and now you’re about to throw up.

  I know you’re clinging to your MOMALA yard sign like Rose on that wooden door after the Titanic went down, and frankly, I don’t blame you. We both know the list of things you cherish *that’s about to vanish like socks in the dryer* is longer than a CVS receipt.

  DEI? Yeah—Discriminate, Exclude, and Ignore

  In an RFTrump administration, you can expect your beloved Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to disappear faster than the free Italian meatball samples at Costco. How much do you want to bet that despotic duo will try to install some sort of transphobic meritocracy where pronouns, chromosomes, and sexual preferences don’t even matter, and hard work and talent will determine how successful you’ll be? I know! Imagine this dystopian future world where job promotions are handed out based on skills and accomplishments rather than skin color or relative neurodivergence or how well your beard compliments your breasts. Go get yourself a paper bag and breathe into it. I’ll wait.

  

  Not anymore, I’m afraid.

  KKKritical Race Theory? RIP.

  I hope you’ve gotten your fill of those engaging CRT discussions, because I’ve a hunch they’re about to go the way of the flip phone. Bobby-loves-Donny will surely put their privileged, white-cloaked heads together (God help us all!) and declare CRT a national threat—right up there with climate change which, by the way, they’ll likely rename something like “ weather”. (I know, for a minute there you thought that Bobby, a lifelong tree hugger, was going to immediately ban gas-powered cars or at least start taxing cow farts or something, but sadly the guy has repeatedly disappointed and angered environmentalists, so I wouldn’t hold your breath.) All that progress you made trying to shame white people for being born melanin deficient and encouraging minorities to feel ever more oppressed, bitter, and victimized? Poof! Gone. (Maybe tissues will become affordable again.)

  

  Open Borders? More Like a Swiss Bank Vault Inside Fort Knox.

  Remember when the United States was all about welcoming and helping the huddled masses yearning to breathe free? Yeah, you can tuck that away on a shelf with your model pyramid and replica Rosetta Stone. Get ready for a giant, impenetrable wall complete with laser beams and possibly a moat filled with piranhas. Instead of the government spending our collective money to import, welcome, house, feed, clothe, educate, connect, and otherwise support strangers who pay no taxes and may or may not have come here to kill us, now those funds are probably going to be used to [gasp!] benefit American citizens. It’s so narcissistic and xenophobic, I don’t even know where to start. The good news is once they eliminate that censorship that kept you so safe during Covid, at least you’ll be able to virtue signal express your displeasure online by using a variety of hashtags like #ImmigrationIsBeautiful and #NoHumanIsIllegal and #I’mStuckInACountryBeingLedByAPairOfRacistWhiteDudesSendHelp.

  

  Fear not, snowflakes. This is not an actual thing.

  Just Make Rich People Pay for Everything? I Don’t Think So.

  With two famously flush white guys running the show, you just know that hyper-taxing the affluent (like AOC’s brilliant and clearly fair and not in any way punitive proposed 70% income tax on the country’s highest earners) is not going to happen. Obviously it’s way better to force those snooty, fat-cat uppercrusters to fork over exponentially more of their hard-earned money to support social programs and reduce income inequality and put gay pride flags in all our classrooms. Now you’re going to have to contribute to all of that, too! It’s so not fair, I honestly can’t even.

  

  Second Amendment Rights? Don’t Tread on THOSE.

  “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Seriously? But… but… that means people will continue to be able to defend themselves against criminals and tyrants! If they would just ban guns completely, everyone knows all the murderous thugs would turn in their weapons and violent crime would cease to exist. Thanks to this nauseating turn of events, the next thing you know, everybody and their granny will be packing heat and folks will be shooting each other over parking spaces instead of just stabbing each other, which is obviously far more civil and less scary. The only safe solution is to lock yourself in your home and never leave again (except for during elections, because they’ll definitely be banning mail-in ballots, those bigoted trolls). Or move to Canada.

  

  You can bring this one up in therapy.

  Foreign Policy? You Mean Nasty Nationalism [shudders].

  I know. We were (still are!) thisclose to going to war with China Russia Iran Syria … somebody. They were about to start drafting our daughters! What an exciting and patriotic time to be alive and to be given the opportunity to fight for… something surely extremely important! I know, America’s meddling nose doesn’t really belong in every other country’s politics; in fact, Ayatollah Khamenei and Kim Jong Un have been begging the US to MIOB for basically ever. Now, not only won’t you have any fun, colorful flags to superimpose over your Facebook profile picture; you just know Trumpedy is going to insist on selfishly putting America First (so anti-Semitic!) and withdrawing from the Paris Agreement (so rude!) and the WHO (again). Oh, and they’ll tax the hell out of Chinese imports, so you can say a sad so long to all those sweet Shein and Temu deals. Sorry, boo. It was fun while it lasted.

  

  Free Speech? You Mean, Mean Tweets Are Coming Back.

  It’s a frightening thought but one we must all come to terms with: The leader of the free world will be able to communicate with people—openly and without censorship—on the largest and most influential free speech platform in the digital universe. Not only that, but you can bet the channel’s formerly progressive founder isn’t merely going to allow this; that suddenly right-wing sycophant will amplify it. (Although surely there’s lots of overlap, Trump, Musk, and Kennedy Jr. have a combined 288 million followers on X. Timala, in comparison, have a sort of embarrassing 16M collective fans. Go ahead and fact-check that while you still can, because I’m pretty sure fact-checking will soon be a thing of the past.)

  

  McSeriously? You Can Kiss Your Fast Food Addiction Goodbye

  I know, your kids live for Chick-fil-A Fridays at school. It’s the highlight of the whole week, practically the only way you can get those little rugrats to the bus stop on time—with tantalizing promises of soggy waffle fries and greasy poultry nuggets awaiting during the midday break. Well, just listen to what that Fauci-bashing anti-vaxxer had to say:

  “Two-thirds of American adults and children suffer from chronic health issues. Fifty years ago that number was less than 1%. In America, 74% of Americans are now overweight or obese, including 50% of our children. One-hundred and twenty years ago, when somebody was obese, they were sent to the circus. When my uncle was president, our country spent $0 on chronic disease. Today, government healthcare spending is almost all for chronic disease, and it’s double the military budget, and it is the fastest growing budget item in the federal budget. Chronic disease costs more to the economy as a whole, at least 4 trillion dollars, five times our military budget. We’re going to bring healthy food back to school lunches. We’re going to stop subsidizing the worst foods with our agricultural subsidies. We’re going to get toxic chemicals out of our food. We’re going to reform the entire food system.”

  There’s no getting around it: Friday mornings are going to suck.

  

  Spoiler: There’s a NEW New World Order Coming to Town.

  I know the dramatic and shocking Kennedonald combo is going to take some getting used to. I mean, we were about to have our country’s first Black Indian, female assigned-female-at-birth cackler commander-in-chief. It was going to be historic; unprecedented! I’ll bet Kamalamadingdong was packing her visit-the-border bag when this bombshell dropped—now she’ll never get to go! (Maybe Doug can take her to Europe instead?)

  That woman had plans, dammit. She was somehow going to lower the cost of living that skyrocketed under her veepdom and fix inflation (apparently, by defining it—simplistically and repetitively) but now she won’t get the chance to do that, either! She was going to completely reform our healthcare and criminal justice systems while also ensuring socialism economic equality for all (but not, you know, at her luxurious level or anything, don’t be ridiculous). She promised to expand Medicaid which would guarantee that more people—especially kids and lower income families—would have access to wonderful pharmaceuticals like Ozempic and vaccines! For free!

  With RFK Jr. in or around the White House, now everyone’s going to have to learn about (ugh) healthy eating and (yuck) preventative health, which is so much harder and more annoying than jabbing yourself with skinny serum. Alas, the curtain is about to fall on that glorious and golden age. If vaccines even survive at all (which they probably won’t because Kennedy likes to claim—based on nothing but peer reviewed literature the CDC refuses to look at which he actually compiled into a bestselling book you’ve never heard of—that unvaccinated kids are healthier across the board in nearly every metric you can think of), you definitely won’t be getting a donut with your next series, I’m afraid.

  You Can Retire Your MAKE AMERICA OBAMA AGAIN hat.

  I wish I had some soothing words of comfort for you, but there’s no getting around it; this is a terrifying time to be alive. Even though Trump was already president and didn’t do any of these things, he could literally declare martial law the day he takes office. He could imprison his political opponents and critics, refuse to leave the White House ever again, and basically destroy democracy by continuing to point out that our beloved news media is fake and corrupt. And Kennedy? That psychopath actually muttered the following words in his (definitely don’t watch it) campaign suspension speech: “Ultimately, the only thing that will save our country and our children is if we choose to love our kids more than we hate each other.”

  (Can you imagine that level of rhetoric spewing from the Oval Office on a routine basis? I mean, sure your side is filled with hatred, but it’s toward specific, hate-worthy things like white privilege, toxic masculinity, police officers, Christians, and Trump!)

  Sadly, it’s looking like this is our future. I guess the good news is, it’s only four years.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/27/2024 – 16:20

• Gold Hits New Record High, Bitcoin Battered As NVDA Earnings Loom
  Gold Hits New Record High, Bitcoin Battered As NVDA Earnings Loom

  Consumer sentiment lifted modestly today (headline Conf Board) but under the hood it was a shit-show with labor market weakness accelerating and purchasing-plans puking. Regional Fed surveys were also ugly (as home prices hit new record highs).

  That ‘bad’ news prompted a dovish shift in rate-cut expectations (with attention once again shifting to 2024 from 2025)…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  The slight easing sent gold to a new record high…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Treasury yields were mixed on the day with the short-end outperforming (2Y -3bps, 30Y +2bps), which dragged the 2Y yield lower on the week. Note that bonds were bid from early in the US session after an ugly EU session…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Nasdaq outperformed on the day (after all the majors were weak out of the gate). Small Caps were the biggest loser with The Dow unchanged…

  

  NVDA was the notable outperformer among the Mag7 today…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Most notably, 0-DTE traders piled aggressively into calls today (but late on were more conservative with buying straddles)…

  

  Source: SpotGamma

  Notably, it has been Dem-policy-driven stocks that have outperformed in the last couple of weeks (but notice the lower pane shows we are at a key relative strength level for Dems/Reps right now)…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  The dollar was unchanged on the day, unable to recover any more of the post-J-Hole losses…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  As gold rallied, the other alternative currency (Bitcoin) crumbled back to pre-J-Hole levels…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Oil prices fell today, seemingly stalling at recent resistance…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Finally, it’s the big one tomorrow… NVDA’s earnings. The S&P 500 vol market is ready…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Are you?

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Of course, it’s different this time.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 08/27/2024 – 16:00

Digest powered by RSS Digest