- Putin: World Risks "Fight Of All Against All" In "Grim Dystopia" Amid Growing Crises
Putin: World Risks “Fight Of All Against All” In “Grim Dystopia” Amid Growing Crises
Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,
Russian leader Vladimir Putin warned that society risks a return to world war if there’s no international effort to ease existing global tensions and imbalances.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum’s virtual Davos Agenda conference on Jan. 27, he offered a grim prediction and noted that the current era shows parallels to the 1920s and 1930s before the “catastrophic World War II.”
“Nowadays, such a heated conflict is not possible, I hope,” Putin said. “Because it will mean the end of our civilization.”
“But I’d like the reiterate that the situation might develop unpredictably and uncontrollably if we sit on our hands doing nothing to avoid it. There’s a possibility that we might experience an actual collapse in global development that might result in a fight of all against all.”
Such a prospect, he said, would result in a “grim dystopia.”
Wealth inequality, political polarization, and international tensions will exacerbate the problem, he said, and on top of that, the CCP virus pandemic is placing even more strain on society.
“The coronavirus pandemic has become a major challenge to mankind, and it has accelerated structural changes, the preconditions for which were already in place,” he said.
“We have every reason to believe that the tensions might be aggravated even further.
“International institutions are weakening, regional conflicts are multiplying, the global security system is degrading.”
He called for an increase in dialogue between different nations and groups to avoid a possible worldwide conflict.
“We need [to] ensure development following a different path—one that is positive, balanced, and constructive,” he said.
Russia currently finds itself amid growing internal tensions after Moscow arrested Putin critic Alexei Navalny after he returned to Russia from Germany.
During the Davos address, Putin seemingly made reference to sanctions and embargoes; several countries have placed sanctions on Russia.
“The use of trade barriers, illegitimate sanctions, restrictions in the financial, technological and information spheres—such a game without rules is dramatically increasing the risks of the unilateral use of military force, which is very dangerous,” Putin said.
Putin also faces an uncertain relationship with U.S. President Joe Biden, whom he spoke with earlier this week.
After their first phone call, Putin formally submitted a bill for the Russian parliament to extend the New START nuclear treaty with the United States by five years, according to Russian media.
“The presidents expressed satisfaction following today’s exchange of diplomatic notes on an agreement to extend the New START Treaty,” Putin’s office announced after his call with Biden, TASS reported.
“International topics included the United States’ unilateral withdrawal from the Open Skies Treaty, problems of keeping in place the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on the Iranian nuclear program, Ukrainian settlement, as well as Russia’s initiative to call a summit of the United Nations Security Council permanent members,” the Kremlin said.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/29/2021 – 02:00 - Newspeak In The 21st Century: How To Become A Model Citizen In The New Era Of Domestic Warfare
Newspeak In The 21st Century: How To Become A Model Citizen In The New Era Of Domestic Warfare
Authored by Cynthia Chung via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
War will continue under the Old Cold War doctrine. War will always be present, and yet will never be seen by the majority of our citizens…
With President Biden’s inauguration many feel that they can finally breathe a deep sigh of relief. At last sanity has been restored and we can all go back to our predictable lives knowing that the future can only get better during these next four years.
Well…not quite.
There still remains the problem that everybody may not be on board with the progressive changes that Biden’s Administration plans to push through. This, of course, is wholly unacceptable.
Disagreement has become an extremely sensitive issue lately; it was once thought that debate was an essential component to a strong and healthy democracy, however, we are now told that it is extremely dangerous, in fact, it may soon be categorised as a form of domestic terrorism.
As early as mid-Nov 2020, Biden was already discussing the need to pass further laws against domestic terrorism. This is interesting since under the 2001 Patriot Act (which was meant to be a temporary enforcement in reaction to 9/11, however, is still in place 19 years later), domestic terrorism is already defined as;
“activities that (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the U.S. or of any state; (B) appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and (C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.”
So, the question begs, what else needs to be added to the Patriot Act, which was recognised at the time of its enforcement as something that should only be temporary since it was understood that it infringed upon civil liberties? Come to think of it, why is the Patriot Act still in place, which allows for the indefinite continuation of human rights violations such as warrantless wiretapping; illegal torture, kidnapping, and detention; mass surveillance; government secrecy; Real ID; no-fly list; political spying; abuse of material witness statutes; and attacks on academic freedom?
As Glenn Greenwald wrote in his formidable paper The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming, “what needs to be criminalized that is not already a crime?”, keeping in mind that as of June 2020, the United States has the highest prisoner rate in the world, followed by El Salvador, Turkmenistan, Thailand and Palau.
Well, the answer is apparently simple and as always for our own good. We have come to a point in time where the enemy is not some radicalized ideology, it is not some foreign despot, it is not even the threat of war (whether it be economic, cyber or nuclear), but rather it is ourselves. We, the people, are the new enemies of the State.
You may protest “Not I! I am a model citizen! I pay my taxes on time, I am never late or call in sick for work, I make sure to be up-to-date with the newest ‘woke’ revelations and I don’t engage with anything outside of the mainstream matrix during my free-time.” People such as yourself think, that when the Biden Administration is calling for tougher laws against domestic terrorism, that it is obviously meant for the ‘other guy,’ those uneducated bigots who are screaming at the top of their lungs “Treason!” and inciting what we are told to be forms of ‘insurrection,’ all in the name of the archaic ideas of ‘patriotism’ and the ‘U.S. Constitution.’
You, unlike so many others, have no problem recognising that the U.S. Constitution is actually part of the problem, that by the standards used today, the U.S. Constitution is itself responsible for ‘inciting violence’ and thus guilty of domestic terrorism, and thus needs to be revoked.
But you see… that’s just not good enough.
Though you are well on your way to becoming a model citizen in the 21st century, you still have a little ways to go. It is for this reason that a guide to 21st century Newspeak has been recently released to make sure that well-intentioned citizens like yourself are fully informed of what is required of you in terms of appropriate behaviour, as well as appropriate thoughts, and though this will take a little more time, appropriate instincts.
21st Century Newspeak
The first alteration that will need to take place is freedom of thought. It has been shown through peer-review studies that individual thoughts are susceptible to forming erroneous beliefs and can lead to dangerous behaviours such as refusal to integrate into a community standard.
Once an individual refuses to integrate into its designated community, it is only a matter of time before this individual shows opposition and even antagonism towards said community. Thus failure to integrate is one of the first signs that an individual is on the path to becoming a domestic terrorist.
Because the individual mind is flawed, it can no longer be trusted to be the standard of its own judgement of what is right and wrong. It is for this reason that we are introducing groupthink. This concept is not new, however, the difference is from now on the individual’s environment will only be allowed to reciprocate the values of groupthink, and all other thoughts outside of groupthink are to be banned and punishable under the new laws.
Even if thoughts outside of groupthink appear as harmless to the collective, they are not, for any thought that is not groupthink threatens to lead to a different outcome than that intended by groupthink and thus is a threat to the security of the collective.
In order to ensure commitment to groupthink, it will be mandatory that every individual engage in at least 2 minutes of Hate every hour throughout the day, every day. This can be achieved either by watching 2 minutes of Hate news, or by engaging in a public 2 minutes of Hate with a colleague, a friend or family member via social media.
It is imperative that an individual watch the 15 minute morning and evening “What to Hate” news provided by the Ministry of Truth (or Minitrue), in order to be the most up-to-date with what are the ongoing and new subjects of Hate, and what were previous subjects of Hate which are no longer deemed to be subjects of Hate.
It is most important that an individual never refer to a former subject of Hate as such. Any present subject of Hate must be seen as having always been a subject of Hate and any former subject of Hate must be seen as having never been a subject of Hate.
This may appear as an impossible task, but we assure you it is entirely possible with the use of doublethink, which many of you have already been practising. Doublethink requires that one be both conscious and unconscious of the fact that they are telling deliberate lies while genuinely believing them; to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies. This makes up a part of our new Party slogan: FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.
Those who excel the most in doublethink will receive the highest stations within our newly organised community, as safe-guards against the renegade, the domestic terrorist.
Another alteration that will need to occur is how we think and refer to the past and the future. With the newly enforced groupthink, the present is what groupthink dictates it to be, which is subject to change, however, must be regarded as having always been.
The past is what the present dictates it to be, if it were not, it could challenge the basis for the present. Thus to preserve the present, the past must serve the present, only justifying why we Hate what we presently Hate and why we Love what we presently Love and can do nothing to contradict these Party lines. There will be permitted no records of an alternative past, there will be no way to prove that the past was ever different from what the present dictates it to be, the only threat to this narrative is the record of the individual mind, and once this ceases to be there will only be the Minitrue record as the recorder of past Truth.
In effect, the model citizen will perceive the past as dead and the future as unimaginable. The future is unimaginable because it is impossible to think of an alternative to the present, in fact, the mere act of thinking of an alternative to the present is considered a challenge to the status quo of the present, and thus is a challenge to groupthink, and thus is a form of domestic terrorism, which we will call from now on thoughtcrime.
Thoughtcrime is essentially any thought pertaining to memory, judgement of right and wrong, thoughts of an alternative reality, and self-reflection, which are now all deemed forms of thoughtcrime. If an individual is to engage in any of these sorts of thoughts, it is only a matter of time before they will come into conflict with groupthink and the Party line, thus private thoughts are banned and punished under the new laws.
It may seem an impossible task at first not to engage in private thoughts, but again, we assure you it is entirely possible using crimestop. Crimestop is the practice of not grasping analogies, failing to perceive logical errors, misunderstanding the simplest arguments, of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop is essentially, protective stupidity.
It is imperative that one practice crimestop during any interaction with another individual, however, it is also imperative that one practice crimestop within their own inner-dialogue, such that even from your own conscience you will be protected from committing a thoughtcrime.
Newspeak will also help dissuade from thoughtcrime. Newspeak is to be the new acceptable vocabulary, anything that references words outside of the most-up-to-date edition of the Newspeak dictionary will be considered Oldspeak and something to be construed as counter to groupthink. It is understood that by reducing the vocabulary to revolve around a few words such as good; which for example can be used as plusgood, doubleplusgood, ungood etc, it will serve to narrow the range of thought an individual is capable of, and thus reduce the capability of committing a thoughtcrime. How wonderful! That in the future we will be unable to commit crime for we will be incapable of its thought! This makes up another part of our new Party slogan: IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
In terms of the new laws, in effect, nothing will change. Unacceptable behaviours and thoughts will not be designated as illegal per se; one reason for this is because we do not plan on having any public trials. Anyone who is in violation of conduct will simply be removed either temporarily into a “re-education facility” or will be vaporised. Any subject that has been vaporised will be removed from the collective memory records and can never be referred to as having ever existed.
The reason why no public trials will be held from now on is because, as we have seen, dissent is infectious. Thus, holding public trials risk further encouragement towards dissent. It is for this reason that dissenters must be removed swiftly and quietly in the middle of the night. Such disappearances will occur relatively regularly and will eventually become the new normal, however, it will not be traumatic for the collective. The subject will simply cease to exist as if it were all just a dream, the structure of our daily routine unaffected.
In order to ensure utmost compliance, the collective will be employing the use of children spies, this has already been occurring abroad, and proves to be very effective.
Purges and vaporizations will be a necessary part of the government mechanics and will become the new normal. We have already discussed the necessity for vaporizations, as for the necessity of purges, it is because the community will be built so as to remain in stasis, however, this can only be accomplished through artificial means, for it is not natural that a thing remain the same but rather that it either improves or deteriorates.
However, in order for the Party to maintain absolute control, there can be no change to the present except for that chosen by the Party, thus any change is a challenge to the Party. In order to facilitate an artificial environment of no change, resources must artificially be kept low, and purges need to occur so that this environment of scarcity is tightly controlled and maintained.
In order for us to achieve this, our economy will have to go through stagnation, we will need to decrease the amount of land used for cultivation, we will no longer add capital equipment needed for industrial growth and great blocks of the population will be prevented from working and will be kept half alive by State charity. The wheels of industry cannot be allowed to turn so as to increase the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed, and in practice the only way of achieving this is by continuous warfare.
War will continue under the Old Cold War doctrine. War will always be present, and yet will never be seen by the majority of our citizens, the reason for this being that war will not be about a real threat to security nor about real conquests but rather will be about maintaining the present status quo by exhausting the surplus of consumable goods, while also helping to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs.
However, real war will be purely an internal affair, the war waged by the ruling group against its own subjects, with the object of the war as to keep the structure of society intact and unchanging.
A peace that is truly permanent under this new ideology is no different than an invisible permanent war. For peace in our new era will equate to stability through no change. This makes up our first Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.
Conclusion
All of these means are necessary if we are to realise that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism, and that oligarchy is the only means to achieving peace, freedom and strength for the collective.
However, we are still very far from this ideal and there is much that threatens its becoming, namely, the masses, or what we call the proles. So long as the masses believe that they are entitled to freedom of thought, our endeavours cannot succeed.
The individual must voluntarily relinquish this. It cannot be taken from them no matter the degree of control and no matter the threat of physical harm. An individual’s mind is theirs and cannot be taken, instead, the individual must be led to believe that it is in their best interest to relinquish their mind.
Let us do our best then to convince the individual that they are no longer fit to use their mind and let us pray that we are successful, for if we fail, our entire system of control fails with it.
“You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity…Reality exists only in the human mind, nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.”
– O’Brien in George Orwell’s “1984”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/29/2021 – 00:10 - Beijing Uses Anal Swabs To Detect COVID-19 Strains
Beijing Uses Anal Swabs To Detect COVID-19 Strains
Just as the WHO acknowledges (in time for the start of the Biden Administration) that the high-cycle PCR tests routinely lead to far higher numbers of false positives than the world had expected, Li Tongzeng, a doctor at Beijing’s You’an Hospital, and a proponent of anal swab tests, claims that “the coronavirus survives longer in the anus or excrement than those taken from upper body tracts.”
And with this, Li is suggesting that the method is becoming more common than he had initially expected. Anal swabs are being deployed in Beijing quarantine as well as in some school settings, according to recent reports out of Beijing’s Daxing district.
Authorities in the Chinese capital have started testing about 2MM people in the center of the city after two cases of a strain of the coronavirus were first detected in Britain were reported in Beijing.
The rapid mass testing campaign started on Friday, a day before the city’s legislature was expected to convene an annual meeting and with just weeks to go until the country’s political heavyweights arrive in the capital for the year’s most important political gatherings.
“All districts and work units must make epidemic prevention and control their top priority and spare no efforts in epidemic prevention and handling,” municipal government spokesman Tian Wei said on Friday afternoon, citing orders from the city’s COVID-19 task force.
The mass testing was conducted after the capital went into partial lockdown in Daxing and Shunyi, with genetic sequencing revealing two cases of the more transmissible coronavirus variant discovered last month in Britain.
The capital has since been on high alert. More than 1.2K people have been tested at a school attended by one pupil with an asymptomatic case of the COVId-19 Each of the contacts at the school had nasal, saliva and anal swabs as well as serum tests – all of which were negative.
The jury is still out on whether anal swabs, which reportedly take about 10 seconds, are more useful than a regular throat swab to test for coronavirus.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/28/2021 – 23:50 - Blinken Says Iran Must Comply With Nuclear Deal Before The US Does
Blinken Says Iran Must Comply With Nuclear Deal Before The US Does
Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,
In a sign that the US is a long way from lifting sanctions on Iran, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US will not return to the nuclear deal until Iran comes back into compliance.
“President Biden has been very clear in saying that if Iran comes back into full compliance with its obligations under the JCPOA, the United States would do the same thing,” Blinken said at a press conference on Wednesday.
Biden with newly confirmed Secretary of State Anthony Blinken “But we are a long ways from that point. Iran is out of compliance on a number of fronts. And it would take some time … for it to come back into compliance in time for us then to assess whether it was meeting its obligations,” he said.
Blinken’s comments come after Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said the US must take the first step. Writing in Foreign Affairs last week, Zarif called on President Biden to unconditionally lift sanctions if he is serious about restoring the JCPOA.
Zarif’s argument is that since the US was the first to violate the deal by re-imposing sanctions on Iran in 2018, it’s on Washington to revive the JCPOA. Iran gradually began violating the deal in 2019, after waiting a year for the other signatories to offset US sanctions.
Reality check for @SecBlinken:
The US
-violated JCPOA
-blocked food/medicine to Iranians
-punished adherence to UNSCR 2231
Throughout that sordid mess, Iran
-abided by JCPOA
-only took foreseen remedial measures
Now, who should take 1st step?
Never forget Trump’s maximum failure.— Javad Zarif (@JZarif) January 28, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Zarif, and other Iranian officials, have made it clear these violations are easily reversible and that they would quickly comply with the agreement if the US gives Iran sanctions relief.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/28/2021 – 23:30 - A Mystery Guest Just Booked All 446 Rooms At An Iconic Canadian Lodge For 65 Days
A Mystery Guest Just Booked All 446 Rooms At An Iconic Canadian Lodge For 65 Days
The entirety of the well known Fairmont hotel at Jasper Park lodge in Alberta has been booked for 65 days beginning February 23. The estate is a collection of log cabins and other buildings that is spread over 700 acres. It is well known for attracting high profile guests.
A mystery guest has booked all 446 rooms at the lodge, who has been mum about who the mystery guest is, and what the purpose of the stay could be.
“The dates are blacked out on Fairmont’s reservation website and a call to the front desk concierge confirmed that no rooms will be made available,” CBC News reported. “Citing the four-star hotel’s dedication to discretion, officials with the hotel aren’t divulging any details, including how the unusual booking might affect staffing levels or how many reservations were cancelled to accommodate it.”
Additionally, guests who previously had reservations booked for that period of time have been told their reservations are cancelled.
A statement from the hotel read: “We have a private booking during the below dates however, as we must always safeguard the privacy of our guests, we do not share details about hotel reservations, meetings, or private events.”
Some are speculating that the hotel is going to be used to film a Television show. The booking even prompted questions to the province’s Chief Medical Officer about potential Covid precautions at the hotel. She responded:
“As we look to any decisions that we make, No. 1 is whether or not there’s any risk to the public, whether any of the activities could potentially cause spread or cause a public risk,” she said.
“And then, No. 2, as we consider any potential requests for exemptions, we also consider the broader public interest and what might be in that broader public interest. And again that’s part of these considerations as we look to this film industry framework that we’re working on.”
As we have noted, the wealth of billionaires has skyrocketed more than $1 trillion during the Covid pandemic, thanks to Central Banks printing trillions of new dollars. To be honest, we’re not surprised by the “mysterious” booking and wouldn’t be surprised if we see more gluttony, a la Lifestyles of the Rich And Famous, in the year ahead.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/28/2021 – 23:10 - DogeCoin Up 800%; WallStreetBets, Elon Musk Involved
DogeCoin Up 800%; WallStreetBets, Elon Musk Involved
Many years ago, in December 2013, when bitcoin was still in its very early adoption phase and few had any illusions that it would ever hit $1000 let alone $40,000, two software engineers – Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer – introduced a cryptocurrency that was meant to be a payment system that was “instant, fun, and free from traditional banking fees” but was in reality a joke, and a meme spoof on the concept of bitcoin. In other words, it was a joke, even within the otherwise austere and serious crypto community. It was called DogeCoin, and was represented by a Shiba Inu dog as its logo, literally taken from the “Doge” meme.
We bring it up, because moments ago, Dogecoin surpassed Litecoin in market cap, hitting $8.5 billion after rising 800% today, and hitting an all-time high of $0.082 before settling down to $0.0667, on volume that overtook both bitcoin and ethereum on binance, with some $3.4 billion dogecoins traded.
So what the hell is going on here, and why is this particular crypto soaring when the rest of the crypto space is quiet?
Is Melvin Capital/Citadel short dogecoin and have the 5.5 million bloodhounds of Wallstreetbets been unleashed yet again?
While it is unclear what sparked the furious buying spree, according to CoinDesk, WSB is indeed involved, and the move was “likely caused by attention from public Reddit trading collective Wall Street Bets combined with a TikTok post about the “dogecoin army” by niche celebrity Carole Baskin from Netflix’s “Tiger King.”
Separately, around 5:47pm ET, Elon Musk tweeted a picture of whippet, which some believe was a to DOGE’s surge, but others note may have unleashed the heaviest part of the buying…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 28, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
… with some reacting to Musk’s tweet “there’s the $DOGE tweet we’ve been waiting for… In typical @elonmusk fashion.”
Whatever the reason, this is the clearest indication yet of the absolute dash for trash momentum observed across capital markets since the Fed’s take over, with “investors” now openly mocking the asset allocation process and dumping their cash into an “asset” which even its creators admit is worthless.
While DOGE appears to have peaked and is now sliding, expect much more insanity tomorrow and the coming days as this ridiculous bubble is now prompting laughable (literally) assets to generate returns the stock market could only dream of.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/28/2021 – 22:57 - Democrats Introduce Senate Bill To Make D.C. The 51st State
Democrats Introduce Senate Bill To Make D.C. The 51st State
Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) and other Democratic senators are introducing a bill for D.C. statehood today, a proposal with heavy opposition in the public in continuing polls.
Indeed, the bill was one of the reasons that members and advocates demanded the killing of the filibuster rule to force through the change in status based on a bare majority.
If successful, it would give the Democrats two more senators in a city-state that will expected to remain reliably blue. I have testified repeatedly on this issue. There are strong arguments for changing the status of the District and statehood is a viable option.
It would clearly be constitutional unlike past proposals. The question is whether it is the best option for the country. Roughly 20 years ago, I proposed a “modified retrocession plan” that would be an alternative if the Congress wanted full voting rights for citizens of the District.
The proposal would make create the first city-state in our history with a population of 700,000.
However, half of the country opposes the idea.
A new Harris/Hill poll shows fifty-two percent of respondents said they favored statehood while 48 percent said they opposed it. That is heavy opposition for such a statehood change.
Biden just unveiled another proposal with heavy public opposition: a commission that would allow court-packing or other structural changes on the Court to blunt the conservative majority.
I have written a long academic publication on the status of the District of Columbia and testified at the prior hearings on allowing for voting representation of District residents. See Jonathan Turley, Too Clever By Half: The Partial Representation of the District of Columbia in the House of Representatives, 76 George Washington University Law Review 305-374 (2008). I also testified in both the House and Senate repeatedly on such proposals.
The debate over D.C. statehood is a complex issue with historical, constitutional, and legal dimensions. It is also an issue with important and unresolved racial issues of a black-majority city without direct representation in Congress. I have previously voiced my view that such lack of representation for the District is unacceptable and untenable in our country.
In all, I have testified five times in the House and the Senate on this issue in Congress, particularly on the effort to simply give the District a vote in the House of Representatives. I encouraged the Congress to avoid such flagrantly unconstitutional measures of a vote as a non-state entity and instead focus on a vote of statehood or retrocession. That is why I offered a “modified retrocession plan”, which was also discussed in an academic work. Under my proposal, the mall and core federal buildings would remain the District of Columbia (as is the case in this legislation) but the remainder of the District would retrocede back to Maryland (as did the other half of the original District to Virginia). In this way, residents would receive full representation while receiving the benefits of various Maryland educational and other opportunities. That reduction of the federal enclave has been incorporated in some statehood proposals. I believed that such retrocession offered the fastest course for not just full representation but improved social and educational programs for the district residents. I laid out a phased retrocession plan that began with immediate and full representation. This could be done by congressional vote.
People of good-faith can disagree on such proposals and the current legislation is clearly a constitutional approach to reaching a final resolution on the lack of representation in Congress. Indeed, it is important to hear from those who believe that statehood is an important step toward dealing with the historical racial inequalities and discrimination in our nation. Modified retrocession may not be enough to resolve such issues for many in our community.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/28/2021 – 22:50 - Putin Declares Virus "Slowly Receding" In Russia Amid Sputnik V Mass Vaccination Campaign
Putin Declares Virus “Slowly Receding” In Russia Amid Sputnik V Mass Vaccination Campaign
Russian President Vladimir Putin told a meeting of his cabinet on Thursday that the swift actions of national health officials have caused the pandemic to slowly subside throughout the country, also given Russia was the first the roll out with a large-scale vaccination program of its population.
“Generally, [these actions] yield positive results,” Putin declared, according to TASS. “The pandemic is gradually receding.”
While stressing it remains “too early to relax” he nonetheless emphasized that the number of recoveries “has been steadily above the infection numbers lately.” Putin added, “As of lethality, the situation is generally satisfactory if you can speak about it in such terms. Nevertheless, this is the case in comparison with other countries.”
Via Zuma Press He further touted at a moment that Hungary has controversially broken ranks with the EU and approved and bought the Russian Sputnik V vaccine that, “We have around 12 infections per every 100,000 people,” which is “four times as low as in European countries, many European countries.”
“We launched a mass vaccination campaign on January 18, we have big plans in this regard,” the president noted. “[Trade and Industry Minister Denis] Manturov reported to me that vaccine production was ahead of schedule,” he added
Yet he still estimated that 68 million Russians needed to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. Late summer and into the fall Russia faced fierce criticism over what Western officials called a “rush” to approve an unproven vaccine.
Indeed Russia was the first out globally, but time will tell of the effectiveness of the efforts. In early December ‘frontline’ workers that included teachers, doctors, social workers were the first round in the mass vaccination efforts, with the middle of this month seeing the campaign reaching the broader population.
Russia now has the fifth highest number of cases worldwide at just over 3.7 million infections, which is barely under the UK. For the past months Russia was among the top four most infected countries globally. Critics have attacked the Kremlin’s official claims of having already vaccinated millions people with Sputnik V, with many suggesting the true number is in reality in the hundreds of thousands.
As the EU warns of supply delays in Covid-19 vaccine doses, and doubts mount about the effectiveness of the British Astra Zeneca offering, the makers of Russia’s @sputnikvaccine say they are ‘ready to help’ the 27-member bloc access supplies.https://t.co/4VBHceCqps
— Bryan MacDonald (@27khv) January 28, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Moscow further says it’s received orders for over a billion doses to be administered abroad at a moment the WHO is still reviewing it, as Reuters reports: “Asked about WHO’s scrutiny of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, Kluge said he had spoken with Moscow’s ambassador on Wednesday and that he could confirm that data needed by WHO scientists to review the shot was en route to Geneva where the WHO is based.”
“The Russian vaccine is being distributed in Europe including EU member state Hungary as well as elsewhere in the world, even though the European Medicines Agency is not currently reviewing it for approval,” the report noted.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/28/2021 – 22:30 - Quinn: The Fourth Turning Detonation, Part 2
Quinn: The Fourth Turning Detonation, Part 2
Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,
In Part One of this article, I discussed the dramatic events that shaped 2020 and will continue to have a major influence on the direction of this Fourth Turning moving forward. The immense power of Mordor on the Potomac seems to be unassailable, but the little people still have a chance if they utilize their skills and intelligence to the utmost.
Now that Trump has been defeated and cast into oblivion by the forces of Mordor on the Potomac, those who have some knowledge about generational theory and the course of previous Fourth Turnings have lamented Trump is not the Grey Champion and they were misled by believing he was their hero. How could he be the Grey Champion if he lost? I do not profess to be an expert, as I am just trying to understand the underlying forces driving this Fourth Turning towards its climax, but losing a battle in a long war does not disqualify Trump as a Grey Champion. The Grey Champion character was born from the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
“Who is this gray patriarch? His hour is one of darkness, and adversity, and peril. That stately form, combining the leader and the saint…could only belong to some old champion of the righteous cause, whom the oppressor’s drum had summoned from his grave.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne
There is not just one Grey Champion during a Fourth Turning, and their participation is generally as a lightening rod for change or the inspiration for younger generations to mobilize and fight the battles which ultimately decide the fate of nations and empires. Samuel Adams and Ben Franklin were Grey Champions during the American Revolution Fourth Turning. Their fiery rhetoric and ability to guide the younger firebrands were their contributions to the cause.
Both Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis were Grey Champions during the Civil War. One was assassinated before the conclusion of the war and the other was on the losing side, spending a couple years in a Federal prison after the war. FDR, Churchill, and Stalin were all Grey Champions during the World War II Fourth Turning. FDR died before the conclusion of the war and Congress implemented a two-term limit because he had become too powerful. Churchill was on the winning side, but the British empire disintegrated during his reign. Stalin, who had already murdered millions of his own people, presided over a despotic regime and immediately became the enemy of his former allies.
Anyone with a true grasp of history would acknowledge all these men had significant personality faults, huge egos, a determination to win by any means necessary (including breaking the law and flaunting the Constitution), and ability to mobilize forces to accomplish their goals. As we are in the thirteenth year of this Fourth Turning and Grey Champions always arise in the earlier stages, there is no doubt Trump was and still is one of the Grey Champions driving this ongoing Crisis towards its bloody climax.
He still has 75 million or so followers, with many of them motivated to go wherever he leads. Does this mean a new party which would destroy the Uni-party Republican/Democrat control over our government? Does it mean taking to the streets and confronting the BLM and ANTIFA domestic terrorists in armed combat? Or will he be convicted by the Senate, thrown in jail, and financially ruined by his failed attempt to defeat the Deep State – possibly spurring his followers to become radicalized – matching the narrative being pushed by the authoritarian leftist regime now in office?
Those who put their faith in Trump are currently in disarray. Some feel betrayed. Others are depressed. Some are just disappointed he was unable to drain the swamp. They believe he just was not up to the task. Some think he was installed by the Deep State to lure a segment of the country into revealing their allegiances so they can be de-programmed and/or forced to grovel for forgiveness by pledging allegiance to the permanent party run by authoritarian billionaire oligarchs.
The accusations and recriminations within the Republican party will surely tear it apart, especially if GOP Senators join Schumer and McConnell in convicting Trump of creating an insurrection. Of course, there are still diehard believers this is just part of the plan and Trump will emerge victorious over senile Joe and his Deep State handlers. Others hope he will run again in 2024, vanquishing his foes and once again making America great again again. It is unlikely that someone with Trump’s ego and desire for attention will just fade into the sunset. He will continue to be a lightning rod, impacting the future course of this Fourth Turning, as one of the Grey Champions.
As I survey the landscape there are a few other major players who also fit the Grey Champion prophet archetype and will certainly play a key role in the forthcoming climactic scenes of this Fourth Turning. On the domestic front Bill Gates has emerged from the shadows during this scamdemic, using his immense wealth and power to push for global vaccinations with experimental DNA altering formulas never used on human beings before. His agenda coincides with Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset new world order.
The Clintons are both Boomers who have functioned as the Jeff Davis to Trump over the last four years, participating and leading the Deep State coup by pushing the Russiagate fabrications to distract from their traitorous criminal acts. Crooked Hillary is ecstatic over deposing Trump and now is leading the effort to bury him. At this stage of the Fourth Turning, it appears Gates and the Clintons are winning, as they have the complete backing of the Deep State, Silicon Valley billionaire tyrants, and the globalist billionaires like Soros.
The two Grey Champions who will most certainly play a part in the second half of this Fourth Turning, when blood is likely to be shed in vast quantities, are Vlad Putin and Xi Jinping. These ruthless dictators have no fear of losing an election or having to deal with a hostile media. The Deep State has been pushing conflict with Russia for Trump’s entire term and continue to push a nuclear power through NATO and vassals in the Middle East.
The intensifying engagements between China and Taiwan, with the U.S. sailing an aircraft carrier force into the South China Sea, and ongoing tensions over trade and spying, have ratcheted up the chances of armed conflict between these nuclear super-powers. Fourth Turnings always plunge into total war, with an inescapable conclusion as to who won and who lost. Defeat means total surrender. The only question is what Pearl Harbor or Fort Sumter moment kicks off the festivities in the foreseeable future.
Based on the first three weeks of this year and what appears to be on the short-term horizon, I am confident the term “detonation” will apply to this fateful year. The intensity level has already reached 10 but is headed up to 11.
As Fourth Turnings go the 80-year cycle would certainly argue for substantial conflict to erupt in 2021.
In 1781, the Battle of Yorktown concluded with Cornwallis surrendering to General Washington and concluding the armed struggle of the American Revolution, insuring the birth of a new nation.
Exactly 80 years later in 1861, Southern states seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America. Lincoln needed to sneak into Washington DC to avoid an assassination attempt in Baltimore. Fort Sumter was attacked and surrendered to Confederate forces. The First Battle of Bull Run resulted in a resounding Confederate victory and led Lincoln to institute a draft and an income tax. Over 600,000 men died in the next four years.
Exactly 80 years later in 1941, while Hitler was riding roughshod across Europe and turning his attention towards Russia, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor after FDR cut off their oil supply to provoke an attack. Tens of millions died over the next four years. It is now exactly 80 years later. One must ponder what potential tragedy awaits our nation and the world?
With the elevation of a vacuous disorientated Trojan horse to the presidency, controlled by dark forces pulling the strings of their puppet, we are already experiencing many of the things Strauss and Howe warned about in their 1997 prophecy.
“Institutions will be increasingly bossy, limiting personal freedoms, chastising bad manners, and cleansing the culture. Powerful new civic organizations will make judgments about which individual rights deserve respect and which do not. Criminal justice will become swift and rough, trampling on some innocents to protect an endangered and desperate society from those feared to be guilty. Expect a loss of personal privacy. Fourth Turnings can be dark times for the free spirit: Just as one kind of official may have new authority to do something for you, another kind—some hastily deputized magistrate—may have new authority to do something to you.”
They were not predicting specifics but could decipher an outline of our future through the fog, by observing previous Fourth Turnings. The limitations of personal freedoms are being implemented by totalitarian politicians, with the Big-Tech surveillance censorship overlords used to enforce the directives of those running the show, while trampling on the 1st Amendment and the right of citizens to voice dissenting opinions. Those who have seized power are now criminalizing any view not fitting their approved narrative and painting all Trump supporters as white supremacists.
These threats of retribution, while concurrently peddling nonsense about national unity, have the potential to backfire and blow up in their faces. Instead of unity, the impeachment of a president no longer in office and attempts to provoke violence by Trump supporters in order to usher in the pre-written 20,000 page Domestic Terror Patriot Act 2.0 is pushing the country towards civil war. The misuse of justice and criminalizing the acts of those exercising their right to live their lives will ignite a firestorm threatening to spread across the nation, with unknown long-term consequences.
I will not pretend to know what comes next, but I am sure the three key factors driving this crisis since 2008: debt, civic decay, and global disorder will continue to coalesce into a lethal concoction, destined to sweep away the underpinnings of the American Empire, ushering in a new social order. I think the repressive measures being implemented by Pelosi, Schumer, despot Democrat governors, and government apparatchiks are a sign of weakness and fear. Their bluster, threats, fear mongering and denunciation of half the voters in the country, portray a precarious fragility, with a dangerous agenda built on a foundation of deception and delusion.
A madness is gripping the nation, a dismal realization nothing is right. Everything has a chaotic feel, as financial markets surpass bubble territory into uncharted waters; politicians threaten and accuse each other of treasonous acts; government overreach and dysfunction is laid bare for all to see; the Deep State has been exposed as their coup to take down Trump required them to step out of the shadows; a manufactured race war led by BLM and ANTIFA useful idiots at the behest of Soros and his ilk continues to fester; Russia and China continue to undermine U.S. hegemony; and the global debt Ponzi scheme has entered its blow-off road to ruin phase.
The only thing keeping these financial markets at these outrageously elevated levels is an irrational level of misplaced trust in their puppet Powell and his feckless Fed cronies. When, not if, these markets begin to cascade downward and greed turns to fear, an implosion of institutional and societal trust will remove the final underpinnings of this unsustainable financial paradigm.
The Wall Street QE addicts and their captured central banker drug dealers were able to exploit the concocted “Covid Crisis” as cover for an already imploding financial system with the injection of $4 trillion of heroin into their veins and the assurance of trillions more. Anyone using reason and rational thought knows this debt solvency fantasy is destined for a disastrous denouement. If it happens in 2021, this year will surely go down in history.
This combustible amalgamation of unpayable debt, civic anarchy, and global chaos are poised to detonate in 2021, initiating a period of maximum darkness, death, destruction, and momentous choices. We are being propelled towards a climax which will mark the death of the old order and the birth of a new. The question is whether the new order will be better or worse for average Americans.
With the newly installed totalitarian regime in Washington DC, it appears they plan to implement full government control over every aspect of our lives, with the final eradication of the 1st, 2nd, and 4th Amendments as the stick and unlimited government checks as the carrot. Their classification and treatment of 75 million Americans as the enemy will accomplish the task of converting them into a real enemy.
There will be lone wolves who use violent means to fight back. Others will go Galt and starve the beast. Others may organize into like minded communities and dare the authorities to trample on their freedoms and liberties. It will be difficult to control 75 million angry, heavily armed, dis-enfranchised deplorables. The new regime is led by arrogant, hubristic, mediocre minded bureaucrats who are incapable of using anything but brutality to get there way.
Their grasp on power is fragile and a determined strategic minded resistance will hit them where they are weakest, sabotaging commerce, communications, the power grid, and their social media propaganda arm. At this point in 2021 it looks bleak for lovers of liberty, but the fight has just begun.
The coming deadly reckoning of this Fourth Turning will require tremendous courage, guile, personal sacrifice, dreadful alternatives, survival skills, intelligence, strategic thinking, and an audacity to win at all costs. Those still caught in the mindset of voting in good guys to change the outcome are delusional, as the outcome of this past election confirmed voting does not matter.
There are wealthy, powerful, sociopath, globalist oligarchs who constitute the real power in this world and unless they are confronted and defeated, the outcome of this Fourth Turning will result in a dark future for humanity and the final obliteration of our Constitution. There is no way to avoid the coming conflict. Sides must be chosen. You will not be able to sit this one out. They will come for you, whether you like it or not.
“If civic virtue is so frequently lost, it must be just as frequently regained. This is what happens in a Fourth Turning. While a Crisis mood renders societies newly desperate, it also renders them newly capable, which is why a saecular winter is to be welcomed as much as feared. As today’s Americans look ahead, the challenge is to marshal the coming season’s new public energies to achieve positive, not destructive ends. The better we ready ourselves collectively the more likely we will be not just to survive the Crisis but to apply its fury for good and humane purposes.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
Based upon history, the ultimate resolution will not be based on compromise, civility, persuasion, or nonviolent means. Our world will be shaken to its very foundation and transformed in unknowable ways over the next decade. Winter has arrived with a ferocity born of the deceptions of powerful men, and we will need to marshal all our strength and fortitude to survive the coming tempests. The fury of the Crisis will eventually exhaust itself and result in a positive or destructive aftermath. History offers no guidance or assurances as to the outcome. That will be entirely up to us. Godspeed and good luck.
* * *
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/28/2021 – 22:10 - US Outraged After Pakistan's Top Court Frees Islamist Who Beheaded Journalist Daniel Pearl
US Outraged After Pakistan’s Top Court Frees Islamist Who Beheaded Journalist Daniel Pearl
The family of slain American journalist Daniel Pearl says they are in “complete shock” after Pakistan’s Supreme Court on Thursday ordered his Pakistani-British killer’s release after the family appealed a previously overturned conviction ruling. He and his accomplices were acquitted by a panel of three judges and will never again see a prison cell over the crime.
“By a majority of two to one, they have acquitted all the accused persons and ordered their release,” Reuters reports, citing a Pakistani courts official. The main suspect in Pearl’s Murder, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, had earlier been found guilty of luring the journalist to a meeting in 2002 in Karachi while he was investigating possible links between Richard C. Reid, known as the “Shoe Bomber”, and Pakistani jihadists.
Daniel Pearl, left, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, right Later the same year the US embassy in Pakistan was subsequently mailed a gruesome beheading video confirmed to be that of 38-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter and California native Daniel Pearl.
“Today’s decision is a complete travesty of justice,” Pearl’s family said.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday in follow-up that the US is “outraged” by the ruling:
Speaking at the White House briefing Thursday, Psaki said the decision “is an affront to terrorism victims everywhere, including in Pakistan,” and she called on the “Pakistani government to expeditiously review its legal options including allowing the United States to prosecute Sheikh for the brutal murder of an American citizen and journalist.”
Psaki said the Pakistani court’s actions underscored the administration’s commitment to secure justice for Pearl’s family.
US “outraged” by the Pakistani supreme court decision to acquit those who murdered @WSJ reporter Daniel Pearl, says @PressSec. pic.twitter.com/6u3Dr6CnCL
— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) January 28, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
It could serve to severely damage US-Pakistani relations while already shaky, and further Reuters writes that the United States could seek to have Sheikh extradited.
“The United States had said it may seek to try Sheikh if efforts to keep him in prison failed in what experts say could be a challenging factor in Pakistan’s relationship with the Washington. It comes as a new U.S. administration is reviewing Afghanistan’s peace process, in which Pakistan is a key player,” according to Reuters.
The horrific slaying had been an early example in the ‘war on terror’ years of the gruesome lengths that al-Qaeda and other Islamist terror organizations would go to in order to send a “message” to the West, with multiple such beheading videos later coming out of Iraq and Syria.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/28/2021 – 21:50 - Meet The Censored: Status Coup
Meet The Censored: Status Coup
Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,
On January 6th, Jon Farina, photographer and videographer for Jordan Chariton’s Status Coup outlet, captured horrifying images. At the Capitol, a pro-Trump mob tried to burst into the building, and a police officer who attempted to intercede was caught in a door. He cried out in pain, but the crowd was indifferent, chanting, “Heave, ho!” as they tried to break in. Farina, in the middle of the physical mayhem as photojournalists often are, caught the scene up close while 30,000 people watched the live feed.
Farina’s footage rocketed around the world, and major press outlets celebrated his work as an example of hard-hitting reporting. CNN did a laudatory story about the freelance photojournalist, with Pamela Brown asking Farina to “bring us inside the mayhem.” Other outlets like USA Today quoted his recollections of that day, and the likes of Steven Colbert on CBS, as well as ABC News, NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, the New York Post, the Daily Mail, and others used it as fodder for outraged coverage of the riot:
For a week or so, Status Coup was feted for service on the front lines of responsible journalism. Nearly two weeks later, on January 18th, another Farina live stream was shut down by YouTube, thanks to policies that will make it very difficult for non-corporate media going forward to do live reporting. In fact, it’s not a stretch to say that if the incident from the 18th happened earlier, we may never have gotten the Capitol pictures.
On the 18th, Farina was in Richmond, Virginia, where a significant rally of pro-gun protesters was expected. There had been widespread reports warning of unrest. CBS relayed FBI fears of “credible threats of violence,” while the Washington Post said officials were “on edge” ahead of the Martin Luther King Day protest, gearing up for a full-scale assault:
Members of the National Guard are on standby. Plywood covers the windows of the State Capitol. Tall metal barricades surround Capitol Square, with police vehicles idling on pathways just inside locked pedestrian gates. Downtown streets will be closed; signs warning against carrying guns have gone up around the city.
“The violent, lawless insurrection and assault on democracy and its institutions that unfolded last week in Washington, D.C., will not be tolerated in the city of Richmond,” Mayor Levar Stoney warned on Thursday.
The threats may have been credible, but when Farina began live-streaming to an audience of 6,000, the event turned out to be peaceful and unremarkable, though not without interest from a news perspective.
“Frankly, there might have been more press than protesters,” Status Coup’s Chariton said later. “And while it was live, it was pretty informative. Jon talked to 4-5 people, and they pretty much all made it clear that they weren’t Trump supporters, that they didn’t support what happened in the Capitol. They were pretty relaxed compared to the propaganda ahead of time.”
Despite the seeming unremarkableness of the event, it shut down abruptly mid-feed. Chariton assumed something happened on Farina’s end.
“Then I got an email from YouTube, telling me we’d violated their ‘Firearms Policy.’ I wasn’t aware they had a firearms policy.”
OUTRAGEOUS…
Now @YouTube @TeamYouTube just REMOVED @StatusCoup & @JonFarina‘s Livestream reporting from PEACEFUL Virginia gun rights rally bc
“we think it violates our firearms policy.”HOW ARE JOURNALISTS SUPPOSED TO CHRONICLE HISTORY IF YOUTUBE-AND OTHERS-ARE OUTLAWING IT? pic.twitter.com/PzD5EmR4MU
— Jordan (@JordanChariton) January 18, 2021
Chariton went onto Twitter to announce what happened, and after a few well-known media figures like Krystal Ball and Ryan Grim complained, YouTube restored the content. Other independents covering the rally, however, like Andrew Kimmel, never had their content restored.
The serious consequence of the Virginia episode was not so much the lost coverage of the rally, but what Chariton had to tell Farina after the event. Well-known for covering labor issues, homelessness, and especially the Flint water crisis, Status Coup had been growing, in large part because of live stream content. Now, however, the possibility that YouTube might issue a strike against his channel, or take it down altogether, forced him into a difficult decision. “I had to tell [Farina] not to go live anymore,” he says.
One person at the same rally wasn’t surprised by what happened. Videographer and well-known protest shooter Ford Fischer of News2Share, the first profile subject of “Meet the Censored,” was also in Richmond to shoot the event. He didn’t get taken down by YouTube, but only because he didn’t bother trying to go live.
“I was there on January 18th and didn’t stream it, because I knew it’d get banned,” Fischer says. “I filmed basically the same rally on January 17th and it did get banned.”
The January 17th rally Fischer referenced was a pro-gun rally in Columbus, Ohio, that in the wake of the Capitol riot garnered significant advance media coverage. Once again, headlines like “FBI warns of Potential Boogaloo Violence During January 17th Rallies” primed audiences to expect the worst, and also to make a direct connection with the January 6th events. In fact, Twitter cited the coming Ohio rally in its post announcing the closure of Donald Trump’s account, describing the Ohio event as a possible “secondary attack”:
Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021.
According to Fischer, the Twitter announcement didn’t exactly make sense, because the protesters in Ohio were more of a libertarian ilk, and, as Farina and Chariton discovered in the Virginia crowd, not so clearly aligned with Trump as Twitter and other media outlets may have imagined. Fischer has frequently covered events involving the gun-toting Boogaloos, whom he describes as anti-authoritarian and less likely to be Trumpists than to profess a pox-on-both-houses attitude to Trump and Joe Biden both (“You might hear something like, ‘Unless you put Ron Paul on the ballot, I’m not voting,’” he says).
Although there’s significant national interest in the group, both among supporters and detractors, Fischer says “I’ve basically stopped trying to live stream rallies involving Boogaloos.” Back on July 4th, 2020, he shot a live stream of a joint armed rally of Boogaloos and Black Lives Matter, protesting together against police violence — here again, we see the significant political differences between Trump supporters and some of these pro-gun groups — only to have the live stream interrupted, on the same grounds that it violated Google’s firearms policy.
Nonetheless, Fischer attempted to shoot the January 17th rally, among other things because of the obvious public interest in the event, which was heavily covered by the mainstream press. Local TV affiliates associated with networks like ABC and CNN covered the January 17th rallies in Columbus and in other locations, even broadcasting live. However, when Fischer tried to live stream, he was cut off in short order by a notice identical to the one received by Chariton. He was reminded that YouTube “does not allow live streams showing someone holding, handling, or transporting a firearm.”
The policy presents obvious head-scratching issues. For one, as Fischer points out, virtually all police carry a firearm, so “there’s obviously some subjectivity in what’s being enforced.” Furthermore, the rule doesn’t seem to apply to major corporate outlets, a double-standard problem that’s a constant in this universe.
In an even more bizarre recent incident, YouTube this past weekend removed video Fischer shot on January 6th — not live footage, but still — of the crowd listening to Donald Trump before the Capitol riot. This time, the grounds were that the content advanced “false claims that widespread fraud errors or glitches affected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.”
Fischer supposes the issue has to do with the fact that the unedited, single-shot video — which is focused mainly on the crowd reaction — caught Trump’s own words. This might make sense, except that Trump’s speech that day is still on YouTube, as broadcast by several CBS affiliates, among others. As with Farina, Fischer’s Capitol protest footage was picked up by numerous major outlets, including CNN, NBC, CBS, BBC, and others, but the system seems to incentivize independent shooters to distribute footage through corporate outlets only, rather than conveying directly to their own audiences.
“I absolutely think there’s a campaign against independent content creators, especially live,” Fischer says. “Major outlets face no such technical issues.”
This makes any attempt to build an alternative news outlet a steep uphill climb, even when there’s a positive audience response, as Chariton has found out. Formerly with The Young Turks, Chariton’s niche is national news from a left/progressive perspective, with special emphasis on the area where corporate outlets once had a near-monopoly, e.g. on-location production of images and reporting.
Typically, alternative media outlets can’t afford to travel much and often have to rely on wire services and commercial coverage for primary source material, especially for expensive beats like the presidential election. Chariton emphasizes going to hot spots like Flint and to election campaign events to generate original images and video interviews, an innovative alt-media take on national news coverage. Live stream coverage had been a major part of their formula.
The Ohio and Virginia incidents underscore two developments involving platforms like YouTube/Google, Facebook, and Twitter in recent years. The first is the campaign to stress what Google calls “authoritative content,” which up-ranks articles and videos issued by major corporate news outlets like CNN or CBS, while decreasing traffic for independent sites on the left, the right, and in between.
The second has been an effort to close loopholes in the platforms’ content moderation regimes. In the wake of the Capitol riot, this trend intensified. After the “insurrection,” a series of trial-balloon stories appeared in the press, suggesting that Internet nooks and crannies where conspiracy theory and misinformation proliferate might need more aggressive cleaning.
The AP warned that “Apple and Google, among others, have left open a major loophole for this material: Podcasts.” The New York Times meanwhile reported on an exodus of millions of users who, fearing a Big Tech crackdown, jumped to encyrpted sites like Signal and Telegram.
The Times quoted the head of the Association of State Criminal Investigative Agencies, Louis Grever, as saying such sites allow “groups that have an ill intent to plan behind the curtain.” Noting the situation “worried U.S. authorities,” the piece suggested the migration might “inflame the debate” over encryption.
Podcasts, encrypted apps: how about live programming? Pundits had long worried that live stream capability was allowing the broadcast of violence and hate speech. In the hands of alternative media, however, the tool posed another problem, in the form of simply showing offensive reality.
In the cases of people like Fischer and Chariton, however, it’s unclear how platforms like YouTube understand the documentation of political demonstrations. If you film a neo-Nazi running his mouth, should you be banned for covering his hate speech? If you show a gun-rights activist carrying a gun, are you yourself engaging in pro-gun activism?
For independent outlets like Status Coup, these questions pose a serious problem. Because they’re dependent financially on platforms like YouTube to reach subscribers, they can’t afford to take the risk of being shut down. But how can alternative media operate if it doesn’t know exactly where the lines are? Also, how can such outlets add value when its one advantage over corporate media — flexibility, and willingness to cover topics outside the mainstream — is limited by the fear of consequences from making independent-minded editorial decisions?
“It’s pretty horrible,” Chariton said, “if we have to consider not doing our jobs, out of fear that YouTube is going to remove our content, or remove our channel without warning (like they’ve begun doing to other, smaller channels).”
The standard response to complaints about incidents like this is that YouTube and Google are private companies, and no one has a right to a platform on a private space. Chariton acknowledges this and concedes there are alternative platforms, like Rokfin, a video-sharing alternative to YouTube.
For the foreseeable future anyway, however, it would be nearly impossible to build a successful alternative video-based channel without the assent of the small handful of major tech platforms that dominate media. “People live on YouTube and Facebook,” is how Chariton puts it.
I asked him a few more questions about the future of live content, and what happened on January 18th:
TK: How has the ability to produce live content affected your business?
JC: Status Coup was up 20,000 subscribers since November, in large part because we were covering stories like the “Stop the Steal” movement and other issues related to the election. I’d say 95% of that content was live content. We’ve done a lot of stuff, from coverage of GM’s decision to lay off 15,000 workers to the epidemic of homelessness in Seattle, to repeated reporting trips in Flint covering the ongoing water crisis. It’s a major part of the business. It costs two to three grand for us to take a trip somewhere, and it’s already tight, but if we’re restricted in any way from doing live, that’s a blow because it brings in a significant amount of our revenue (which we need to then fund future in-the-field reporting trips).
TK: What happened in Virginia to affect your decision-making about live content going forward?
JC: I had to tell my cameraman not to go live… They’ve already shown they’re willing to take down some outlets entirely, without warning. The email YouTube sent me, I felt they could consider that a warning, and the next time, they could either give us a copyright strike, or remove us. I just can’t afford to take that risk.
TK: Do you see this as part of a wider effort to close informational loopholes at these platforms?
JC: It’s already documented that YouTube has been hiding independent channels in a cave, while elevating “authoritative” channels like — according to YouTube — CNN and Fox News. That’s Silicon Valley basically just saying outright, “We’re elevating some sources at the expense of others…” Unless you’re a major outlet that has a line to YouTube, you don’t have any way of clearing up these episodes. It’s easier to talk to someone at the CIA than it is to actually reach a human being at YouTube.
TK: What are the implications of an incident like this for alternative media?
JC: First of all, it’s worth pointing out, the only reason my content was restored is that I threw a shit-fit on Twitter, and people like Krystal Ball and Ryan Grim complained. But people like Andrew Kimmel did not have their content restored, proving there’s basically no rhyme or reason to this. It’s arbitrary. We’ve come to a place where you’d almost have to clear your decisions with YouTube ahead of time to feel completely safe.
I understand, there must be some limits. If someone like Alex Jones is saying, “Go get your guns, get out there,” that’s really dangerous.
But this, this is beyond a slippery slope. It’s a cliff. If they start pulling live streams or issuing strikes like this, it’s basically a death sentence for outlets like ours.
Subscribe to TK News here.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/28/2021 – 21:30 - Dr. Fauci Wrong Again: Novavax Vaccine Only 50% Effective Against "Mutant" South African COVID Strain
Dr. Fauci Wrong Again: Novavax Vaccine Only 50% Effective Against “Mutant” South African COVID Strain
The latest COVID-19 vaccine news is unequivocally disappointing.
Novavax, one of six US companies that received hundreds of millions of dollars upfront from the US government to develop a COVIID-19 vaccine, has just released preliminary data from its Phase 3 trials. The data showed the vaccine was 89.3% effective in the UK branch of the trial.
Vaccine trials were held in nearly half a dozen countries, but in the UK, 62 people (out of roughly 15K) came down with COVID-19 symptoms after receiving either the vaccine or a placebo. Of these, six had received the vaccine, while 56 had gotten the placebo.
Yet, in a separate, middle-stage study in South Africa, the trial data suggested the vaccine was much less effective. In South Africa, the Novavax shot was about 49.4% effective against Covid-19 in the study. Preliminary results showed that more than 90% of the sick subjects for whom sequencing data were available were infected with the new variant circulating in South Africa.
The news comes at an inopportune time: A few hours ago, the CDC revealed that the first two confirmed cases of the hyper-infectious South African COVID mutation had been confirmed in South Carolina.
In a separate Novavax trial held in South Africa, the efficacy was significantly lower. In a small trial the rate of protection was just 50%. Almost all the cases that scientists have analyzed there so far were caused by the mutated strain, known as B.1.351.
What’s even more disturbing: The data also showed that many trial participants were infected with the variant even after they had already had COVID-19.
Novavax tried to put a bright spin on the results.
“We have the first trial — we are the first to conduct an efficacy trial — in the face of a changing virus,” said Stanley Erck, the president and chief executive of Novavax. He said that researchers expected the variants could change the trial results, but “the amount of change has been a bit of a surprise to everyone.”
However, there’s no denying the fact that scientists like Dr. Anthony Fauci who repeatedly claimed that the vaccines would provide enduring protection despite mutations of the virus were clearly exaggerating their level of certainty. But that’s not the first time the data has gone against “the science”.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/28/2021 – 21:10 - Silicon Valley Joins Push To Recall Newsom As New Candidates Eye Gubernatorial Bids
Silicon Valley Joins Push To Recall Newsom As New Candidates Eye Gubernatorial Bids
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,
A group of technology investors and executives has joined the push to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom, as one investor announced a gubernatorial bid.
Chamath Palihapitiya, the CEO of Social Capitol and a former Facebook executive, said in a tweet this week that he is running for governor as he used a hashtag for the campaign to remove Newsom.
“It’s on,” he wrote.
“California is a mess – it’s too expensive, our teachers are underpaid, and our schools aren’t good enough,” his campaign website says.
The site says the longtime Democratic donor would cut taxes to zero percent, give teachers a minimum salary of $70,000, and will dole out $2,000 for every new child born in the state.
As the campaign to recall Newsom gathers more and more signatures, it has attracted more and more supporters—including previous supporters of the governor.
David Sacks, founder of the Craft Ventures fund, donated $60,000 to Newsom’s successful 2018 bid. But he came out Tuesday in support of Palihapitiya, who he described as a centrist Democrat, telling Bloomberg that Newsom “is totally beholden to special interests.”
Kevin Faulconer, the former Republican mayor of San Diego, is also mulling a bid. He signed the recall campaign shortly after the New Year, writing on Facebook that “it’s time to start holding the governor accountable.”
Recall Gavin 2020 initially drew scoffs but has proven immensely popular, drawing nearly 1.3 million signatures as of this week. That’s 77 percent of the number required to put removing Newsom to voters on an upcoming ballot.
Campaign organizers alleged that Newsom lifting the harsh stay-at-home order on Monday was done to try to “maintain what grasp he still holds on the state.”
“He knows he’s in trouble. It was a reckless choice; he made it by the seat of his pants, and now he’s going to get criticized for it,” Anne Hyde Dunsmore, the campaign manager for the recall effort, told The Epoch Times.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom walks to a press conference at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, Calif., on Jan. 15, 2021. (Irfan Khan/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
Asked about the notion during a briefing, Newsom said it was “complete utter nonsense.”
Officials asserted they lifted the order because of metrics linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, with projections showing a continued decrease in positive cases. COVID-19 is the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.
Critics say Newsom, in his first term, bungled the CCP virus response. California has the most positive cases in the United States. They also point to his going out to eat in a crowded, indoor room while urging residents not to do so—news of the dinner leaked out later, prompting an apology.
A spokesman for Newsom has told news outlets that the campaign is a waste of money and that the governor would “rather focus on getting through the homestretch of the pandemic.”
There’s a model to recalling a governor in California. Gray Davis, a Democrat, was recalled in 2003. The campaign to oust him received strong financial support from Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who warned Newsom last month to take the current effort seriously.
Recall Newsom is getting donations from Silicon Valley. Patricia Perkins-Leone donated $99,800 last month, according to state records. She is the wife of Doug Leone, managing partner of the Sequoia Capital fund. Additionally, Dixon Doll and his wife, Carol, have given nearly $192,000. Doll is also a venture capitalist.
Other large donors include the Prov. 3:9 LLC, construction company owners Susan and Howard Groff, and the California Revival political action committee.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/28/2021 – 20:50 - Masayoshi Son Rewards Top Execs With Massive Loans To Help Pump SoftBank Shares
Masayoshi Son Rewards Top Execs With Massive Loans To Help Pump SoftBank Shares
With retail traders asserting their dominance over equity markets in a way the world hasn’t seen before (thanks to Wall Street Bets and its legions of rabid users hell-bent on punching hedge-fund shorts in the nose by taking GME to the moon), it’s worth looking back on an incident – which only unfolded few months ago – where Zero Hedge called out SoftBank for using an options-trading strategy that was partly responsible for driving huge gains in the Nasdaq (which, in turn, bolstered SoftBank’s bottom line) (and, in turn, bolstering both SoftBank and many of its top positions).
SoftBank ended up making billions via what we termed “the biggest gamma squeeze” in history. But now that a similar squeeze has made GME the markets story of the year, and retail traders are once again taking over the market, SoftBank has shared another piece of the puzzle in its annual report.
As the FT reports thanks to an incentive package that was approved a year ago (last February), four top SoftBank executives are sitting on a collective gain that could be as large as $1.2BN after they were each loaned hundreds of millions of dollars to buy the company’s (fast-rising) shares.
Last year, SoftBank granted a total of $600MM in loans to four top executives: Rajeev Misra, head of SoftBank’s infamous Vision Fund, Marcelo Claure, currently the head of SoftBank Group International, Katsunori Sago, SoftBank’s chief strategy officer, and Ken Miyauchi, recently promoted to president and CEO (Nikkei targeted Miyauchi in a glowing profile published Thursday).
Since then, three of these men (including, most famously, Misra) have stepped down from SoftBank’s board, alleviating the company of the responsibility for disclosing these compensation schemes. As one “expert” pointed out, not only is it unusual (if perhaps not illegal) for a company to refuse to disclose these compensation packages, in Japan, hefty executive pay packages are frowned upon, which is one reason why SoftBank might not want to reveal them.
At any rate, the FT let the cat out of the bag. And now SoftBank (and its Chairman Masayoshi Son) has once again been caught with its hand in the cookie jar.
The three men’s departure from the SoftBank board may mean that SoftBank will no longer be required to disclose fully their compensation and borrowings from the company to buy shares. One person said SoftBank is discussing whether to keep the same disclosures levels to reassure investors.
“This kind of incentive scheme is extremely rare for Japanese companies,” said Katsuyuki Kubo, a corporate governance expert at Waseda University. “While there is no legal obligation, ideally from a governance perspective, incentives for top executives who are actively involved in running the company should be disclosed since the information is important for investors.” Mr Son has essentially backstopped his company’s potential losses on the loans to his lieutenants, with a footnote in the report explaining that the SoftBank founder had guaranteed any “shortfall” between the value of the collateral and the loan.
This isn’t the first time Son has used SoftBank shares to reward executives or founders.
The 63-year-old SoftBank chief executive has provided similar support in the past. In 2019, Mr Son personally guaranteed $2bn of loans taken out by the then 25-year-old founder of Oyo, an Indian hotel business backed by the Vision Fund. One asset manager, whose fund holds a significant stake in SoftBank, said that investors were now probably used to the idea that Mr Son likes senior staff to be both leveraged and incentivised through large holdings of SoftBank stock. “But what we are seeing now seems to be taking that to the extreme. It adds into the picture of a company that is basically one guy calling every single shot, and your choice whether to take whatever risks come with that,” said the investor.
But the great pains that Masayoshi Son took to disguise the loans suggest that something untoward might be afoot.
Two of these executives, Misra and Claure, already rank among the top paid executives in Japan earning $15MM and $19.6MM last year (sums that are unusually high in Japan.
Depending on when they exit the position, the men could be sitting on gains of anywhere between $300MM and $1.2BN. Now, some institutional investors are telling the FT that these loans have aroused their suspicions, and that they fear that the departure of Misra and two of the other four men from the SoftBank board late this past year might have been engineered to keep these loans in the dark.
While trying to keep top talent on board in the wake of the 2019 WeWork disaster, did Masayoshi Son create another mess while trying to clean up an earlier one?
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/28/2021 – 20:30 - 6 State Attorneys General Warn Biden Over Potential Presidential Overreach
6 State Attorneys General Warn Biden Over Potential Presidential Overreach
Authored by Janita Kan via The Epoch Times,
A coalition of state attorneys general on Wednesday sent a letter to President Joe Biden reminding him that any potentially unconstitutional executive actions or federal overreach will not go unchallenged.
The letter, signed by six attorneys general (AGs), puts the Biden administration on notice that any actions that might exceed their statutory authority, are inconsistent with constitutional tenets, or place civil liberties at risk could trigger legal action by the states.
“We stand ready to meet with your administration to discuss more how the issues below affect our States; litigation is never first option, and we would like to help your team in its important job on behalf of all Americans, consistent with the Constitution and the rule of law,” West Virginia AG Patrick Morrisey, who is leading the group, wrote in the letter addressed to the White House (pdf).
“Yet if you sign unconstitutional laws passed by Congress, it will be our responsibility and duty to challenge those laws in court. If cabinet officials, executive officers, and agencies go beyond the bounds of their statutory authority, fail to follow legally required procedures, or fall short of the bedrock Administrative Procedure Act obligation of reasoned decision making, it will likewise be our responsibility to take action.”
The Administrative Procedure Act, or APA, is a federal law that governs the process for agency rulemaking and has been frequently invoked to challenge executive branch rules and regulations.
Morrisey is joined by AGs from Arkansas, Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, and Texas.
It comes as Biden issued a series of executive orders in his first week since taking office. Some of the executive orders have overturned Trump-era policies, while others have established or expanded policies relating to climate change, racial equity, and the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic.
Some of the orders have already drawn widespread scrutiny, such as the decisions to rejoin the Paris Climate agreement and to cancel the Keystone XL Pipeline, which is expected to put thousands of jobs at risk and undermine the U.S. relationship with Canada. The Biden admin has also met with backlash for embracing a quasi-Marxist critical race theory in its policies seeking to prioritize certain racial groups that have historically met with disadvantage over others.
Similarly, Biden’s order addressing discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation is expected to threaten the constitutional freedom to exercise one’s religious beliefs for individuals and organizations who affirm the traditional understanding of human persons as created biologically male and female.
“The President cannot cut constitutional corners or shirk statutory strictures without inevitably doing more harm to our country than good,” the AGs wrote.
“The foundations of our republic and American life are embedded within our Constitution’s carefully crafted design.
“Accordingly, today by this letter we respectfully urge you when pursuing your policy priorities to honor the core constitutional tenets which should be appreciated and respected by every person entrusted with the honor and burdens of the presidency,” they wrote to Biden.
The letter notes the freedom of religion and religious expression, and the right to bear arms as two areas of concern.
The AGs said that while there is always pressure for U.S. presidents and Congress to exceed their power “lest they be judged to be ignoring important issues or failing to address critical problems,” it is a president’s duty to uphold the U.S. Constitution’s separation of powers as well as respect the sovereignty of the states.
They added that limits on federal power are not a flaw of the Constitution and that when certain issues that are excluded from the federal sphere need to be addressed, the “states are ready and able to do the job.”
The Biden administration has already faced several legal challenges over its executive actions. A federal judge in Texas temporarily blocked Biden’s executive order to halt the deportation of certain immigrants for 100 days. The order is seen as a setback for the administration, which had campaigned on implementing far-reaching immigration changes, including a plan that would legalize about 11 million illegal immigrants.
Earlier on Wednesday, Western Energy Alliance, a group representing fossil fuel producers on federal lands, challenged Biden’s executive order aimed at halting oil and gas leasing on federal lands and waters.
Legal challenges against presidential orders are not uncommon. During former President Donald Trump’s four years in office, Democrat AGs frequently sued his administration on a range of executive actions and regulations in the area including health, climate, and immigration.
According to a website run by Dr. Paul Nolette, associate professor of political science at Marquette University, who tracked the lawsuits against the former president, the Trump administration was sued 157 times in cases where states were initial plaintiffs, successful intervenors, or in single state lawsuits.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/28/2021 – 20:10 - JPMorgan Has Some Bad News For Hedge Funds Hoping The Nightmare Ends Soon
JPMorgan Has Some Bad News For Hedge Funds Hoping The Nightmare Ends Soon
For a few hours this morning it seemed that all was lost for r/WallStreetBets and their crusade to teach Wall Street billionaires a lesson, when one exchange after another banned buying in the most-shorted stocks, an unprecedented unilateral decision made by brokerages (one of which, Robinhood, is effectively joined at the hip with hedge fund Citadel, which in turn is a part owner of Melvin Capital which was destroyed by the short squeeze that Robinhood banned, so a clear conflict of interest), and one which sent GME stock as low as $112 after trading at $500 just hours earlier.
However the hedge funds short Gamestop, who may have declared victory prematurely, had to put the champagne back on ice because just after the close, amid tremendous pushback from clients, Congress, and the public – not to mention what appears to be a liquidity crisis as millions of accounts bailed – Robinhood announced it would allow buying to resume on Friday, sending the stock up almost double after hours.
And since any victory for the WallStreetBets crowd means the short squeeze is back, it also means that a defeat for hedge funds, as can be seen in the chart below which shows that the Goldman most shorted basket is a mirror image of the Goldman hedge fund VIP basket.
In other words, any expectation that the WSB crowd would be finally crushed today and the hedge fund world would return to normalcy was crushed.
But what happens next, and how does it all end?
Last night we speculated that if indeed there are more shorts – both synthetically or otherwise – than available shares, then the only place bearish hedge funds will be get shares to cover their shorts is from the company itself. Which means that Gamestop can theoretically ask for any price (somewhat reasonable) and hedge funds will have to agree. After all, it’s not GME’s fault that hedge funds were so greedy they overshorted the company, which really is what all this boils down to.
The only wait out of this for the shorts may be to beg for the company to sell them stock. And GME can name any price https://t.co/4785L2P3VB
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 28, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Of course, that is a bit of an idealistic take, one where hedge funds finally are forced to pay for their stupidity. Alas, in a country as corrupt as this one, that’s unlikely to ever happen. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that the answer suddenly matters extremely.
In fact, as JPM’s Andrew Tyler writes in his EOD market intelligence note, “Are we there yet” -i.e., is the squeeze over – is “the biggest question and hardest to answer definitively.”
Here is his take.
- POSITIONING INTELLIGENCE: The team published a new note, Tactical Takes | De-Grossing Accelerates – 1-Day Magnitude in Line with Last March, but Medium Trend Not There Yet
- Summary of what we saw yesterday:
- Globally, yesterday was a >3z (i.e. standard deviation) de-gross day with vastmajority (80%) happening in US, but did see it in EMEA (about 2z) and APAC(~1z).
- Equity L/S funds were the main ones reducing exposure in the US – for perspective, Tues was a -3z de-gross day and Wed was about 2x that.
- Quants were de-grossing DoD as well, but magnitudes were more in line with Tues, which was a 1z event.
- Despite all the recent Active de-grossing, gross and net $ exposure are relativelyunchanged YTD (because market still up in some parts, e.g. small caps, and HighSI names up a lot).
- For the US High SI names, yesterday appeared to be a ~5z covering event
- Notionally, because these stocks have rallied so much, the SMV is barelydown YTD, but the magnitude of the active covering over the past fewweeks appears to be nearly in line with what we saw last March.
- Performance on Wed was worst of past 3 days with long-short spread nearlydouble the worst days in March ’20 for L/S funds (long-short spread for Quants andMulti-Strats was quite negative as well).
- Are we there yet? (the biggest question and hardest to answer definitively)
- On the short side, the magnitude of covering in the High SI stocks would suggest it is closer to the end, but it is not clear that this holds true more broadly.
- The bigger risk seems to be whether the recent long selling that started in earnest this week has to persist for a while longer.
- Put together, in N. America, the 4wk active de-grossing has NOT yet reached even a 1z event and not nearly where things got to last March/April or in prior periods of strong de-grossing.
- Furthermore, with notional exposures effectively still near highs (and performance negative), it’s likely that gross leverage has gone up for many funds.
- With all this said, the fact that this is NOT occurring due to a broader weakening in the macro backdrop makes it harder to gauge how much further this should go.
In short, expect much more pain. No surprise there. What we find shocking however is that just yesterday another JPMorganite, Marko Kolanovic published a note urging clients to do just the opposite, BTFD, claiming that the WSB fiasco would be over soon and won’t have any material impacts. In retrospect, we now know which report was meant for the “good” clients, and which was one the mindless fodder meant for general consumption.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/28/2021 – 19:48 - POSITIONING INTELLIGENCE: The team published a new note, Tactical Takes | De-Grossing Accelerates – 1-Day Magnitude in Line with Last March, but Medium Trend Not There Yet
- How To Survive "Cancel Culture" When You Have Unpopular Opinions
How To Survive “Cancel Culture” When You Have Unpopular Opinions
Authored by Terry Trahan via TheOrganicPrepper.com,
Well, hello there. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we live in a vastly different world than the last time I posted here. The social landscape, political, and, it seems, everyday life is trending vastly different since 2020, Covid, and the national elections.
Daisy recently sent out an email explaining the shift away from discussing politics in light of cancel culture and the like. I want to expand on those thoughts, but from an underground, guerrilla angle.
A huge part of survival, prepping, and Nomad Strategies is getting done what needs to be done with minimal interference or notice from those around us. The more eyes on your project, the more people that can foul up our plans, throw a wrench in the works, or, nowadays, ruin your life.
Have a secret identity.
So, we turn to lesson number one from the great bastion of literature: comic books.
What does almost every comic character have? A secret identity. And why? So they are not having to fight, protect their family, and hide from the public all the time. That is a mighty wise course of action. Life is not a movie. There are rarely times to take a bold, public stand that will put you or your people in danger.
It is a blessing to live in the time and place we do that enables us to engage in such vociferous debate levels with no real consequences. That is not the norm throughout history, and, as we can see, it is changing in front of our eyes. All one needs to do is look at the world outside of the U.S. for current or very recent historical examples. Take a look at where Selco comes from or Belfast just a couple of decades ago. Look at many areas of the Middle East, Syria, or Asia for current displays of enforcement.
You don’t have to share your opinions with everyone.
Keeping a low profile as long as possible is a crucial OpSec practice.
Note: I am not saying you are not allowed to have opinions. But, I am a firm believer in only discussing them with known associates in private. It is also easier to keep seeing the other party as still human if you do it in person. *Othering is a nasty thing to do and nastier to be on the receiving end of. Remembering that the other side is not the devil incarnate helps to identify actual enemies easier. Instead of jumping at every boogyman brought to your attention, save your energy for real, in your face threats.
*The term Othering describes the reductive action of labeling and defining a person as a subaltern native, as someone who belongs to the socially subordinate category of the Other.
Choose your battles wisely, or don’t battle at all
Another reason for concentrating on the mission: it’s a waste of your time. Leave the arguing and name-calling to others. Arguing lessens your productivity and may alienate potential allies that could assist you. (Except for those pesky Facebook posts you made, calling their kind evil and stupid.) Choosing not to participate in arguments and debates shows that you have mental toughness, compassion, discernment, and, most importantly, self-control.
In case you aren’t aware, those and your integrity are essential things to keep intact. Both for our own well being and for cultivating good, successful relationships. Keep your ego intact, and if you can exercise the self-control required to not argue points with others that don’t matter in the day-to-day.
You will be more peaceful.
Fewer distractions = more time to work on numero uno
As Toby Cowern’s recent article asks: Are You Maintaining the Most Vital Resources in Your Preppertoire? And what is that resource? YOU. Are you making sure that self-care is the most important part of your prepping plans?
We want to give ourselves as much time as possible to work on various aspects of ourselves that need the work.
Distractions from this can be costly. It can be costly in terms of time wasted on a needless post, and at its worst, it can literally cost you everything you have worked for and built up.
Stop throwing chum to the internet sharks.
An important but often overlooked aspect of any successful underground work is the ability to escape notice. Therefore escaping issues that will negatively impact your ability to move forward will help you complete whatever the mission at hand is.
Rather than willingly compromising your future, stop engaging with the sharks. Instead of spending time engaged in activities that are not beneficial, use your time wisely. Allocate the majority of your time to doing the work. Use your downtime to recharge, find the good, relax, and keep your eyes on the prize.
There may be a time in the near future where we must elevate to a more offensive posture. But now is not that time. What we do now is an important step in keeping us more even-keeled and ready. Don’t volunteer yourself for the enemies list. There are already plenty of people that will gladly put some of us there.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/28/2021 – 19:30 - Dallas DEA Makes Largest-Ever Meth Bust In North Texas
Dallas DEA Makes Largest-Ever Meth Bust In North Texas
The Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) Dallas field division reported this week the largest methamphetamine seizure ever in North Texas, according to local news WFAA.
DEA agents seized 1,950 pounds of meth, valued at $45 million, hidden within the bed of a refrigerated tractor-trailer off Interstate 35 in Denton County. A detection dog or sniffer dog pinpointed the large stash during a traffic stop, amounting to 663 packages.
“It’s a staggering amount to be seized at one time,” said Eduardo Chavez, the Special Agent in Charge for DEA Dallas. “They were like sausage links.”
The bust was equivalent to 20% of the total amount the Dallas field division seized in 2020.
“I see a lot of lives saved when we can stack up kilograms of drugs like this on a table,” Chavez said. “Unfortunately, methamphetamine is one of the largest threats in North Texas, so we would anticipate that a lot of it was destined for the market here.”
Chavez said the drugs were likely intended for black markets in St. Louis, Chicago, and Atlanta. The DEA believes the drugs belonged to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel headed by Nemesio Oseguera-Cervantes, otherwise known as “El Mencho.”
“No doubt, this got his (El Mencho) attention. A seizure like this, he most likely got a phone call,” Chavez said. “We take one of these seizures and try to expand the network, try to identify perhaps what other ones have gotten through.”
During the pandemic, the Trump administration cracked down on drug traffickers along a ‘meth superhighway’ controlled by Mexican cartels that stretched across the U.S. A six-month operation by the federal government seized thousands of pounds of meth, tens of millions of dollars, and hundreds of firearms.
During the pandemic, meth inflation surged from $4,000 in March to nearly $16,000 by May.
Meanwhile, deaths related to meth-overdoses have surged across the country, especially among Blacks and American Indians/Alaska Natives.
“While much attention is focused on the opioid crisis, a methamphetamine crisis has been quietly, but actively, gaining steam — particularly among American Indians and Alaska Natives, who are disproportionately affected by a number of health conditions,” said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).
The Trump administration made a concerted effort among federal, state, and local leaders to combat drug traffickers and criminal cartels for violating U.S. sovereignty via breaching the southern border. However, it remains to be seen if the Biden administration will continue such policies.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/28/2021 – 19:23 - Sri Lanka's Stock Market Is Up 30% In 2021 And Has Doubled From Its 2020 Lows
Sri Lanka’s Stock Market Is Up 30% In 2021 And Has Doubled From Its 2020 Lows
While attention in the U.S. may be focused on the ongoing short squeezes in a few select names, the Sri Lankan stock market – as a whole – isn’t far behind.
Stocks in Sri Lanka have returned a “world beating” 30% so far this year, Bloomberg noted on Wednesday. The returns are eye popping, especially given that we are only 28 days into the new year.
Traders in Sri Lanka have bought $802 million worth of equities this month, the report notes, which is 45% of last year’s total domestic purchases. The domestic inflows come as many overseas investors leave the market, selling a net $25 million in shares in January. In 2020, overseas investors had outflows of $273 million.
Joshua Crabb, a Hong Kong-based money manager, told Bloomberg: “As the pandemic rebound got underway, abundance of global liquidity, substantial rate cuts and domestic retail participation have helped fuel the rally. Keep in mind the currency has also weakened, which makes exports more competitive, encourages tourism and introduces inflation, which helps nominal assets like equities.”
The country’s Colombo Stock Exchange All Share Index tumbled in March 2019 with global markets as a result of the global pandemic and localized political uncertainty. But the country’s central bank cut its key rate by 200 basis points and has provided liquidity, prompting the nation’s market to scream higher.
The market has doubled off of its lows and the country has now even re-opened some of its airports for international tourism again. The country also recently approved the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid vaccine for emergency use, providing another tailwind for the market heading into the Spring.
Crabb concluded: “In the near term, I would expect the market to consolidate its gains. At current valuations, we really need to see an improvement in the economy and in company earnings to see another leg up.”
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/28/2021 – 19:10
Digest powered by RSS Digest
Saving...
