- "White Man's Burden": The US Has Been Fighting "Forever Wars" Against Muslims For 120 Years
"White Man's Burden": The US Has Been Fighting "Forever Wars" Against Muslims For 120 Years
Authored by Darius Shahtahmasebi via TheMindUnleashed.com,
U.S.-led wars in the Middle East have killed some four million Muslims since 1990. The recently published Afghanistan papers, provided an insight into the longest war in U.S. history and revealed how U.S. officials continuously lied about the progress being made in Afghanistan, lacked a basic understanding of the country, were hiding evidence that the war was unwinnable, and had wasted as much as $1 trillion in the process.
Unfortunately, this phenomenon is nothing new. While most people accept that the United States has been interfering with Muslim populations quite heavily since World War II, the truth is that the U.S. has been fighting “forever wars” against Muslim populations for well over 100 years. (If you want to really go back into history, Thomas Jefferson was also fighting Muslims in the oft-forgotten Barbary Wars in the early 1800s).
The average American school curriculum likely doesn’t feature the fact that the U.S. waged a war from 1899 to 1913 in the southernmost island of the Philippines. Known as the Moro War, it was the longest sustained military campaign in American history until the war in Afghanistan surpassed it a few years ago. As a result, the U.S. and the Philippine governments are still embroiled in a battle with Islamist insurgents in the southern Philippines, which takes the meaning of “forever war” to a whole new level.
Despite over a century passing since the U.S. led a counterinsurgency war against the Islamic Moros, its similarities with the Afghanistan war are incredibly noteworthy, to say the least.
Even reading accounts of the terrain in which both conflicts were fought suggest they were equally as treacherous. As detailed in the memoir of Captain John Pershing, fighting the Moro Wars “entailed guerrilla warfare in a country unknown to us, with its swamps and rivers and its hills and mountains, every foot of which was familiar to the inhabitants and their insurrecto troops.”
While the U.S. often boasts about fighting for freedom, many Americans may be wondering how it is that their freedom came to be located in the Philippines in the first place. Was it worth sending 75,000 American troops in just 1900 alone to the Philippines to fight and die? And was the operation even remotely successful?
More importantly seems to be the indication that the U.S. military was not welcome in the Philippines, much as it is not welcomed by Afghanistan or any other Muslim-majority nation which has to duel with the U.S. Empire. After the U.S. defeated the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay and annexed the Philippines under the 1898 Treaty of Paris, the Moro population were not even consulted. The U.S. then sought to “pacify” them using brute force.
“I want no prisoners,” ordered General Jacob Smith on Samar Island during the war in 1902. “I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me.”
Fast forward over 100 years later and it is difficult to see how U.S. military doctrine has changed for the better. A video came to light in 2010 of then-General James Mattis saying that it was “a hell of a lot of fun to shoot” people in Afghanistan. Mattis was later rewarded for his heroism and bravery by being crowned Donald Trump’s secretary of defense for a short while.
As you can imagine, General Smith received his wish just as Mattis after him, with perhaps half a million locals dying as a result of the U.S. invasion. At Bud Dajo, some 1,000 Moro separatists, including their families had fled to the crest of a volcano to escape the American invasion. Allegedly, American troops reached the top of the volcano and fired down into the crater until they killed 99 percent of the inhabitants. The colonizers then took the time and effort to pose for a photograph with the hundreds of dead bodies (no, seriously).
It is also worth noting that some 4,000 U.S. soldiers lost their lives during this particular war. This closely mirrors the number of coalition deaths since 2001 in Afghanistan—and for good reason. To minimize U.S. personnel deaths in the Philippines’ war, the U.S. military deployed Filipinos led by U.S. officers into battle. (Sound familiar?)
At one stage, Filipinos ended up doing almost all of the dying as U.S. soldiers slowly left the battle theatre. In fact, the final year of conflict was the bloodiest year of the Moro war. This seems to be the trend in a number of U.S. wars. This is certainly true with respect to Afghanistan, with the U.S. military and its Afghan lackeys on the ground killing more civilians than the Taliban in recent times.
But what is all this senseless violence for? To put it simply, whether in the Philippines, Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere, this rampage is all borne out of the belief that America’s subordinates are not capable of ruling themselves and will ultimately profit from American occupation. This was actually the firm thinking of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, who saw it as the duty of the United States to maintain the Philippines as a protectorate. This idea was famously (or infamously) termed the “White Man’s Burden” in a poem written by Rudyard Kipling, who sent the poem to Teddy prior to his decision to engage in the Philippine-American war. A 1902 Life Magazine cover even depicted an apparent waterboarding of a Filipino POW by U.S. personnel (the supporters in the background seem to be watching with glee).
When not much has changed, it seems it never will. We can also expect this type of activity to continue for the foreseeable future, given the geopolitical stakes at hand. In the case of the Philippines, it was recently reported that Chinese and Philippine foreign ministers have sealed an agreement for the two nations to pursue joint oil and gas exploration in the hotly contested South China Sea.
As it turns out, the South China Sea could contain anywhere between 125 billion barrels of crude oil and 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The idea that a foreign adversary, especially one rising to prowess on the world stage such as China, could control the majority of these resources unchecked is a major blow to the U.S. Empire.
Whether it is lithium, opium, and geostrategic chess moves in Afghanistan; or natural gas and oil in the South China Sea, Muslim populations will continue to suffer in a colonial terror campaign which has been unfolding for over 100 years.
Think of it this way: if another century passes and your great grandchildren had never heard of the “forever war” that took place in Afghanistan in the early 2000s, all the while watching a new war unfold in the Indo-Pacific region for similar reasons, you would rightfully be fuming in your grave.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/27/2019 – 23:45 - Visualizing Every Coal Power Plant In The World (1927-2019)
Visualizing Every Coal Power Plant In The World (1927-2019)
If you live in a developed country, it’s been clear that the appetite for coal power is falling.
Not only has coal been singled out as a primary source of carbon emissions and air pollution, but, as Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins details below, it’s also been getting phased out in favor of cheap natural gas in some regions around the world.
In the U.S., electricity generation from coal has been dropping since the late 2000s, and in Europe the departure from coal has accelerated even quicker. In fact, it’s estimated that European coal power output could fall 23% in 2019 alone.
A Different Global Story
However, despite a growing consensus around the use of thermal coal in the West, the global story is actually quite different.
Today’s animation from SVT Nyheter details every coal power plant in the world from 1927 to 2019, and it shows that coal power — especially in South Asia — has continued to ramp up.
As of 2019, there are an estimated 2,425 coal-fired power plants in the world, combining for an operating capacity of about 2,000 GW and roughly 15 billion tonnes of CO₂ emissions.
Global Tipping Point?
Since 2010, there have been hundreds of new coal power plants commissioned — and almost all of them can be found somewhere in Asia:
However, it seems that this could be the year that the story changes.
Preliminary data suggests that Indian coal consumption could drop in 2019 for the first time in over a decade. Meanwhile, it’s expected that China’s growing coal capacity could be fully offset by decreasing use of the fossil fuel in developed nations.
As a result, according to Carbon Brief, global coal power generation could fall 3% in 2019:
If this trend continues, it could be a sign of a tipping point in global coal consumption — and if the sentiment around coal shifts the same way in China, the potential impact could be amplified even further.
Will 2020 provide additional evidence towards a global sea change in coal dependence, or is 2019 just a blip on the radar?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/27/2019 – 23:25 - Understanding Why There's No FBI Whistleblowers Outlining Institutional Corruption
Understanding Why There's No FBI Whistleblowers Outlining Institutional Corruption
Authored by ‘sundance’ via TheConservativeTreehouse.com,
To understand why there’s no-one in the administrative mid-tier of the FBI acting in a whistle-blowing capacity requires a background perspective looking at the totality of corruption. The institutions are protecting themselves; and yes, that protection applies to the internal dynamics.
Former DAG Rod Rosenstein was dirty. He might not have started out dirty, but his actions in office created a dirty mess. Rosenstein facilitated the McCabe operation against Trump during the May 16th, 2017, White House FBI sting against Trump with Mueller. Rosenstein also facilitated the special counsel (writ large), and provided three scope memos to expand the corrupt investigation of President Trump. According to the inaction of AG Bill Barr, we’re not allowed to see those authorizing scope memos.
Additionally, despite knowing the Trump investigation held a false predicate, Rosenstein signed the 3rd renewal of a fraudulent FISA application. Worse yet, even if Rosenstein was caught up by corruption around him, he did nothing to stop the fraud once identified.
Why is Rosenstein a key inflection point? Because Rod Rosenstein recommended current FBI Director Christopher Wray to President Trump. POTUS then allowed Wray, as he does all department heads, to select his deputy – Wray chose David Bowditch.
Keep in mind the National Security Division of the DOJ (DOJ-NSD) was/is the epicenter of many corrupt activities, including filing the fraudulent FISA application, manipulating interpretations of law for FARA (§901) violations, and doing all of this while denying any inspector general oversight. As FISA Judge Rosemary Collyer recently noted, the DOJ-NSD is positioned as a rogue legal arm of the U.S. intelligence apparatus.
FBI Director Wray selected the former head of DOJ-NSD to become the lead lawyer for the FBI, chief legal counsel Dana Boente.
So from Rosenstein we got: Chris Wray, David Bowditch, Dana Boente and another dubious DOJ recommendation, DC U.S. Attorney Jessie K Liu (ref. Awan Bros and James Wolfe). Keep this in mind moving forward.
Another career corrupt-o-crat to come out of the DOJ-NSD, who was also involved in the fraudulent legal filings was the lead lawyer for the division, Michael Atkinson.
Atkinson was moved from DOJ-NSD to become the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG). Yes, the same IGIC who manipulated the rules and regulations to allow the hearsay Ukraine CIA “whistleblower”, Eric Ciaramella.
What we end up with is a brutally obvious, convoluted, network of corrupt officials; each carrying an independent reason to cover their institutional asses… each individual interest forms a collective fraudulent scheme inside the machinery of the FBI apparatus.
The motive behind the DOJ/FBI effort to cover for Senate Intelligence Committee Security Director James Wolfe’s unlawful classified information leaks, is connected to this network and expands into the SSCI Chairman (Richard Burr) and Vice-Chair Mark Warner.
Security Director Wolfe was working on instructions from inside the committee itself; his leak of the FISA application to journalist Ali Watkins was in alignment with the intents/motives of the SSCI in March 2017. Dirty politicians corrupting staff.
The DOJ and FBI didn’t charge James Wolfe with the leaking of classified information because it would have exposed corruption within the SSCI. Wolfe was prepared to call the senators in his defense…. this could not be allowed. The SSCI has oversight over the intelligence community to include the FBI, DOJ, DOJ-NSD, CIA, ODNI etc.
How does all of this corruption come together?…. More importantly how does this level of institutional corruption create the inability of FBI whistle-blowers to come forward?
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is the approver for any nominations for any executive appointed position involving the intelligence community.
If the senate intel committee wants to block the nomination, likely adverse to their interests, they can… simply, they don’t take it up. (See Trump’s attempt to appoint Representative John Ratcliffe as ODNI as an example.)
However, along with approving Wray and Bowditch, the SSCI also approved former DOJ-NSD legal counsel Michael Atkinson to become Intelligence Community Inspector General. Who would an honest intelligence whistle-blower have to go through? Dirty Michael Atkinson.
The same dirty Michael Atkinson who was the top legal counsel to the head of the DOJ-NSD when the corrupt DOJ-NSD agency operations were ongoing. See how the whistle-blower block works?
Aligned interests – The Senate Intel Committee uses the placement of Atkinson to block any whistle-blower action that would be adverse to their interests. Whistle-blowers ain’t stupid, they know what surrounds them.
Senator Mark Warner and Senator Richard Burr are dirty. So too is ICIG Atkinson, FBI Director Chris Wray, FBI Deputy Director David Bowditch and FBI Legal Counsel Dana Boente.
Robert Mueller was dirty. Rod Rosenstein was dirty. All of the special counsel lawyers including Andrew Weissmann and Brandon Van Grack (Flynn prosecutor) are dirty. Additionally Mueller’s lead FBI Agent David Archey, who was promoted after the corrupt special counsel investigation to be the head of the Virginia FBI field office, dirty.
FBI official David Archey, like ICIG Michael Atkinson, conveniently put into a place where he can run cover for FBI operations that might expose dirty DC and Virgina-based FBI activities. See how that works?
Try telling me with all we know about the Mueller investigation how anyone on the special counsel assignment was participating in a fraudulent investigation without knowing.
Special Agent Peter Strzok, dirty. FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, dirty. FBI Lawyer Lisa Page, dirty. FBI media spox Michael Kortan, dirty. James Comey, Andrew McCabe and James Baker, dirty-dirty-dirty. Fortunately all of these are fired… but what about Supervisory Special Agent Joseph Pientka (SSA1)? Pientka clearly outlined as dirty by IG Horowitz report on FISA abuse, and yet still employed; still providing cover.
So what exactly does that make Horowitz? Perhaps lead corruption polisher who comes in willfully blind behind the Bondo application team?
That, all of that, in its brutal totality, is why we have not seen any honest FBI whistle-blowers come forward.
There’s no-one for them to blow the whistle to…
Every day we spend outraged about what the DOJ and FBI did in 2016 and 2017, is one less day that AG Bill Barr is not being held accountable for all of this current DOJ and FBI corruption that stares him in the face when he brushes his teeth each morning.
If we had a functioning Fourth Estate none of these corrupt officials could survive investigative media scrutiny. Unfortunately the corrupt administrative state doesn’t *play* the press, it actually involves the press…. it absorbs the press… it attaches the press viability to its own position…. it makes the press part of the corrupt process.
The press cannot turn against the corrupt administrative state without exposing their own culpability, participation and lack of credibility… It’s a protective circle.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/27/2019 – 23:05 - A Decade Of Boozing Comes To A Close
A Decade Of Boozing Comes To A Close
As the decade comes to a close, what better time to look back and review which trends in alcohol made an impact – and which ones likely won’t be sticking around for the 2020s.
Craft spirits caught on in a big way during the decade, according to Bloomberg. There were 195 independent craft distilleries in the U.S. in 2010 and that number rose to 1,586 by 2018. With handmade-style liquors becoming popular, major brands like Proximo and Remy Cointreau found themselves purchasing majority stakes in small distilleries.
Kaveh Zamanian, founder of Louisville, Kentucky’s Rabbit Hole Distillery, which was purchased in 2019 by Pernod Ricard said: “The benefit of a strategic partnership allows us to scale up in a meaningful way.”
Zamanian doesn’t see the partnership as “selling out”, but rather as an investment in his vision and path toward more product innovation.
Meanwhile, U.S. tariffs on European alcoholic products could continue to make the next year even better for domestic-made spirits. Additionally, the recently signed Craft Beverage Modernization Tax Reform Act provides distillers savings of $10.80 per gallon of the first 100,000 gallons produced.
Celebrity liquor also became popular in the 2010’s, including “Born & Bred Vodka from Channing Tatum, Heaven’s Door Whiskey from Bob Dylan, Virginia Black Whiskey from Drake, Villa One Tequila from Nick Jonas, and even Ron de Jeremy spirits from porn star Ron Jeremy.”
George Clooney also wound up selling his Casamigos tequila brand to Diageo for $1 billion in 2017. Actor Ryan Reynolds acquired part of Oregon’s Aviation Gin in 2017, also.
Andrew Chrisomalis, CEO of Davos Brands, which owns Aviation, said: “Ryan is recruiting new fans to the gin category and to American gin in particular.”
Aside from ownership, some other actors took a different angle on things. Meanwhile, Matthew McConaughey was named “creative director” for Wild Turkey in 2016.
Julka Villa, managing director at Campari Group, which owns Wild Turkey said: “The decision to partner with Matthew was born out of a desire to share our rich, storied history with a younger bourbon consumer.”
In the decade ahead, eyes will also be on Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston’s “Dos Hombres” mezcal brand and Kate Hudson’s gluten free, non-GMO corn-based vodka, “King Street”.
The rise in premium spirits has also led to higher quality mixers. For instance, Fever Tree from the U.K., which makes mixers, was valued at $4.5 billion earlier this year. Other mixer companies will also be gaining traction in the upcoming decade.
Jordan Silbert, founder of Q Mixers in Brooklyn, New York said: “When we launched over 10 years ago, consumers in the know wanted to make great drinks and they began investing in premium spirits. It only made sense that mixing those better spirits with mixers of comparable quality and sophistication would make better drinks.”
Additionally, low alcohol drinks have also been a trend over the past decade, as we have highlighted before here on Zero Hedge.
Lynn House, national spirits specialist and portfolio mixologist for Heaven Hill said: “Spritzes and low alcohol session cocktails are a way for people to enhance a moment without the punch of a high proof spirit.”
The trend seems to be set for the upcoming decade: low alcohol fizzy and highball type drinks made with liquers won’t be going away anytime soon, even though tariffs may have an impact on availability of some cordials.
Meanwhile, according to Nielsen, sales of hard seltzer like White Claw are up more than 208% in 2019.
There has also been a rise in bitter-style drinks that has coincided with the hop-heavy beer trend that started in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Amor y Amargo, a bitters-focused cocktail bar in New York City, started as a pop-up bar in 2011 and has graduated to a full blown bar due to popular demand. It now has a second location in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that it opened in 2019.
Nick Elozevic, co-owner of Diamond Dogs, a casual neighborhood bar in Astoria, Queens said: “Years of watching people like Anthony Bourdain on TV has expanded American consumers’ palates and appreciation for different flavors.”
Finally, the growth of cocktails on social media has helped contribute to their popularity outside of social media. Bright drinks and ridiculous glasses all make for good fodder on social media.
Liquor brands hire social media cocktail stylists like Josue Romeo to help in posting content. They also work with consultants like Alexandra Farrington to come up with eye-catching concepts that will grab people’s attention on social media. Some bars even have their own budgets for “creative directors”.
But looking into the 2020’s, some are hopeful that the trend doesn’t continue. “With constantly shifting algorithms and platforms such as Instagram experimenting with not posting “likes”, maybe we can all soon go back to sipping plain old glasses of wine—and not telling anyone about it,” Bloomberg concludes.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/27/2019 – 22:45 - Donald Trump Will Easily Be Reelected: There's Been No Repudiation Of What He Represents and There Won't Be
Donald Trump Will Easily Be Reelected: There's Been No Repudiation Of What He Represents and There Won't Be
Authored by Anis Shivani via Counterpunch.org,
I predicted well before the last election that Donald Trump would be elected, having felt that way once he rode down that golden escalator with his rapist invective. Ever since he was elected, I’ve also believed he’ll be reelected, more easily this time.
An illustrative personal anecdote, one of many over the last three years: A creative writing PhD with tons of debt, whose wife happens to be an undocumented Filipina, became mighty angered by the promise of student debt cancelation. What about those who have paid their dues by taking out debt? No doubt he would refuse a blanket amnesty for “illegals” too. His DACA wife paid her dues.
The columnists at the New York Times are all angry at the possibility of decriminalization of border crossings, health care for the undocumented, and abolition of private insurance. They don’t want to do away with Trumpian inhumanity. They want the oppression to continue, but without the transparent rhetoric.
Minus the Trumpian rhetorical overlash, war, empire, violence, hollowness, junk goods, and a junk life are all the people have ever known and all they want.
Historical movement in long cycles can’t be short-circuited, as we can see in the resistance of the liberal elites toward Sanders, the only candidate who could beat Trump, versus the stampede toward Warren, who provides a safe alternative, and would surely lose.
But what kind of a fascist doesn’t start a war in three years? Trump doesn’t need war, because he has brought the war home by making us confront our emptiness directly. He is the catalyst we needed at this time, and he is fulfilling his purpose beautifully. America is exhausted, which the liberal elites don’t get.
Trump keeps making noises about Iran, but he hasn’t actually done it yet. His pullback at the last moment, when the bombers were supposedly already on their way, is a trope that makes sense to a lot of people. We could have, in a science-fictional world, the repetition of this particular action—pulling back from the brink, the antithesis to Strangelovian irrevocability—day after day, and it would be the right psychotropic drug to rouse us.
And what kind of a huckster is he? He constantly keeps changing his mind, which is not a character flaw, but the essence of his “deal-making.” America can’t find a better deal—from the New Deal to the Fair Deal to the imaginary Green New Deal, a landscape of lost opportunities and blighted dreams—so contingent honor, betrayed promises, and infinite self-cancelation constitute the only kind of deal-making possible. And unlike The Apprentice there can be no winner at the end, while the rest get fired, because the endless prevarication—saying two things at the same time, often diametrically opposite—is what constitutes deal-making. We’d better get used to it: it is the welcome end to a century of liberal social planning.
To be totally adrift, he’s saying and resonating mightily, is to have total freedom. The empire embraces its most recent eruption of vulgarity, barbarism, and eco-destruction as a welcome development—at least the dispossessed do, if not the meritocrats. To move beyond the dead language of liberal political correctness, which all of the Democratic candidates suffer from, is a great service. He is preparing us for the imminent turmoil of the coming decades—concluding at last in secession and fragmentation by mid-century—with the kind of language the empire needs now. He’s reading history well, only too well, far better than his ideological opponents, the neoliberal globalizers or the democratic socialists.
Not one of his opponents is prepared to say that power is America—brute, unforgiving, no-second-chances power. This kind of power requires a base removed from liberal education. He reforms language every day, in his tweets, which emanate from our deepest unconscious, such as when liberal stand-up comedians turn out to be racists and mysogynists in their revealing moments.
As we prepare for the age of brutality, he’s telling us—as the Times columnists confirm every day in the limits they impose to compassion—that the recent gloss of multicultural tolerance, in the Reagan/Clinton/Obama years, was the final fantasy. His border wall seeks to literalize the walls of segregation and inequality that have been going up relentlessly all throughout the interior. He won’t start wars of humanitarian liberation, because that was the foreign aspect to the domestic malevolence passing as tolerance.
Jeane Kirkpatrick counseled in the 1970s that we could work with good authoritarians around the world but not socialists. Trump’s affection for Modi, Bolsonaro, Putin, Kim Jong-un, and Mohammad bin Salman is nothing new. It is how we have always operated, even in the halcyon days of Kissinger’s détente, when we violently crushed democracy in Chile and elsewhere, or under the spiritual Carter, when we trapped the Russian bear in Afghanistan, much to Brzezinski’s delight.
Trump doesn’t want to restart history, to repudiate Francis Fukuyama, or Bill Clinton. Nor does he want to start a clash of civilizations, to validate Samuel Huntington, or Bush Jr. He is content with leaving history alone, which seems natural, coming so soon after Bush Jr.’s counselors, who wanted full spectrum dominance. The deal, as Trump sees it, is ever-changing, immune from textual recreation, legal solidity, constitutional affirmation.
What is his obsession with China then? China for the last three decades has been a management consultant’s dream come true. Trump is not playing a zero-sum game, a chessboard called economic nationalism, with China. With him we move beyond oligarchic nationalism or even democratic fascism. China helps construct a total vacuum of thought reaching even beyond the vulgarity of trashy American consumerism. We no longer want their tacky goods. We want the Harley-Davidsons back—or not, it’s okay if they don’t come back. If we can’t recall manufacturing, and we leave world trade, then we are thrown upon a manly ideal, where we make things and do things for ourselves, except that Trump and his followers know that that ideal is well past reach, going out of fashion with the rise of consumerism precisely a century ago.
The 2020s: an exact reversal of the rise of optimistic consumerism in the 1920s. History does have its symmetries, if you know where to look. The end to advertising, news broadcasting, modernist propaganda, the religion of self-help and therapy, physical fitness, institutionalized spying, and technological utopia.
His attack on the media, the breathing tube for an empty liberal consumerism that died long ago, is the most welcome move to his fervent supporters. You can’t believe a word you see. You have to create your own reality, which the Internet helped bring about starting in the 1990s. Consider the real scandal of Joe Biden’s son’s corruption, already noted matter-of-factly in leading newspapers, versus the impeachable scandal of just talking—airing out possible deals to land political opponents in trouble. Torture, assassination, deportation, and ecocide are all within the pale, for the resistance, for those who would like to replace him with an acceptable alternative who will take empire back to where it was.
But it’s not going to happen, because he never was the bearer of a virus, which implies something alien. He is the perfect mirror, just as Nixon followed Johnson, Reagan followed Carter, and Bush followed Clinton, in performing not so much an oscillation but an exaggerated return to form. Empires, heavy and difficult to maneuver, don’t engage in circular or sideways motions. Trump is the accelerant to the end point empire needs now, just as Reagan and Bush served their functions earlier, and in that sense he is a true man of the people. You don’t beat a man of the people electorally, you just don’t.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/27/2019 – 22:25 - Is Tesla Shoving It In Trump's Face By Producing Cars In China To Skirt Tariffs?
Is Tesla Shoving It In Trump's Face By Producing Cars In China To Skirt Tariffs?
Once again it seems like the rules apply to everyone – except Tesla.
First it was “Funding Secured”, argued to be one of the most blatant examples of securities fraud in recent history – all but ignored by the SEC. Then it was scores of Tesla vehicles involved in various “Autopilot” related accidents – all but ignored by the NHTSA.
Now it’s moving to China to produce vehicles in order to skirt tariffs – all but ignored by President Trump.
Tesla is now going to be delivering Model 3 vehicles built in its Shanghai factory effective Monday, according to Reuters. Construction of the plant began in January and production started in October. Tesla’s goal is to produce 250,000 vehicles a year at the factory, after the Model Y is added to the line.
The first 15 cars to roll off the line on December 30 will go to employees.
Elon Musk, pretending to give a shit. The factory will be delivering cars just 357 days after the factory’s construction started. We also recently reported that Musk was somehow able to procure a $1.4 billion loan from various Chinese banks at a 10% discount to the prime rate.
That’s right, nothing to see here, President Trump…
The China made cars are priced at $50,000 before subsidies and Tesla wants to have deliveries in full swing by January 25. China is the world’s biggest EV market and sold 1.3 million NEVs last year.
Tesla is also working to build infrastructure in China, setting up service centers and charging stations across the country.
We can’t help but ask: With all of the outrage Trump has directed toward conventional manufacturers like General Motors and Carrier – why does Elon Musk and Tesla once again get a pass?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/27/2019 – 22:05 - Scientists Say Aliens Should Have Already Visited Earth
Scientists Say Aliens Should Have Already Visited Earth
Authored by Manuel Garcia Aguilar via TheMindUnleashed.com,
The debate about the existence of alien life has been a topic that has interested humans for a long time and the scientific community has had split opinions regarding our solitude in this amazingly big universe.
Now, new research published in the Astronomical Journal provides further information that invites us to rethink our mindset on this topic.
During the summer of 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi posed a question to his colleagues over lunch:
“Don’t you ever wonder where everybody is?”
He was referring to alien life.
The Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and we could say that that was roughly the time it took a “kind of life” to be capable of space travel. Our universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old.
Fermi proposed that during this time, the galaxy should have been overrun with intelligent, technologically-advanced aliens. Yet, we have no evidence of this despite decades of searching. This postulate became known as the Fermi Paradox.
Briefly, some of the main points of this paradox, formalized by Michael H. Hart, are:
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There are billions of stars in the Milky Way similar to the Sun.
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With high probability, some of these stars have Earth-like planets, and if the Earth is typical, some may have already developed intelligent life.
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Some of these civilizations may have developed interstellar travel.
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Even at the slow pace of currently envisioned interstellar travel, the Milky Way galaxy could be completely traversed in a few million years
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And since many of the stars similar to the Sun are billions of years older, this would seem to provide plenty of time
Now, you can have a clearer view of why this paradox is so interesting for scientists and further investigation is being done, the odds seem to be really high.
The expectation that the universe should be teeming with intelligent life is linked to models like the Drake equation, which suggests that even if the probability of intelligent life developing at a given site is small, the sheer multitude of possible sites should nonetheless yield a large number of potentially observable civilizations.
This new study offers a different perspective on the question: maybe aliens are just taking their time and being strategic.
“If you don’t account for the motion of stars when you try to solve this problem, you’re basically left with one of two solutions,” Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback the study’s lead author said.
“Either nobody leaves their planet, or we are in fact the only technological civilization in the galaxy.”
Stars orbit the center of the galaxy on different paths at different speeds. They occasionally pass each other, so, aliens could be waiting for their next destination to come closer, Caroll-Nellenback’s study says.
Researchers have formulated different theories trying to answer the Fermi Paradox, including the possibility that all alien life forms in oceans below a planet’s surface and there’s even the “zoo hypothesis” which imagines that societies in our galaxy decided to not contact us to “preserve” us in a way analogical to how we preserve some natural places—or even to prevent them from getting some kind of “disease” from us.
A crucial fact to this new study is the fact that, as previously mentioned, the galaxy moves. So, aliens could be waiting for an optimal travel distance to explore new territories.
“If long enough is a billion years, well then that’s one solution to the Fermi paradox,” Carroll-Nellenback said.
Another important thing to notice is that the research team did not attempt to guess at the alien’s motivations or politics, something that usually delayed the attempts to solve the Fermi Paradox.
We have to consider also that our consciousness and our perception of the “civilization” concept may play a crucial part in this kind of studies. So, our predictions may be based on our own behavior.
“We tried to come up with a model that would involve the fewest assumptions about sociology that we could,” Carroll-Nellenback said.
So far, we’ve detected about 4,000 planets outside of our solar system and none have been shown to host life. But we haven’t looked that hard—there are at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way and even more planets, so we still have a lot more to explore.
Maybe, merging philosophy and science together for a moment, we could believe that at some point, if there is in fact alien life out there in the universe, we (or our kids, grandkids, or great grandkids) will get to know them and make really close contact, assuming all of this in basis of some of the ideas exposed in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, where he says that if something can happen, and there is enough time for that to happen, it will happen.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/27/2019 – 21:45 -
- Russian YouTubers Create Gas-Powered Replica Of Tesla's Cybertruck Using A Hatchback And Some Sheet Metal
Russian YouTubers Create Gas-Powered Replica Of Tesla's Cybertruck Using A Hatchback And Some Sheet Metal
Who knows how long it could be before Tesla finally starts production and delivery of its Cybertruck? Given the company’s timelines of days past, it could be years.
Maybe that’s why a group of three men in Russia decided they were just going to make their own knock off of the truck, from a gas powered car, according to Business Insider. And so, that’s exactly what the YouTube channel Pushka Garazh – which translates to “Gun Garage” in English – did.
And they did it using an early model of a Russian made hatchback. The men started with this: a Lada Samara, a hatchback created by Russian car maker AvtoVAZ.
The group spent about $1,300 USD to create the replica, spray painting the hatchback after covering the car in sheet metal. However, at 13 feet long, the replica is about 6 feet shorter than the actual Cybertruck.
The replica, however, doesn’t have any doors (just like a Model S in the winter!). So people that want to get in and out are forced to go through the trunk.
The guys even added Tesla branded hubcaps and a horizontal beam brakelight, like the one found on the actual Cybertruck. The replica is also gas powered.
The garage has put the vehicle up for sale for about $10,700, or 666,666 rubles.
It has even been spotted near Russia’s capital and has cause “quite a stir” on social media.
If you ask us, they did a great job in re-creating the overall hideousness of the vehicle. Given how shoddy it looks, we’re sure those on the street lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the replica likely had no problem believing it was the real thing.
You can watch the entire episode where they build the replica here:
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/27/2019 – 21:25 - Report Hyped By Climate Alarmists Warned: Millions Dead, Nuclear War, & Sunken Major Cities By 2020
Report Hyped By Climate Alarmists Warned: Millions Dead, Nuclear War, & Sunken Major Cities By 2020
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
According to experts, climate change will result in “millions” of deaths, major European cities being sunken, nuclear war and global environmental riots…all within the next 5 days.
That’s because they made the prediction back in 2004 and said all that would happen by 2020, which is just 5 days away.
“Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters,” reported left-wing newspaper the Guardian on February 22, 2004.
“A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world,” the report added.
The alarmist document went on to claim that nations would resort to using nuclear weapons to protect dwindling food supplies, a situation that would “bring the planet to the edge of anarchy.”
Remember guys, it’s just 5 days until the UK is “plunged into a Siberian climate.”
From the same trustworthy people who gave you mass starvation of humanity by the 80’s, “ice free” Arctic summers by 2013 and Greta Thunberg.
You can trust them. pic.twitter.com/afGut28mXv
— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) December 27, 2019
The authors of the report, Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, also asserted that “By 2020 ‘catastrophic’ shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war,” causing widespread “crop failure” and “famine.”
So apparently, the UK is just 5 days away from being plunged into a “Siberian climate” and millions of people are about to die in a giant nuclear carnage caused by global food shortages and monster droughts.
Or alternatively, so-called “climate experts” have been proven spectacularly wrong on absolutely everything, from Paul Ehrlich’s prediction of millions of deaths from famine by the 80’s, to Al Gore’s absurd claim that the Arctic would have “ice free” summers by 2013.
Just like the much heralded “secret report” that predicted global catastrophe by 2020, none of it happened.
So why should we trust the same people now?
* * *
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Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/27/2019 – 21:05 - Opioid Abusers Also Face Higher Risks Of Death From Suicide, Disease & Car Accidents
Opioid Abusers Also Face Higher Risks Of Death From Suicide, Disease & Car Accidents
The surge in drug overdose deaths linked to powerful opioids like fentanyl and other analogues will likely be remembered as the defining national health crisis of the 2010s. And as the decade draws to a close, one study found that people who use illicit opioids face an increased risk of other “deaths of despair.”
According to CNN, which cited findings from the study initially published Thursday in the medical journal JAMA Psychiatry (one of the more well-respected medical journals in the US) users of illicit opioids (i.e. everyone who uses them without a prescription) face an elevated risk of dying from noncommunicable diseases (like heart disease), infectious diseases and viruses (like HIV and Hep C), suicide and other unintentional injuries (like car accidents).
Suicide deaths among the sample group studied occurred at nearly 8x the expected rate, while unintentional injuries occurred at 7x the expected rate. Deaths from interpersonal violence, while still relatively infrequent, occurred at 9x the normal rate, which is also unsurprising. Heroin addicts will often take risks to get high, including trying to rob drug dealers, who often carry guns to ward off such attacks.
“People might be surprised that although overdose was the most common cause of death, it’s far from the only cause of death that people using opioids outside a prescription experience at excessive rates,” said Sarah Larney, lead author of the study and a senior research fellow at the University of New South Wales’ National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre in Australia.
“Smoking-related illnesses such as cancer and cardiovascular diseases are common. Trauma is another major factor. People are exposed to car accidents, assaults and other causes of injuries at greater than usual rates, and suicide is also much more common than in the broader population,” she said. “It’s really clear that although overdose prevention is critical, we also need to look at the range of poor outcomes that people are experiencing, and work to reduce other causes of excess mortality such as suicide, chronic diseases and infectious diseases.”
Researchers looked at opioid users across 28 countries, and compared their data to data collected from 124 previously published studies, some that were conducted as far back as Jan. 2009.
Unsurprisingly, researchers found that men faced significantly higher rates of drug-related deaths than women (unsurprising since the majority of hard-drug users are men). Older users also faced significantly higher rates of drug-related deaths.
But among women examined in the study, deaths from HIV were particularly pronounced. That’s hardly surprising, since female heroin users will often work as prostitutes to raise money to finance their addictions. Men who consume excessive amounts of alcohol, meanwhile, registered much higher rates of deaths related to liver disease.
Overall, while poisoning- or substance-related deaths were the most common cause of death among opioid users (accounting for 31.5% of deaths), noncommunicable diseases accounted for 24.1% of deaths, while infectious diseases accounted for 19.7% and physical traumas accounted for 18.1%.
“To me the most important message to take from this study is that we need to think beyond the drug. People using opioids are people first and foremost, and have complex health and social needs,” Larney said. “Making sure people have access to essential medicines to treat HIV and Hepatitis C; encouraging smoking cessation through access to nicotine replacement therapies; and ensuring access to nutritious food and safe shelter would all go towards reducing the death toll in this population.”
A report issued in September by the US Congress Joint Economic Committee entitled “Long-Term Trends in Deaths of Despair” found that “mortality from deaths of despair far surpasses anything seen in America since the dawn of the 20th century…the recent increase has primarily been driven by an unprecedented epidemic of drug overdoses.”
The explosion of opioid use and opioid-related deaths have been the primary drivers of a drop in overall life expectancy in the US for three straight years.
Most of those dying are relatively young white male adults.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/27/2019 – 20:45 - What's Good And Bad About Automation
What's Good And Bad About Automation
Authored by Stephen Davies via The American Institute for Economic Research,
Currently, there is a lot of discussion about the impact of technologies such as artificial intelligence on the world of work and employment.
Some of this is alarmist, and some excessively excited. There will indeed be dramatic changes, but history and economic theory both suggest that these will not radically alter the nature of the economic system.
However, while we should not fear the changes brought by widespread and extensive automation, we should be concerned about the way the process works and about its short-term and transitional aspects. Devising ways of dealing with these is a real challenge for both public policy and civil society.
In the last few years, there has been a lot of discussion about a new wave of automation that is already under way and starting to transform much of the economy. The central element in this is the combination of telecommunications with artificial intelligence (AI). This makes possible, people both hope and fear, the replacement of a great deal of human labor of many types. It is AI in particular that attracts the attention, not least because of recent dramatic breakthroughs such as the development by the Google-owned firm Deep Mind of an AI that could defeat the world’s best Go player (Go is a game played mainly in the Far East that in terms of its complexity is at least one order of magnitude higher than chess).
There have of course been many episodes of mechanization and automation before over the last 250 years. The argument made by many is that this time really is different for two reasons:
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AI replaces not just human labor but the human mind and judgment as well;
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and the automation will make market signals unnecessary because the key resource will be information, which is inherently abundant and can be reproduced at zero marginal cost.
There is a consensus that a lot of jobs or kinds of employment are going to disappear in the next two decades or so. There is disagreement over just how many will go as a proportion of currently existing employment. The OECD estimates that just under 10 percent of existing jobs are at high risk of automation. Other studies all conclude that the correct figure is somewhere in the high 40 percent range. The weight of opinion is therefore on the higher side of the two kinds of estimate.
Kinds of Jobs
There is a general agreement about the kinds of jobs that are likely to vanish. They all have certain qualities. One is that they are routine and repetitive, involving the repeated performance of standardized tasks. This includes both simple manual jobs and process-driven desk jobs. Another is that the job or role can be captured in a decision-making tree or flow diagram so that the range of decisions that have to be made is finite (it may still be large) — this means it can be done by an algorithm.
There is also general agreement about the kinds of work that are at low risk of automation. One is work requiring manual dexterity and manipulation (because of the difficulty of replicating the human hand); another is anything that requires human judgment or creativity, dealing with something that cannot be captured in an algorithm. The OECD study also argues that work involving human interaction is likely to survive simply because people crave human contact. Others are skeptical about this. Finally, there are some cases where stubborn human prejudice will keep the job in existence: it would be much safer if airplanes were entirely automated, but in polls most people would (irrationally) prefer a human pilot.
Given this, we can easily construct a list of the kinds of employment that are likely to vanish in the next decade or two. These range from jobs such as truck drivers and taxi drivers (replaced by autonomous vehicles), to a lot of logistics and warehouse work (replaced by automated handling systems), to a lot of routine work in the financial-services sector both high and low paid, to most legal work (but not trial lawyers) and most medical work, including diagnosis and prescription (but not surgery). There will thus be substantial losses of both blue collar and white collar jobs — in fact the losses of the second kind are likely to be larger.
Common Responses
Faced with this prospect of a huge upheaval in employment with many kinds of work simply vanishing, one response is to panic. The fear is that there will simply be no work available, or not enough for the people looking for and needing paid work. Others are excited and see this as a huge opportunity.
A popular reaction at the moment is to see this as the way toward a radical reconstruction of the entire economic system and a move beyond capitalism to some other kind of economic order. The idea is that the connection between work and income will be decisively severed and that we will also move into a world in which many products will be capable of being reproduced at zero marginal cost, which means they will be effectively free: in that case, the price mechanism will no longer operate.
This view has been eloquently put forth by people on the Marxist left such as Paul Mason (in Post-Capitalism) and Aaron Bastani (in Fully Automated Luxury Communism). These authors see the chance to realize the vision of the young Marx, in which the alienation of work is abolished along with the division of labor.
There are also people on the free market side who see this kind of outcome as likely, although what they envisage is a capitalist economy in which a large part of the population subsists on free stuff while not working or doing low-paid work.
New Kinds of Work
Neither panic and despair nor excitement is justified. The question to ask is not whether new technology is going to replace many jobs but whether those jobs will be replaced by new ones. There have been several episodes before where observers have expected the end of employment because of automation, and in every case the actual result has been that while many jobs do disappear, they are replaced by even more new ones.
Of course, that does not mean the same pattern is bound to happen again — to think so is to commit the fallacy of induction. It really could be different this time. However, there are theoretical reasons to doubt the more excitable predictions.
Firstly, many theoreticians of AI have a mechanistic view of human consciousness and decision making. For them, the human brain is simply a computer, only more complex and made of neurons rather than silicon. Hence the processes that create human thought are no different from the kind that take place in a computer or an AI, and any and all of them can be reproduced in a sufficiently advanced AI. This would mean that any and all human activities could be performed by an AI.
This, however, confuses intelligence and consciousness. We truly have no idea what the latter is or how it is produced, but we do know that the two are distinct (there are animals that we can show to have one but not the other). An AI or computer procedure, no matter how advanced, can only do what its programming and algorithm allow for — it cannot originate anything. This means that genuine creativity or the exercise of judgment when confronted by something novel cannot be built in. They remain human capacities.
Secondly, there is the question of knowledge. Even if most activities can be reduced to an algorithmic decision tree, the knowledge that those decisions will be made on is mostly tacit, localized, changing, and therefore incapable of being expressed in writing or numbers. This gives humans an advantage because of their greater flexibility and adaptability (AI can also learn, but this process is not as flexible as in humans). Putting the two things together means that there are many areas where humans will retain an advantage. Even if AI can also do these things, it will do so at a higher cost.
Thirdly, this misunderstands what automation does and hence its effects. What automation of any kind does is to make work more productive and hence to free up time and resources by increasing the intensity of the use of resources. Instead of using X amount of time and Y physical resources to get a given output, you use a fraction of X and Y to get the same result. This frees up the resources and human time for doing other things.
The result is fewer people doing some things and the people no longer doing them doing other things (often in different places). One challenge is that we do not know what those other things will be (although we can make informed guesses). We should not speak of a displacement of human labor but rather of its being freed up to do new things, in the way that all of the labor once needed to grow food has been released to do a myriad of other tasks. (The argument about zero-marginal-cost production misunderstands the nature of both scarcity and the price system, but that is another argument).
Genuine Challenges
So should we just chill and see what happens? Not so. There are two genuine challenges that these changes pose. The first is that the rewards from the new activity and its output will accrue to a small minority. The historical pattern is that this is what happens in the early phase of any technological transformation, due to first-mover advantage and simple good fortune.
However, as time passes and the returns to the new technologies decline as it becomes mature and widely adopted, the income and wealth gap that widened in the earlier phase starts to shrink. This is what we can observe in both the 19th and 20th centuries. However, this takes time, and in the meantime you can have serious political and social unrest, for obvious reasons. Moreover, today the high rewards to first movers are artificially heightened and prolonged by the legal system, above all the current regime of intellectual property rights.
The second challenge is that the transitional costs in human terms of rapid innovation can be very high. Outside the world of economic models, the reallocation of both capital and labor as a result of technological innovation is neither immediate nor frictionless. This is because of the heterogeneity of both labor and capital — they are not uniform.
In plain English, this means that many capital resources such as buildings and machinery will simply become useless because they are in the wrong place or cannot be readily adapted or changed to a new use. In terms of labor, a person who has a range of skills that are now redundant may find it very difficult to acquire new ones or to move physically to a different place. In human terms, this can be very painful and traumatic and very destructive of both human connections and personal happiness. This is a real challenge – you can write off capital, but writing off human beings (often in large numbers or in concentrated locations) is both wrong in itself and very dangerous.
What Should Be Done?
If that is the real challenge of AI and automation (as opposed to fantasies of automated luxury communism or panic and despondency about the replacement of humans), what then should be done? Clearly, there is a place for imaginative public policy, which should mainly take the form of institutional reform and innovation rather than paid programs (e.g., radical reform of intellectual property).
The main step though is to look to social entrepreneurialism. We need people to develop solutions to the challenge of radical change in work and employment at a local level and in a decentralized but networked way. It is mutualism and social action that we need to rediscover and employ. Fortunately, some of the results of the current wave of automation are likely to make this easier, but that is for another column.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/27/2019 – 20:25 -
- Japan's Richest Man Quits SoftBank Board After Clashes With Masayoshi Son
Japan's Richest Man Quits SoftBank Board After Clashes With Masayoshi Son
After the year SoftBank just had, this is probably the last thing its shareholders want to see.
One of SoftBank’s last two remaining non-executive directors is stepping down from its board after 18 years, removing perhaps the company’s biggest internal skeptic, according to a Reuters report.
Tadashi Yanai, the CEO of Uniqlo owner Fast Retailing and a longtime Masa advisor, said he’s leaving SoftBank to focus more on expanding his own business into new markets, including Italy, India and Vietnam. With a net worth of $25 billion (according to Forbes), Yanai is the wealthiest person in Japan. But at SoftBank, he was known as a close ally and sometimes critic of Masayoshi Son credited with attempting to rein in some of Masa’s more reckless tendencies.
But whatever his reasons for leaving, the fact remains that Yanai’s departure comes at a time when his more conservative outlook is badly needed.
Tadashi Yanai
In one of his most famous quotes, Yanai said “Dreams are all good, but nothing beats realistic management. Let’s keep our feet firmly on the ground.”
Unfortunately, the word “Realistic” was never a big part of Masayoshi Son’s vocabulary. As his reputation as one of the world’s greatest momentum investors grew, Son pushed his firm toward ever-larger bets on Silicon Valley startups, leaving firms like Uber and WeWork with outrageous valuations that many analysts found difficult to justify.
After WeWork scrapped its planned IPO, SoftBank was forced to swoop in with a rescue package to stave off an imminent WeWork bankruptcy filing.
Then, in its Q3 earnings report, SoftBank suffered a staggering $4.6 billion writedown on its WeWork investment. But that wasn’t all: In addition to the WeWork fiasco, SoftBank’s ill-advised bets on Uber and Slack, both of which flopped after their long-anticipated IPOs this year, bringing the firm’s losses in 2019 to somewhere around $10 billion.
After the WeWork fiasco, shareholders were calling for Masa to step aside. Instead, the SoftBank founder and chairman acknowledged that “there was a problem with my own judgment, that’s something I have to reflect on.” He promised to be more conservative in the future.
But according to the FT, it appears that Masa has already changed his mind. Despite the failure of the first SoftBank Vision Fund, a $100 billion pot of mostly Saudi money used to invest in dozens of tech startups, sources close to Masa say the chairman wants to continue investing aggressively by raising a Vision Fund 2 (though it’s not clear where he intends to find the money and investors, now that the Saudis have reportedly soured on their relationship with SoftBank, and Japanese Telecom/Tech/VC/whatever conglomerate’s reputation as a responsible steward of capital lies in tatters.
Back in 2017, Yanai told a weekly Japanese business newspaper that his role was to raise sometimes painful questions.
“I realise he has a knack for investing, but if he’s going to make use of his ability, I want him to be successful as an entrepreneur rather than as an investor,” Yanai said in an interview with weekly paper Nikkei Veritas at the time. “I want him to focus on his core business.”
During a presentation last month, Son joked about being scolded by Yanai, and said his longtime friend could be a “scary external director” at times.
Shortly after, Bloomberg published the latest edition of Bloomberg Businessweek with a cover lampooning Son’s many investing failures.
Omg. pic.twitter.com/wRwCLhyRC6
— Ivan the K™ (@IvanTheK) December 27, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
At this point, remaining SoftBank investors should be trying to figure out exactly why Yanai left. Was he simply exhausted after 18 years of service on the board? Or was it Masayoshi Son’s hubris that drove him out the door?
Whatever the reason, with Yanai out, SoftBank’s board is now composed almost entirely of SoftBank executives and employees. That’s definitely a recipe for a more insular company, and more “yes” men surrounding Masayoshi Son.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/27/2019 – 20:05 - "Decline Is Now Inevitable" – Dennis Meadows On 'The Limits To Growth'
"Decline Is Now Inevitable" – Dennis Meadows On 'The Limits To Growth'
Authored by Adam Taggart via PeakProsperity.com,
Fifty years ago, an international team of researchers was commissioned by the Club of Rome to build a computer simulation of exponential economic and population growth on a finite planet.
In 1971, its findings were first released in Moscow and Rio de Janeiro, and later published in 1972 under the title The Limits To Growth. The report concluded:
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Given business as usual, i.e., no changes to historical growth trends, the limits to growth on earth would become evident by 2072, leading to “sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity”. This includes the following:
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Global Industrial output per capita reaches a peak around 2008, followed by a rapid decline
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Global Food per capita reaches a peak around 2020, followed by a rapid decline
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Global Services per capita reaches a peak around 2020, followed by a rapid decline
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Global population reaches a peak in 2030, followed by a rapid decline
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Growth trends existing in 1972 could be altered so that sustainable ecological and economic stability could be achieved.
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The sooner the world’s people start striving for the second outcome above, the better the chance of achieving it.
Few reports have generated as much debate, discussion and disagreement. Though it’s hard to argue that its forecasts made back in the early 1970s have proved eerily accurate over the ensuing decades.
But most of its warnings have been largely ignored by policymakers hoping (blindly?) for a rosier future.
One of the original seventeen researchers involved in The Limits To Growth study, Dennis Meadows, joins us for the podcast this week. Fifty years later, what does he foresee ahead?
Decline is now inevitable.
We’re without any question moving into the remainder of a century which is going to see, by the end of these decades, a much smaller population, much lower level of energy and material consumption and so forth.
Whether we retain equity amongst people and avoid the more violent forms of conflict remains to be seen. But sustainable development is no longer an option.
This is one of the most important discussions we’ve ever recorded among the hundreds produced over the past decade.
Click the play button below to listen to Chris’ interview with Dennis Meadows (55m:24s).
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/27/2019 – 19:45 -
- China Crackdown On Bitcoin Miners Sparks Concern
China Crackdown On Bitcoin Miners Sparks Concern
China has been raiding Bitcoin miners who’ve been illegally using electricity — presents a significant danger since so much of the world’s hash rate is concentrated in one country, reported Asia Times.
A recent interview with Ethan Pierse, director of the CryptoAssets Institute, said a recent government crackdown on mining facilities was due to miners illegally using electricity. By law, miners have to register with the government to use large amounts of power. Since electricity is so cheap, miners from around the world have flocked to China.
Pierse said, “People are going around that even still and tapping into electricity where they can and siphoning that off. So basically, they see that and monitor that there are weird peaks of electricity usage in places, and they go and track it down. One miner’s using the same electricity as a single household or dozens of households.”
Pierse said 65% of the world’s hash rate is produced in China. He said the Siachen region is responsible for 50% of that.
If any network disruption occurred in China, it would be very problematic for the global Bitcoin network.
Pierse said, “If you’re basing your economy or if you’re trying any kind of monetary policy to anything, whether it’s bitcoin or eventually other things, and the mining of that particular cryptocurrency is controlled this much by another government, more or less their ability to shut that down in and of itself can cause severe economic problems for governments or large corporations or other platforms that are leveraging this.”
In June, China’s Bitcoin miners controlled 60% of the global hash rate, and now the figure is up to 65% in December.
Chris Bendkisen, head of research at CoinShares, believes the rapid increase in the Chinese share of hash rate could be due to the deployment of advanced mining technology and cheap electricity.
“This is beneficial to the Chinese mining industry,” said Bendiksen. “If you are the first to increase your proportion of the hash rate, and you can do that before your competitors, that’s generally good.”
Mining crypto has become more difficult over the last several years as profitability sags. The overall Bitcoin hash rate has risen 80% since June, which in recent times, has created stronger profitability for miners who have access to cheap electricity.
With China controlling more and more of the world’s Bitcoin hash rate, some worry that the US could be falling behind the crypto curve, as Beijing is making a state effort to be a leader in blockchain.
Other top mining hubs are in the US, Russia, and Kazakhstan.
China could be laying the groundwork for a state-backed digital currency in the mid-2020s as it wants to become a leader in crypto in the intermediate timeframe.
The danger at play is that there’s too much hash rate concentrated in China and could lead to global network issues if disruptions in the country were seen.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/27/2019 – 19:25 - What Do They Know? US And Russia Both Developing Plans To Deal With Incoming Asteroids
What Do They Know? US And Russia Both Developing Plans To Deal With Incoming Asteroids
Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,
When the Russians take decisive action, it is usually for a reason. As you will see below, the Russians have suddenly decided that now is the time to create an organization that will be tasked with detecting, tracking and potentially destroying incoming asteroids. Are they doing this now because they have finally decided that this is a good idea, or has something gotten their attention? Of course they are not likely to publicly admit if they have come to the conclusion that a gigantic space rock is heading directly toward us. Just like the U.S. government, the Russian government is very interested in maintaining social order, and so they would probably delay telling the public about a potential asteroid impact for as long as possible.
In life, what people do is far more important than what they say, and the new center that the Russians have just created will not just be watching giant space rocks. According to Futurism, this new organization will be in charge of making sure “they don’t collide with Earth”…
Russian space agency Roscosmos is creating a center devoted to monitoring meteors, comets, and asteroids to ensure they don’t collide with Earth — even it means having to blow them up in space.
“As part of the creation of a monitoring system and information support for the safety of space activities in near-Earth space, we plan to launch the Russian Center for Small Celestial Bodies, whose main task will be to detect and track celestial bodies approaching Earth,” Igor Bakaras, a senior official at Roscosmos subsidiary TsNIIMash, told Russian-owned news agency Sputnik.
Certainly nobody can fault the Russians for allocating resources toward this purpose.
Our solar system is full of potentially dangerous giant space rocks, and a big enough impact could literally end our civilization.
But why now?
According to a British news source, this new organization will be evaluating whether it is better “to destroy celestial objects or steer them on to new trajectories and away from Earth”…
Roscosmos, the Russian equivalent of Nasa, wants to work out if it’s possible to destroy celestial objects or steer them on to new trajectories and away from Earth.
This could involve slamming a ‘kinetic impactor’ craft in the rock or using a satellite to drag it onto a new course. Nukes could also be sent into space to blow up the rocks.
A new department at Roscosmos called the Russian Centre for Celestial Bodies will be tasked with looking into space to find comets and asteroids approaching Earth.
Once again, nobody can argue with the value of such a major project, but isn’t NASA already doing all this?
Couldn’t the Russians just sit back and let us Americans do all the work?
I wish someone would ask Vladimir Putin that question.
And this sudden move by the Russians comes just one year after the U.S. issued a “National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan”…
In 2018, The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a new report titled the “National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan”.
The 18-page document outlines the steps that NASA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will take over the next 10 years to both prevent dangerous asteroids from striking Earth and prepare the country for the potential consequences of such an event.
Maybe U.S. officials suddenly decided last year that having a plan for incoming giant space rocks was a great idea, and maybe the Russians decided that it was such a great idea that they should copy us.
Or maybe both governments know something that they aren’t telling us yet.
Of course the truth is that NASA has not even identified most of the giant space rocks that are floating around out there. For example, back in July a very large asteroid came very close to hitting us…
A 427-foot-wide asteroid whizzed within 45,000 miles of Earth on Thursday.
While that may sound far away, 45,000 miles is what astronomers consider a close shave: It’s less than 20% of the distance between Earth and the moon. This was the closest we’ve come to an “Armageddon”-like scenario in at least a few years.
If that asteroid had actually hit our planet, it would have been the worst disaster that any of us have ever seen by a very wide margin.
And according to leaked emails, officials at NASA only knew about it the day before it whizzed by us…
Travelling at 55,000mph and measuring 426 feet by 187ft (130m x 57m), NASA only realised 2019 OK was coming 24 hours before it passed.
Experts say that had it hit, it would have devastated an entire city like London with over 30 times the energy of the atomic blast at Hiroshima.
So the truth is that we could be hit by a giant space rock at any time, and none of us may have any idea that it is even coming.
With that being said, there are a couple of enormous asteroids that scientists do know about that could potentially be major problems over the next decade.
The first one that I want to discuss is 2007 FT3. That is not a fancy name, and not that much is known about the asteroid, but apparently there is a chance that it “might hit the planet on Oct. 2, 2024”…
In the case of 2007 FT3, Sentry reported that the asteroid could hit Earth between the years 2024 and 2116. During these years, Sentry recorded a total of 164 potential Earth impacts caused by the asteroid. As noted by the monitoring system, there’s a chance that 2007 FT3 might hit the planet on Oct. 2, 2024.
By the way, Rosh Hashanah begins on the evening of October 2nd, 2024. I don’t know if that is important, but I thought I would throw that out there.
According to NASA, this asteroid would hit at a speed of approximately 46,000 miles per hour, and it would “create a crater that’s several miles long”…
Based on the data collected by Sentry, the asteroid has an estimated diameter of about 1,115 feet, which makes it almost as tall as the Empire State Building. The monitoring system noted that it could breach Earth’s atmosphere and hit the planet at a velocity of around 46,000 miles per hour.
Given the asteroid’s speed and size, it is certainly capable of causing high levels of destruction if it ends up colliding with Earth. Upon impact, it would create a crater that’s several miles long. The energy that will be released from the asteroid’s explosion would be powerful enough to level an entire city as well as its neighboring areas.
2007 FT3 is not getting much publicity at all, but a slightly larger asteroid that could potentially hit us in 2029 is getting far more attention.
On April 13th, 2029, it is being projected that Apophis will pass by our planet at a distance that is “ten times closer than the moon”. The following comes from Wikipedia…
The closest known approach of Apophis comes on April 13, 2029, when the asteroid comes to within a distance of around 31,000 kilometres from Earth’s surface. The distance, a hair’s breadth in astronomical terms, is ten times closer than the moon, and even closer than some man-made satellites.[23] It will be the closest asteroid of its size in recorded history. On that date, it will become as bright as magnitude 3.1[22] (visible to the naked eye from rural as well as darker suburban areas, visible with binoculars from most locations).[24] The close approach will be visible from Europe, Africa, and western Asia. During the approach, Earth will perturb Apophis from an Aten-class orbit with a semi-major axis of 0.92 AU to an Apollo-class orbit with a semi-major axis of 1.1 AU.
NASA insists that it will not actually hit us, but other independent researchers are skeptical.
And if Apophis doesn’t hit us then, NASA has listed ten other future dates when it potentially could…
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April 12, 2060
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April 11, 2065
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April 12, 2068
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October 10, 2068
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April 13, 2076
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April 13, 2077
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April 13, 2078
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October 10, 2089
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April 13, 2091
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April 14, 2103
Over in Russia, they are so concerned about this asteroid that they have “developed intercontinental ballistic missiles that aim to destroy asteroid Apophis”…
In what sounds like an elevator pitch for an Armageddon sequel, Russian scientists announced that they’ve developed intercontinental ballistic missiles that aim to destroy asteroid Apophis, which is going to swing by Earth in 2036.
Also referred to as 99942 Apophis, it measures 210-330 meters (690-1080 feet) in diameter. According to a Slate article by astronomer Phil Plait an encounter with Earth would mean not so fun times for our planet; “it would release the energy equivalent to more than 1 billion tons of TNT exploding, at least 20 times more than the largest nuke ever detonated!”
Russian scientists have also warned that Apophis could have “hundreds of opportunities to hit the Earth over the course of the next century”.
But for now, both American and Russian scientists are assuring us that everything is just fine and that there is no reason to panic.
Do you believe them?
Maybe they are telling us the truth.
Maybe there is nothing to be concerned about at all.
But of course both governments have a long track record of being loose with the truth, and it wouldn’t be much of a surprise at all if they weren’t exactly being straight with us.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/27/2019 – 19:05 -
- Demographic Armageddon: Japan's Births Drop To Lowest Since 1874 As Deaths Hit Highest Since World War II
Demographic Armageddon: Japan's Births Drop To Lowest Since 1874 As Deaths Hit Highest Since World War II
Japan’s demographic Armageddon made another entry in the history books this week when Japan’s welfare ministry estimated that in 2019, Japan’s population organically shrank by 512,000 people this year compared to 2018. That’s a drop of more than the entire population of the city of Atlanta.
While Japan’s demographic doom is well-known, its severity has taken on a breathless haste in recent years with births in the country — which are expected to drop below 900,000 this year — are at their lowest figure since 1874 according to the NYT, when the population was about 70% smaller than its current 124 million.
Meanwhile, as Japan’s birthrate collapses, the total number of deaths is accelerating with every passing year, and in 2019 the figure is expected to reach almost 1.4 million, 60% more than the number of births, and the highest level since the end of World War II, a rise driven by the country’s increasingly elderly population.
That gap between births and deaths, which has risen above half a million for the first time ever, has put Japan on the path to demographic destruction and deflationary doom, because in a country that shrinks by over half a million people each year, economic concepts such as resource scarcity become increasingly quaint.
Indeed, as the number of births goes down, there are fewer young people entering its work force. That means fewer people to replace retiring workers and support them as they age, a situation that poses a serious threat to Japan’s economic vitality and the security of its social safety net – although, as we noted previously, Japan is not even in the Top 10 list of nations with the heaviest retiree burden; that group is headed by Italy, Greece and France.
Japan is not the only country having to cope with a shrinking society. It’s not even the country with the lowest birthrate: That title, according to the NYT, goes to South Korea. Meanwhile, other countries — including China and the United States — also face declining birthrates, which could spell demographic trouble down the road.
But Japan stands out in one specific way: it is the world’s grayest nation, with almost 28% of its residents over the age of 65.
Japan reached it demographic tipping point over a decade ago, giving Tokyo ample opportunity to find a solution and address the effects of its declining population. The country has been consistently shrinking since 2007, when the country’s population dipped by around 18,000 people. Since then, however, the losses have accelerated, crossing the half-million mark this year for the first time. Across the nation, whole villages are vanishing as young people choose not to have children or move to urban areas in search of better employment opportunities (or they just happen to be close to the Fukushima radioactive wasteland).
Unfortunately for Japan, it’s only going to get worse as there is no end to the decline in sight. The government estimates that the population could shrink by around 16 million people, nearly 13%, over the next 25 years.
In seeking to stave off demographic armageddon, Japan has made efforts to push up its fertility rate defined as the average number of births per woman, from its current level of around 1.4 to a target of 1.8, although still short of the 2.1 considered necessary to hold the population steady. The government has moved to encourage births by increasing incentives for parents to have more children and reducing obstacles that might discourage those who want to.
But like every other failed attempt by the state or economists to dictate behavior, the incentives have proved woefully insufficient as more people in Japan are putting off childbirth — or not having children at all — either to take advantage of economic opportunities or because they worry that economic opportunities do not exist and feel that they cannot afford children. Even for those who do want to be parents, the hurdles remain daunting.
Demand for day care in the country far outstrips supply, making it difficult for working women to juggle careers and children. Meanwhile, working men who want to take advantage of the country’s generous paternity leave can find themselves stigmatized by an entrenched cultural belief that a man’s place is in the office, not in the home.
If this wasn’t enough, the NYT also notes that adding to the government’s worries, marriage is also on the decline. The number of marriages dropped by 3,000 year-on-year to 583,000, according to the data released on Tuesday, part of a steep decline over the last decade.
Ironically, the most practical solution, if only from a labor standpoint, is also a terminal one for Japan as a society: as births continue to drop, Japan has tried to promote robots as a supplement for its shrinking work force. The only problem: robots don’t vote, don’t pay taxes, and don’t have little robot children of their own.
Finally, in an attempt to succeed where Germany, and Merkel’s “Open Door” policies failed, Japan has also committed to accepting limited numbers of immigrants to handle vital work such as caring for the elderly. This year the country began issuing more than a quarter-million visas to immigrants who will do such work. The only problem: the Japanese are notorious nationalists and tend to ostracize, mock and ridicule and gai jin to the point where nobody actually wants to stay in the notoriously closed-off society.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/27/2019 – 18:45 - David Stockman: Here's What A Fed Audit Could Really Reveal
David Stockman: Here's What A Fed Audit Could Really Reveal
International Man: Trump is calling for a weaker dollar and negative interest rates. What does this tell you about Trump’s understanding of economics?
David Stockman: It tells you that he has no understanding of economics at all!
I think Trump is not even a primitive when it comes to economic comprehension. His views are just plain stupid when it comes to exchange rates. He seems to think it’s some grand game of global golf, where the strongest player gets the lowest score.
What sense does it make tweeting as he did recently in attacking the Fed?
According to Trump, the US economy is so much better than the rest of the world’s economies, and therefore we should have the lowest interest rate as a result. It has nothing to do with economic logic or with principles related to sound money. I think he’s just thrashing about trying to create a warning that if things go badly, it’s the Fed’s fault.
The whole narrative on the economy is wrong.
The low unemployment rate is something he inherited. It’s the end of the longest business cycle in history—126 months.
As the economy continues the inch forward, the inventory of excess labor goes down. The unemployment rate, even as badly measured as it is by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), inherently goes lower. He didn’t have anything to do with it.
In fact, if you look at the first 33 job reports under President Trump, the average gains have been 190,000 a month. During the last 33 reports under President Obama, it was 225,000 a month.
There has been no acceleration. There has been no improvement. It’s a running out of the business cycle, even as the foundation underneath has been made worse and worse by Trump’s trade policies and a really insane fiscal policy of driving the deficit to over a trillion dollars at the top of the business cycle.
Even John Maynard Keynes himself said that you ought to try to balance the budget and even generate a surplus at the top of the cycle.
We’re right in the middle of the worst kind of economic policy in my lifetime, anyway—going back to the 1960s.
Trump is completely clueless about how we got here, how he got here, and where we’re going.
I’ve said many times that if you boast about it, you own it. He’s been boasting about the stock market, which is the greatest bubble in history. He’s been boasting about a business cycle that he inherited that’s got all kinds of rot underneath and that’s nearing its final days.
All of that’s going to come home to roost, and I think it’s very likely to happen before the 2020 election.
So the 2020 election is not all over except for the shouting, as a lot of people believe. In fact, the prospect that Elizabeth Warren gets the nomination on the Democratic side and becomes a serious contender to the Oval Office is very high. The irony is that it will ensure the stock market’s collapse and Trump’s defeat. He’s setting himself up for the worst possible outcome.
International Man: The Fed recently said it could increase its tolerance for inflation before it considers raising interest rates. It would be a major policy shift. What’s really going on here?
David Stockman: I think what’s going on is that they’re looking for another excuse to capitulate to Wall Street next time it has a hissy fit because it believes the Fed owes them another shot of stimulus and more liquidity.
Let’s address the underlying issue now. The 2% inflation target is absurd to begin with. There is no historical or theoretical evidence to suggest that inflation at 2% is better for growth and prosperity than inflation at 1.5%, 1%, or even -1%.
This is just made up, just like the money they created that’s been snatched from thin air, adopted as official policy in January 2012.
It becomes a rolling excuse for running the printing press and accommodating both the politicians in Washington, D.C., who want low interest rates so that debts are cheap to finance and the gamblers on Wall Street who want low interest rates because they result in higher asset values and cheaper costs for carry trade speculators.
The idea that we haven’t had enough inflation as it’s measured by one indicator—the Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) deflator—is kind of crazy for two reasons.
First, there’s a lot of other inflation measures that say we easily achieved 2% inflation.
The 16% trimmed-mean CPI is a very handy tool. It has the same CPI data at the product code level as that in the regular CPI, but in order to smooth out the monthly figure, it takes out the lowest and highest 16% of individual prices.
It’s probably more accurate than CPI because it removes the outliers but puts them back in as soon as they reach the center of the distribution.
The trimmed-mean CPI has averaged 2% since January 2012. During the last 12 months, it’s reached 2.34%, way over the Fed’s 2% target.
There are lots of issues here.
One of them is that there are many ways to measure inflation. Another issue is that you can’t scientifically measure inflation in a dynamic global economy like the one we’re in today.
It’s just an average in some arbitrarily-weighted product categories that are way too complicated, even for the bureaucrats at the BLS.
And third, even if you could measure it halfway accurately, which I seriously doubt, the Fed has no tools to achieve its targets anyway.
The big swings of inflation are from commodity cycles and the global trading system, evidenced in oil prices, metal and materials prices, food and grain prices, and so forth. The Fed can’t do much about that.
The point is, inflation targeting is one of the greatest efforts at misdirection that a government agency has ever concocted. This gives them a license to constantly intervene and meddle in the financial markets—pointlessly fiddling with the whole price structure of debt and equity assets.
The less inflation there is, the better.
They can’t target it to the second decimal point, and you can’t measure it anyway.
The fact that they’re now saying, “Well, we don’t mean to target inflation on a monthly basis or quarterly or annual basis, it’s a cumulative basis from a day one,” indicates they are maybe starting from the Garden of Eden or something like that.
It just shows you that they’ve backed themselves into a corner of illogic and stupidity, from which I don’t think there’s any exit.
International Man: There are increasing calls for central banks to combat climate change. The IMF, the European Central Bank, and several others have chimed in. What does this mean, and why are central bankers suddenly so keen on this topic?
David Stockman: This is beyond stupid. What could the central banks possibly do to help the global economies adjust to climate change? Climate change may or may not be happening, and if it is, it’s due to planetary forces that central banks have absolutely no power to impact or counteract.
In my view, it’s one of the many hoaxes going on. It does remind you of how far out modern Keynesian central banking has become. They only have one tool: they can try to falsify interest rates, and they do that by injecting flat credit and liquidity into the market.
That’s all they can do. They have no other ability to drive the $85 trillion global economy, or the $21 trillion domestic economy.
They have a crude instrument. As they say, when your only instrument is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That’s the case with the Fed.
The only thing they can do is inflate financial asset prices on Wall Street and other financial markets. If they can’t even drive the macroeconomy to hit their inflation targets, how are they going to redirect the macroeconomy to use more green energy?
It’s so idiotic that it doesn’t merit any further discussion.
These central banks are the all-time champions at mission creep.
They have added mission after mission, including inflation at 2%, as they measure it, and now they want another mandate. They want another reason to enhance their power. When already, they are the most powerful state institutions in the world, and they’re in the process of wrecking prosperity everywhere.
International Man: If Rand Paul finally gets his audit of the Federal Reserve, what do you think they’ll find?
David Stockman: What he’s going to find is just more detail on the absurdities of what they’re doing already.
I think one that you would look into is this policy called Interest on Excess Reserves (IOER). They targeted that number at 1.55% right now. There’s about $1.5 trillion of excess reserves in the banking system.
So, they’re paying out to the banks upwards of $23 billion a year in order to keep excess funds on deposit at the Fed, rather than putting it to work in the macroeconomy.
How stupid is that?
They are blindly fixated on commanding the money market rate. The Federal Funds Market has disappeared. Ben Bernanke basically destroyed that. There’s nothing left there.
Since they know that the federal funds rate is pretty much nothing in the broad money markets—which are dominated by the repo markets, they have come up with IOER to show that they can make an interest rate happen.
It’s crazy. This is what you get from modern central banks.
We have to ask, why don’t they just get out of the way and let those reserves either stay on deposit at the Fed, or let them flow into the repo market, the money market, or the commercial paper market?
So, that’s one area that a thorough audit of the Fed could get at.
The second one that I think would be even more interesting, if it were done properly, is to recognize that they’ve created a bloated balance sheet. They’re back at it again—it peaked at $4.5 trillion from a base of $900 billion, at the time of the crisis in 2008.
They rolled it back a little bit under the short-lived Quantitative Tightening (QT).
The minute the stock market had a moderate hissy fit last fall and last Christmas, they immediately dropped the project, announced the end of QT in August, and started back the other way.
So, now they’re back up to $4 trillion and rising rapidly.
The reason I’m mentioning this is that you have $4 trillion of assets at work earning the interest rates that Uncle Sam is paying on 10-year paper, the interest rates that Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae are paying on their longer-term securities—all of this money is coming into the Fed.
The cost of their liabilities is practically nothing because they’ve been created from thin air by hitting the button on the digital printing press. Other than the $23 billion that they’re paying out in this phony IOER scheme, basically, they have cost-free liabilities, and a $4 trillion balance sheet that is earning interest.
Now, the reason I’m bringing this up is it brings in a massive profit. A lot of it that gets cycled back to the Treasury, which is another circular scheme of stupidity. But it also gets used for a big fat, juicy payroll, for some 20,000 people—including several thousand economists.
It’s not only these people on the payroll, but there are all kinds of contract research they fund from the massive profits they generate from printing money. That means that a substantial share of the academic economists in the United States is on the payroll of the Federal Reserve. They lick the boots of the guy who’s signing the checks.
The system is bad enough the way it is—between the political process, the dominance of statism, interventionism, and Keynesianism. But now, even the academic economists on the payroll are being paid to find that the Fed is doing a wonderful job and should be doing even more.
If we have an audit, we ought to find out the name and serial number of every damn economist that’s on their payroll or that’s getting contract research and ignore them—because they’re saying what the master wants to hear.
* * *
What could be the greatest bubble in history is reaching its final days. President Trump’s call for a weaker US dollar and negative interest rates is a last ditch effort to keep the party going. The whole financial system could come crumbling down much faster than most people think. That’s exactly why NY Times bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released an urgent report on how to survive and thrive during an economic collapse. Click here to download the PDF now.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/27/2019 – 18:25 - Warren Campaign Sounds The Alarm As Q4 Fundraising Total Plunges 30%
Warren Campaign Sounds The Alarm As Q4 Fundraising Total Plunges 30%
Elizabeth Warren’s campaign is losing fundraising steam just days after ridiculing Mayor Pete Buttigieg for raising money from billionaires.
At least that’s the tone coming from an email she sent supporters on Friday. Warren, who ironically spent the last Democratic debate trying to distance herself from Buttigieg’s fundraising tactics, disclosed that it has only raised $17 million in the fourth quarter, marking a significant drop from her fundraising totals in the third quarter.
“So far this quarter, we’ve raised a little over $17 million. That’s a good chunk behind where we were at this time last quarter,” her e-mail says, according to CNBC.
In the third quarter, her campaign brought in $24.6 million, far more than most other candidates, including Joe Biden and Buttigieg.
Warren’s momentum in the Democratic primary race has slowed in recent months, as she has fallen behind Joe Biden, who now leads the field of candidates. The plunge in fundraising also comes after Warren escalated her attacks on billionaires like Leon Cooperman and Mike Bloomberg, who she has accused of “trying to buy” the nomination.
Warren said during the last debate to Mayor Buttigieg: “So, the Mayor just recently had a fundraiser that was held in a wine cave full of crystals and served $900 a bottle wine. Think about who comes to that. He had promised that every fundraiser he would do would be open door but this one was closed door. We made the decision many years ago that rich people in smoke filled rooms would not pick the next President of the United States.”
You can watch Warren spar with Buttigieg at the last debate here:
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/27/2019 – 18:05 - Deplorables Versus The Ruling Class: A Global Struggle
Deplorables Versus The Ruling Class: A Global Struggle
Authored by Chet Richards via The American Thinker blog,
Consider the age of monarchs. Squabbling barons select a supreme ruler – a king or an emperor — to suppress the squabbling. Peace and prosperity return to the land. The king makes policy but he can’t do everything. His minions take care of the details.
Minions mean bureaucracy. The bureaucracy grows. The king grows old and dies. The dynasty continues. The bureaucracy continues – always continues, and always grows. The bureaucracy becomes an establishment kingdom unto itself. The bureaucracy grows in power and serves its own interests. The king diminishes in power. The land grows restless under the increasing regulatory tyranny and taxes. Legitimacy – what the Chinese called the “mandate of heaven” – is lost and so is the dynasty.
Change the names and we are at the end of a similar cycle – a cycle that began with the guillotine. This time it is a world-wide cycle. The modern king is a modern tyrant – Stalin, Hitler, Mao were the worst.
The socialist idea had been kicking around since the 18th century. This seemingly plausible notion shaped the various Marxist evils of the 20th century. The Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Nazism, Fascism, and today’s imperious European Union, are all socialist tyrannies of one degree or another.
Bureaucratic agencies become ideal tools for tyrants. A tyrant can point his agencies in a particular direction and unleash them. They immediately glory in their new power. Horrors ensue. Nazi Germany gave us the Holocaust and war. Stalin used betrayal. Friends betrayed friends. Children spied on parents. During the Soviet show trials of the 1930’s Stalin’s innocent victims were forced to falsely confess in order to save the lives of their families. Fear reigns.
Sound familiar? How about the FBI inducing General Flynn to plead guilty in order to protect his son? Mao injected dark comedy by unleashing hordes of children to humiliate their elders. No one was safe. Fear reigns. Sound familiar? Antifa anyone? Black Lives Matter anyone? Greta anyone? Mao lives!
The United States has become an undemocratic administrative state as well, but only by happenstance. In this country Congress has ceded much of its power to unchecked regulatory agencies, allowing them to write their own laws — regulations which enable them to prosecute, and persecute, anyone who might stand in an agency’s way. The agencies are powers unto themselves — judge, jury, and arresting police altogether. Innocents are often victims.
It isn’t just the regulatory, or administrative, state that is the problem. There is a growing sense that something is terribly wrong throughout society – throughout progressive liberal society, that is. How about needles in the street? How about sanctuary cities, counties and states? How about the ruins of Detroit? How about the weekly slaughter in Chicago? How about suppression of free speech in academia? How about the corrupt liberal media? How about big tech bias and censorship? It seems that our governments, and our intellectual establishments both, no longer serve the average citizen. They serve only a leftist political ideology, and themselves.
Worst of all, the political ideology that the establishment promotes is antithetical to the native ideology of America. America was founded as a society with spiritual values. True America is a society where the family is paramount. It is a society where a person is rewarded in proportion to his contribution. It is a society devoted to the individual where the individual is inherently free because his rights derive from the Creator not from the government. The purpose of government, according to the American ideology, is to serve the individual, not to be his master. The collection of individuals is to be the master of the government. This is classical liberalism – now a conservative ideal. It is the opposite of “progressive liberalism.”
The true American ideology cautions against granting power to any bureaucratic establishment. In its ever increasing hunger for power the establishment has gravitated to an alien progressive ideology – an ideology of ever bigger government and government control. But the bossy progressive Left increasingly forbids Americans to be Americans.
Political turmoil is the consequence. The barons are squabbling. The Left openly advocates overthrowing the Constitution. The Right counters with Donald Trump. The Left politically assassinates him with impeachment. The Right, with centrist allies, will reelect him anyway. The Mandate of Heaven has been removed from the elitist establishment. It is passing to the Deplorables.
It isn’t just in America. The world as a whole is pivoting. The dogmatic socialist established order is ending. We enter the age of the Deplorables. The Deplorables are ascending in America, with Trump, in Britain with Brexit, in Hong Kong, in much of Europe, in Latin America, in Iran. Deplorables are the antidote to arrogant globalist socialists. Deplorables everywhere say “from now on we will make our own decisions.”
Hong Kong Deplorables protest extradition bill (credit: Studio Incendo)
What is it with the Deplorables? What gives them such power?
Three things, I believe, are elevating them.
Deplorables are pragmatic. They are not wedded to any extreme ideology. Deplorables will go with anything that works. It is no wonder that the Deplorables began in America. For, as Americans we inherit the pragmatism of our pioneering ancestors.
Second, the Deplorables adhere to the original American ideology of free individuals. They reject the concentration of government power that has accumulated over the past century.
The third energizer is a technological miracle – the internet. Establishments everywhere fear the internet. And properly so. For the first time we can instantly communicate across the world. We can find like-minded people everywhere. We have discovered just how very many people agree with us.
It follows that Deplorables are no longer just an American phenomenon, the phenomenon resonates with people everywhere. People around the world are much the same. They value their traditions and customs. They value their families, their values, their spiritual heritage. They value their nation. They resent the imposition of intrusive government by strangers, by bureaucratic globalists. They are becoming Deplorables.
Born in the still free parts of America, this new movement seems destined to chart the course for the whole world — for this century and beyond.
The Mandate of Heaven no longer rests with the condescending progressive bureaucratic establishment. It is passing back to the people. It is passing to Deplorables everywhere in the world.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/27/2019 – 17:45
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